The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life quotes

But one must know how to go underneath the symbol to the reality which it represents and which gives it its meaning.

The most barbarous and the most fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need, some aspect of life, either individual or social.

The reasons with which the faithful justify them may be, and generally are, erroneous; but the true reasons do not cease to exist, and it is the duty of science to discover them.

The reasons with which the faithful justify them may be, and generally are, erroneous; but the true reasons do not cease to exist, and it is the duty of science to discover them.

In reality, then, there are no religions which are false.

All are true in their own fashion; all answer, though in different ways, to the given conditions of human existence. It is undeniably possible to arrange them in a hierarchy.

But howsoever real this greater complexity and this higher ideality may be, they are not sufficient to place the corresponding religions in different classes.

All are religions equally, just as all living beings are equally alive, from the most humble plastids up to man.

So when we turn to primitive religions it is not with the idea of depreciating religion in general, for these religions are no less respectable than the others. They respond to the same needs, they play the same rôle, they depend upon the same causes;

And in reality, observation proves that these indispensable guide lines, in relation to which all things are temporally located, are taken from social life. The divisions into days, weeks, months, years, etc., correspond to the periodical recurrence of rites, feasts, and public ceremonies.[5]

A calendar expresses the rhythm of the collective activities, while at the same time its function is to assure their regularity.[6]

It is the same thing with space. As Hamelin has shown,[7] space is not the vague and indetermined medium which Kant imagined; if purely and absolutely homogeneous, it would be of no use, and could not be grasped by the mind.

That is to say that space could not be what it is if it were not, like time, divided and differentiated. But whence come these divisions which are so essential? By themselves, there are neither right nor left, up nor down, north nor south, etc.

All these distinctions evidently come from the fact that different sympathetic values have been attributed to various regions.

Since all the men of a single civilization represent space in the same way, it is clearly necessary that these sympathetic values, and the distinctions which depend upon them, should be equally universal, and that almost necessarily implies that they be of social origin.[8]

This duality of our nature has as its consequence in the practical order, the irreducibility of a moral ideal to a utilitarian motive, and in the order of thought, the irreducibility of reason to individual experience.

In so far as he belongs to society, the individual transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he acts.

This same social character leads to an understanding of the origin of the necessity of the categories.

it is because they have not yet recognized the necessity of resorting to the laborious methods of the natural sciences to gradually scatter the darkness. The same state of mind is found at the root of many religious beliefs which surprise us by their pseudo-simplicity.

It is science and not religion which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.

But the human mind, says Jevons,[30] has no need of a properly scientific culture to notice that determined sequences, or a constant order of succession, exist between facts, or to observe, on the other hand, that this order is frequently upset.

But in the first place, the supernatural cannot be reduced to the unforeseen.

The new is a part of nature just as well as its contrary.

If we state that in general, phenomena succeed one another in a determined order, we observe equally well that this order is only approximative, that it is not always precisely the same, and that it has all kinds of exceptions.

he believes that by this means he forces him to come out and show himself.[68] Moreover, if it is true that man depends upon his gods, this dependence is reciprocal.

The gods also have need of man; without offerings and sacrifices they would die.

We shall even have occasion to show that this dependence of the gods upon their worshippers is maintained even in the most idealistic religions.

for such a promiscuity, or even too direct a contiguity, would contradict too violently the dissociation of these ideas in the mind.

The sacred thing is par excellence that which the profane should not touch, and cannot touch with impunity.

To be sure, this interdiction cannot go so far as to make all communication between the two worlds impossible; for if the profane could in no way enter into relations with the sacred, this latter could be good for nothing.

But it does not result in binding together those who adhere to it, nor in uniting them into a group leading a common life.

There is no Church of magic.

Between the magician and the individuals who consult him, as between these individuals themselves, there are no lasting bonds which make them members of the same moral community, comparable to that formed by the believers in the same god or the observers of the same …

… the magician is for magic what the priest is for religion, but a college of priests is not a Church, any more than a religious congregation which should devote itself to some particular saint in the shadow of a cloister, would be a particular cult.

A Church is not a fraternity of priests; it is a moral community formed by all the believers in a single faith, laymen as well as priests.

But magic lacks any such community.[86]

he is something else.

Human nature is the result of a sort of recasting of the animal nature, and in the course of the various complex operations which have brought about this recasting, there have been losses as well as gains.

How many instincts have we not lost? The reason for this is that men are not only in relations with the physical environment, but also with a social environment infinitely more extended, more stable and more active than the one whose influence animals undergo.

Human nature is the result of a sort of recasting of the animal nature, and in the course of the various complex operations which have brought about this recasting, there have been losses as well as gains. How many instincts have we not lost?

The reason for this is that men are not only in relations with the physical environment, but also with a social environment infinitely more extended, more stable and more active than the one whose influence animals undergo.

To live, they must adapt themselves to this. Now in order to maintain itself, society frequently finds it necessary that we should see things from a certain angle and feel them in a certain way;

so it looks for something upon which to discharge itself, and naturally turns toward the thing which has provoked it, even though this has no effect. The action of an adult in similar circumstances is often as slightly reasonable.

When we are violently irritated, we feel the need of inveighing, of destroying, though we attribute no conscious ill-will to the objects upon which we vent our anger.

There is even so little confusion that when the emotion of a child is calmed, he can very well distinguish a chair from a person: he does not act in at all the same way towards the two.

… to the mind do not express them exactly, and that the symbols with the aid of which they have been thought of partially hide their real nature, but more than that, behind these images and figures there exists nothing but the nightmares of primitive minds.

In fine, religion is nothing but a dream, systematized and lived, but without any foundation in reality.[134]

Thence it comes about that the theorists of animism, when looking for the origins of religious thought, content themselves with a small outlay of energy.

When the philosophers of the eighteenth century made religion a vast error imagined by the priests, they could at least explain its persistence by the interest which the sacerdotal class had in deceiving the people.

But if the people themselves have been the artisans of these systems of erroneous ideas at the same time that they were its dupes, how has this extraordinary dupery been able to perpetuate itself all through the course of history?

One might even demand if under these conditions the words of science of religions can be employed without impropriety. A science is a discipline which, in whatever manner it is conceived, is always applied to some real data.

… is inadmissible that systems of ideas like religions, which have held so considerable a place in history, and to which, in all times, men have come to receive the energy which they must have to live, should be made up of a tissue of illusions.

To-day we are beginning to realize that law, morals and even scientific thought itself were born of religion, were for a long time confounded with it, and have remained penetrated with its spirit.

How could a vain fantasy have been able to fashion the human consciousness so strongly and so durably? Surely it ought to be a principle of the science of religions that religion expresses nothing which does not exist in nature;

To-day we are beginning to realize that law, morals and even scientific thought itself were born of religion, were for a long time confounded with it, and have remained penetrated with its spirit.

How could a vain fantasy have been able to fashion the human consciousness so strongly and so durably?

Surely it ought to be a principle of the science of religions that religion expresses nothing which does not exist in nature; for there are sciences only of natural phenomena.

But on the contrary, religion could not survive the animistic theory and the day when its truth was recognized by men, for they could not fail to renounce the errors whose nature and origin would thus be revealed to them.

What sort of a science is it whose principal discovery is that the subject of which it treats does not exist?

But as our author very justly says,[151] this idea and concept are impossible without the word.

Language is not merely the external covering of a thought; it also is its internal framework.

It does not confine itself to expressing this thought after it has once been formed; it also aids in making it. However, its nature is of a different sort, so its laws are not those of thought.

But as our author very justly says,[151] this idea and concept are impossible without the word. Language is not merely the external covering of a thought; it also is its internal framework.

It does not confine itself to expressing this thought after it has once been formed; it also aids in making it.

However, its nature is of a different sort, so its laws are not those of thought. Then since it contributes to the elaboration of this latter, it cannot fail to do it violence to some extent, and to deform it.

Now to establish these relations it is neither necessary nor always useful to heap up numerous experiences upon each other; it is much more important to have a few that are well studied and really significant.

One single fact may make a law appear, where a multitude of imprecise and vague observations would only produce confusion.

In every science, the scholar would be overwhelmed by the facts which present themselves to him, if he did not make a choice among them.

One single fact may make a law appear, where a multitude of imprecise and vague observations would only produce confusion. In every science, the scholar would be overwhelmed by the facts which present themselves to him, if he did not make a choice among them.

It is necessary that he distinguish those which promise to be the most instructive, that he concentrate his attention upon these, and that he temporarily leave the others to one side.

That is why, with one reservation which will be indicated below, we propose to limit our research to Australian societies. They fulfil all the conditions which were just enumerated.

But totemic images are not placed only upon the walls of their houses, the sides of their canoes, their arms, their utensils and their tombs; they are also found on the bodies of the men.

They do not put their coat-of-arms merely upon the things which they possess, but they put it upon their persons; they imprint it upon their flesh, it becomes a part of them, and this world of representations is even by far the more important one.

In fact, it is a very general rule that the members of each clan seek to give themselves the external aspect of their totem.

a native once said to us when we were discussing the matter with him, 'That one,' pointing to his photograph which we had taken, 'is the same thing as me: so is a kangaroo' (his totem)."[389]

So each individual has a double nature: two beings coexist within him, a man and an animal.

In order to give a semblance of intelligibility to this duality, so strange for us, the primitive has invented myths which, it is true, explain nothing and only shift the difficulty, but which, by shifting it, seem at least to lessen the logical scandal.

It is the phratries which have served as classes, and the clans as species.

It is because men were organized that they have been able to organize things, for in classifying these latter, they limited themselves to giving them places in the groups they formed themselves.

And if these different classes of things are not merely put next to each other, but are arranged according to a unified plan, it is because the social groups with which they commingle themselves are unified and, through their union, form an organic whole, the …

But in constructing it, we have at least had need of a model; for how could this idea ever have been born, if there had been nothing either in us or around us which was capable of suggesting it to us?

To reply that it was given to us a priori is not to reply at all; this lazy man's solution is, as has been said, the death of analysis.

But it is hard to see where we could have found this indispensable model except in the spectacle of the collective life.

But neither the spectacle of physical nature nor the mechanism of mental associations could furnish them with this knowledge.

The hierarchy is exclusively a social affair. It is only in society that there are superiors, inferiors and equals.

Consequently, even if the facts were not enough to prove it, the mere analysis of these ideas would reveal their origin. We have taken them from society, and projected them into our conceptions of the world.

The hierarchy is exclusively a social affair. It is only in society that there are superiors, inferiors and equals. Consequently, even if the facts were not enough to prove it, the mere analysis of these ideas would reveal their origin.

We have taken them from society, and projected them into our conceptions of the world.

It is society that has furnished the outlines which logical thought has filled in.

Moreover, there is nothing here which is special to totemism. Even in the most advanced religions, there is scarcely a god who has not kept something of this ambiguity and whose functions are not at once cosmic and moral.

At the same time that it is a spiritual discipline, every religion is also a means enabling men to face the world with greater confidence.

Even for the Christian, is not God the Father the guardian of the physical order as well as the legislator and the judge of human conduct?

How could the emblem of the group have been able to become the figure of this quasi-divinity, if the group and the divinity were two distinct realities?

The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as totem.

But how has this apotheosis been possible, and how did it happen to take place in this fashion?

… which we recognize in him, we follow out his opinions, not because they seem wise, but because a certain sort of physical energy is imminent in the idea that we form of this person, which conquers our will and inclines it in the indicated direction.

Respect is the emotion which we experience when we feel this interior and wholly spiritual pressure operating upon us.

Then we are not determined by the advantages or inconveniences of the attitude which is prescribed or recommended to us; it is by the way in which we represent to ourselves the person recommending or prescribing it.

But it cannot succeed in this task if it does not have sufficient authority, and it can obtain this authority only from opinion itself.

If a people did not have faith in science, all the scientific demonstrations in the world would be without any influence whatsoever over their minds.

Even to-day, if science happened to resist a very strong current of public opinion, it would risk losing its credit there.[681]

… these powers with which they feel themselves in connection, and from that, we are able to catch a glimpse of the way by which they were led to represent them under forms that are really foreign to their nature and to transfigure them by thought.

But a god is not merely an authority upon whom we depend; it is a force upon which our strength relies.

The man who has obeyed his god and who, for this reason, believes the god is with him, approaches the world with confidence and with the feeling of an increased energy.

There are occasions when this strengthening and vivifying action of society is especially apparent.

In the midst of an assembly animated by a common passion, we become susceptible of acts and sentiments of which we are incapable when reduced to our own forces; and when the assembly is dissolved and when, finding ourselves alone again, we fall back to our ordinary level, we are then able to measure the height to which we have been raised above ourselves.

History abounds in examples of this sort.

The sentiments provoked by his words come back to him, but enlarged and amplified, and to this degree they strengthen his own sentiment. The passionate energies he arouses re-echo within him and quicken his vital tone.

It is no longer a simple individual who speaks; it is a group incarnate and personified.

Beside these passing and intermittent states, there are other more durable ones, where this strengthening influence of society makes itself felt with greater consequences and frequently even with greater brilliancy.

In addition to these free forces which are constantly coming to renew our own, there are others which are fixed in the methods and traditions which we employ.

We speak a language that we did not make; we use instruments that we did not invent; we invoke rights that we did not found; a treasury of knowledge is transmitted to each generation that it did not gather itself, etc.

It is to society that we owe these varied benefits of civilization, and if we do not ordinarily see the source from which we get them, we at least know that they are not our own work.

Even to-day, howsoever great may be the liberty which we accord to others, a man who should totally deny progress or ridicule the human ideal to which modern societies are attached, would produce the effect of a sacrilege.

There is at least one principle which those the most devoted to the free examination of everything tend to place above discussion and to regard as untouchable, that is to say, as sacred: this is the very principle of free examination.

This aptitude of society for setting itself up as a god or for creating gods was never more apparent than during the first years of the French Revolution.

Then some sign takes its place; it is to this that we connect the emotions it excites. It is this which is loved, feared, respected; it is to this that we are grateful; it is for this that we sacrifice ourselves.

The soldier who dies for his flag, dies for his country; but as a matter of fact, in his own consciousness, it is the flag that has the first place.

It sometimes happens that this even directly determines action. Whether one isolated standard remains in the hands of the enemy or not does not determine the fate of the country, yet the soldier allows himself to be killed to regain it.

He loses sight of the fact that the flag is only a sign, and that it has no value in itself, but only brings to mind the reality that it represents; it is treated as if it were this reality itself.

Now the totem is the flag of the clan.

It is therefore natural that the impressions aroused by the clan in individual minds—impressions of dependence and of increased vitality—should fix themselves to the idea of the totem rather than that of the clan:

Nothing is worth nothing. The impressions produced in us by the physical world can, by definition, contain nothing that surpasses this world.

Out of the visible, only the visible can be made; out of that which is heard, we cannot make something not heard.

Then to explain how the idea of sacredness has been able to take form under these conditions, the majority of the theorists have been obliged to admit that men have superimposed upon reality, such as it is given by observation, an unreal world, constructed entirely …

But from our point of view, these difficulties disappear.

Religion ceases to be an inexplicable hallucination and takes a foothold in reality.

In fact, we can say that the believer is not deceived when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he receives all that is best in himself: this power exists, it is society.

But this error is merely in regard to the letter of the symbol by which this being is represented to the mind and the external appearance which the imagination has given it, and not in regard to the fact of its existence.

Behind these figures and metaphors, be they gross or refined, there is a concrete and living reality.

Thus religion acquires a meaning and a reasonableness that the most intransigent rationalist cannot misunderstand. Its primary object is not to give men a representation of the physical world;

But collective representations very frequently attribute to the things to which they are attached qualities which do not exist under any form or to any degree.

Out of the commonest object, they can make a most powerful sacred being.

Yet the powers which are thus conferred, though purely ideal, act as though they were real; they determine the conduct of men with the same degree of necessity as physical forces. The Arunta who has been rubbed with his churinga feels himself stronger;

it adds to reality or deducts from it according to the circumstances. Thus there is one division of nature where the formula of idealism is applicable almost to the letter: this is the social kingdom.

Here more than anywhere else, the idea is the reality.

Even in this case, of course, idealism is not true without modification. We can never escape the duality of our nature and free ourselves completely from physical necessities:

Therefore, the sacred character assumed by an object is not implied in the intrinsic properties of this latter: it is added to them.

The world of religious things is not one particular aspect of empirical nature; it is superimposed upon it.

This conception of the religious, finally, allows us to explain an important principle found at the bottom of a multitude of myths and rites, and which may be stated thus:

for since the group is now no longer present and active, individual temperaments easily regain the upper hand.

The violent passions which may have been released in the heart of a crowd fall away and are extinguished when this is dissolved, and men ask themselves with astonishment how they could ever have been so carried away from their normal character.

But if the movements by which these sentiments are expressed are connected with something that endures, the sentiments themselves become more durable. These other things are constantly bringing them to mind and arousing them;

If the moral force sustaining the believer does not come from the idol he adores or the emblem he venerates, still it is from outside of him, as he is well aware. The objectivity of its symbol only translates its externalness.

Thus social life, in all its aspects and in every period of its history, is made possible only by a vast symbolism.

The material emblems and figurative representations with which we are more especially concerned in our present study, are one form of this; but there are many others. Collective sentiments can just as well become incarnate in persons or formulæ:

But these distinctions, which seem so natural to us, are in no way primitive. In the beginning, all the kingdoms are confounded with each other.

Rocks have a sex; they have the power of begetting; the sun, moon and stars are men or women who feel and express human sentiments, while men, on the contrary, are thought of as animals or plants.

This state of confusion is found at the basis of all mythologies. Hence comes the ambiguous character of the beings portrayed in the mythologies; they can be classified in no definite group, for they participate at the same time in the most opposed groups.

These various material substrata are not mere habitations of the soul; they are the soul itself seen from without. When blood flows, the soul escapes with it.

The soul is not in the breath; it is the breath.

It and the part of the body where it resides are only one. Hence comes the conception according to which a man has a number of souls. Being dispersed in various parts of the organism, the soul is differentiated and broken up into fragments.

therefore, we assign them a place apart in our psychical life.

Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it.

In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves.

In fine, the belief in the immortality of the soul is the only way in which men were able to explain a fact which could not fail to attract their attention; this fact is the perpetuity of the life of the group.

Individuals die, but the clan survives.

So the forces which give it life must have the same perpetuity. Now these forces are the souls which animate individual bodies; for it is in them and through them that the group is realized. For this reason, it is necessary that they endure.

The medium in which we thus move is less opaque and less resistant: we feel ourselves to be, and we are, more at our ease there.

In a word, the only way we have of freeing ourselves from physical forces is to oppose them with collective forces.

But whatever we receive from society, we hold in common with our companions. So it is not at all true that we are more personal as we are more individualized. The two terms are in no way synonymous:

So it is not at all true that we are more personal as we are more individualized. The two terms are in no way synonymous: in one sense, they oppose more than they imply one another.

Passion individualizes, yet it also enslaves.

Our sensations are essentially individual; yet we are more personal the more we are freed from our senses and able to think and act with concepts.

But whatever we receive from society, we hold in common with our companions.

So it is not at all true that we are more personal as we are more individualized.

The two terms are in no way synonymous: in one sense, they oppose more than they imply one another. Passion individualizes, yet it also enslaves. Our sensations are essentially individual;

So it is far from true that religious internationalism is a peculiarity of the most recent and advanced religions.

From the dawn of history, religious beliefs have manifested a tendency to overflow out of one strictly limited political society; it is as though they had a natural aptitude for crossing frontiers, and for diffusing and internationalizing themselves.

Of course there have been peoples and times when this spontaneous aptitude has been held in check by opposed social necessities; but that does not keep it from being real and, as we see, very primitive.

In reality, of course, the two sorts of rites which we denominate thus are closely associated; we shall see that they suppose one another. But still, they are different and, if it is only to understand their connection, it is necessary to distinguish them.

By definition, sacred beings are separated beings.

That which characterizes them is that there is a break of continuity between them and the profane beings. Normally, the first are outside the others. A whole group of rites has the object of realizing this state of separation which is essential.

But abstinences and privations do not come without suffering.

We hold to the profane world by all the fibres of our flesh; our senses attach us to it; our life depends upon it.

It is not merely the natural theatre of our activity; it penetrates us from every side; it is a part of ourselves. So we cannot detach ourselves from it without doing violence to our nature and without painfully wounding our instincts.

In both it is admitted that suffering creates exceptional strength. And this belief is not without foundation. In fact, it is by the way in which he braves suffering that the greatness of a man is best manifested.

He never rises above himself with more brilliancy than when he subdues his own nature to the point of making it follow a way contrary to the one it would spontaneously take.

By this, he distinguishes himself from all the other creatures who follow blindly wherever pleasure calls them; by this, he makes a place apart for himself in the world.

He is struck by the fact that there is something excessive in the disdain they profess for all that ordinarily impassions men. But these exaggerations are necessary to sustain among the believers a sufficient disgust for an easy life and common pleasures.

It is necessary that an elite put the end too high, if the crowd is not to put it too low.

It is necessary that some exaggerate, if the average is to remain at a fitting level.

The guilty man feels himself attacked by a force which dominates him and against which he is powerless. Has he eaten the totemic animal? Then he feels it penetrating him and gnawing at his vitals; he lies down on the ground and awaits death.[1095]

Every profanation implies a consecration, but one which is dreadful, both for the subject consecrated and for those who approach him.

It is the consequences of this consecration which sanction, in part, the interdict.[1096]

… to see the original source of the whole sacrificial institution in a sacrifice of this sort.[1147] Sacrifice was not founded to create a bond of artificial kinship between a man and his gods, but to maintain and renew the natural kinship which primitively united them.

Here, as elsewhere, the artifice was born only to imitate nature.

But in the book of Smith this hypothesis was presented as scarcely more than a theory which the then known facts supported very imperfectly.

yet in another way, it is from them that men get theirs; for after they have once arrived at maturity, it is from them that men acquire the force needed to support and repair their spiritual beings.

Thus we are able to say that men make their gods, or, at least, make them live; but at the same time, it is from them that they live themselves.

So they are regularly guilty of the circle which, according to Smith, is implied in the very idea of a sacrificial tribute: they give to the sacred beings a little of what they receive from them, and they receive from them all that they give.

so they, too, have their periods of giving way. But men could not regard these spectacles as indifferent spectators.

If he is to live, the universal life must continue, and consequently the gods must not die.

So he seeks to sustain and aid them; for this, he puts at their service whatever forces he has at his disposition, and mobilizes them for this purpose. The blood flowing in his veins has fecundating virtues; he pours it forth.

The means employed to succour them, howsoever crude these may be, cannot appear vain, for everything goes on as if they were really effective.

Men are more confident because they feel themselves stronger; and they really are stronger, because forces which were languishing are now reawakened in the consciousness.

So we must be careful not to believe, along with Smith, that the cult was founded solely for the benefit of men and that the gods have nothing to do with it: they have no less need of it than their worshippers.

The real reason for the existence of the cults, even of those which are the most materialistic in appearance, is not to be sought in the acts which they prescribe, but in the internal and moral regeneration which these acts aid in bringing about.

The things which the worshipper really gives his gods are not the foods which he places upon the altars, nor the blood which he lets flow from his veins: it is his thought.

Nevertheless, it is true that there is an exchange of services, which are mutually demanded, between the divinity and its worshippers. The rule do ut des, by which the principle of sacrifice has sometimes been defined, is not a late invention of utilitarian theorists:

On the one hand, the individual gets from society the best part of himself, all that gives him a distinct character and a special place among other beings, his intellectual and moral culture.

If we should withdraw from men their language, sciences, arts and moral beliefs, they would drop to the rank of animals.

So the characteristic attributes of human nature come from society. But, on the other hand, society exists and lives only in and through individuals.

The second principle is ordinarily summed up in the formula: like produces like. The representation of a being or condition produces this being or condition.

This is the maxim which brings about the rites which we have just been describing, and it is in them that we can best observe its characteristics.

The classical example of the magic charm, which is ordinarily given as the typical application of this same precept, is much less significant. The charm is, to a large extent, a simple phenomenon of transfer.

The first thing which is implied in the notion of the causal relation is the idea of efficacy, of productive power, of active force. By cause we ordinarily mean something capable of producing a certain change.

The cause is the force before it has shown the power which is in it; the effect is this same power, only actualized.

Men have always thought of causality in dynamic terms. Of course certain philosophers had refused all objective value to this conception; they see in it only an arbitrary construction of the imagination, which corresponds to nothing in the things themselves.

But we know that the soul is quite another thing from a name given to the abstract faculty of moving, thinking and feeling; before all, it is a religious principle, a particular aspect of the collective force.

In fine, a man feels that he has a soul, and consequently a force, because he is a social being.

Though an animal moves its members just as we do, and though it has the same power as we over its muscles, nothing authorizes us to suppose that it is conscious of itself as an active and efficacious cause.

In this connection, it is useless to substitute hereditary habit for individual habit, for habit does not change its nature by lasting longer than one man's life; it is merely stronger.

An instinct is not a rule.

The rites which we have been studying allow us to catch a glimpse of another source of this authority, which, up to the present, has scarcely been suspected.

by themselves, they tend towards an organization which, when once established, imposes itself upon individuals. And as action cannot go beyond intelligence, it frequently happens that the latter is drawn into the same way and accepts without discussion the theoretical postulates demanded by action.

The imperatives of thought are probably only another side of the imperatives of action.

It is to be borne in mind, moreover, that we have never dreamed of offering the preceding observations as a complete theory of the concept of causality. The question is too complex to be resolved thus.

the very same causes which called it into existence make it a necessity.

Art is not merely an external ornament with which the cult has adorned itself in order to dissimulate certain of its features which may be too austere and too rude; but rather, in itself, the cult is something æsthetic.

Owing to the well-known connection which mythology has with poetry, some have wished to exclude the former from religion;[1220] the truth is that there is a poetry inherent in all religion.

… very moment when the weepers seem the most overcome by their grief, some one speaks to them of some temporal interest, it frequently happens that they change their features and tone at once, take on a laughing air and converse in the gayest fashion imaginable.[1261]

Mourning is not a natural movement of private feelings wounded by a cruel loss; it is a duty imposed by the group.

One weeps, not simply because he is sad, but because he is forced to weep. It is a ritual attitude which he is forced to adopt out of respect for custom, but which is, in a large measure, independent of his affective state.

it is a duty imposed by the group.

One weeps, not simply because he is sad, but because he is forced to weep.

It is a ritual attitude which he is forced to adopt out of respect for custom, but which is, in a large measure, independent of his affective state. Moreover, this obligation is sanctioned by mythical or social penalties.

When some one dies, the family group to which he belongs feels itself lessened and, to react against this loss, it assembles.

A common misfortune has the same effects as the approach of a happy event: collective sentiments are renewed which then lead men to seek one another and to assemble together.

We have even seen this need for concentration affirm itself with a particular energy: they embrace one another, put their arms round one another, and press as close as possible to one another.

We have seen elsewhere how human sentiments are intensified when affirmed collectively.

Sorrow, like joy, becomes exalted and amplified when leaping from mind to mind, and therefore expresses itself outwardly in the form of exuberant and violent movements.

But these are no longer expressive of the joyful agitation which we observed before; they are shrieks and cries of pain. Each is carried along by the others; a veritable panic of sorrow results.

Hence the metamorphosis which makes a dreaded enemy out of the relative of yesterday. This transformation is not the origin of mourning; it is rather its consequence.

It translates a change which has come over the affective state of the group: men do not weep for the dead because they fear them; they fear them because they weep for them.

But this change of the affective state can only be a temporary one, for while the ceremonies of mourning result from it, they also put an end to it. Little by little, they neutralize the very causes which have given rise to them.

The group feels its strength gradually returning to it; it begins to hope and to live again.

Presently one stops mourning, and he does so owing to the mourning itself.

But as the idea formed of the soul reflects the moral state of the society, this idea should change as this state changes.

… associating them all in the same mental state, and therefore in disengaging a sensation of comfort which compensates the original loss.—Since they weep together, they hold to one another and the group is not weakened, in spite of the blow which has fallen upon it.

Of course they have only sad emotions in common, but communicating in sorrow is still communicating, and every communion of mind, in whatever form it may be made, raises the social vitality.

The exceptional violence of the manifestations by which the common pain is necessarily and obligatorily expressed even testifies to the fact that at this moment, the society is more alive and active than ever.

Of course the sentiments inspired by the two are not identical: respect is one thing, disgust and horror another. Yet, if the gestures are to be the same in both cases, the sentiments expressed must not differ in nature.

And, in fact, there is a horror in religious respect, especially when it is very intense, while the fear inspired by malign powers is generally not without a certain reverential character.

The shades by which these two attitudes are differentiated are even so slight sometimes that it is not always easy to say which state of mind the believers actually happen to be in.

There are two sorts of sacredness, the propitious and the unpropitious, and not only is there no break of continuity between these two opposed forms, but also one object may pass from the one to the other without changing its nature.

The pure is made out of the impure, and reciprocally.

It is in the possibility of these transmutations that the ambiguity of the sacred consists.

Between the propitiously sacred and the unpropitiously sacred there is the same contrast as between the states of collective well-being and ill-being. But since both are equally collective, there is, between the mythological constructions symbolizing them, an intimate kinship of nature.

The sentiments held in common vary from extreme dejection to extreme joy, from painful irritation to ecstatic enthusiasm; but, in any case, there is a communion of minds and a mutual comfort resulting from this communion.

The fundamental process is always the same; only circumstances colour it differently. So, at bottom, it is the unity and the diversity of social life which make the simultaneous unity and diversity of sacred beings and things.

In fact, whoever has really practised a religion knows very well that it is the cult which gives rise to these impressions of joy, of interior peace, of serenity, of enthusiasm which are, for the believer, an experimental proof of his beliefs.

The cult is not simply a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly translated; it is a collection of the means by which this is created and recreated periodically.

Whether it consists in material acts or mental operations, it is always this which is efficacious.

… real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge, nor to add to the conceptions which we owe to science others of another origin and another character, but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live.

The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger.

He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them. It is as though he were raised above the miseries of the world, because he is raised above his condition as a mere man;

… order that these principal aspects of the collective life may have commenced by being only varied aspects of the religious life, it is obviously necessary that the religious life be the eminent form and, as it were, the concentrated expression of the whole collective life.

If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.

Religious forces are therefore human forces, moral forces. It is true that since collective sentiments can become conscious of themselves only by fixing themselves upon external objects, they have not been able to take form without adopting some of their characteristics from other things:

Finally, there is no question of exercising a physical constraint upon blind and, incidentally, imaginary forces, but rather of reaching individual consciousnesses, of giving them a direction and of disciplining them. It is sometimes said that inferior religions are materialistic. Such an expression is inexact.

All religions, even the crudest, are in a sense spiritualistic: for the powers they put in play are before all spiritual, and also their principal object is to act upon the moral life.

Thus it is seen that whatever has been done in the name of religion cannot have been done in vain: for it is necessarily the society that did it, and it is humanity that has reaped the fruits.

But, in the first place, things are arbitrarily simplified when religion is seen only on its idealistic side: in its way, it is realistic. There is no physical or moral ugliness, there are no vices or evils which do not have a special divinity.

There are gods of theft and trickery, of lust and war, of sickness and of death.

Christianity itself, howsoever high the idea which it has made of the divinity may be, has been obliged to give the spirit of evil a place in its mythology. Satan is an essential piece of the Christian system;

it is as if they said that men have made religions because they have a religious nature. Animals know only one world, the one which they perceive by experience, internal as well as external.

Men alone have the faculty of conceiving the ideal, of adding something to the real.

Now where does this singular privilege come from? Before making it an initial fact or a mysterious virtue which escapes science, we must be sure that it does not depend upon empirically determinable conditions.

Vital energies are over-excited, passions more active, sensations stronger; there are even some which are produced only at this moment.

A man does not recognize himself; he feels himself transformed and consequently he transforms the environment which surrounds him.

In order to account for the very particular impressions which he receives, he attributes to the things with which he is in most direct contact properties which they have not, exceptional powers and virtues which the objects of every-day experience do not possess.

The ideal society is not outside of the real society; it is a part of it. Far from being divided between them as between two poles which mutually repel each other, we cannot hold to one without holding to the other.

For a society is not made up merely of the mass of individuals who compose it, the ground which they occupy, the things which they use and the movements which they perform, but above all is the idea which it forms of itself.

It is undoubtedly true that it hesitates over the manner in which it ought to conceive itself; it feels itself drawn in divergent directions.

they correspond to this new set of psychical forces which is added to those which we have at our disposition for the daily tasks of existence.

A society can neither create itself nor recreate itself without at the same time creating an ideal.

This creation is not a sort of work of supererogation for it, by which it would complete itself, being already formed; it is the act by which it is periodically made and remade.

it is the act by which it is periodically made and remade. Therefore when some oppose the ideal society to the real society, like two antagonists which would lead us in opposite directions, they materialize and oppose abstractions.

The ideal society is not outside of the real society; it is a part of it.

Far from being divided between them as between two poles which mutually repel each other, we cannot hold to one without holding to the other.

Now how could he add to the energies which he possesses without going outside himself? How could he surpass himself merely by his own forces?

The only source of life at which we can morally reanimate ourselves is that formed by the society of our fellow beings; the only moral forces with which we can sustain and increase our own are those which we get from others.

Let us even admit that there really are beings more or less analogous to those which the mythologies represent. In order that they may exercise over souls the useful direction which is their reason for existence, it is necessary that men believe in them.

it misunderstands the fundamental conditions of the religious life. If up to the present it has remained in the stage of theoretical aspirations which have never been realized, it is because it is unrealizable.

A philosophy may well be elaborated in the silence of the interior imagination, but not so a faith.

For before all else, a faith is warmth, life, enthusiasm, the exaltation of the whole mental life, the raising of the individual above himself. Now how could he add to the energies which he possesses without going outside himself?

If up to the present it has remained in the stage of theoretical aspirations which have never been realized, it is because it is unrealizable. A philosophy may well be elaborated in the silence of the interior imagination, but not so a faith.

For before all else, a faith is warmth, life, enthusiasm, the exaltation of the whole mental life, the raising of the individual above himself.

Now how could he add to the energies which he possesses without going outside himself? How could he surpass himself merely by his own forces?

Thus we see how, in certain cases, this universalistic tendency has been able to develop itself to the point of affecting not only the higher ideas of the religious system, but even the principles upon which it rests.

Thus there is something eternal in religion which is destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself.

There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality.

But though the work may have miscarried, it enables us to imagine what might have happened in other conditions; and everything leads us to believe that it will be taken up again sooner or later.

There are no gospels which are immortal, but neither is there any reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones.

As to the question of what symbols this new faith will express itself with, whether they will resemble those of the past or not, and whether or not they will be more adequate for the reality which they seek to translate, that is something which …

Its pity for the outcast seems to us too Platonic; we desire another which would be more practicable; but as yet we cannot clearly see what it should be nor how it could be realized in facts.

In a word, the old gods are growing old or already dead, and others are not yet born.

This is what rendered vain the attempt of Comte with the old historic souvenirs artificially revived; it is life itself, and not a dead past which can produce a living cult. But this state of incertitude and confused agitation cannot last for ever.

But howsoever important these facts taken from the constituted sciences may be, they are not enough; for faith is before all else an impetus to action, while science, no matter how far it may be pushed, always remains at a distance from this.

Science is fragmentary and incomplete; it advances but slowly and is never finished; but life cannot wait.

The theories which are destined to make men live and act are therefore obliged to pass science and complete it prematurely.

they come after each other like the waves of a river, and even during the time that they last, they do not remain the same thing. Each of them is an integral part of the precise instant when it takes place.

We are never sure of again finding a perception such as we experienced it the first time; for if the thing perceived has not changed, it is we who are no longer the same.

On the contrary, the concept is, as it were, outside of time and change; it is in the depths below all this agitation; it might be said that it is in a different portion of the mind, which is serener and calmer.

it holds closely to my organism and personality and cannot be detached from them. All that I can do is to invite others to place themselves before the same object as myself and to leave themselves to its action.

On the other hand, conversation and all intellectual communication between men is an exchange of concepts.

The concept is an essentially impersonal representation; it is through it that human intelligences communicate.[1309]

there are others of which we perceive certain aspects only. There are even a great many which we pervert in holding, for as they are collective by nature, they cannot become individualized without being retouched, modified, and consequently falsified.

Hence comes the great trouble we have in understanding each other, and the fact that we even lie to each other without wishing to: it is because we all use the same words without giving them the same meaning.

We are now able to see what the part of society in the genesis of logical thought is.

In the last resort, the value which we attribute to science depends upon the idea which we collectively form of its nature and rôle in life; that is as much as to say that it expresses a state of public opinion.

In all social life, in fact, science rests upon opinion.

It is undoubtedly true that this opinion can be taken as the object of a study and a science made of it; this is what sociology principally consists in. But the science of opinion does not make opinions;

Consequently things can no longer be contained in the social moulds according to which they were primitively classified; they must be organized according to principles which are their own, so logical organization differentiates itself from the social organization and becomes autonomous.

Really and truly human thought is not a primitive fact; it is the product of history; it is the ideal limit towards which we are constantly approaching, but which in all probability we shall never succeed in reaching.

Thus it is not at all true that between science on the one hand, and morals and religion on the other, there exists that sort of antinomy which has so frequently been admitted, for the two forms of human activity really come from one and …

Now if the synthesis of particular conceptions which take place in each individual consciousness are already and of themselves productive of novelties, how much more efficacious these vast syntheses of complete consciousnesses which make society must be!

A society is the most powerful combination of physical and moral forces of which nature offers us an example.

Nowhere else is an equal richness of different materials, carried to such a degree of concentration, to be found.

[865] It may be objected perhaps that unity is the characteristic of the personality, while the soul has always been conceived as multiple, and as capable of dividing and subdividing itself almost to infinity.

But we know to-day that the unity of the person is also made up of parts and that it, too, is capable of dividing and decomposing. Yet the notion of personality does not vanish because of the fact that we no longer think of it as a metaphysical and indivisible atom.

It is the same with the popular conceptions of personality which find their expression in the idea of the soul. These show that men have always felt that the human personality does not have that absolute unity attributed to it by certain metaphysicians.

Thus it comes about that among the Euahlayi, the magicians are the only ones who have or who can procure individual totems. As each one has a collective totem in addition, he finds himself having many souls.

But there is nothing surprising in this plurality of souls: it is the condition of a superior power.

But when collective totemism once begins to lose ground, and when the conception of the protecting ancestor consequently begins to grow dim in the mind, another method must be found for representing the double nature of the soul, which is still felt.