The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas

Abstract

THE present volume completes Prof. Wester-marck's work, which is likely to remain for a long time a standard repertory of facts, which the moralists of every school will, no doubt, set themselves to interpret, each after his own fashion. Hie liber est in quo quaeret sua dogmata quisque, and it is as a tribute to the author's erudition and fulness of matter that I hasten to add that the second half of the distich is also likely to be fulfilled; there are few schools of moralists who will not find something to their taste in this vast repertory of information about the moral codes and practices of mankind. The practices and beliefs of different races and ages with respect to the rights and duties of property, regard for the truth, concern for the general happiness, suicide, sexual relations, religion, and the supernatural.generally, such are only a few of the topics with which Prof. Westermarck deals, and he deals with none of them without producing masses of significant fact for which, apart from his aid, the student of moral ideas and institutions would have to search hopelessly through the whole literature of anthropology. Merely to have done so much, even if Prof. Westermarck had gone no further, would have been to establish an inextinguishable claim on the gratitude of his readers, but it need not be said of the author of the “History of Human Marriage” that he has attempted to do much more. His aim, at least, is not merely to record the facts and classify them, but to offer a philosophical interpretation of them, to put forward a definite theory of the “origin” and “development” of the ethical side of human thought. It is quite out of the question for a single reviewer, who is not even an anthropologist, to presume to pronounce a summary judgment upon the success with which the task has been executed, and the present writer would therefore be understood to be attempting nothing more than the utterance of one or two of the reflections suggested to one interested reader by Prof. Westermarck's book.

The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas.

By E. Westermarck. In 2 vols. Vol. ii. Pp. xv + 852. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1908.) Price 14s. net.