to
permanence by difference of occupation and sexual solidarity, this
segregation receives the continuous support of religious conceptions as
to human relations. These conceptions center upon contact, and ideas of
contact are at the root of all conceptions of human relations at any
stage of culture; contact is the one universal test, as it is the most
elementary form, of mutual relations. Psychology bears this out, and the
point is psychological rather than ethnological.

As I have pointed out before and shall have occasion to do so again, a
comparative examination, assisted by psychology, of the emotions and
ideas of average modern humanity is a most valuable aid to ethnological
inquiry. In this connection, we find that desire or willingness for
physical contact is an animal emotion, more or less subconscious, which
is characteristic of similarity, harmony, friendship, or love.
Throughout the world, the greeting of a friend is expressed by contact,
whether it be nose-rubbing, or the kiss, the embrace, or the clasp of
hands; so the ordinary expression of friendship by a boy, that eternal
savage, is contact of arm and shoulder. More interesting still for our
purpose is the universal expression by contact of the emotion of love.
To touch his mistress is the ever-present desire of the lover, and in
this impulse, even if we do not trace it back, as we may without being
fanciful, to polar or sexual attraction inherent in the atoms, the
[Greek: philia] of Empedocles, yet we may place the beginning and ending
of love. When analyzed, the emotion always comes back to contact.

Further, mere willingness for contact is found universally when the
person to be touched is healthy, if not clean, or where he is of the
same age or class or caste, and, we may add, for ordinary humanity the
same sex.

On the other hand, the avoidance of contact, whether consciously or
subconsciously presented, is no less the universal characteristic of
human relations where similarity, harmony, friendship, or love is
absent. This appears in the attitude of men to the sick, to strangers,
distant acquaintances, enemies, and in cases of difference of age,
position, sympathies or aims, and even of sex. Popular language is full
of phrases which illustrate this feeling.

Again, the pathology of the emotions supplies many curious cases where
the whole being seems concentrated upon the sense of touch, with
abnormal desire or disgust for contact; and in the ev