If under the conditions in which humanity lives nowadays one could imagine a man totally detached from his species, leading a solitary life, Morality would be absolutely meaningless to him. The idea is one he could never conceive. It would have no significance. Good and bad would always retain their original meaning as labels for sensual qualities, for pleasant or unpleasant sensations of taste, smell, etc.; they would never be spiritualized or apply to the quality of actions. He would be unable to attach any meaning to the words duty and right. The terms virtue, vice, conscience, repentance would convey nothing to him. Morality can only originate when the individual lives united with fellow beings in a social community. It is a consequence of this union. It is the one condition on which alone this union can be permanent. The solitary individual must, however, not be confused with the lonely one. Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on a desert island and forced to stay there without companionship, is not primitive man. He is a son of civilization who has fallen upon evil days. In his enforced solitariness he maintains the habits of thought of his original surroundings. He preserves the concepts of Morality even though he has no occasion to obey its dictates. He can, if not actually yet potentially, be a paragon of virtue or a sink of iniquity; he can have a very delicate or a very dull conscience. He continues to be a man of social instincts cut off from society, and goes on thinking and feeling in a social manner. By primitive man I mean man as he was before society originated. For, contrary to the sociological school which denies the individual and boldly refuses to allow him any existence, declaring society to be older and earlier than the individual, I think I have conclusively shown ("_Der Sinn der Geschichte_" [The Meaning of History]) that man is not by nature a gregarious animal, that he lived alone, being self-sufficing as long as the climatic conditions, under which he first made his appearance on earth, enabled him to exist by his own unaided efforts and capabilities, and that he banded himself together with others in gangs, troops and hordes--the earliest forms of subsequent society--when, after the first ice age following his appearance, the struggle for existence grew ever harder, ever more laborious, transcending the powers of the individual so that he could only overcome Nature, now grown hostile to him, by uniting with others of his kind.