Alongside of these constructions of the character of natural man, however, there early appeared a different method of investigation, whose aim it was to adhere more closely to empirical facts. Why should we not regard those of our human institutions which still appear to be a direct result of natural conditions as having existed in the earliest period of our race? Marriage and the family, for example, are among such permanent cultural institutions, the one as the natural union of the sexes, the other as its necessary result. If marriage and family existed from the beginning, then all culture has grown out of the extension of these primitive associations. The family first developed into the patriarchal joint family; from this the village community arose, and then, through the union of several village communities, the State. The theory of a natural development of society from the family was first elaborated by Aristotle, but it goes back in its fundamental idea to legend and myth. Peoples frequently trace their origin to an original pair of ancestors. From a single marriage union is derived the single tribe, and then, through a further extension of this idea, the whole of mankind. The legend of an original ancestral pair, however, is not to be found beyond the limits of the monogamous family. Thus, it is apparently a projection of monogamous marriage into the past, into the beginnings of a race, a tribe, or of mankind. Wherever, therefore, monogamous marriage is not firmly established, legend accounts for the origin of men and peoples in various other ways. It thinks of them as coming forth from stones, from the earth, or from caverns; it regards animals as their ancestors, etc. Even the Greek legend of Deukalion and Pyrrha contains a survival of such an earlier view, combined with the legend of an original ancestral pair. Deukalion and Pyrrha throw stones behind them, from which there springs a new race of men. The thought of an original family, thus, represents simply a projection of the present-day family into an inaccessible past. Clearly, therefore, it is to be regarded as only an hypothesis or, rather, a fiction. Without the support which it received from the Biblical legend, it could scarcely have maintained itself almost down to the present, as it did in the patriarchal theory of the original state of man to which it gave rise. The Aristotelian theory of the gradual origin of more comprehensive organizations, terminating in the State, is no less a fiction; the social communities existing side by side in the period of Greece were arbitrarily represented as having emerged successively in the course of history. Quite naturally, therefore, this philosophical hypothesis, in common with the corresponding legend of the original family, presupposes primitive man to have possessed the same characteristics as the man of to-day. Thus, it gives no answer at all to the question concerning the nature of this primitive man.