Note 31 — Chapter II · THE DAWN OF MORALITY: CONSCIENCE IN THE KINSHIP GROUP
Reading edition
It should be carefully noted that this is very different from saying that his life is immoral. To pronounce it immoral would be like pronouncing immoral the life of the child, in whom the sense of right and wrong has not yet arisen. The savage is a child not only in intellect but also in moral feeling. As Bagehot says, “We may be certain that the morality of prehistoric man was as imperfect and as rudimentary as his reason” (Physics and Politics (1873), p. 115).