Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 9, 1898.djvu/280

254 there is anything in them which necessitated this broad separation: it must have been imposed upon them from without. In other words, the moral incompatibility, in the name of which we to-day prohibit incest, is itself a consequence of this prohibition, which therefore must be due to some other cause. This cause is the totality of beliefs and rites of which exogamy was the outcome—totemism. Once the prejudices relative to blood had led men to forbid all union between kindred, the sexual instinct obliged them to seek satisfaction outside the kindred group, and hence it speedily differentiated from the kin-sentiment. Two spheres were thus opened to human activity and sensibility. The one—the clan, the family—was and remained the theatre of duty, morality. The other, the external, was that of passion, which only took-on a moral character in the measure in which it affected domestic interests. In the meantime, and in consequence of its initial freedom from the idea of duty, it has enriched humanity with emotions and ideas that but for exogamy could never have existed. To it the imagination owes many of the developments of art and poetry, and many of the aspirations which we count among the most precious inheritances of civilisation.

We have not presumed to criticise this very stimulating essay; considerations of time and space have limited us to a bare outline of its main thesis. It should be read and studied, together with the analysis and criticisms, by the same author later in the volume, of the recent works of Professor Kohler, Herr Grosse, and others. The criticisms of the former we can only accept with reserve, for we believe there is more to be said on behalf of an early prevalence of group-marriage than M. Durkheim admits. In any case, however, he has effected a masterly presentment of his view, and it deserves respectful consideration.

For anthropologists the whole volume is full of interest. We wish well to the new venture; and we gladly hail the rise of a French critical and constructive school of enquirers into savage custom.