Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/279

Rh with which blood, and especially the blood of the totem and the totem-clan, is regarded. He contends that this horror was at first confined, so far as women were concerned, to those of the clan, and resulted in exogamy, and that in course of time, when, as the consequence of exogamy, women of various clans became intermixed in residence, the horror and the taboo were extended to them all; but, because this was only a secondary effect, it was not complete, and the total separation of the sexes only extended to those of the same clan.

The importance of this theory will be seen at a glance. It offers a simple explanation of the recoil which all nations have experienced from what they regard as incest, while it is not open to the objections urged, and urged successfully, against the rival theories of Spencer, Maclennan, and Westermarck. At present, however, it is merely a theory; it depends upon the universality of totemism, and moreover demands careful examination in connection with rites of marriage and other customs. M. Durkheim does not concern himself with these. He goes on to argue that exogamy, thus originated, has evolved with the family. Beginning with the uterine clan, when paternity, having long been admitted as a fact, obtained legal recognition, and legal relationships were transferred from the mother's side exclusively to the father's, these sexual interdictions followed them. When totemism disappeared, and with it the clan-system, exogamy attached itself to the new types of the family which began to be constituted and which rested on other bases. It was accommodated to them, extending on the one hand to relations never contemplated by the unilateral clan-system, and on the other hand becoming more circumscribed as the wider clan-relationships ceased to be recognised. Family life is dominated by the idea of duty. The domestic affections of parent and child, brother and sister, are tinged with respect incompatible with conjugal relationship. The very existence of the family rests on exogamy, understanding that term in a wide sense. Sexual relations, as we conceive them, are based upon pleasure, upon mutual attraction. They do not become permanent, the family, properly speaking, does not come into existence until the arrival of children. Sexual relations being thus founded in spontaneity, they are opposed radically to the ties of kinship. But this implies that they must first of all have been rejected from the moral atmosphere in which the family has its being. Not that