illustration of what has here been said may be found in the fusion of the ancient notions of sacrifice in the Christian dogma of the atonement.211
We have said that with the rise of civilisation tribal society became divided into classes, owing to the growth of individual, as opposed to corporate ownership of property. The old relations of persons to society were thus 297 destroyed, and with them much of the meaning of.the old ethical ideas. In the tribal state the responsibility of the individual to the limited community of which he formed a part was strongly felt, while he recognised no duty outside this community. In the new conception of morality that now arose he had, it is true, duties to all men as a man, irrespective of his social group, but they were vague, and could be evaded or explained away with little disturbance of the conscience; because the central point round which morality revolved was a spiritual deity, who was the source and goal of all moral aspiration, and directly revealed himself to the individual conscience. These two are the two ethical poles, first, the tribal ethics, the responsibility to a community however limited, and, secondly, the universal or introspective ethics, or responsibility to a divinity, for whom humanity was but a means of realising himself. In these ethics the duties of man to man were of secondary importance. But though the tendency was in this direction from the beginnings of civilisation, it took historically 298 many centuries to realise itself, and only reached its final development in Christianity. ‘
As regards the future form of the moral consciousness, we may safely predict that it will be in a sense a return on a higher level to the ethics of the older world, with the difference that the limitation of scope to the kinship group in its narrower sense, which was one of the causes of the dissolution of ancient society, will disappear, and the identification of individual with social interests will be so complete that any divorce between the two will be inconceivable to the average man.