[1] In the same way, we shall say of these societies that they are primitive, and we shall call the men of these societies primitives. Undoubtedly the expression lacks precision, but that is hardly evitable, and besides, when we have taken pains to fix the meaning, it is not inconvenient.

[2] But that is not equivalent to saying that all luxury is lacking to the primitive cults. On the contrary, we shall see that in every religion there are beliefs and practices which do not aim at strictly utilitarian ends (Bk. III, ch. iv, § 2). This luxury is indispensable to the religious life; it is at its very heart. But it is much more rudimentary in the inferior religions than in the others, so we are better able to determine its reason for existence here.

[3] It is seen that we give a wholly relative sense to this word "origins," just as to the word "primitive." By it we do not mean an absolute beginning, but the most simple social condition that is actually known or that beyond which we cannot go at present. When we speak of the origins or of the commencement of religious history or thought, it is in this sense that our statements should be understood.

[4] We say that time and space are categories because there is no difference between the rôle played by these ideas in the intellectual life and that which falls to the ideas of class or cause (on this point see, Hamelin, Essai sur les éléments principaux de la représentation, pp. 63, 76).

[5] See the support given this assertion in Hubert and Mauss, Mélanges d'Histoire des Religions (Travaux de l'Année Sociologique), chapter on La Représentation du Temps dans la Religion.

[6] Thus we see all the difference which exists between the group of sensations and images which serve to locate us in time, and the category of time. The first are the summary of individual experiences, which are of value only for the person who experienced them. But what the category of time expresses is a time common to the group, a social time, so to speak. In itself it is a veritable social institution. Also, it is peculiar to man; animals have no representations of this sort.

This distinction between the category of time and the corresponding sensations could be made equally well in regard to space or cause. Perhaps this would aid in clearing up certain confusions which are maintained by the controversies of which these questions are the subject. We shall return to this point in the conclusion of the present work (§ 4).

[7] Op. cit., pp. 75 ff.

[8] Or else it would be necessary to admit that all individuals, in virtue of their organo-physical constitution, are spontaneously affected in the same manner by the different parts of space: which is more improbable, especially as in themselves the different regions are sympathetically indifferent. Also, the divisions of space vary with different societies, which is a proof that they are not founded exclusively upon the congenital nature of man.

[9] See Durkheim and Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, in Année Sociologique, VI, pp. 47 ff.

[10] See Durkheim and Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, in Année Sociologique, VI, p. 34.

[11] Zuñi Creation Myths, in 13th Rep. of the Bureau of Amer. Ethnol., pp. 367 ff.

[12] See Hertz, La prééminence de la main droite. Etude de polarité religieuse, in the Revue Philosophique, Dec., 1909. On this same question of the relations between the representation of space and the form of the group, see the chapter in Ratzel, Politische Geographie, entitled Der Raum in Geist der Völker.

[13] We do not mean to say that mythological thought ignores it, but that it contradicts it more frequently and openly than scientific thought does. Inversely, we shall show that science cannot escape violating it, though it holds to it far more scrupulously than religion does. On this subject, as on many others, there are only differences of degree between science and religion; but if these differences should not be exaggerated, they must be noted, for they are significant.

[14] This hypothesis has already been set forth by the founders of the Völkerpsychologie. It is especially remarked in a short article by Windelbrand entitled Die Erkenntnisslehre unter dem Völkerpsychologischen Gesichtspunke, in the Zeitsch. f. Völkerpsychologie, viii, pp. 166 ff. Cf. a note of Steinthal on the same subject, ibid., pp. 178 ff.

[15] Even in the theory of Spencer, it is by individual experience that the categories are made. The only difference which there is in this regard between ordinary empiricism and evolutionary empiricism is that according to this latter, the results of individual experience are accumulated by heredity. But this accumulation adds nothing essential to them; no element enters into their composition which does not have its origin in the experience of the individual. According to this theory, also, the necessity with which the categories actually impose themselves upon us is the product of an illusion and a superstitious prejudice, strongly rooted in the organism, to be sure, but without foundation in the nature of things.

[16] Perhaps some will be surprised that we do not define the apriorist theory by the hypothesis of innateness. But this conception really plays a secondary part in the doctrine. It is a simple way of stating the impossibility of reducing rational knowledge to empirical data. Saying that the former is innate is only a positive way of saying that it is not the product of experience, such as it is ordinarily conceived.

[17] At least, in so far as there are any representations which are individual and hence wholly empirical. But there are in fact probably none where the two elements are not found closely united.

[18] This irreducibility must not be taken in any absolute sense. We do not wish to say that there is nothing in the empirical representations which shows rational ones, nor that there is nothing in the individual which could be taken as a sign of social life. If experience were completely separated from all that is rational, reason could not operate upon it; in the same way, if the psychic nature of the individual were absolutely opposed to the social life, society would be impossible. A complete analysis of the categories should seek these germs of rationality even in the individual consciousness. We shall have occasion to come back to this point in our conclusion. All that we wish to establish here is that between these indistinct germs of reason and the reason properly so called, there is a difference comparable to that which separates the properties of the mineral elements out of which a living being is composed from the characteristic attributes of life after this has once been constituted.

[19] It has frequently been remarked that social disturbances result in multiplying mental disturbances. This is one more proof that logical discipline is a special aspect of social discipline. The first gives way as the second is weakened.

[20] There is an analogy between this logical necessity and moral obligation but there is not an actual identity. To-day society treats criminals in a different fashion than subjects whose intelligence only is abnormal; that is a proof that the authority attached to logical rules and that inherent in moral rules are not of the same nature, in spite of certain similarities. They are two species of the same class. It would be interesting to make a study on the nature and origin of this difference, which is probably not primitive, for during a long time, the public conscience has poorly distinguished between the deranged and the delinquent. We confine ourselves to signalizing this question. By this example, one may see the number of problems which are raised by the analysis of these notions which generally pass as being elementary and simple, but which are really of an extreme complexity.

[21] This question will be treated again in the conclusion of this work.

[22] The rationalism which is imminent in the sociological theory of knowledge is thus midway between the classical empiricism and apriorism. For the first, the categories are purely artificial constructions; for the second, on the contrary, they are given by nature; for us, they are in a sense a work of art, but of an art which imitates nature with a perfection capable of increasing unlimitedly.

[23] For example, that which is at the foundation of the category of time is the rhythm of social life; but if there is a rhythm in collective life, one may rest assured that there is another in the life of the individual, and more generally, in that of the universe. The first is merely more marked and apparent than the others. In the same way, we shall see that the notion of class is founded on that of the human group. But if men form natural groups, it can be assumed that among things there exists groups which are at once analogous and different. Classes and species are natural groups of things.

If it seems to many minds that a social origin cannot be attributed to the categories without depriving them of all speculative value, it is because society is still too frequently regarded as something that is not natural; hence it is concluded that the representations which express it express nothing in nature. But the conclusion is not worth more than the premise.

[24] This is how it is legitimate to compare the categories to tools; for on its side, a tool is material accumulated capital. There is a close relationship between the three ideas of tool, category and institution.

[25] We have already attempted to define religious phenomena in a paper which was published in the Année Sociologique (Vol. II, pp. 1 ff.). The definition then given differs, as will be seen, from the one we give to-day. At the end of this chapter (p. 47, n. 1), we shall explain the reasons which have led us to these modifications, but which imply no essential change in the conception of the facts.

[26] See above, p. 3. We shall say nothing more upon the necessity of these preliminary definitions nor upon the method to be followed to attain them. That is exposed in our Règles de la Méthode sociologique, pp. 43 ff. Cf. Le Suicide, pp. 1 ff. (Paris, F. Alcan).

[27] First Principles, p. 37.

[28] Introduction to the Science of Religions, p. 18. Cf. Origin and Development of Religion, p. 23.

[29] This same frame of mind is also found in the scholastic period, as is witnessed by the formula with which philosophy was defined at this time: Fides quærens intellectum.

[30] Introduction to the History of Religions, pp. 15 ff.

[31] Introduction to the History of Religions, p. 23.

[32] See below, Bk. III, ch. ii.

[33] Prolegomena to the History of Religions, p. 25 (tr. by Squire).

[34] Primitive Culture, I, p. 424. (Fourth edition, 1903.)

[35] Beginning with the first edition of the Golden Bough, I, pp. 30-32.

[36] Notably Spencer and Gillen and even Preuss, who gives the name magic to all non-individualized religious forces.

[37] Burnouf, Introduction à l'histoire du bouddhisme indien, sec. edit., p. 464. The last word of the text shows that Buddhism does not even admit the existence of an eternal Nature.

[38] Barth, The Religions of India, p. 110 (tr. by Wood).

[39] Oldenberg, Buddha, p. 53 (tr. by Hoey).

[40] Oldenberg, ibid., pp. 313 ff. Cf. Kern, Histoire du bouddhisme dans l'Inde, I, pp. 389 ff.

[41] Oldenberg, p. 250; Barth, p. 110.

[42] Oldenberg, p. 314.

[43] Barth, p. 109. In the same way, Burnouf says, "I have the profound conviction that if Çâkya had not found about him a Pantheon already peopled with the gods just named, he would have felt no need of inventing them" (Introd. à l'hist. du bouddhisme indien, p. 119).

[44] Burnouf, op. cit., p. 117.

[45] Kern, op. cit., I, p. 289.

[46] "The belief, universally admitted in India, that great holiness is necessarily accompanied by supernatural faculties, is the only support which he (Çâkya) should find in spirits" (Burnouf, p. 119).

[47] Burnouf, p. 120.

[48] Ibid., p. 107.

[49] Ibid., p. 302.

[50] This is what Kern expresses in the following terms: "In certain regards, he is a man; in certain others, he is not a man; in others, he is neither the one nor the other" (op. cit., I, p. 290).

[51] "The conception" "was foreign to Buddhism" "that the divine Head of the Community is not absent from his people, but that he dwells powerfully in their midst as their lord and king, so that all cultus is nothing else but the expression of this continuing living fellowship. Buddha has entered into Nirvâna; if his believers desired to invoke him, he could not hear them" (Oldenberg, p. 369).

[52] "Buddhist doctrine might be in all its essentials what it actually is, even if the idea of Buddha remained completely foreign to it" (Oldenberg, p. 322).—And whatever is said of the historic Buddha can be applied equally well to the mythological Buddhas.

[53] For the same idea, see Max Müller, Natural Religion, pp. 103 ff. and 190.

[54] Op. cit., p. 146.

[55] Barth, in Encyclopédie des sciences religieuses, VI, p. 548.

[56] Oldenberg, op. cit., p. 53.

[57] 1 Sam. xxi., 6.

[58] Levit. xii.

[59] Deut. xxii., 10 and 11.

[60] La religion védique, I, p. 122.

[61] Ibid., p. 133.

[62] "No text," says Bergaigne, "bears better witness to the consciousness of a magic action by man upon the waters of heaven than verse x, 32, 7, where this belief is expressed in general terms, applicable to an actual man, as well as to his real or mythological ancestors: 'The ignorant man has questioned the wise; instructed by the wise, he acts, and here is the profit of his instruction: he obtains the flowing of streams'" (p. 137).

[63] Ibid., p. 139.

[64] Examples will also be found in Hubert, art. Magia in the Dictionnaire des Antiquités, VI, p. 1509.

[65] Not to mention the sage and the saint who practise these truths and who for that reason are sacred.

[66] This is not saying that these relations cannot take a religious character. But they do not do so necessarily.

[67] Schultze, Fetichismus, p. 129.

[68] Examples of these usages will be found in Frazer, Golden Bough, 2 edit., I, pp. 81 ff.

[69] The conception according to which the profane is opposed to the sacred, just as the irrational is to the rational, or the intelligible is to the mysterious, is only one of the forms under which this opposition is expressed. Science being once constituted, it has taken a profane character, especially in the eyes of the Christian religions; from that it appears as though it could not be applied to sacred things.

[70] See Frazer, On Some Ceremonies of the Central Australian Tribes in Australian Association for the Advancement of Science, 1901, pp. 313 ff. This conception is also of an extreme generality. In India, the simple participation in the sacrificial act has the same effects; the sacrificer, by the mere act of entering within the circle of sacred things, changes his personality. (See, Hubert and Mauss, Essai sur le Sacrifice in the Année Sociologique, II, p. 101.)

[71] See what was said of the initiation above, p. 39.

[72] We shall point out below how, for example, certain species of sacred things exist, between which there is an incompatibility as all-exclusive as that between the sacred and the profane (Bk. III, ch. v, § 4).

[73] This is the case with certain marriage and funeral rites, for example.

[74] See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 534 ff.; Northern Tribes of Central Australia, p. 463; Howitt, Native Tribes of S.E. Australia, pp. 359-361.

[75] See Codrington, The Melanesians, ch. xii.

[76] See Hubert, art. Magia in Dictionnaire des Antiquités.

[77] For example, in Melanesia, the tindalo is a spirit, now religious, now magic (Codrington, pp. 125 ff., 194 ff.).

[78] See Hubert and Mauss, Théorie Générale de la Magie, in Année Sociologique, vol. VII, pp. 83-84.

[79] For example, the host is profaned in the black mass.

[80] One turns his back to the altar, or goes around the altar commencing by the left instead of by the right.

[81] Loc. cit., p. 19.

[82] Undoubtedly it is rare that a ceremony does not have some director at the moment when it is celebrated; even in the most crudely organized societies, there are generally certain men whom the importance of their social position points out to exercise a directing influence over the religious life (for example, the chiefs of the local groups of certain Australian societies). But this attribution of functions is still very uncertain.

[83] At Athens, the gods to whom the domestic cult was addressed were only specialized forms of the gods of the city (Ζεύς κτήσιος, Ζεύς ἑρκεῖος). In the same way, in the Middle Ages, the patrons of the guilds were saints of the calendar.

[84] For the name Church is ordinarily applied only to a group whose common beliefs refer to a circle of more special affairs.

[85] Hubert and Mauss, loc. cit., p. 18.

[86] Robertson Smith has already pointed out that magic is opposed to religion, as the individual to the social (The Religion of the Semites, 2 edit., pp. 264-265). Also, in thus distinguishing magic from religion, we do not mean to establish a break of continuity between them. The frontiers between the two domains are frequently uncertain.

[87] Codrington, Trans. and Proc. Roy. Soc. of Victoria, XVI, p. 136.

[88] Negrioli, Dei Genii presso i Romani.

[89] This is the conclusion reached by Spencer in his Ecclesiastical Institutions (ch. xvi), and by Sabatier in his Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, based on Psychology and History (tr. by Seed), and by all the school to which he belongs.

[90] Notably among numerous Indian tribes of North America.

[91] This statement of fact does not touch the question whether exterior and public religion is not merely the development of an interior and personal religion which was the primitive fact, or whether, on the contrary, the second is not the projection of the first into individual consciences. The problem will be directly attacked below (Bk. II, ch. v, § 2, cf. the same book, ch. vi and vii, § 1). For the moment, we confine ourselves to remarking that the individual cult is presented to the observer as an element of, and something dependent upon, the collective cult.

[92] It is by this that our present definition is connected to the one we have already proposed in the Année Sociologique. In this other work, we defined religious beliefs exclusively by their obligatory character; but, as we shall show, this obligation evidently comes from the fact that these beliefs are the possession of a group which imposes them upon its members. The two definitions are thus in a large part the same. If we have thought it best to propose a new one, it is because the first was too formal, and neglected the contents of the religious representations too much. It will be seen, in the discussions which follow, how important it is to put this characteristic into evidence at once. Moreover, if their imperative character is really a distinctive trait of religious beliefs, it allows of an infinite number of degrees; consequently there are even cases where it is not easily perceptible. Hence come difficulties and embarrassments which are avoided by substituting for this criterium the one we now employ.