[36] Op. cit., p. 68.
[37] I have excised a criticism of Dr. Durkheim's theory of the modus by which "primary clans" segmented into secondary clans (L'Année Sociologique, vi. pp. 7-34), because, since a clan, exogamous and with female reckoning of descent, cannot conceivably segment itself, as we have proved, my other arguments are as superfluous as they are numerous.
[CHAPTER VI]
THE AUTHOR'S THEORY
Mr. Darwin's theory of man's early social condition—Either men lived in male communities, each with his own female mates, or man was solitary, living alone with his female mates and children—His adolescent sons he drove away—The latter view accepted—It involves practical exogamy—Misunderstood by M. Salomon Reinach—Same results would follow as soon as totems were evolved—Totemism begins in assumption, by groups of men, of the names of natural objects—Mr. Howitt states this opinion—Savage belief in magical rapport between men and things of the same name—Mr. Frazer and Professor Rhys died for this fact—Theory of Dr. Pikler—Totemism arises in the need of names to be represented in pictographs—But the pictograph is later than the name—Examples of magic of names—Men led to believe in a connection of blood kin between themselves and objects of the same names—These objects regarded with reverence—Hence totemic exogamy merely one aspect of the general totem name—Group names were sobriquets of local groups, given by members of other local groups—Proof that such names may be accepted and gloried in—Cases of tribal names given from without and accepted—Mr. Hill-Tout on influence of names—His objection to our theory answered—Mr. Howitt's objections answered—American and Celtic cases of derisive nicknames accepted—Two Australian totem names certainly sobriquets—Religious aspect of totemism—Results from a divine decree—Other myths—Recapitulation.
The problem has been to account for the world-wide development of kinships, usually named after animals, plants, and other objects, and for the rule that the members of these kins may never marry within the kinship as limited by the name, Crow, Wolf, or whatever it may be. Why, again, are these kinships regimented, in each tribe, into two "phratries," exogamous, which also frequently bear animal names? No system hitherto proposed seems satisfactory, for the reasons given in the preceding critical chapters.
In trying to construct a more satisfactory system than those which have been criticised, we must commence, like others, with an hypothesis as to what kind of social animal man was when he began his career. Now we really are not quite reduced to conjecture, for Mr. Howitt's knowledge of savage life, in such a country as Australia, proves that the economic conditions, the search for supplies, and the blunt inefficiency of the earliest weapons, instruments, and hunting methods must have forced men to live in small separate groups. The members, again, of each group, being animated by "individual likes and dislikes" (including love, hate, jealousy, maternal affection, and the associations of kindness between a male and those whom he provided for and protected), must soon have evolved some discrimination of persons, and certain practical restraints on amatory intercourse. In groups necessarily very small, these germinal elements of later morality could be evolved, as they could not be evolved in the gregarious communal horde of theory.