The Elementary Forms of the Religious LifeDurkheim, Émile
Religion
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Durkheim, Émile
Cults; Religion; Religion -- Philosophy; Rites and ceremonies; Totemism
In the paper to which we have already made allusion several times, we
have shown what light these facts throw upon the way in which the idea
of kind or class was formed in humanity. In fact, these systematic
classifications are the first we meet with in history, and we have just
seen that they are modelled upon the social organization, or rather that
they have taken the forms of society as their framework. 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 tribe. The unity of these first
logical systems merely reproduces the unity of the society. Thus we have
an occasion for verifying the proposition which we laid down at the
commencement of this work, and for assuring ourselves that the
fundamental notions of the intellect, the essential categories of
thought, may be the product of social factors. The above-mentioned facts
show clearly that this is the case with the very notion of category
itself.
However, it is not our intention to deny that the individual intellect
has of itself the power of perceiving resemblances between the different
objects of which it is conscious. Quite on the contrary, it is clear
that even the most primitive and simple classifications presuppose this
faculty. The Australian does not place things in the same clan or in
different clans at random. For him as for us, similar images attract one
another, while opposed ones repel one another, and it is on the basis of
these feelings of affinity or of repulsion that he classifies the
corresponding things in one place or another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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