A system that is generally accepted in America, that also exists in Asia among people of entirely different races, that is frequently found in a more or less modified form all over Africa and Australia, such a system requires a historical explanation and cannot be talked down, as was attempted, e. g., by McLennan. The terms father, child, brother, sister are more than mere honorary titles; they carry in their wake certain well-defined and very serious obligations, the aggregate of which comprises a very essential part of the social constitution of those nations. And the explanation was found. In the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) there existed up to the first half of the nineteenth century a family form producing just such fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, as the old Indo-American system of kinship. But how remarkable! The Hawaiian system of kinship again did not agree with the family form actually prevailing there. For there all the children of brothers and sisters, without any exception, are considered brothers and sisters, and regarded as the common children not only of their mother or her sisters, or their father and his brothers, but of all the brothers and sisters of their parents without distinction. While thus the American system of kinship presupposes an obsolete primitive form of the family, which is still actually existing in Hawaii, the Hawaiian system on the other hand points to a still more primitive form of the family, the actual existence of which cannot be proved any more, but which must have existed, because otherwise such a system of kinship could not have arisen. According to Morgan, the family is the active element; it is never stationary, but in progression from a lower to a higher form in the same measure in which society develops from a lower to a higher stage. But the systems of kinship are passive. Only in long intervals they register the progress made by the family in course of time, and only then are they radically changed, when the family has done so. "And," adds Marx, "it is the same with political, juridical, religious and philosophical systems in general." While the family keeps on growing, the system of kinship becomes ossified. The latter continues in this state and the family grows beyond it. With the same certainty which enabled Cuvier to conclude from some bones of Marsupialia found near Paris that extinct marsupialia had lived there, with this same certainty may we conclude from a system of kinship transmitted by history that the extinct form of the family corresponding to this system was once in existence.
The systems of kinship and forms of the family just mentioned differ from the present systems in that every child has several fathers and mothers. Under the American system to which the Hawaiian system corresponds, brother and sister cannot be father and mother of the same child; but the Hawaiian system presupposes a family, in which, on the contrary, this was the rule. We are here confronted by a series of family forms that are in direct contradiction with those that were currently regarded as alone prevailing. The conventional conception knows only monogamy, furthermore polygamy of one man, eventually also polyandry of one woman. But it passes in silence, as is meet for a moralizing philistine, that the practice silently but without compunction supersedes these barriers sanctioned officially by society. The study of primeval history, however, shows us conditions, where men practiced polygamy and women at the same time polyandry, so that their children were considered common to all; conditions that up to their final transition into monogamy underwent a whole series of modifications. These modifications slowly and gradually contract the circle comprised by the common tie of marriage until only the single couple remains which prevails to-day.
In thus constructing backward the history of the family, Morgan, in harmony with the majority of his colleagues, arrives at a primeval condition, where unrestricted sexual intercourse existed within a tribe, so that every woman belonged to every man, and vice versa.
Much has been said about this primeval state of affairs since the eighteenth century, but only in general commonplaces. It is one of Bachofen's great merits to have taken the subject seriously and to have searched for traces of this state in historical and religious traditions. To-day we know that these traces, found by him, do not lead back to a stage of unlimited sexual intercourse, but to a much later form, the group marriage. The primeval stage, if it really ever existed, belongs to so remote a period, that we can hardly expect to find direct proofs of its former existence among these social fossils, backward savages. Bachofen's merit consists in having brought this question to the fore.[7]
It has lately become a fashion to deny the existence of this early stage of human sex life, in order to spare us this "shame." Apart from the absence of all direct proof, the example of the rest of animal life is invoked. From the latter, Letourneau (Evolution du mariage et de la famille, 1888) quoted numerous facts, alleged to prove that among animals also an absolutely unlimited sexual intercourse belongs to a lower stage. But I can only conclude from all these facts that they prove absolutely nothing for man and the primeval conditions of his life. The mating of vertebrates for a lengthy term is sufficiently explained by physiological causes, e. g., among birds by the helplessness of the female during brooding time. Examples of faithful monogamy among birds do not furnish any proofs for men, for we are not descended from birds.
And if strict monogamy is the height of virtue, then the palm belongs to the tapeworm that carries a complete male and female sexual apparatus in each of its 50 to 200 sections and passes its whole lifetime in fertilizing itself in every one of its sections. But if we confine ourselves to mammals, we find all forms of sexual intercourse, license, suggestions of group marriage, polygamy and monogamy. Only polyandry is missing;[8] that could be accomplished by men only. Even our next relations, the quadrumana, exhibit all possible differences in the grouping of males and females. And if we draw the line still closer and consider only the four anthropoid apes, Letourneau can only tell us, that they are now monogamous, now polygamous; while Saussure contends according to Giraud-Teulon that they are monogamous. The recent contentions of Westermarck[9] in regard to monogamy among anthropoid apes are far from proving anything. In short, the information is such that honest Letourneau admits: "There exists no strict relation at all between the degree of intellectual development and the form of sexual intercourse among mammals." And Espinas says frankly:[10] "The herd is the highest social group found among animals. It seems to be composed of families, but from the outset the family and the herd are antagonistic; they develop in directly opposite ratio."
It is evident from the above that we know next to nothing of the family and other social groups of anthropoid apes; the reports are directly contradictory. How full of contradiction, how much in need of critical scrutiny and research are the reports even on savage human tribes! But monkey tribes are far more difficult to observe than human tribes. For the present, therefore, we must decline all final conclusions from such absolutely unreliable reports.
The quotation from Espinas, however, offers a better clue. Among higher animals, the herd and family are not supplements of one another, but antitheses. Espinas demonstrates very nicely, how the jealousy of the males loosens or temporarily dissolves every herd during mating time. "Where the family is closely organized, herds are formed only in exceptional cases. But wherever free sexual intercourse or polygamy are existing, the herd appears almost spontaneously.... In order that a herd may form, family ties must be loosened and the individual be free. For this reason we so rarely find organized herds among birds.... Among mammals, however, we find groups organized after a fashion, just because here the individual is not merged in the family.... The rising sense of cohesion in a herd cannot, therefore, have a greater enemy than the consciousness of family ties. Let us not shrink from pronouncing it: the development of a higher form of society than the family can be due only to the fact that it admitted families which had undergone a thorough change. This does not exclude the possibility that these same families were thus enabled to reorganize later on under infinitely more favorable circumstances."[11]
It becomes apparent from this, that animal societies may indeed have a certain value in drawing conclusions in regard to human life—but only negatively. The higher vertebrate knows, so far as we may ascertain, only two forms of the family: polygamy or pairs. In both of them there is only one grown male, only one husband. The jealousy of the male, at the same time tie and limit of the family, creates an opposition between the animal family and the herd. The latter, a higher social form, is here rendered impossible, there loosened or dissolved during mating time, and at best hindered in its development by the jealousy of the male. This in itself is sufficient proof that the animal family and primeval human society are irreconcilable; that ancient man, struggling upward from the animal stage, either had no family at all or at the most one that does not exist among animals. A being so defenceless as evolving man might well survive in small numbers though living in an isolated state, the highest social form of which is that of pairs such as Westermarck, relying on hunter's reports, attributes to the gorilla and the chimpanzee. Another element is necessary for the elevation out of the animal stage, for the realization of the highest progress found in nature: the replacing of the defencelessness of the single individual by the united strength and co-operation of the whole herd. The transition from beast to man out of conditions of the sort under which the anthropoid apes are living to-day would be absolutely unexplainable. These apes rather give the impression of stray sidelines gradually approaching extinction, and at all events in process of decline. This alone is sufficient to reject all parallels between their family forms and those of primeval man. But mutual tolerance of the grown males, freedom from jealousy, was the first condition for the formation of such large and permanent groups, within which alone the transformation from beast to man could be accomplished. And indeed, what do we find to be the most ancient and original form of the family, undeniably traceable by history and even found to-day here and there? The group marriage, that form in which whole groups of men and whole groups of women mutually belong to one another, leaving only small scope for jealousy. And furthermore we find at a later stage the exceptional form of polyandry which still more supersedes all sentiments of jealousy and hence is unknown to animals.
