(_b_) Children--and adult savages resemble children in many respects--like to amuse themselves by setting up prohibitions and backing them up with threats of punishment. 'If you do this,' they will say, 'that will happen to you.' The 'this' and the 'that' have usually no logical connection with each other, neither is there in the mind of the child any thought of a particular kind of power, or agent, meting out the punishment. This kind of play is strikingly similar to a large number of magical practices. Can it not be regarded as the prototype of most taboo customs? In taboo there is usually no logical and no qualitative relation between the prohibition and the punishment. Neither is there, ordinarily, any notion of a particular agent carrying out the threat. It involves, it seems, nothing more than the assumption of a causal connection between two facts brought together by 'chance' association under the pressure of a desire for food or success at war, or for the enforcement of a rule of conduct.[29] The punishment announced is anything on the efficacy of which one may choose to rely. In Madagascar conjugal fidelity is enforced by the threat that the betrayed husband will be killed or wounded in the war; among the indigenous tribes of Sarawak, the belief is that the camphor obtained by the men in the jungle will evaporate if the women are unfaithful during the absence of their husbands, while in East Africa, the husband would, in the same eventuality, be killed or hurt by the elephant he is hunting.[30] The high sanction which the requirements of social life give to beliefs of this sort is readily understood. (_c_) It is a fact of common observation that in passionate moments, men of every degree of culture act, in the absence of the object of their passion, more or less as if it was present. A man grinds his teeth, shakes his fist, growls at the absent enemy; a mother presses to her breast and talks fondly to the departed babe. The pent-up motor tendencies must find an outlet. To restrain every external sign of one's desires or intentions when under great emotional excitement is unendurable pain. By the sick-bed of one beloved, one must do something, however useless to him. Who shall say that we do not have in this natural tendency the origin of the large class of magical acts represented by sticking pins into, or burning, an effigy? The less a person is under the control of reason, the more likely is he, not only to yield to promptings of this order, but also to be seduced by his wish into a belief in their efficacy.