Synopses & Reviews
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III PRIMITIVE MARITAL RELATIONS 2. Trial Marriage, Divorce, Polygamy Primitive Sex Relations Not of One Type Only.?What with the doubts cast upon original universal promiscuity and upon universal group communism as a second stage in the progress toward an enduring monogamic marriage bond, are we left no tolerably sure evidence as to primitive marriage conditions? It seems likely that we may approximate nearer the truth by eliminating the qualification universal from the generalizations on this subject. The universal savors too strongly of pure logic, and human institutions are notoriously indifferent to logic, save that experimental pragmatic logic involved in reacting upon life problems. Now life problems vary both in space and time; hence spontaneous variations in these reactions are to be expected; and the only universal is the adapting of some means to some end. That is to say, the only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that mankind, given time enough, will by some hook or crook squirm out of the difficulty. But this is far from saying that the same hooks or crooks will everywhere be used in the face of similar difficulties. Applying this dictum to the evolution of marriage, instead of a universal series of forms or stages through which mankind has passed, we should find that there has been only a general trend, and that the series is not at all uniform, but broken into and disturbed at many points. Hence we are prepared to find a perfect sequence of forms existing alongside of survivals, anticipations, and distorted forms. For example, France in our own day is presumed to have attained the monogamous stage, yet fifty thousand of Paris prostitutes indicate a survival of promiscuity. And such overlapping of sex relations may be observed in most moder...
Synopsis
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