ing
caused its death by some such indiscretion. [132] Here the idea clearly
seems to be that the father's and child's life are one, the latter
being derived from and part of the former. The custom of the Couvade
may therefore perhaps be assigned to the early patriarchal stage. The
first belief was that the child derived its life from its mother,
and apparently that the weakness and debility of the mother after
childbirth were due to the fact that she had given up a part of her
life to the child. When the system of female descent changed to male
descent, the woman was taken from another clan into her husband's;
the child, being born in its father's clan, obviously could not draw
its life from its mother, who was originally of a different clan. The
inference was that it drew its life from its father; consequently
the father, having parted with a part of his life to his child, had
to imitate the conduct of the mother after childbirth, abstain from
any violent exertion, and sometimes feign weakness and lie up in the
house, so as not to place any undue strain on the severed fraction
of his life in his child, which would be simultaneously affected with
his own, but was much more fragile.

61. Similarity and identity.

Again, primitive man had no conception of likeness or similarity,
nor did he realise an imitation as distinct from the thing
imitated. Likeness or similarity and imitation are abstract ideas,
for which he had no words, and consequently did not conceive of
them. And clearly if one had absolutely no term signifying likeness
or similarity, and if one wished to indicate say, that something
resembled a goat, all one could do would be to point at the goat and
the object resembling it and say 'goat,' 'goat.' Since the name was
held to be part of the thing named, such a method would strengthen the
idea that resemblance was equivalent to identity. This point of view
can also be observed in children, who have no difficulty in thinking
that any imitation or toy model is just as good as the object or animal
imitated, and playing with it as such. Even to call a thing by the name
of any object is sufficient with children to establish its identity
with that object for the purposes of a game or mimicry, and a large
part of children's games are based on such pretensions. They also have
not yet clearly grasped the difference between likeness and identity,
and between an imitation of an object and the object itself. A larg