himself in the wars of the tribe. . . . No sooner did he hear the fatal news than he was seized by the most extraordinary convulsions and cramp in the stomach, which never ceased till he died, about sun-down the same day." "1 Contact with the Mikado's clothes or drinking vessels was avoided, not from fear of contracting any of his qualities, but because the clothes would cause swellings and pains all over the body, and the vessels would burn up the throat. Contact with a corpse, which might, one would have thought, lead to contracting the "quality" of death, produces loss of hair and teeth.2 In Whydah the negroes may not look upon the sacred python, when it goes in procession, because, if they did," their bodies would at once become the prey of loathsome maggots." Fear of contracting the qualities of the thing loathed does not, as far as appears, seem to be alleged by the savage as his reason for avoiding persons or things taboo. He is not commonly explicit as to the consequences of breaking taboo; he only gets so far as something plainly suggested by the association of ideas, e.g. tabooed food will disagree with him more or less seriously; clothes be, like the robe steeped in the blood of Nessus, more or less uncomfortable. But as a rule the consequences are left in the vague; they are matter for private and divers conjectures the one thing about which the savage has no doubt is that the taboo must not be broken. In fine, the imperative of taboo is categorical, not hypothetical. The last sentence will have reminded the reader that, according to the Intuitionist school of moral philosophers, what distinguishes the Moral Sentiment and Ethical Laws from all others is precisely the fact that their commands are categorical, and that they require unconditional obedience without regard to the consequences. The man who is honest because to be honest is the best policy, is not actuated by a 1 Frazer, op. cit. 168, and A Pakeha Maori, Old New Zealand, 96. 3 Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 61. Frazer, who says taboo "subserved the progress of civilisation by fostering conceptions of the rights of property and the sanctity of the marriage tie. . . . We shall scarcely err in believing that even in advanced societies the moral sentiments, in so far as they are merely sentiments, and are not based on an induction from experience, derive much of their force from an original system of taboo."1 We may now, taking leave of previous theories of taboo, go on our own way; and, as our starting-point, we will take the fact that among savages universally there are some things which categorically and unconditionally must not be done. That this feeling is a "primitive" sentiment, a tendency inherent in the mind of man, the following considerations will, I hope, incline the reader to believe. Though all things taboo are dangerous, not all dangerous things are taboo; for instance, it is not taboo to eat poisonous plants, handle venomous serpents, jump over a precipice, beard the lion, or, in fine, to do anything the danger of which you can discover for yourself, either by your own experience or that of others. On the contrary, it is things which experience could never teach you to be dangerous that are taboo, such as touching a new-born child, or the water in which a holy person has washed. Indeed, experience, so far from being able to generate the belief that these things are dangerous, would have shown that there was no danger in them, and would not have given rise to but have destroyed the belief -the proof of which is that, in Polynesia, the belief in taboo has been broken down chiefly by the fact that Europeans violated taboos innumerable, and were, as the natives saw, none the worse. The sentiment, then, as it appears even in its earliest and lowest manifestations, cannot have been derived from experience; it is prior to and even contradictory to experience. In fine, it is an inherent tendency of the human mind; and as such it does not stand isolated and alone, for in a previous chapter we have seen that the belief in the uniformity of nature, the tendency to expect what has once happened to happen again, is independent of, as it is often disappointed by experience. Between these two sentiments, namely, the positive belief that what you have done 1 Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. "Taboo," 4 once you can do again, and the negative belief that there are some things which you must not do, there are other points of contact, as we shall have occasion to note, besides their common origin. The next point in our theory of taboo is that, though the moral sentiment undoubtedly does "derive much of its force from an original system of taboo," it is not merely in the morality of advanced societies that taboo continues to display its force, nor is taboo in its origin specifically moral. In advanced societies there are other things which must not be done, besides immoral acts, e.g. irreligious acts, breaches of the code of honour, violations of etiquette, etc. And in savage communities there are things taboo which are not irreligious or immoral, but rather non-moral. But the sentiment, merely as a sentiment and apart from the reason or justification of it, is the same in all cases, namely, that the thing must not be done. The sentiment in itself, therefore, is neither exclusively moral, religious, nor social. In other words, the sentiment is purely formal and without content; the conviction that there are some things which must not be done does not help us at all to know what things they are which must not be done, just as the conviction that what has happened once will happen again under similar circumstances does not tell us whether the circumstances of the second occasion of a given experience are similar to those of the first-whether the a we have before us is really similar to the a which was followed by b. How primitive man settled what things were not to be done there is no evidence to show. We will therefore content ourselves with the fact that as far back as we can see in the history-or rather the prehistory-of man, taboo was never grossly material. It marked the awe of man in the presence of what he conceived-often mistakenly to be the supernatural; and if his dread of contact with blood, babes, and corpses appears at first sight irrational, let us remember that in these, the three classes of objects which are inherently taboo, we have man in relation to the mystery of life and death, and in his affinity to that supernatural power which he conceived to be a spirit like himself. The danger of contact with these objects is "imaginary," if you like, but it is spiritual, i.e. it is the feeling that experience, senseexperience, is not the sole source or final test of truth; and that the things which are seen bring man daily into relation with things unseen. For, once more, the essence of taboo is that it is, à priori, that without consulting experience it pronounces certain things to be dangerous. Those things, as a matter of fact, were in a sense not dangerous, and the belief in their danger was irrational. Yet had not that belief existed, there would be now no morality, and consequently no civilisa-, tion. The things were indeed dangerous, but the danger was for us men of to-day, not for those who obeyed the taboo-for civilisation and not for the savage. It was a danger which no experience at the time could have discovered, so remote was it and so great. If the savage appears irrational in his choice of objects to be taboo, his belief in the transmissibility of taboo was equally irrational and equally essential to the progress of mankind. The belief that every person who touched a thing taboo became himself tabooed, and was a fresh centre of infection to everyone and everything around him, is obviously an à priori belief, which is due not to experience at all, but to the association of ideas. The terror of the original taboo spread to all associated with it, and everything that suggested it. This belief was a fallacy, as experience would at once have demonstrated, had the savage dared to make the experiment. But this fallacy was the sheath which enclosed and protected a conception that was to blossom and bear a priceless fruit the conception of Social Obligation, To respect taboo was a duty towards society, because the man who broke it caught the taboo contagion, and transmitted it to everyone and everything that he came in contact with. Thus the community had a direct and lively interest in requiring that every member should respect taboo. On the other hand, it was equally the interest of the individual to avoid contact with things taboo, because the infection fell first and most fatally on him. Thus private interest and public good coincided exactly; and the problem that puzzles modern moral philosophers so much, namely, which of the two, if they do not coincide, can a man reasonably be expected to follow, was and would be still absolutely inconceivable in a community where taboo is an institution. It seems, therefore, that those philosophers who regard selfishness as alone "natural" and primitive, have neglected the actual facts of the case, for from the beginning the sense of duty towards society has been necessarily present as a restraining influence on the individual. He has shrunk from violation of taboo not merely as an individual, but also and always as a member of society. The terror with which he viewed the prospect of coming into personal contact with things taboo was identically the same feeling with which he viewed the taboo-breaker. Nor could he, if he broke taboo, hope by secrecy to conceal his offence and escape his punishment, for the taboo contagion infects, as we have seen, even those who unwittingly come in contact with the thing taboo. That society would not exist, if the individual members thereof did not find their account in supporting it, is undeniable; but it is equally true that no society could exist unless the feeling of social obligation held it together. Now, it is clear that the conviction that a man's own private interest requires him to perform his duty towards the community must have done much to bind society together. It is also obvious that a man must have been powerfully stimulated to do his duty by the further conviction that it was impossible for any violation of duty to be hid. The belief, therefore, in the transmissibility of taboo effected two things. First, by rendering it impossible even to imagine a divergence between private and public good, it protected the growth of the / feeling of social obligation until it was strong enough to stand to some extent alone. Next, by inspiring the conviction that all breaches of taboo must inevitably be promptly discovered, it prepared the way for the higher feeling that, whether likely to be discovered or not, wrong must not be done. But though there were all these possibilities of good in the institution of taboo, it was only amongst the minority of mankind, and there only under exceptional circumstances, that the institution bore its best fruit. For evolution and progress are not identical. Everywhere there has been evolution, but progress has been rare. Indeed, in many respects the evolution of taboo has been fatal to the progress of humanity. The belief in the transmissibility of taboo led, |