xisted, and it is still longer before they are
appreciated. Another long time must pass, and a higher stage of mental
development must be reached, before they can be used as a basis from
which to deduce rules for meeting, in the future, problems whose
pressure can be foreseen. The folkways, therefore, are not creations of
human purpose and wit. They are like products of natural forces which
men unconsciously set in operation, or they are like the instinctive
ways of animals, which are developed out of experience, which reach a
final form of maximum adaptation to an interest, which are handed down
by tradition and admit of no exception or variation, yet change to meet
new conditions, still within the same limited methods, and without
rational reflection or purpose. From this it results that all the life
of human beings, in all ages and stages of culture, is primarily
controlled by a vast mass of folkways handed down from the earliest
existence of the race, having the nature of the ways of other animals,
only the topmost layers of which are subject to change and control, and
have been somewhat modified by human philosophy, ethics, and religion,
or by other acts of intelligent reflection. We are told of savages that
"It is difficult to exhaust the customs and small ceremonial usages of a
savage people. Custom regulates the whole of a man's actions,--his
bathing, washing, cutting his hair, eating, drinking, and fasting. From
his cradle to his grave he is the slave of ancient usage. In his life
there is nothing free, nothing original, nothing spontaneous, no
progress towards a higher and better life, and no attempt to improve his
condition, mentally, morally, or spiritually."[1] All men act in this
way with only a little wider margin of voluntary variation.

+4. Impulse and instinct. Primeval stupidity. Magic.+ "The mores
(_Sitten_) rest on feelings of pleasure or pain, which either directly
produce actions or call out desires which become causes of action."[2]
"Impulse is not an attribute of living creatures, like instinct. The
only phenomenon to which impulse applies is that men and other animals
imitate what they see others, especially of their own species, do, and
that they accomplish this imitation the more easily, the more their
forefathers practiced the same act. The thing imitated, therefore, must
already exist, and cannot be explained as an impulse." "As soon as
instinct ceased to be sole ruler of living creatures, i