Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/760

740 of the use of their names by other men, and the custom would be so far religious; but it would probably be encouraged by the chiefs on governmental grounds, and would in so far be ethical. Even the religious usage probably goes back to the sentiment of respect felt for the chiefs as rulers.

A number of taboo customs seem to be probably or possibly social. The prohibition of the use of the flesh of a particular animal or of a whole class of animals as food is of uncertain origin. It is supposed by some to result from the idea of totems, each tribe refraining from the flesh of its own totem, but other considerations may have entered in part at least into the usage, and the origin of totemism itself is unknown. The rule among some tribes that women shall not eat human flesh is possibly social; it was perhaps intended to guard the character of women. When it is forbidden to touch a dead body or a burial ground, or a man who has slain an enemy, the idea of pollution thus incurred may be physical, though it may also come from the belief that the dead person is a spirit or inhabited by a spirit. It is possible also that this last may be the ground of the rule that persons dangerously ill should not be touched; here, however, a physical reason may have been effective. The appropriation or protection of property by taboo depends on ordinary principles of social organization. When a chief declares that a certain object is his head or his hand, and thereby secures it for himself, this is merely using the religious sanction to give authority to what we may suppose to be a natural disposition in chiefs, namely, to appropriate as much of the property of their tribesmen as possible. A private man who declares his field taboo, and thus prohibits other men from entering it, is only asserting the right of private property and calling in the aid of religion.

It may fairly be said that those taboo usages which are really ethical arise from ideas which have been established by social intercourse. In the case of the sick person, for example, that certain persons are forbidden to touch him is a religious usage, and if the prohibition were universal, it would be fatal to the sick man; but the helpfulness of those persons who actually tend him comes from the kindly relations engendered by ordinary social intercourse, which overbear the religious prohibition. It does not appear that taboo has ever pronounced any class of actions to be good or bad; it has only brought particular acts under existing moral categories. Neither it nor any other religious institution has ever in the first instance taught men that it was wrong to steal or right to be kind.

So far we have regarded only the content of ethical usage. We now have to ask whether, if religion has received its code from ethics, it has not communicated something in return. It is