(2) In primitive life there is a drastic repression of any incipient rebelliousness, through the enforcement of custom or explicit law in the ways we have indicated; the fear of a heavy discouragement to any innovator.  If men dared to defy the community morals, they were very likely to be put to death before the habit of free judgment had much time to spread.  There was thus a sort of artificial selection for survival of the conventional type, and weeding-out of the freethinker and moral genius.  Even in historic times this process has continued and been an enormous clog on human progress.  The man of revolutionary moral insight has had to pay the penalty, if not of death as in the case of Socrates or of Jesus-at least of ridicule and ostracism, of excommunication and isolation as, in our own day, with Tolstoy.  Many and many a saint who might have been a beacon-light to mankind has lived under the curses or sneers of his fellows and died in loneliness, to be soon forgotten.  A few have, after years of opposition, obtained a following and accomplished great reforms, as did Buddha, Mohammed, St. Francis, and Luther.  But none can count the potential reformers, the men of new insight, of individual moral judgment, who have been crushed by the weight of group-opposition.  Man has been the worst enemy of his own progress.

(3) There is another aspect to this selective process, noted before in another context- the struggle for existence between groups.  So intense are these tribal struggles in early society that harmony within a group is absolutely necessary.  Individualization means disorganization; and whatever communities developed free thought and divergent ideas were at a disadvantage when it came to action.  Many such groups, ahead of their rivals in individual moral development, were wiped out by barbaric armies that gave unquestioning obedience to the tribal will and worked together like a machine.  Up to a certain stage in human development individuality was an undesirable variation and was ruthlessly repressed, sometimes by the execution of the particular offenders, sometimes by the destruction of the group to which they belonged and which they by their divergence weakened.  What forces made against custom-morality?  Against these repressive forces, however, other forces were from early times urging men on to reject the tyranny of custom.  Those inward promptings that we call conscience were continually tending to become less the echo of the group conventions and more the expression of the individual’s needs and deepest desires.

(1) At bottom, of course, lay the natural restlessness and passions of men, the impatience of control, the longing for liberty, and the craving for self-expression.  The combative instinct, pride, obstinacy, and notably the sex-instinct, were from earliest times spurring men on to a disregard of the conventional and the formation of individual standards.