is punished.  Among the Karens of India, if a man is found with poison in his possession, he is bound and placed for three days in the hot sun, his poison is destroyed, and he is pledged not to obtain any more.  If he is suspected of killing anyone, he is executed.[204] Particularly distressing modes of death, and other means of penalizing death by poison more severely than motor modes of killing, were adopted.  The Chinese punish the preparation of poisons or capture of poisonous animals with beheading, confiscation, and banishment of wife and children.  In Athens insanity caused by poison was punished with death.  The Sachsenspiegel provides death by fire.  In the lawbook of the tsar Wachtang a double composition price was exacted for death by poison.  And in ancient Wales death and confiscation were the penalty for death by poison, and death or banishment the penalty of the manufacturer of poisons.  The same quality of disapproval is expressed in early law of sorcery, and it is unnecessary to give details of this also.  But, stated in emotional terms, both poison and sorcery, and other underhand practices arouse one of the most distressing of the emotions—­the emotion of dread, if we understand by this term that form of fear which has no tangible or visible embodiment, which is apprehended but not located, and which in consequence cannot be resisted; the distress, in fact, lying in the inability to function.  The organism which has developed structure and function through action is unsatisfied by an un-motor mode of decision.  We thus detect in the love of fair play, in the Golden Rule, and in all moral practices a motor element; and with changing conditions there is progressively a tendency, mediated by natural selection and conscious choice, to select those modes of reaction in which the element of chance is as far as possible eliminated.  This preference for functional over chance or quasi-chance forms of decision is expressed first within the group, but is slowly extended, along with increasing commercial communication, treaties of peace, and with supernatural assistance, to neighboring groups.  The case of Odysseus is an instance of a moment in the life of the race when a disapproval is becoming of general application.

On our assumption that morality is dependent on strains, and that its development is due to the advantage of regulating these strains, we may readily understand why most of the canons of morality are functions of the katabolic male activity.  Theft, arson, rape, murder, burglary, highway robbery, treason, and the like, are natural accompaniments of the more aggressive male disposition; the male is par excellence both the hero and the criminal.  But on the side of the sex we might expect to find the female disposition setting the standards of morality, since reproduction is even a greater part of her nature than of man’s.  On the contrary, however, we find the male standpoint carried over and applied to the reproductive process,