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Dr. Unwin (whose full results were published last autumn in his Sex and Culture): Primitive peoples may be classified in two ways: according to the height of their culture (or the amount of social energy they display); and according to the degree of sexual restraint they impose upon themselves. As a measure of the height of their culture (or the amount of their energy) we may take their behaviour towards the supernatural. Thus we may distinguish a zoistic culture of least energy, in which there are no temples and no cult or tendance of the dead, a manistic culture of intermediate energy, in which there is a cult or tendance of the dead, and a deistic culture of most energy, in which temples are erected. On the other hand, we may measure the degree of sexual restraint in terms of the pre-nuptual restraints imposed on women, and distinguish three types: pre-nuptual freedom, occasional continence, and pre-nuptual continence.
Now there is a complete correlation between zoistic cultures and pre-nuptual freedom, between manistic cultures and occasional continence, and between deistic cultures and pre-nuptual continence. Therefore, it would seem that the height of a civilization is in direct proportion to the amount of sexual restraint that it imposes upon itself.
Professor Flügel: These results are at once hopeful, startling, puzzling and depressing: hopeful, because they represent a new phase in the co-operation between anthropology and clinical psychology, and because they confirm what, other things being equal, we might expect, namely an inverse relation between the degree of directly sexual activity and the degree of 'sublimated' or 'cultural' activity; startling, in the definiteness of their results; puzzling, because they go much farther than any