Page:The evolution of marriage and of the family ... (IA evolutionofmarri00letorich).pdf/361

 the innovators of the future; but this new branch of human knowledge can only grow by submitting to the method of the natural sciences. Before everything else, it is important to classify the facts that have been observed. This course is imperative. It is dry, and lends itself with difficulty to oratorical effusions, but no other path can lead to the truth. My constant anxiety has been to be faithful to it, and as an anthropologist I have especially borrowed my materials from ethnography. Step by step, and following as much as possible the hierarchic order of human races and of civilisations, I have described the modes of marriage and of the family adopted by the numerous varieties of the human type; I have endeavoured to note the phases of their evolution, and to show how superior forms have evolved from inferior ones. Now that I am at the end of my inquiry, it will be well to sum up clearly its result.

The prime cause of marriage and the family is purely biological; it is the powerful instinct of reproduction, the condition of the duration of species, and the origin of which is necessarily contemporaneous with that of primal organisms, of protoplasmic monads, multiplying themselves by unconscious scissiparity. By a slow specialisation of organs and functions, in obedience to the laws of evolutionary selection, various animal types have been created; and when they have been provided with separate sexes and conscious nervous centres, procreation has become a tyrannic need, driving males and females to unite in order to fulfil the important function of reproduction.

In this respect man is strictly assimilable to the other animals, and with him as with them all the intoxication of love has for its initial principle the elective affinity of two generating cellules of different sex. So far, this is mere biology, but it results, among superior animals, in sociological phenomena, in pairings which endure after the satisfaction of procreative needs, and produce in outline some forms of human marriage, or rather, of sexual union in humanity—namely, promiscuity, polygamy, and even monogamy. Our most primitive ancestors, our precursors, half men and half apes, have certainly had extremely gross customs, which are still in great measure preserved among the least developed races.