Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 3.djvu/768

 THE RELATION OF SEX TO PRIMITIVE SOCIAL

CONTROL.

THE first expressions of culture, feeble, unformulated, and unreflective in their nature, are incidental accompaniments of physiological desires and of their satisfaction through appropri- ate forms of activity. The two physiological desires of the first magnitude are nutrition and reproduction, and associated life in human as in animal society is reached more immediately through the activities connected with the fact of sex than through the activities connected with the stimulus furnished by food. And further, the characteristic steps in culture are to be referred in their genesis to organic peculiarities of the male and female, and of the two the female is the more immediately social nature. 1

The old theory of promiscuity, associated conspicuously with the name of Lubbock, has been elaborately discredited by Westermarck, 2 but it must be recognized that in arguing for a definite system of monogamy in early society, after the analogy of monogamous unions in animal society, Westermarck is quite as wide of the mark in the opposite direction. There was a tendency to monogamy among animals, dictated, along with other instinctive practices, by natural selection. But the very powerful animal instinct of copulation-for-reproduction- only disappeared completely in the human species with the introduction of memory, imagination, and clothing, and there intervened between animal monogamy and civilized monogamy a period when the reflective attention of society was fixed on the fact of sex, resulting in a type of sexual union more inconstant than that found among certain animals, and yet not systemat- ically promiscuous, in the sense that it implied the commonly

1 Cf. AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY, Vol. Ill, pp. 59 ff., " On a Difference in the Metabolism of the Sexes."

2 E. WESTERMARCK, The History of Human Marriage.

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