First of all, it is evident to one who looks carefully into the
question of early sex-habits that the lower races are intensely
interested in sexual life. A large part of their thought, and even of
their inventive ingenuity, is spent in this direction. The pleasures
of life are few and gross, but are pursued with vigor; and, _mutatis
mutandis_, love bears about the same relation to the activities of
the Australian aborigine as it bore to those of Sir Lancelot and the
knights of olden time.
A failure to perceive this is the great defect in Westermarck's great
work, where it is assumed that, if animals were monogamous, primitive
man must have been much the more so. The fact is that in respect
to memory, imagination, clothing, mode of association, and social
restraint man differed radically from the animals, and precisely
through these added qualities he took not only an instinctive,
but an artificial and reasoned, interest in sexual practices; and
this resulted in a state of consciousness which made sexual life
uninterruptedly interesting, in contrast with a pairing season among
animals, and also in a constant tendency toward promiscuity, whether
this state was ever actually reached or not.
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