But there is really nothing in this fact which sets this nascent morality apart from our own. It differs from ours not in kind but only in degree. The morality of the masses is still largely customary morality. Most persons in their social relations, in business, and in religion, follow unthinkingly the tribal conscience, that is, the conventional morality of the society of which they are members, rather than their own individual sense of right and wrong. “Reflective morality” is still the morality of the few. The ever-renewed moral task of man is to change the customary tribal conscience into a reflective individual conscience. [Sidenote: Collective responsibility] There is still another phase of the incipient morality of the kinship group which claims our attention because of its significance for the history of the evolution of morals. It is a group morality, that is, a morality based on the idea of collective responsibility. This conception presents one of the most striking phenomena in the history of the moral evolution of mankind. Among peoples in the earlier stages of moral development the family or clan group rather than the individual is regarded as the ethical unit, and the act of any member of this group, when such act concerns a member or members of another social group, is looked upon as the act of the whole body to which he belongs.[40] For the wrongdoing of one all are held responsible.[41] This group morality, with which the true history of the unfolding moral consciousness of the race begins, we shall meet with as a sort of survival in every stage of the moral progress of humanity from the lowest to the highest level of culture. “It is,” in the words of Hobhouse, “one of the dominant facts, if not _the_ dominant fact, ethically considered, in the evolution of human society.”[42] The account of that slow change in the moral consciousness of man which has gradually caused group morality, in most spheres of life and thought, to give place to individual morality, that is, to that conception of moral responsibility which holds every man responsible for his own act, and only for his own act, makes up one of the most instructive chapters in the moral history of the world.[43] We shall find significant survivals of this idea of collective responsibility, particularly in the religious domain. In truth, a large part of religious history is nothing more nor less than an account of the influence and outworkings of this notion. Men making their gods like unto themselves have imagined them as acting on this principle of communal responsibility, and as bringing upon a whole people pestilence, famine, war, or other calamity in revenge or punishment for some neglect in worship or act of sacrilege on the part of perhaps a single member of the tribe or nation.