Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/599

Rh for it. He recognized the value of a knowledge of the organizing cause of the family in antiquity, but gave up the search for it as hopeless. Others, more hopeful, have succeeded where he failed, until it has now been reduced to certainty that the constituent bond of the family was neither the patria potestas, nor simple community of blood, nor natural love and affection, and that neither of these things suffices to explain its existence, but that it finds its ultimate reason in religious principle and practice. In his treatise on "Hindu Law," Mr. John D. Mayne shows that ancestor-worship is the actual governing motive of native Indian jurisprudence to this day—ancestor-worship, the same principle which Coulanges so skillfully proved to be anterior to all Aryan social institutions, and which Spencer has found to be universal among all primitive peoples and the radical principle of all known religions. Coulanges erred in making the worship of the dead a finality, just as Maine erred—an error which I believe he has partially recognized—in believing the resources of his science insufficient to penetrate behind the—patria potestas. The reason of ancestor-worship is discovered in the physical condition of primitive man, in his earliest methods of thought, his ideas of life and death, of life hereafter, and of the divine principle. Just as the student of the history of Roman law is forced to never lose sight of the patriarchal family—the nidus of those rudimentary ideas which are to the jurist what the primary crusts of the earth are to the geologist—so the student of the Aryan household must not only ever remember that its source is in the sentiment of religion, and that "the one unfailing centripetal force of archaic society" was community of worship, but he must go further, and place himself in a position to fully realize ancient habits of thought at the time when ancestor-worship was the dominant form of belief. To try to account for that belief by reasoning after our own approved methods methods—which at first seem to us to be the natural and only possible ones—is to grope hopelessly in the dark. We must make an effort to reconstruct primitive man on his intellectual side, as the paleontologist does on his anatomical side, and then to think as he thought. Here we leave our special department of laws and customs, and take up the study of general culture history; and, if in going back we lose distinctness and coherency, we shall find nevertheless the thing which shaped the thought at its birth, and that is the essential matter.

The only scholar who has as yet made any systematic and noteworthy effort to discover the causes of the primitive universality of ancestor-worship is Mr. Spencer, and his views are most worthy of attention, however liable they may be to future modification. He contends that ancestor-worship may be explained by having recourse to the ideas concerning sleep and dreams entertained by the earliest men, while they are still incapable of generalization and without any correct idea of causation and law, "lacking the very implements of