The first of the virtues perhaps arose in the following manner.[1] In battle or the chase, every man must keep up with the others and strive with resolution for victory. He must not turn back and flee. Men who excelled were admired, and the hero was praised with little introspective analysis, so long as morality remained upon the level of custom. The other men unthinkingly imitated him under the suggestive influence of prestige. They thus acquired, unconsciously in large measure, and entirely without self-conscious reflection, a habit or rudimentary sentiment. Sooner or later, however, it must have been explicitly recognized that the hero possessed an unusual and highly desirable habit of fighting hardest, running most risks, and sticking to the last. While for a time this habit may have been attributed to magical or animistic causes, possessing an unusual amount of manitou or mana for instance,[2] ultimately the hero's conduct must have been attributed to peculiar mental traits that were to be acquired by self-conscious cultivation. This habit then was much admired, and called ἀρετή or virtus. Men generally approved it, carefully cultivated it in themselves by deliberate rational choice, and it became a virtue in the Aristotelian sense. Later, when other desirable mental traits had also been discovered and commended, the first of the virtues become designated more specifically as Courage. At its lowest level courage is the overcoming of the instinct of flight and emotion of fear by freer expression of the pugnacious instinct and emotion of anger.[3] The mammalian ancestors of men had been weak in body as compared with their enemies, and for them flight and concealment had usually been the best line of action in the face of danger. The function of the pugnacious instinct was chiefly of service only when they were cornered and desperately at bay. Consequently, when through
- ↑ The statements here advanced regarding the origin of the virtues, while necessarily hypothetical, as all incursions into pre-historic moral evolution must be, have been formulated with careful reference to the chief works on primitive morals, with whose reports they are believed to be entirely compatible.
- ↑ Irving King, The Development of Religion, chap. VI; R. R. Marett, The Threshold of Religion, chap. IV and passim.
- ↑ To avoid cumbersomeness of expression a single term will hereafter be used to designate both the instinct as a whole and its emotion on both neural and mental sides except when the distinctions need to be maintained.
