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JAINA GAZETTE.
[Aug. & Sept.
The
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being mere men, we are gregarious. We live in groups. lowest types of men known to anthropologists are the totemworshipping aborigines of Australia, the Veddahs of Ceylon and the Bhils, Gonds, Santals of India. All these are found to live in groups. And I may say in passing that the seeds of our civilisation of Piccaddilly or St. Paul's are laid in the ancestor-worship, tree-taboo and totem corroborees of these undeveloped children of our mother nature. Self-regarding morality is neither needed nor possible in these men. The whole of their morality is non-self-regarding. That is their morality regards the group more than the individual, e. g., all the men of one totem or group of Australians must marry all the women of another totem and of no other. So there is promiscuity of intercourse, partially restrained by customary endogamy and exogamy. In self-regarding morality I do or abstain from doing something because my own innermost conviction favours or rejects it. In group-regarding morality I act or abstain from acting because I have to consider the effect of my act or abstention upon the society of which I am a member. To illustrate from the totem-marriage. Suppose the snake totem is married to the monkey totem. snake-man may like one particular monkey-woman; and she may reciprocate the preference. If self-regarding morality had full play, we should have the highest form of marriage between these two. But group morality makes such monogamous marriage impracticable and immoral. The snake-man must remain the husband of all the monkey-women; and the monkey-women must remain the wife of all the snakemen. So you see, group morality is in conflict with individual morality. This conflict is the same in character as that in your breasts and mine. For me a thing is right, moral and desirable; for the group it may not be. Hence the conflict. Take an example. I am starving and I am in a lonely jungle; there is only one shop of a dirty Halvai (confectioner) with laddus on a plate which I have seen a dog sniff at, and reject as if unworthy of his canine palate. The Brahmins and Maulvis both teach me that the laddus are unclean and uneatable, the Hindus,. Mahomedans, the old and the new testaments all teach me that the Halvai is dirty and I must not Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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