Elements of Folk Psychology / Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind

n by a number of families, particularly by such as are most closely related. Yet the groups of co-dwellers are not so much determined by considerations of kinship as by the size of the pla

them. Thus, there is a division of the people into districts, and these are determined geographically rather than ethnologically. Every one is entitled to obtain his food, whether game or products of the soil, from a specified territory. Custom strictly guards this communa

ut interference on the part of his clan, moreover, he exercises absolute control over his children, who remain with the individual family just as in the case of a developed monogamy. There is no trace of sex-groups, such as are later to be found in the case of the men's houses and the age-groups. Only temporarily, on the occasion of common under

ent meaning in Germany until the beginning of the eighteenth century. Having in mind the "Golden Horde" of the Tartars, a horde was understood to mean a particularly dreaded division of warriors. The furious force of these Asiatic hordes, and the terror which they spread, later caused the concept to be extended to all unorganized, wild, and unrestrained masses of men. Taking the word in this wider significance, we may now say that the horde, as a fairly large social group in which only very meagre suggestions of an organized tribal system occur, is characteristic of primitive times, no less than are the isolated single family and the beginnings of the joint family. Thus defined, however, the horde does not differ essentially from the animal herd, in the meaning which the latter concept would possess when applied to human-kind. And it is not impossible that in the extension of the meaning of the term 'horde,'

wise affords a glimpse into the mental characteristics of primitive peoples. For that which differentiates the horde from t