INTRODUCTION 



quence, before elder, offspring were mature, and 

 free from parental care, the younger offspring 

 would be present to give new interest to the 

 life of what now tended to resemble a primi- 

 tive family or a group of families. That very 

 irregularity of the earliest human or sexual re- 

 lationships which Fiske's theory meanwhile 

 presupposes, would lead, upon the basis of a 

 very simple tendency towards gregariousness, 

 to the formation of hordes, in which the many 

 young must have constituted a certain tie that 

 held all the interested parents more or less to- 

 gether. Now the care of the offspring during 

 this prolonged period of infancy would itself 

 be a training in sympathetic feelings. These 

 latter would gradually extend themselves to 

 the various members of the primitive horde 

 thus formed. The result would be a social 

 group, that on a higher level would become, 

 for primitive man, a clan, with a consciousness 

 of its family ties. The selective value of clan- 

 nishness, when once it had thus originated, 

 would lead to the extension of the clan in size, 

 to the knitting together of its various rela- 

 tions, and to the development of secondary 

 social virtues such as had to do with the pre- 

 servation of the clan in its conflict, both with 

 nature and with other clans. The social rela- 

 tions thus resulting would react, both through 

 Ixxxiii 



