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, preposterous and unreasonable
as some of the taboos were, they undoubtedly had the effect of
compelling the growth of self-control. Fear does not seem a very worthy
motive, but in the beginning it curbed the violence of the purely animal
passions, and introduced order and restraint among them. Simultaneously
it became itself, through the gradual increase of knowledge and
observation, transmuted and etherealized into something more like wonder
and awe and (when the gods rose above the horizon) into reverence.
Anyhow we seem to perceive that from the early beginnings (in the
Stone Age) of self-consciousness in Man there has been a gradual
development--from crass superstition, senseless and accidental, to
rudimentary observation, and so to belief in Magic; thence to Animism
and personification of nature-powers in more or less human form,
as earth-divinities or sky-gods or embodiments of the tribe; and to
placation of these powers by rites like Sacrifice and the Eucharist,
which in their turn became the foundation of Morality. Graphic
representations made for the encouragement of fertility--as on the
walls of Bushmen's rock-dwellings or the ceilings of the caverns of
Altamira--became the nurse of pictorial Art; observations of plants
or of the weather or the st