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,

for instance in Polynesia, to the desertion and inhuman abandonment of the sick, who were regarded as taboo, and therefore could not be ministered to, because those who tended them would themselves become taboo. Again, the taboo contagion spread so widely as to check man with its iron hand in every attempt which he might make to subdue nature and utilise her gifts. With its arbitrary and senseless restrictions it overgrows healthy social tendencies and kills them, as moss kills off grass or ivy strangles the tree. The taboo laid on young mothers is extended to all women; hence the separation of man and wife ("I have scarcely ever seen. anything like social intercourse between husband and wife," says the Ojibway, Peter Jones), the degradation of women and the destruction of natural affection (" the wife beheld unmoved the sufferings of her husband, and the amusement of the mother was undisturbed by the painful crying of her languishing child "1). In religion the institution also had a baneful effect; the irrational restrictions, touch not, taste not, handle not, which constitute formalism, are essentially taboos -indispensable to the education of man at one period of his development, but a bar to his progress later.

The growth of taboo, then, need not detain us. It is amply accounted for by the fatal rapidity with which, thanks to the association of ideas, it spreads over the whole of savage and even semi-civilised life. But the process by which taboo element of civilisation calls for

has been converted into an some explanation. The facts with which we have to reckon in our attempt are these: on the one hand, we have a network of innumerable taboos covering the whole life of the savage, restricting in the most irrational and injurious manner his incomings and outgoings, his mode of eating, his family life, his whole existence, from the time when he is taboo as a new-born child to the time when he is a corpse, and as such is equally taboo. On the other, in modern civilisation we have all these taboos cast aside, except those which subserve the cause of morality and religion, and those which lend their force to the code of honour, social etiquette, and minor morals generally. Evidently a process of selection-"natural" or otherwise has been at work, and the problem is to discover 1 Ellis, Polynesian Researches, iv. 126.

the nature of that process. We might surmise that the selective agency has been experience. Mankind has discovered by experience the baleful consequences of certain taboos, the beneficial effects of others, and has retained the latter while rejecting the former. Not all communities have been equally alert in the work of discrimination; the most discriminating, the quickest to learn by experience, have fared best, the fittest have survived. This theory has its recognised place in moral philosophy under the title of " the Unconscious Utilitarianism of Common Sense"; unconsciously, but none the less effectively, mankind has selected for condemnation as immoral those actions which militate against utility, and has exacted as a moral duty the performance of those which tend to the general good.

The difficulty I have in accepting this theory is that it fails to take into account one of the most marked features of taboo. The very life of taboo as an institution depends on the success with which it forbids the appeal to experience and prevents experiments from being made. If the field of experience were open freely to the savage, doubtless repeated experiment would in course of time teach him, as the theory of unconscious utilitarianism requires that it should. But taboo closes the field to him. He dare not make the experiments which, if made, would enlighten him. Even if accidentally and unintentionally he is led to make such an experiment, instead of profiting by the experience, he dies of fright, as did the Australian slave who ate his master's dinner; or if he does not die, he is tabooed, excommunicated, outlawed; and his fate in either case strengthens the original respect for taboo. The vicious circle with which taboo surrounds the savage is exactly like that which "sympathetic magic" weaves round him. The belief that "like produces like "—which is the foundation of sympathetic magic-blinds his eyes to the facts which should undeceive him, and the teachings of experience fall consequently in vain on ears which will not hear.

Now, the fallacy that like produces like stands in the same relation to the positive belief in the uniformity of nature that the transmissibility of taboo stands in to the negative belief that some things there are which must not be done.

Each belief, the positive and the negative, is inherent in man's mind and indispensable to his welfare. Each, however, is rendered barren or misleading by a fallacy due solely to the association of ideas. From the fallacy of magic man was delivered by religion; and there are reasons, I submit, for believing that it was by the same aid he escaped from the irrational restrictions of taboo.

The reader will have noticed for himself that the action of taboo is always mechanical; contact with the tabooed object communicates the taboo infection as certainly as contact with water communicates moisture, or an electric current an electric shock. The intentions of the taboobreaker have no effect upon the action of the taboo; he may touch in ignorance, or for the benefit of the person he touches, but he is tabooed as surely as if his motive were irreverent or his action hostile. Nor does the mood of the sacred persons, the Mikado, the Polynesian chief, the priestess of Artemis Hymnia, modify the mechanical action of taboo; their touch or glance is as fatal to friend as foe, to plant life as to human. Still less does the morality of the taboo-breaker matter; the penalty descends like rain alike upon the unjust and the just. In a word, there is no rational principle of action in the operation of taboo; it is mechanical; arbitrary, because its sole basis is the arbitrary association of ideas; irrational, because its principle is " that causal connection in thought is equivalent to causative connection in fact."1

On the other hand, the dominant conception of modern civilisation is that the universe is intelligible, that it is constructed on rational principles, and that the reasons of things may be discovered. This is the avowed axiom of metaphysics, which aims at proving the truth of its axiom by presenting an orderly and rational system of the universe. It is the tacit assumption, or the faith, of science, as is shown by the fact that, if a hypothesis, such as that of evolution, fails to account for all the facts which it professes to explain, the man of science infers, not that the facts themselves are unintelligible and not to be accounted for on rational principles, but that his hypothesis is at fault. The 1 A. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 95.

same assumption is made by the religious sentiment, which, even when most distressed, for example by the apparent triumph of injustice or by problems such as that of the origin of evil, still holds that the facts are capable ultimately of a satisfactory explanation.

The advance, then, which civilisation has made on savagery consists, partially at least, in shaking off the bonds imposed upon the mind by the association of ideas, in seeking a rational instead of a mechanical explanation of things; in fine, to return to the subject of this chapter, in the rationalisation of taboo. Now, wherever the operation of taboo is accepted as an ultimate fact which requires no explanation, there no advance towards its rationalisation can be made, and progress is impossible. But as soon as a taboo is taken up into religion, its character is changed; it is no longer an arbitrary fact, it becomes the command of a divine being, who has reasons for requiring obedience to his ordinances. Not all taboos, however, are taken up into religion; there is a process of selection and rejection. To the consideration of this process we shall return shortly; here all we are concerned with is to point out that when the taboos which receive the sanction of religion are regarded as reasonable, as being the commands of a being possessing reason, then the other taboos also may be brought to the test of reason, and man may gradually learn to disregard those which are manifestly unreasonable. The conviction begins to gain strength that God does not forbid things without a reason; at the same time, religion, by selecting certain taboos to receive its sanction, strengthens them and thereby relatively weakens the force of those which it rejects. The fact that the latter have not received the religious sanction creates a presumption that they are less binding, and makes it easier for man to discard them if they have no reason and no utility. Hence, all the elaborate precautions which are taken by the savage to prevent his food from becoming tabooed, dwindle down to the etiquette of the dining-table; the removal of a garment, lest it should be tabooed by the glance of a superior, is etiolated into civilised man's form of salutation; and the interdict from fire and water as a social penalty survives only in the cut direct. But though restrictions which are