Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/130

 I20 Psychology and Ethnology.

continually being moulded by intelligence and design, and a factor that runs so through the whole of history is incap- able of explaining a particular episode.

Dual organization does not stop incest in the least. It allows a man to marry his mother, or a daughter her father, according as descent is patrilineal or matrilineal. The natural conclusion is that it was never meant to prevent incest. But the psychological anthropologist prefers the methods of Ptolemy to those of Copernicus. He maintains his original assumption and calls in another assumption to help the first. He supposes that the savage does not think as we do ; that if he sets out after a definite purpose he generally goes a roundabout way and often never gets there at all. Thus rationalistic, utilitarian psychology has to be supplemented by what we may call functional psycho- logy, which undertakes to explain savage customs by the mental functions of the savage mind : by association, emotion, confusion of thought, massive apprehension, ana- logical reasoning and so forth.

Both methods are inconsistent with one another : the first is merely the application of old English psychology to savages and is therefore uniformitarian ; the second, on the contrary, is obliged to postulate for the savage different processes of thought to account for his different ideas. This does not prevent them from forming a close alliance. The first concludes that exogamy and matrimonial classes were invented to prevent incest ; if you object that there was a much simpler way of doing it by proclaiming, " Thou shalt not marry thy sister, nor thy mother, nor thy daughter," then the second method comes to the rescue with the reply, " Oh, but savages have undeveloped intelligences and could not keep in mind their relationships." After the assertion that savages are no mere machines, but intelligent beings endowed " with a practical ingenuity and logical thoroughness and precision," ^ it is suggested that this

•Trazer, Totentism and Exogamy, vol. iv., p. 105.