Perhaps more important still than any of the above-mentioned motives is the one to which Herr Lippert has called attention.[339] In a nation where, owing to the undeveloped division of labour, all people necessarily become more or less like each other, the individual must, he thinks, feel a strong desire to develop a fixed ego, a personality apart, which can be distinguished from all his fellows. This craving may perhaps, as Lippert thinks, have something to do with the growth of a philosophical consciousness. But it may also be considered from a purely practical point of view. In the same way as ornaments on weapons and implements often serve as owners’ marks,[340] so the ornaments on the body may serve as means of identifying, for social and political purposes, the man who is decorated with them. The Moko patterns of the Maoris, for instance, have in fact been used as legally recognised marks, and copies of them applied, instead of signatures, to documents.[341] Whether the utilitarian or the more philosophic explanation be preferred, it is evident that, even if there had been no necessity to attract the attention of the opposite sex, the impulse to create an appearance which is at least to some degree personal would have led to the different systems of embellishment. Thus among people who wear clothes any details in dresses and gems would be made distinctive; where the naked body is lightly coloured, so as to make tattooing conspicuous, distinguishing patterns would be incised; among darker nations, on the other hand, simple scars would be cut; and finally, in the blackest tribes, on whose skin not even scars stand out, modes of hair-dressing would afford a last expedient for differentiation. And it is evident that tribes in their intercourse with each other would be led by the same considerations as individuals.[342] Even in a fictitious unisexual mankind there might thus have appeared precisely the same kind of common and fixed signs by which tribes are differentiated from each other, and of individual signs by which members of the same tribe are distinguished by variations from the common type. These signs must necessarily, as was shown in the foregoing, exercise a powerful influence on the opposite sex, and their development may therefore have been to some extent furthered by sexual selection. But it seems impossible to contend that they have been invented only for the purposes of courtship.[343]