In accordance with our opening statement, polemics will be strictly avoided here, particularly in reference to questions of prehistory; and, therefore, we need not concern ourselves with the problem whether certain facts point to the previous existence of group marriage or promiscuity; nor with the problem whether certain features are survivals of a similar state of things.[230] Highly objectionable from our point of view, however, is the fact that our best informants (especially Howitt and Spencer and Gillen) describe the facts of sexual life of to-day in terms of their hypothetical assumptions. To gain, therefore, a clear picture of the actual state of things we shall have to disintegrate all that is hypothetic in the statements from the actual facts. [230] The solution of this problem would, in the first place, require a revision of the concept of _survival_, in order to avoid arbitrariness when classifying one custom as a survival, another as an innovation. I venture to say such classifications have been made too carelessly. I think it will be clear from the whole of this book, that the individual family should not be considered as a mere innovation, and that, accordingly, there is hardly any justification for treating the customs in question as survivals. But this is only by way of parenthesis; these problems lie outside our task. They must be treated on a broader basis than that of the Australian ethnographic area only. That is the first reason why it will be necessary to submit here and there the statements to some discussion. But there is another reason. Being concerned with the problem of the individual family and individual relationship, we must keep in mind that although the sexual aspect of family life is very important, nevertheless, it is only one side of the picture, and that to outline this picture correctly, we may not exaggerate one side of it. Now, by a quite illegitimate silent assumption, the sexual features are often treated as the most important--in some cases as the exclusive factors of marriage. But marriage, as we saw and shall have the opportunity to see still more clearly, is rooted in all the manifold facts that constitute the family life: mode of living, economics of the household, and above all the relation of the parents to their children. Unless it is proved, therefore, that the unity of family life and the individuality of the family break down on all these points, no general inference as to group marriage can be drawn from the mere facts of sexual communism. In other words, sexual licence is nothing like group marriage. How far we have the right to infer the _actual_ existence of group marriage (_ergo_ group family) from sexual facts in Australia, must therefore be discussed now, while we are concerned with the sexual aspect of the Australian family.