Since the subject first engaged my close attention, it has always seemed to me incomprehensible that a dispute should ever have arisen among anthropologists, ethnologists, and historians of civilization as to whether, among the primitive forms of the sexual relationship, marriage was the first, or whether it was preceded by a state of sexual promiscuity. Whoever knows the nature of the sexual impulse, whoever has arrived at a clear understanding regarding the course of human evolution, and, finally, whoever has studied the conditions that even now prevail, alike among primitive peoples and among modern civilized races, in the matter of sexual relations, can have no doubt whatever that =in the beginnings of human development a state of sexual promiscuity did actually prevail=.[155] “The ideal goal,” says Heinrich Schurtz, “towards which, more or less consciously, civilized humanity is undoubtedly advancing, involuntarily also becomes the standard by which the past is judged, and sentiment and mood take the place of a single-minded endeavour to arrive at truth.” Thus it has happened that the ideal of permanent marriage between a single man and a single woman, which, in fact, as we shall proceed to explain, must persist as =an ideal of civilization never to be lost=, has been employed as a standard for the judgment of bygone conditions. This error is one into which Westermarck more especially has fallen in his “History of Human Marriage” (Jena, 1893)--a work of considerable value from its richness in ethnological detail. Hence Westermarck’s criticism of the doctrine of promiscuity, based as it is upon false premises, “has ultimately remained barren,” as Heinrich Schurtz has proved.[156] Westermarck, for example, simply ignores the fact that within the group-marriage of sexual associates, within the totem, promiscuity undoubtedly existed. Since, as we shall see, among the tribes and races living in social unions, sexual promiscuity can be proved to have existed side by side with, and commonly in advance of, the development of marriage, it is indubitable that primitive man, in whom the sexual impulse was still purely instinctive, had simply no knowledge of “marriage” in the modern sense of the term. Otherwise, indeed, the “mother-right” would not have been necessary, for matriarchy was the typical expression of the uncertainty of paternity which resulted from sexual promiscuity. The great freedom of sexual intercourse in primitive times is denoted by various investigators by many different terms; sometimes it is called “promiscuity,” sometimes “free-love,” sometimes “group-marriage,” “polyandry,” “polygamy,” “religious and sexual prostitution,” etc. The classical works of Bachofen, Bastian, Giraud-Teulon, von Hellwald, Kohler, Friedrich S. Krauss, Lubbock, MacLennan, Morgan, Friedrich Müller, Post, H. Schurtz, Wilcken, and others, have proved beyond question the existence of this primordial hetairism.