ter it. It is almost
impossible to find a case of a group in which marriage does not exist,
and in which the sex relation is one of true promiscuity. We are told
that there is no family institution amongst the Bako, dwarfs in Kamerun.
They obey animal instincts without restriction.[1142] This means that
the origin of the family institution lies in the period before any group
formations now open to our study, and promiscuity is an inference as to
what preceded what we can find. A woman with a child entered into an
arrangement with a man, whether the father or not was immaterial, by
which they carried on the struggle for existence together. The
arrangement must have afforded advantages to both. It was produced by an
agreement. The family institution resulted and became customary by
imitation. Marriage was the form of agreement between the man and the
woman by which they entered into the family institution. In the most
primitive form of life known to us (Australians and Bushmen) the man
roams abroad in search of meat food. His wife or wives stay by the fire
at a trysting place, care for the children, and collect plant food. Thus
the combination comes under the form of antagonistic cooperation. It
presents us the germ of the industrial organization. It is a product of
the folkways, being the resultant custom which arises, in time, out of
the ways of satisfying interests which separate individuals, or pairs,
invent and try. It follows that marriage in all its forms is in the
mores of the time and place.

+361. Regulation is conventional, not natural.+ The sex passion affects
the weal or woe of human beings far more than hunger, vanity, or ghost
fear. It has far more complications with other interests than the other
great motives. There is no escaping the good and ill, the pleasure and
pain, which inhere in it. It has two opposite extremes,--renunciation
and license. In neither one of these can peace and satisfaction be
found, or escape from the irritation of antagonistic impulses. There is
no ground at all for the opinion that "nature" gave men an appetite the
satisfaction of which would be peaceful and satisfactory, but that human
laws and institutions have put it under constraints which produce
agony.[1143] The truth is that license stimulates desire without limit,
and ends in impotent agony. Renunciation produces agony of another kind.
Somewhere between lies temperance, which seems an easy solution, but
there is no defini