was reached, seems not
to have carried with it a sense of the double obligation of
parenthood. "Marriage was brittle in the early times," says Sir John
Lubbock. The obvious relationship of mother and child, the lack of
such irrefutable testimony to parenthood in the case of man, and other
elements of primitive experience lending confusion to the situation,
made it a process of time and a test of growing intelligence for men
to learn that babies take two parents to give them birth.

When the human male did learn that he was a father, as his mate was a
mother, it seems to have mentally intoxicated him, and led the way to
many social vagaries. The grotesque comedy of the couvade, which
proved a tragedy so often for the poor mother compelled by the custom
to rise in her weakness and even neglect her new-born baby, in order
to do double work and to tempt the appetite of her lord after his
make-believe pangs of childbirth, was one sign that primitive
consciousness found the new knowledge of double parentage very
exciting.

The varieties of phallic worship found in so many ages and among so
many peoples show how man plumed himself upon the generative function
and how he linked it with the god-idea. The "religious dedication of
women," which gratified at once the lust of priests and the demands of
ancient theology that the gods should have the best of everything
earthly, is another testimony to the preoccupation of early man with
sex in its relation to religion. This idea of the sacrifice of
sex-relationship to the gods passed down through the ages until actual
celibacy became the ideal of the holy life and the Divine was supposed
to be better served by monks and nuns than by fathers and mothers.

In the family relation the experience of fathers, after they knew
themselves to be such, has been widely varied and not along any single
line of development. To quote Le Tourneau again, "There has been no
strict relation between intellectual development and the form of
sexual union. Even among monkeys, as in men, we find both polygamy and
monogamy; and bees and other forms of lower life show a high degree of
social organization and division of labor without the institution of
the family at all." The relation of the sexes has always been a deep
concern of human society even in most primitive forms of social order,
but after men knew the connection between the gratification of
sex-instinct and the procreative function, they began to