Ninth, it is far from established that exogamy and totem abstinence are the two fundamental prohibitions of totemism. Freud refers (p. 180) to Goldenweiser’s study of the subject, which is certainly both analytical and conducted from a psychological point of view even though not psychoanalytical; but he fails to either accept or refute this author’s carefully substantiated finding that these two features cannot be designated as primary in the totemic complex.
Tenth, that these two totemic taboos are the oldest of all taboos is pure assertion. If all other taboos are derived from them by displacement or distortion, some presentation of the nature and operation and sequence of these displacements is in order. An astronomer who casually said that he believed Sirius to be the center of the stellar universe and then proceeded to weave this opinion into the fabric of a still broader hypothesis, would get little hearing from other astronomers.
A final criticism—that the persistence into modern society and religion of this first “great event with which culture began” is an unexplained process—will not be pressed here, because Freud has anticipated it with a tu quoque (pp. 259–261): social psychologists assume a “continuity in the psychic life of succeeding generations” without in general concerning themselves much with the manner in which this continuity is established.
No doubt still other challenges of fact or interpretation will occur to every careful reader of the book. The above enumeration has been compiled only far enough to prove the essential method of the work; which is to evade the painful process of arriving at a large certainty by the positive determination of smaller certainties and their unwavering addition irrespective of whether each augments or diminishes the sum total of conclusion arrived at. For this method the author substitutes a plan of multiplying into one another, as it were, fractional certainties—that is, more or less remote possibilities—without recognition that the multiplicity of factors must successively decrease the probability of their product. It is the old expedient of pyramiding hypotheses; which, if theories had to be paid for like stocks or gaming cards, would be less fre-
