ibuted to _economic_
progress except in so far as every stable organization may be favorable
to general progress. It has been claimed that it effected the
domestication of animals and plants.[920] In support of this claim it is
urged that, apart from reverence for these objects, there is nothing in
savage ideas and customs that could lead to domestication. Early man,
seeking food, would try all accessible animals and plants--but why, it
is asked, should he desire to keep them as attachments to his home and
cultivate them for his own use? Would his purpose be amusement? But,
though savages sometimes have animals as pets, the custom is not
general, and such pets are freely killed. Could the motive be utility?
The answer is that savages have neither the ability to perceive the
advantage, for food and labor, that would accrue from domestication, nor
knowledge of the fact that seeds must be kept, in order to secure a
crop, from one year to another, nor the self-restraint to practice
present abstinence for the sake of future good.

+565+. On the other hand, it is said, semireligious reverence for
animals preserves them from injury, they lose their fear of man, and
those that are domesticable become tame and are appropriated and used by
men; and sacred plants are retained from one year to another for ritual
purposes, and their seeds produce a succession of crops. Totem animals
are not eaten--a pastoral people does not eat its cattle, it keeps them
for their milk. In a word, animals, it is held, are not tamed by man of
set purpose, but grow tame when not molested, and those that are edible
or capable of rendering service are gradually domesticated; and
similarly, through religious use of plants, the possibility of
cultivating certain plants becomes known.

+566+. This argument rests on the assumption of the universal mental
incapacity of early men--a subject admittedly obscure. Certainly they
appear to be quite lacking in knowledge and reflection in some regards;
yet they sometimes show remarkable skill in hunting (so, for example,
the African Pygmies), and they have created remarkable languages. But,
if we leave the question of intellectual capacity aside, there are facts
that seem to throw doubt on the totemic origin of domestication. In the
first place, the conditions under which reverence for a totemic animal
may make it tame do not appear to have existed in totemic society. For
such taming it is necessary that the animal