waif in the midst of tremendous forces of whose nature
and mode of operation he was entirely ignorant--he was
BESET with terrors; dangers loomed upon him on all sides.
Even to-day it is noticed by doctors that one of the chief
obstacles to the cure of illness among some black or native
races is sheer superstitious terror; and Thanatomania is the
recognized word for a state of mind ("obsession of
death") which will often cause a savage to perish from a
mere scratch hardly to be called a wound. The natural
defence against this state of mind was the creation of an
enormous number of taboos--such as we find among
all races and on every conceivable subject--and these taboos
constituted practically a great body of warnings which
regulated the lives and thoughts of the community, and
ultimately, after they had been weeded out and to some
degree simplified, hardened down into very stringent
Customs and Laws. Such taboos naturally in the beginning
tended to include the avoidance not only of acts which
might reasonably be considered dangerous, like touching a
corpse, but also things much more remote and fanciful
in their relation to danger, like merely looking at a mother-
in-law, or passing a lightning-struck tree; and (what is
especially to be noticed) they tended to include acts which
offered any special PLEASURE or temptation--like sex or
marriage or the enjoyment of a meal. Taboos surrounded
these things too, and the psychological connection is easy
to divine: but I shall deal with this general subject later.

It may be guessed that so complex a system of regulations
made life anything but easy to early peoples; but,