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52   RESTRICTIONS IN MARRIAGE.

5. TABOO. The survival of young animals largely depends on their inherent timidity, their keen sensitiveness to warnings of danger by their parents and others, and to their tenacious recollection of them. It is so with human children, who are easily terrified by nurses' tales and thereby receive more or less durable impressions.

A vast complex of motives can be brought to bear upon the naturally susceptible minds of children, and of uneducated adults who are mentally little more than big children. The constituents of this complex are not sharply distinguishable, but they form a recognisable whole that has not yet received an appropriate name, in which religion, superstition, custom, tradition, law, and authority all have part. This group of motives will for the present purpose be entitled " immaterial " in contrast to material ones. My contention is that the experience of all ages and all nations shows that the immaterial motives are frequently far stronger than the material ones, the relative power of the two being well illustrated by the tyranny of taboo in many instances, called as it is by different names in different places.. The facts relating to taboo form a voluminous literature, the full effect of which cannot be conveyed by brief summaries. It shows how, inmost parts of the world, acts that are apparently insignificant, have been invested with ideal importance, and how the doing of this or that has been