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Ethics. Джон ДьюиЧитать онлайн книгу.

Ethics - Джон Дьюи


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or lawless person in a Kumi, we shall all share the responsibility for him." (Simmons and Wigmore, Transactions, Asiatic Society of Japan, xix., 177 f.)

      For another aspect of the group take Cæsar's description of landholding among the Germans:

      "No one possesses privately a definite extent of land; no one has limited fields of his own; but every year the magistrates and chiefs distribute the land to the clans and the kindred groups (gentibus cognationibusque hominum) and to those (other groups) who live together." (De Bell. Gall., VI., 22.)

      "All these phratric and gentile associations, the larger as well as the smaller, were founded upon the same principles and tendencies of the Grecian mind—a coalescence of the idea of worship with that of ancestry, or of communion in certain special religious rites with communion of blood, real or supposed." "The god or hero, to whom the assembled members offered their sacrifices, was conceived as the primitive ancestor to whom they owed their origin."

      "The members of the ancient family were united by something more powerful than birth, affection, or physical strength; this was the religion of the sacred fire, and of dead ancestors. This caused the family to form a single body both in this life and in the next."

      Finally, the following passage on clanship among the Kafirs brings out two points: (1) That such a group life implies feelings and ideas of a distinctive sort; and (2) that it has a strength rooted in the very necessities of life.

      "A Kafir feels that the 'frame that binds him in' extends to the clan. The sense of solidarity of the family in Europe is thin and feeble compared to the full-blooded sense of corporate union of the Kafir clan. The claims of the clan entirely swamp the rights of the individual. The system of tribal solidarity, which has worked so well in its smoothness that it might satisfy the utmost dreams of the socialist, is a standing proof of the sense of corporate union of the clan. In olden days a man did not have any feeling of personal injury when a chief made him work for white men and then told him to give all, or nearly all of his wages to his chief; the money was kept within the clan, and what was the good of the clan was the good of the individual and vice versa. The striking thing about this unity of the clan is that it was not a thought-out plan imposed from without by legislation upon an unwilling people, but it was a felt-out plan which arose spontaneously along the line of least resistance. If one member of the clan suffered, all the members suffered, not in sentimental phraseology, but in real fact." (Dudley Kidd, Savage Childhood, pp. 74 f.)

      § 2. KINSHIP AND HOUSEHOLD GROUPS

      1. The Kinship Group.—The kinship group is a body of persons who conceive of themselves as sprung from one ancestor, and hence as having in their veins one blood. It does not matter for our study whether each group has actually sprung from a single ancestor. It is highly probable that the contingencies of food-supply or of war may have been an original cause for the constitution of the group, wholly or in part. But this is of no consequence for our purpose. The important point is that the members of the group regard themselves as of one stock. In some cases the ancestor is believed to have been an animal. Then we have the so-called totem group, which is found among North American Indians, Africans, and Australians, and was perhaps the early form of Semitic groups. In other cases, some hero or even some god is named as the ancestor. In any case the essential part of the theory remains the same: namely, that one blood circulates in all the members, and hence that the life of each is a part of the common life of the group. There are then no degrees of kindred. This group, it should be noted, is not the same as the family, for in the family, as a rule, husband and wife are of different kinship groups, and continue their several kinship relations. Among some peoples marriage ceremonies, indeed, symbolize the admission of the wife into the husband's kinship, and in this case the family becomes a kinship group, but this is by no means universally the case.

      2. The Family or Household Group.—Two kinds of families may be noted as significant for our purpose. In the maternal family the woman remains among her own kin, and the children are naturally reckoned as belonging to the mother's kin. The husband and father is more or less a guest or outsider. In a blood feud he would have to side with his own clan and against that of his wife if his clan quarreled with hers. Clan and family are thus seen to be distinct. In the paternal, which easily becomes


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