e form of
art--decorations, costumes, songs, and tattoos. In modern
life, as we have seen, praise and blame take the form of public
opinion, as expressed by friends, acquaintances, newspapers,
and the like.[1] Praise and blame are not so fixed and rigid
in civilized communities; individuals move freely among diverse
groups whose standards differ. But group approval is
none the less effective.

[Footnote 1: See page 106.]

In primitive life and, though less patently, in contemporary
society, physical force is the ultimate power for enforcing
custom. Primitive chiefs are usually the strong men
of the tribes; and behind law in modern social organization
is the physical power of the State to enforce it.

MORALITY AS CONFORMITY TO THE ESTABLISHED. The beginning
of morals is thus to be found in conformity to the established
or customary. The criterion of morality is compliance--compliance
with the regular, the socially approved, the common
(that is, the communal) ways of action. Apart from
the consequences of violation, violation _per se_ is impure,
unholy, immoral. The terms are, in some cases, interchangeable.
In primitive life, violations are regarded with particular
horror, because they are frequently held to be not only
infringements of established ways of the tribe, but as offenses
against the gods, offenses which involve the whole tribe in
the retributive punishments of the gods. Violation of the
customary may, indeed, apart from arousing intellectual disapproval,
provoke a genuine revulsion of feeling on the part
of a group which has acquired certain fixed habits. We still
feel emotionally shocked by the infringement of a custom
that we do not intellectually value highly. If we examine our
moral furniture we find it made up of an immense number of
early acquired inhibitions or "checks." These not only prevent
us from violating, at least without qualms, standards to
which we have early been trained; they make deviations or
irregularities on the part of others appear as "immoral," even
before or without our intellectually classifying them as such.
There are adults, for example, who cannot outgrow the feeling
to which they have early been habituated, that card-playing
at any time, or baseball-playing on Sunday, is "evil," even
though they are no longer intellectually affected by scruples
in those respects. There is significance in the fact that by
speaking of "irregularities" in a man's conduct, we signify.
or i