We have seen[1103] the facility with which the primitive confuses kingdoms and identifies the most heterogeneous things, men, animals, plants, stars, etc. Now we see one of the causes which has contributed the most to facilitating these confusions. Since religious forces are eminently contagious, it is constantly happening that the same principle animates very different objects equally; it passes from some into others as the result of either a simple material proximity or of even a superficial similarity. It is thus that men, animals, plants and rocks come to have the same totem: the men because they bear the name of the animal: the animals because they bring the totemic emblem to mind; the plants because they nourish these animals; the rocks because they mark the place where the ceremonies are celebrated. Now religious forces are therefore considered the source of all efficacy; so beings having one single religious principle ought to pass as having the same essence, and as differing from one another only in secondary characteristics. This is why it seemed quite natural to arrange them in a single category and to regard them as mere varieties of the same class, transmutable into one another. When this relation has been established, it makes the phenomena of contagion appear under a new aspect. Taken by themselves, they seem to be quite foreign to the logical life. Is their effect not to mix and confuse beings, in spite of their natural differences? But we have seen that these confusions and participation have played a rôle of the highest utility in logic; they have served to bind together things which sensation leaves apart from one another. So it is far from true that contagion, the source of these connections and confusions, is marked with that fundamental irrationality that one is inclined to attribute it at first. It has opened the way for the scientific explanations of the future. CHAPTER II THE POSITIVE CULT I.--_The Elements of the Sacrifice_ Whatever the importance of the negative cult may be, and though it may indirectly have positive effects, it does not contain its reason for existence in itself; it introduces one to the religious life, but it supposes this more than it constitutes it. If it orders the worshipper to flee from the profane world, it is to bring him nearer to the sacred world. Men have never thought that their duties towards religious forces might be reduced to a simple abstinence from all commerce; they have always believed that they upheld positive and bilateral relations with them, whose regulation and organization is the function of a group of ritual practices. To this special system of rites we give the name of _positive cult_.