" Westermarck points out very
truly that the prohibition of incest could not be founded on experience
even if (as he is himself inclined to believe) consanguineous marriages
are injurious to the offspring; incest is prevented "neither by laws, nor
by customs, nor by education, but by an _instinct_ which under normal
circumstances makes sexual love between the nearest kin a psychic
impossibility." There is, however, a very radical objection to this
theory. It assumes the existence of a kind of instinct which can with
difficulty be accepted. An instinct is fundamentally a more or less
complicated series of reflexes set in action by a definite stimulus. An
innate tendency at once so specific and so merely negative, involving at
the same time deliberate intellectual processes, can only with a certain
force be introduced into the accepted class of instincts. It is as awkward
and artificial an instinct as would be, let us say, an instinct to avoid
eating the apples that grew in one's own yard.[186]
The explanation of the abhorrence to incest is really, however,
exceedingly simple. Any reader who has followed the discussion of sexual
selection in the present volume and is also familiar with the "Analysis of
the Sexual Impulse" set forth in the previous volume of these _Studies_
will quickly perceive that the normal failure of the pairing instinct to
manifest itself in the case of brothers and sisters, or of boys and girls
brought up together from infancy, is a merely negative phenomenon due to
the inevitable absence under those circumstances of the conditions which
evoke the pairing impulse.
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