d therefore that, in that field
also, folkways were first raised to mores. "Rights" are the rules of
mutual give and take in the competition of life which are imposed on
comrades in the in-group, in order that the peace may prevail there
which is essential to the group strength. Therefore rights can never be
"natural" or "God-given," or absolute in any sense. The morality of a
group at a time is the sum of the taboos and prescriptions in the
folkways by which right conduct is defined. Therefore morals can never
be intuitive. They are historical, institutional, and empirical.

World philosophy, life policy, right, rights, and morality are all
products of the folkways. They are reflections on, and generalizations
from, the experience of pleasure and pain which is won in efforts to
carry on the struggle for existence under actual life conditions. The
generalizations are very crude and vague in their germinal forms. They
are all embodied in folklore, and all our philosophy and science have
been developed out of them.

+32. The folkways are "true."+ The folkways are necessarily "true" with
respect to some world philosophy. Pain forced men to think. The ills of
life imposed reflection and taught forethought. Mental processes were
irksome and were not undertaken until painful experience made them
unavoidable.[63] With great unanimity all over the globe primitive men
followed the same line of thought. The dead were believed to live on as
ghosts in another world just like this one. The ghosts had just the same
needs, tastes, passions, etc., as the living men had had. These
transcendental notions were the beginning of the mental outfit of
mankind. They are articles of faith, not rational convictions. The
living had duties to the ghosts, and the ghosts had rights; they also
had power to enforce their rights. It behooved the living therefore to
learn how to deal with ghosts. Here we have a complete world philosophy
and a life policy deduced from it. When pain, loss, and ill were
experienced and the question was provoked, Who did this to us? the world
philosophy furnished the answer. When the painful experience forced the
question, Why are the ghosts angry and what must we do to appease them?
the "right" answer was the one which fitted into the philosophy of ghost
fear. All acts were therefore constrained and trained into the forms of
the world philosophy by ghost fear, ancestral authority, taboos, and
habit. The habits and customs