SCIENCE OF COMPARATIVE JURISPRUDENCE. 581 



counts for it. He recognized the value of a knowledge of the organ- 

 izing cause of the family in antiquity, but gave up the search for it as 

 hopeless. Others, more hopeful, have succeeded where he failed, until 

 it has now been reduced to certainty that the constituent bond of the 

 family was neither the patria potestas, nor simple community of 

 blood, nor natural love and affection, and that neither of these things 

 suffices to explain its existence, but that it finds its ultimate reason 

 in religious principle and practice. In his treatise on " Hindu Law," 

 Mr. John D. Mayne shows that ancestor-worship is the actual govern- 

 ing motive of native Indian jurisprudence to this day ancestor-wor- 

 ship, the same principle which Coulanges so skillfully proved to be 

 anterior to all Aryan social institutions, and which Spencer has found 

 to be universal among all primitive peoples and the radical principle 

 of all known religions. Coulanges erred in making the worship of 

 the dead a finality, just as Maine erred an error which I believe he 

 has partially recognized in believing the resources of his science in- 

 sufficient to penetrate behind the patria potestas. The reason of ances- 

 tor-worship is discovered in the physical condition of primitive man, 

 in his earliest methods of thought, his ideas of life and death, of life 

 hereafter, and of the divine principle. Just as the student of the his- 

 tory of Roman law is forced to never lose sight of the patriarchal fam- 

 ily the nidus of those rudimentary ideas which are to the jurist what 

 the primary crusts of the earth are to the geologist so the student of 

 the Aryan household must not only ever remember that its source is 

 in the sentiment of religion, and that "the one unfailing centripetal 

 force of archaic society " was community of worship, but he must go 

 further, and place himself in a position to fully realize ancient habits 

 of thought at the time when ancestor- worship was the dominant form 

 of belief. To try to account for that belief by reasoning after our 

 own approved methods methods which at first seem to us to be the 

 natural and only possible ones is to grope hopelessly in the dark. We 

 must make an effort to reconstruct primitive man on his intellectual 

 side, as the paleontologist does on his anatomical side, and then to 

 think as he thought. Here we leave our special department of laws 

 and customs, and take up the study of general culture history ; and, if 

 in going back we lose distinctness and coherency, we shall find never- 

 theless the thing which shaped the thought at its birth, and that \s the 

 essential matter. 



The only scholar who has as yet made any systematic and note- 

 worthy effort to discover the causes of the primitive universality of 

 ancestor-worship is Mr. Spencer, and his views are most worthy of 

 attention, however liable they may be to future modification. He 

 contends that ancestor-worship may be explained by having recourse 

 to the ideas concerning sleep and dreams entertained by the earliest 

 men, while they are still incapable of generalization and without any 

 correct idea of causation and law, " lacking the very implements of 



