This expansion of the area covered by the moral feelings is the dominant fact in the moral history of mankind. It is the overlooking of this fact that has caused writers like Buckle to make their strange misreading of history and to maintain that though man during historic times has made immense progress on material and intellectual lines, he has made little or no progress in morality. The truth is, as we shall learn, that in no domain has progress been greater, the gains larger or more precious, than in the moral. From clan morality, based on physical kinship, mankind has advanced or is advancing to world morality, based on the ethical kinship of men. This is the one increasing purpose running through all history--the creation of a moral order embracing the whole human race. [Sidenote: Sources for the history of morals] The facts for a history of morals must be sought chiefly outside the literature of ethical theory and speculation. They must be looked for in the customs, laws, institutions, mythologies, literatures, maxims, and religions of the different races, peoples, and ages of history.[10] In all these there is always an ethical element; often this forms their very essence. “In every sentence of the penal code,” as the moralist Wilhelm Wundt remarks, “there speaks the voice of an objective moral conscience.” In truth all law codes, whether civil or criminal, are essentially nothing more nor less than the embodiment of man’s conceptions of what is just and unjust. Mythologies, literatures, and philosophies are charged with moral sentiment. In religion there struggle for utterance the deepest moral feelings and convictions of the human soul. [Sidenote: The moral ideal] The moral life fulfills itself in many ways. Every age and every race has its own moral type or ideal.[11] This, as we shall use the term, may be defined as a group of virtues held in esteem by a given people or a given age. It is the accepted standard of conduct, of excellence, of character. This ideal may be a very simple thing, embracing only a few rudimentary virtues, as in the case of peoples on the lower levels of culture; or it may be a very complex thing, embracing many and refined virtues, as in the case of civilized societies in which the mutual relationships of the members are many and various. The history of morals is in the main an account of moral ideals or types.[12] Indeed so large is the part that these have played in the growth and decay of races and civilizations that universal history may be defined quite accurately as “the paleontology of moral ideals.”[13]