Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 2.djvu/449

 SOCIAL CONTROL 435

a tribesman was feigned to be the veritable son of a member of a tribe, are both evidences of the highest value that the Arabs were incapable of conceiving any absolute social obligation or social unity which was not based on kinship." 1

When kinship was the sole firm bond between men it would not do to admit gradations. " Nothing can be clearer than that the original doctrine of kinship recognized no difference of degree."* Blc^od relationship was so conceived as to appear everywhere equally absolute, and thus to unite all the members of the group in equal bonds. It is only after social feeling acquires other props that there is suffered to prevail a rationalistic view of kinship recognizing degrees of remoteness and of obligation. "All people who think of counting degrees, instead of consid- ering the whole liayy as a single unity of blood, are the men who break up the old society and bring in that growing chaos which made the prophet's (Mohammed's) new law a welcome reforma- tion.'^

The virtue of kinship lay not in recognition of common descent, but in a realizing sense of identity. "A kin was a group of persons whose lives were so bound up together, in what must be called a physical unity, that they could be treated as parts of one common life. The members of one kindred looked upon themselves as one living whole, a single animated mass of blood, flesh, and bones, of which no member could be touched without all the members suffering." 4 Both fellowship and morality run along these lines. "Under such a system there can be no inviolable fellowship except between men of the same blood" 5 .... "no binding precepts of conduct except those that rest on the principle of kinship." 6 "No life and no obliga- tion was sacred unless it was brought within the charmed circle of the kindred blood." 6

A close connection between morality and the conviction of identity of life is witnessed by the blood covenant, where the

'ROBERTSON SMITH, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, p. 51.

A'inship and Marriage, p. 53. *Ibid., p. 52. * Ibid., p. 254.

4 ROBERTSON SMITH, Religion of the Semites, p. 255. Ibid., p. 269.