ABSTRACT
In early stages people see habitual aggression and counter-aggression, now between societies and now between individuals. Neighbouring tribes fight about the limits to their territories, trespassing first on one side and then on the other; and further fights are entailed by the requirement that mortality suffered shall be followed by mortality inflicted. The idea of justice is that of a balancing of injuries—“an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” This remains the idea during early stages of civilization. The true idea is generated by experience of the evils which accompany the false idea. Naturally, the perception of the right restraints on conduct becomes clearer as respect for these restraints is forced on men, and so rendered more habitual and more general. Men’s incursions into one another’s spheres constitute a kind of oscillation, which, violent at the outset, becomes gradually less with the progress towards a relatively peaceful state of society.
