er can
have held such a view for one moment. When Bentham wrote (_Theory of
Legislation_, pt. iii., chap. V.) that "individuals accustomed to see
each other from an age which is capable neither of conceiving desire
nor of inspiring it, will see each other with the same eyes to the end
of life," he showed infinitely less knowledge of human nature than the
author of _Paul and Virginia_, who makes a boy and a girl grow up
almost like brother and sister, and at the proper time fall violently
in love with one another. Who cannot recall in his own experience love
marriages of schoolmates or of cousins living in intimate association
from their childhood? To say that such bringing up together creates
"indifference" is obviously incorrect; to say that it leads to
"aversion" is altogether unwarranted; and to trace to it such a
feeling as our horror at the thought of marrying a sister, or mother,
is simply preposterous.

The real source of the horror of incest in civilized communities was
indicated more than two thousand years ago by Plato. He believed that
the reason why incestuous unions were avoided and abhorred, was to be
found in the constant inculcation, at home and in literature, that

"They are unholy, hated of God, and most infamous....
Everyone from his earliest childhood has heard men
speaking in the same manner about them always and
everywhere, whether in comedy or in the graver language
of tragedy. When the poet introduces on the stage a
Thyestes or an Oedipus, or a Macareus having secret
intercourse with his sister, he represents him, when
found out, ready to kill himself as the penalty of his
sin." (_Laws,_ VIII., 838.)

Long before Plato another great "medicine man," Moses, saw the
necessity of enforcing a "taboo" against incest by the enactment of
special severe laws relating to intercourse between relatives; and
that there was no "instinct" against incest in his time is shown by
the fact that he deemed it necessary to make such circumstantial laws
for his own people, and by his specific testimony that "in all these
things the nations are defiled which I cast out from before you, and
the land is defiled." Regarding his motives in making such laws,
Milman has justly remarked (_H.J_., I., 220),

"The leading principle of these enactments was to
prohibit near marriage between those parties among
whom, by the usage of their society, early and frequent