366 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
of what we should call a scruple. We have come to the point where there is a conscious relationship between conduct and result, between a definite act and a sense of responsibility for it. The savage at least knows what he has done, recalls the affection of the brute, and his own affection for the brute, and is aware that he might have avoided the act. He may not only feel uncomfortable over it, but clearly may be conscious of a wish that he had not done it. In that wish, that one had not done a certain act, we have the " scruple " showing itself, and the glimmerings of a moral sense. It would be more pronounced, for instance, if among members of the same clan or tribe two individual human beings, who have worked together and been of service to each other, fall into strife and one kills the other. Even where no punishment is to follow, or the slayer has no fear of consequences, there may still be the scruple in the wish that he had not done the deed. To be sure, such a wish is but an incipient phase, and does not amount to much a vague sense of regret, nothing more.
It has reached a much higher phase, and launched the human creature on a very much more advanced stage, when the scruple comes in before the act, now and then keeping him from follow- ing out his first impulse or committing the deed of anger. When scruples act as a check on impulses, the higher soul is getting a start. And I suppose the moral sense may arise to this extent among the lower savage tribes although it would prevail, of course, only between members of the same tribe.
We sometimes wonder that the primitive human creature is so low-down, vindictive, or " brutalized," as it were, with so little recognition of human rights, so feeble a sense of justice ; with such a weak respect for himself, or for man as man, or for a fellow human creature. Why is it that in a large number of instances we find such distorted, perverted, monstrous condi- tions ? How is it that it should be the glory among certain tribes of people to have committed murder ? What is to explain the fact that among many races a man feels a sense of shame, positive humiliation, until he has butchered some other human creature ? How is it that, among other races, stealing,
