modern nations what they are; their born structure
bears the trace of the laws of their fathers;' but the ancient nations
came into no such inheritance; they were the descendants of people who
did what was right in their own eyes; they were born to no tutored
habits, no preservative bonds, and therefore they were at the mercy of
every impulse and blown by every passion.

The condition of the primitive man, if we conceive of him rightly, is,
in several respects, different from any we know. We unconsciously
assume around us the existence of a great miscellaneous social machine
working to our hands, and not only supplying our wants, but even
telling and deciding when those wants shall come. No one can now
without difficulty conceive how people got on before there were clocks
and watches; as Sir G. Lewis said, 'it takes a vigorous effort of the
imagination' to realise a period when it was a serious difficulty to
know the hour of day. And much more is it difficult to fancy the
unstable minds of such men as neither knew nature, which is the
clock-work of material civilisation, nor possessed a polity, which is a
kind of clock-work to moral civilisation. They never could have known
what to expect; the whole habit of steady but varied anticipation,
which makes our minds what they are, must have been wholly foreign to
theirs.

Again, I at least cannot call up to myself the loose conceptions (as
they must have been) of morals which then existed. If we set aside all
the element derived from law and polity which runs through our current
moral notions, I hardly know what we shall have left. The residuum was
somehow, and in some vague way, intelligible to the ante-political man,
but it must have been uncertain, wavering, and unfit to be depended
upon. In the best cases it existed much as the vague feeling of beauty
now exists in minds sensitive but untaught; a still small voice of
uncertain meaning; an unknown something modifying everything else, and
higher than anything else, yet in form so indistinct that when you
looked for it, it was gone--or if this be thought the delicate fiction
of a later fancy, then morality was at least to be found in the wild
spasms of 'wild justice,' half punishment, half outrage,--but anyhow,
being unfixed by steady law, it was intermittent, vague, and hard for
us to imagine. Everybody who has studied mathematics knows how many
shadowy difficulties he seemed to have before he understood the
problem, and