[31] Durkheim, ‘La prohibition de l’inceste et ses origines,’ in L’année sociologique, i. 64. Professor Durkheim refers in this connection to an article by Dr. Simmel, ‘Die Verwandtenehe,’ in Vossische Zeitung, June 3rd and 10th, 1894. But I cannot find that Dr. Simmel is really opposed to my view. He only says, “Das intime Beisammenleben wirkt keineswegs nur abstumpfend, sondern in vielen Fällen gerade anreizend, sonst würde die alte Erfahrung nicht gelten, dass die Liebe, wo sie beim Eingehen der Ehe fehlte, oft im Laufe derselben entsteht.”
[32] Cf. Bentham, Theory of Legislation, p. 220:—“Individuals accustomed to see each other and to know each other, from an age which is neither capable of conceiving the desire nor of inspiring it, will see each other with the same eyes to the end of life.”
[33] For advocates of such a view see Westermarck, op. cit. p. 310 sqq. More recently it has been expressed by Krauss, in Am Ur-Quell, iv. 151, and Finck, Primitive Love, p. 49.
[34] Plato, Leges, viii. 838. Among the Maoris of New Zealand, according to Mr. Colenso (Maori Races, p. 47 sq.), adult brothers and sisters slept together, as they had always done from their birth, “not only without sin, but without thought of it.”
Dr. Havelock Ellis, again, objects that my theory assumes the existence of a kind of instinct which can with difficulty be accepted. “An innate tendency,” he says, “at once so specific and so merely negative, involving at the same time deliberate intellectual processes, can only with a certain force be introduced into the accepted class of instincts. It is as awkward and artificial an instinct as would be, let us say, an instinct to avoid eating the apples that grew in one’s own orchard. The explanation of the abhorrence of incest is really, however, exceedingly simple…. The normal failure of the pairing instinct to manifest itself in the case of brothers and sisters, or of boys and girls brought up together from infancy, is a merely negative phenomenon due to the inevitable absence under those circumstances of the conditions which evoke the pairing impulse…. Between those who have been brought up together from childhood all the sensory stimuli of vision, hearing, and touch have been dulled by use, trained to the calm level of affection, and deprived of their potency to arouse the erethistic excitement which produces sexual tumescence.”[35] I think that Dr. Ellis has considerably exaggerated the difference between my theory and his own. The “instinct” of which I have spoken is simply aversion to sexual intercourse with certain persons, and this is a no more complicated mental phenomenon than, for instance, an animal’s aversion to eating certain kinds of substances. Indeed, Dr. Ellis himself, in his excellent ‘Studies in the Psychology of Sex,’ gives us many instances not only of sexual indifference, but of sexual aversion, quite instinctive in character.[36] Thus the largest proportion of male inverts described by him experience what is called horror feminæ, that is to say, “woman as an object of sexual desire is disgusting” (not merely indifferent) to them.[37] And Dr. Ellis also repeatedly speaks of the “abhorrence” of incest.
[35] Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, ‘Sexual Selection in Man,’ p. 205 sq.
[36] I have been blamed for making an illegitimate use of the word “instinct” (Crawley, The Mystic Rose p. 446). But if, as Dr. Ellis says, “an instinct is fundamentally a more or less complicated series of reflexes set in action by a definite stimulus,” or as Mr. Crawley puts it (op. cit. p. 446), instinct “has nothing in its content except response of function to environment,” then the aversion I speak of may certainly be called an instinct.
[37] Havelock Ellis, op. cit. p. 164.
The objection has been raised that, if my explanation of the prohibition of incest were correct, connections between unrelated persons who have been brought up together should be as repulsive as connections between near kin; whereas, as a matter of fact, the two cases are regarded in a very different light, the latter, only, being held incestuous.[38] Much, of course, depends on the closeness of the union, and Dr. Steinmetz’s argument that “the very sensual Frenchmen often seem to marry the lady friends of their earliest youth,”[39] is certainly not to the point. I believe that sexual love between a man and his foster-daughter is almost as great an abnormality as sexual love between a father and his daughter; and among some peoples marriages between persons who have been brought up together in the same family or who belong to the same local group, without being related to each other by blood, are held blamable or are actually prohibited.[40] Even between lads and girls who have been educated in the same school there is a remarkable absence of erotic feelings, as appears from an interesting communication by a person who has for many years been the head-mistress of such a school in Finland. One youth assured her that neither he nor any of his friends would ever think of marrying a girl who had been their school fellow;[41] and I heard of a lad who made a great distinction between girls of his own school and other, “real,” girls, as he called them. Yet however objectionable and unnatural unions between foster-parents and foster-children or between foster-brothers and foster-sisters may appear to us, I do not deny that unions between the nearest blood-relatives inspire a horror of their own; and it seems natural that they should do so considering that from earliest times the aversion to sexual intercourse between persons living closely together has been expressed in prohibitions against unions between kindred. Such unions have been stigmatised by custom, law, and religion, whilst much less notice has been taken of intercourse between unrelated persons who may occasionally have grown up in the same household. The belief in the supernatural, especially, has played a very important part in the ideas referring to incest, as in other points of sexual morality, owing to the mystery which surrounds everything connected with the function of reproduction.[42] The Aleuts in early times believed that incest, which they considered the gravest crime, was always followed by the birth of monsters with walrus tusks, beards, and other disfigurations.[43] The Kafirs likewise maintain that the offspring of an incestuous union will be a monster, as “a punishment inflicted by the ancestral spirit.”[44] The Bataks of Sumatra regard a long drought as a decisive proof that two cousins have had criminal intercourse with each other.[45] The Galelarese think that incest calls forth alarming natural phenomena, such as earthquakes, the eruption of a volcano, or torrents of rain.[46] So also the higher religions have branded incest as a heinous sin. As for Christianity’s views on the subject, it is sufficient to notice that the prohibited degrees were extended by the Church,[47] and that the jurisdiction over incest, as over all sexual offences, was exercised by the ecclesiastical courts.[48]
[38] Steinmetz, ‘Die neueren Forschungen zur Geschichte der menschlichen Familie,’ in Zeitschr. f. Socialwiss. ii. 818 sq.