240 TOTEMISM AND EXOGAMY 



far-seeing care for the future welfare of their 

 remote descendants " (iv., 168). And he proceeds 

 to point out that the highest races do not found 

 their unions on any system of eugenics. Further, 

 he continues : " What idea these primitive sages 

 and lawgivers, if we may call them so, had in their 

 minds when they laid down the fundamental lines 

 of the institution we cannot say with certainty ; 

 all that we know of savages leads us to suppose 

 that it must have been what we now call a super- 

 stition, some crude notion of natural causation 

 which to us might seem transparently false, though 

 to them it doubtless seemed obviously true. Yet, 

 egregiously wrong as they were in theory, they 

 appear to have been fundamentally right in prac- 

 tice. What they abhorred was really evil ; what 

 they preferred was really good. Perhaps we may 

 call their curious system an unconscious mimicry 

 of science. The end which it accomplished was 

 wise, though the thoughts of men who invented 

 it were foolish. In acting as they did, these poor 

 savages blindly obeyed the impulse of the great 

 evolutionary forces which, in the physical world, 

 are constantly educing higher out of lower forms 

 of existence, and in the moral world civilization 

 out of savagery. If that is so, exogamy has been an 

 instrument in the hands of that unknown power, 

 the masked wizard of history, who, by some 

 mysterious process, some subtle alchemy, so often 

 transmutes in the crucible of suffering the dross 

 of folly and evil into the fine gold of wisdom and 

 good." 



Amazing stream of words ! But to what do they 



