ABSTRACT
The savage—so runs to-day's verdict of competent anthropologists—has a deep reverence for tradition and custom, an automatic submission to their biddings. He obeys them 'slavishly', 'unwittingly', 'spontaneously', through 'mental inertia', combined with the fear of public opinion or of supernatural punishment ; or again through a 'pervading group-sentiment if not group-instinct'. A similar idea is expressed by a third writer, a sociologist, who has contributed more towards our understanding of the organization of savages from the point of view of mental and social evolution than perhaps any one living anthropologist. Anthropology seems here to be faced by a similar difficulty as the one overcome by Tylor in his "minimum definition of religion". The savage does break the law sometimes, though rarely and occasionally, has been recorded by observers and taken into account by builders of anthropological theory, who have always maintained that criminal law is the only law of savages.
