ons of what will be injurious to the
group. The laws about the sexes, about property, about war, and about
ghosts, have this character. They always include some social philosophy.
They are both mystic and utilitarian, or compounded of the two.

Taboos may be divided into two classes, (1) protective and (2)
destructive. Some of them aim to protect and secure, while others aim to
repress or exterminate. Women are subject to some taboos which are
directed against them as sources of possible harm or danger to men, and
they are subject to other taboos which put them outside of the duties or
risks of men. On account of this difference in taboos, taboos act
selectively, and thus affect the course of civilization. They contain
judgments as to societal welfare.

+36. No primitive philosophizing; myths; fables; notion of societal
welfare.+ It is not to be understood that primitive men philosophize
about their experience of life. That is our way; it was not theirs. They
did not formulate any propositions about the causes, significance, or
ultimate relations of things. They made myths, however, in which they
often presented conceptions which are deeply philosophical, but they
represented them in concrete, personal, dramatic and graphic ways. They
feared pain and ill, and they produced folkways by their devices for
warding off pain and ill. Those devices were acts of ritual which were
planned upon their vague and crude faiths about ghosts and the other
world. We develop the connection between the devices and the faiths, and
we reduce it to propositions of a philosophic form, but the primitive
men never did that. Their myths, fables, proverbs, and maxims show that
the subtler relations of things did not escape them, and that reflection
was not wanting, but the method of it was very different from ours. The
notion of societal welfare was not wanting, although it was never
consciously put before themselves as their purpose. It was pestilence,
as a visitation of the wrath of ghosts on all, or war, which first
taught this idea, because war was connected with victory over a
neighboring group. The Bataks have a legend that men once married their
fathers' sisters' daughters, but calamities followed and so those
marriages were tabooed.[64] This inference and the cases mentioned in
sec. 28 show a conception of societal welfare and of its relation to
states and acts as conditions.

+37. The imaginative element.+ The correct apprehension of f