al
formations, that is to say, peoples and nations. Thence are born the
primitive instincts of sociability and in life in promiscuity arise the
first rudiments of sexual selection.

But if we can reconstruct in imagination the primitive savage, by
combining our conjectures, it is not given us to have an empirical
intuition of him, just as it is not given us to determine the genesis of
that hiatus, that is to say, that break in continuity, thanks to which
human life is found detached from animal life to rise, in the sequel, to
an ever higher level. All men who live at this moment on the earth's
surface and all those who, having lived in the past, were the objects
of any trustworthy observation, are found, and were found, already
sufficiently removed from the moment when purely animal life had ceased.
A certain social life with customs and institutions, even if it be of
the most elementary form that we know, that is to say, of the Australian
tribes, divided into classes and practising the marriage of all the men
of one class with all the women of another class, separates human life
by a great interval from animal life. If we consider the _maternal
gens_, of which the classic type, the Iroquois type, has, thanks to
Morgan's work, revolutionized prehistoric science, while giving us at
the same time the key to the origins of history properly so called, we
have a form of society already much advanced by the complexity of its
relations. At that stage of social life which, according to our
knowledge, seems very elementary, that is to say, in the Australian
society, not only does a very complicated language differentiate men
from all other animals (and language is a condition and an instrument, a
cause and an effect of sociability), but the specialization of human
life, apart from the discovery of fire, is manifested by the use of many
other artificial means by which the needs of life are satisfied. A
certain territory acquired for the common use of a tribe, a certain art
of hunting--the use of certain instruments of defense and attack and the
possession of certain utensils for preserving the things acquired--and
then the ornamentation of the body, etc., all this means that at bottom
this life rests upon an artificial, although very elementary, basis,
upon which men endeavor to fix themselves and adapt themselves,--upon a
basis which is after all the condition of all further progress.
According as this artificial basis is more o