And here we are introduced to certain facts of profound significance.
This conscious relinquishment of immediate and special good to
gain distant and general good, while it is a cardinal trait of
the self-restraint called moral, is also a cardinal trait of
self-restraints other than those called moral--the restraints that
originate from fear of the visible ruler, of the invisible ruler, and
of society at large. Whenever the individual refrains from doing that
which the passing desire prompts, lest he should afterward suffer
legal punishment, or divine vengeance, or public reprobation, or all
of them, he surrenders the near and definite pleasure rather than risk
the remote and greater, though less definite, pains, which taking it
may bring on him; and, conversely, when he undergoes some present
pain, that he may reap some probable future pleasure, political,
religious, or social. But though all these four kinds of internal
control have the common character that the simpler and less ideal
feelings are consciously overruled by the more complex and ideal
feelings; and though, at first, they are practically co-extensive
and undistinguished, yet, in the course of social evolution,
they differentiate; and, eventually, the moral control, with its
accompanying conceptions and sentiments, emerges as independent. Let us
glance at the leading aspects of the process.
While, as in the rudest groups, neither political nor religious rule
exists, the leading check to the immediate satisfaction of each
desire as it arises, is consciousness of the evils which the anger of
fellow-savages may entail, if satisfaction of the desire is obtained
at their cost. In this early stage the imagined pains which constitute
the governing motive are those apt to be inflicted by beings of like
nature, undistinguished in power: the political, religious, and
social restraints are as yet represented only by this mutual dread of
vengeance.
When special strength, skill, or courage, makes one of them a leader in
battle, he necessarily inspires greater fear than any other, and there
comes to be a more decided check on such satisfactions of the desires
as will injure or offend him. Gradually as, by habitual warfare,
chieftainship is established, the evils thought of as likely to arise
from angering the chief, not only by aggression upon him, but by
disobedience to him, become distinguishable both from the smaller evils
which other personal antagonisms cause, and from the more diffused
evils thought of as arising from social reprobation. That is, political
control begins to differentiate from the more indefinite control of
mutual dread.
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