ed as
totemistic; but the Fabii and Caepiones, named after cultivated plants,
and the Picentes and Hirpini, after woodpecker and wolf, though tempting
to the totemist, have not persuaded Dr. Frazer to accept them as
totemistic, and may be left out of account here; there may be many
reasons for the adoption of such names besides the totemistic one. In
the course of the last Congress of religious history, a sober French
scholar, M. Toutain, made an emphatic protest against the prevailing
tendency in France, of which the leading representative is M. Salomon
Reinach.[24] Let us pass on at once to the second primitive mode of
thought which I mentioned just now, and which is not nearly so
remote--speaking anthropologically--from classical times as totemism.
Totemism belongs to a form of society, that of tribe or clan, in which
family life is unknown in our sense of the word, and it is therefore
wholly remote from the life of the ancient Italian stocks, in whose
social organisation the family was a leading fact; but _taboo_ seems
rather to be a mode of thought common to primitive peoples up to a
comparatively advanced stage of development, and has left its traces in
all systems of religion, including those of the present day.

By this famous word _taboo_, of Polynesian origin, is to be understood a
very important part of what I have called the protoplasm of primitive
religion, and one closely allied both to magic and fetishism. For our
present purposes we may define it as a mysterious influence believed to
exist in objects both animate and inanimate, which makes them
_dangerous_, _infectious_, _unclean_, _or holy_, which two last
qualities are often almost identical in primitive thought, as Robertson
Smith originally taught us.[25] What exactly the savage or
semi-civilised mind thought about this influence we hardly yet know; we
have another Polynesian word, _mana_, which expresses conveniently its
positive aspect, and may in time help us towards a better understanding
of it.[26] It is in origin pre-animistic, _i.e._ it is not so much
believed to emanate from a _spirit_ residing in the object, as from some
occult miasmatic quality. All human beings in contact with other men or
things possessing this quality are believed to suffer in some way, and
to communicate the infection which they themselves receive. As Dr.
Farnell says in his chapter on the ritual of purification,[27] "The
sense-instinct that suggests all this was probab