ccount for the growth of moral
customs we need to assume only social life; practically all our
requirements that refer to the relations between men are found among
early tribes, and it may be taken for granted that any body of human
beings, living together and having some form of activity, would work out
some such system of rules, mostly negative or prohibitive but also to
some extent positive. Even the law of kindness, a product of natural
human sympathy, exists among the lowest known peoples. The reference of
moral growth to social necessities does not involve the denial of a
germinal sense of right and wrong or of germinal moral ideals, but this
sense and these ideals arise, through reflection, from experience. We
are here concerned only with the actual conduct of men traceable in the
early forms of society.

+584+. But while social life is the basis of ethical construction, the
actual ethical constitution of men has been influenced by religion, in
later times by the supplying of lofty ideals and sanctions, in early
times by a magical determination of things injurious. It is this second
category that is covered by the term 'taboo,' a Polynesian word said to
mean 'what is prohibited.' Prohibitions arising from natural human
relations constitute civil law; those arising from extrahuman or other
magical influences constitute taboo.[936]

+585+. Early man, regarding all objects as possibly endowed with power,
selects out of the whole mass by observation and experience certain
objects which affect his life, his relations with which he finds it
desirable to define. These are all mysterious;[937] some are helpful,
some harmful. The helpful objects become lucky stones, amulets. The
injurious or dangerous objects are the more numerous; in an atmosphere
of uncertainty the mysterious is dreaded, avoided, and guarded against
by rules.[938]

+586+. The objects affected by the conception of taboo are as various as
the conditions of human life--they include things inanimate and animate,
and events and experiences of all sorts. Sometimes the danger is
supposed to be inherent in the object, sometimes the quality of
dangerousness is imposed on it or infused into it by some authority; but
in all cases there is present the force (mana) that, in savage theory,
makes the external world a factor in human destinies.[939] This force
may be transmitted from one object to another (usually by contact[940]),
and thus the taboo infection may s