When, however, we affirm that the triumph of maternal love in the
continued companionship of a male child, constituted the solution of
the social problem before us, we do not intend to convey the idea that
it lay solely in the fact of a simple inclusion of male offspring
within a group. Such a condition, however significant in the actual
case, has nothing in itself but what is common to the family economy
of many animals. It is the normal one, for instance, among many
pithecoids, as baboons, &c., where we find the younger males still form
an integral part of the horde, although denied all marital rights. But,
however inexorable among such species the temporary separation from
the females during the actual season of rut, there is at other times
a propinquity in amity as members of the same herd, which lessened
doubtless the fierceness of the strife during the periodic play of
passion, a truce in fact admitting of peace and alliance in offence and
defence during most of the year.
With our ancestors there could be no such healing pause, the unnatural
sexual modification of the race had rendered it impossible. The
non-periodicity of the sexual function in rut would have made the
whole year, with two adult males in presence, an interval of trial
insupportable to the mere brute. With this race the banishment of the
youth would be for all time, and the loss would be not only that of
an ally, each exile would become an active enemy. Now we have hinted
that the importance, in a potential sense, of a movement towards union,
in such creatures, arose precisely from the fact that, on account of
the intensity of the relations between male and male, and especially
between father and son, their amicable conjunction was only possible
under such exceptional conditions as would probably conduce to its
stability whenever it did take place.
Indeed such inchoate rule or habit, a corollary of the early idea, as
reigns in regulation of marital rights among lower creatures, would
not be fully adequate for this higher creation. With lower creatures,
might alone confers rights, which feebler force ever seeks each chance
to invade, all stratagems being legitimate as a means to that end.
With inchoate man such imperfect rule of action had become utterly
impossible. The greater endowment in memory and reason entailed a too
fatally added hate on non-compliance. For inchoate men the requisite
law required such further exactness in definition as should leave no
doubt of a meaning, not only to be understood, but to be accepted and
obeyed unconditionally.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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