436 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
parties make a life-and-death compact by tasting the blood, either of each other or of some animal, by the tie of milk which unites the foster child to the kin of the foster mother, 1 by the ceremony of adoption, by the significance attached to the taking of food together, 2 by the invention of eponymous heroes to cement alliance of kindreds, and by the prevalence of the sac- rificial meal for the purpose of confirming fellowship between a god and his worshipers. 3
Could we look into the heart of the primitive men who were put to such symbols and fictions in the quest for a firm basis of association, we should see a strange interplay of belief and feel- ing, of fear and sympathy. The sentiment natural to those who have suckled at the same breast and lived in the same tent had to be greatly altered before it could hold men together in large groups. There had to grow up a theory which should conduct regard for others along certain lines whether it tended that way of itself or not. To the old spontaneity succeeded a set of fel- lowship feelings more or less artificial. As impulsive sympathy failed often to answer the summons of theory, the blood bond must be so conceived as to inspire awe. It might, moreover, be fortified by superstitious fears and dread of the spirits or gods. So far as these make the tie effective we have the control already considered under the term "belief."
How far the conviction of a common physical life could of itself incline men to fellowship it is hard to say. But for the local associating and cooperating group this conviction must have aided in confirming, extending, and making durable whatever spontaneous affection already existed. Lasting order between men required that the fitfulness of natural feeling be corrected by the stability of those feelings associated with beliefs.
The crude early ideas of relationship seem to have been supported by totemism. Here "the belief that all members of a tribe are of one blood is associated with a conviction, more or less religious in character, that the life of the tribe is in some mysterious way derived from an animal, a plant, or some other
1 Religion of the Semites, p. 257. 7 Ibid., p. 252. 3 Ibid., p. 251.
