CHAPTER V

PIACULAR RITES AND THE AMBIGUITY OF THE NOTION OF SACREDNESS Howsoever much they may differ from one another in the nature of the gestures they imply, the positive rites which we have been passing under review have one common characteristic: they are all performed in a state of confidence, joy and even enthusiasm. Though the expectation of a future and contingent event is not without a certain uncertainty, still it is normal that the rain fall when the season for it comes, and that the animal and vegetable species reproduce regularly. Oft-repeated experiences have shown that the rites generally do produce the effects which are expected of them and which are the reason for their existence. Men celebrate them with confidence, joyfully anticipating the happy event which they prepare and announce. Whatever movements men perform participate in this same state of mind: of course, they are marked with the gravity which a religious solemnity always supposes, but this gravity excludes neither animation nor joy. These are all joyful feasts. But there are sad celebrations as well, whose object is either to meet a calamity, or else merely to commemorate and deplore it. These rites have a special aspect, which we are going to attempt to characterize and explain. It is the more necessary to study them by themselves since they are going to reveal a new aspect of the religious life to us. We propose to call the ceremonies of this sort piacular. The term _piaculum_ has the advantage that while it suggests the idea of expiation, it also has a much more extended signification. Every misfortune, everything of evil omen, everything that inspires sentiments of sorrow or fear necessitates a _piaculum_ and is therefore called piacular.[1233] So this word seems to be very well adapted for designating the rites which are celebrated by those in a state of uneasiness or sadness. I Mourning offers us a first and important example of piacular rites. However, a distinction is necessary between the different rites which go to make up mourning. Some consist in mere abstentions: it is forbidden to pronounce the name of the dead,[1234] or to remain near the place where the death occurred;[1235] relatives, especially the female ones, must abstain from all communication with strangers;[1236] the ordinary occupations of life are suspended, just as in feast-time,[1237] etc. All these practices belong to the negative cult and are explained like the other rites of the same sort, so they do not concern us at present. They are due to the fact that the dead man is a sacred being. Consequently, everything which is or has been connected with him is, by contagion, in a religious state excluding all contact with things from profane life. But mourning is not made up entirely of interdicts which have to be observed. Positive acts are also demanded, in which the relatives are both the actors and those acted upon. Very frequently these rites commence as soon as the death appears imminent. Here is a scene which Spencer and Gillen witnessed among the Warramunga. A totemic ceremony had just been celebrated and the company of actors and spectators was leaving the consecrated ground when a piercing cry suddenly came from the camp: a man was dying there. At once, the whole company commenced to run as fast as they could, while most of them commenced to howl. "Between us and the camp," say these observers, "lay a deep creek, and on the bank of this, some of the men, scattered about here and there, sat down, bending their heads forwards between their knees, while they wept and moaned. Crossing the creek we found that, as usual, the men's camp had been pulled to pieces. Some of the women, who had come from every direction, were lying prostrate on the body, while others were standing or kneeling around, digging the sharp ends of yam-sticks into the crown of their heads, from which the blood streamed down over their faces, while all the time they kept up a loud, continuous wail. Many of the men, rushing up to the spot, threw themselves upon the body, from which the women arose when the men approached, until in a few minutes we could see nothing but a struggling mass of bodies all mixed up together. To one side, three men of the Thapungarti class, who still wore their ceremonial decorations, sat down wailing loudly, with their backs towards the dying man, and in a minute or two another man of the same class rushed on to the ground yelling and brandishing a stone knife. Reaching the camp, he suddenly gashed both thighs deeply, cutting right across the muscles, and, unable to stand, fell down into the middle of the group, from which he was dragged out after a time by three or four female relatives, who immediately applied their mouths to the gaping wounds while he lay exhausted on the ground." The man did not actually die until late in the evening. As soon as he had given up his last breath, the same scene was re-enacted, only this time the wailing was still louder, and men and women, seized by a veritable frenzy, were rushing about cutting themselves with knives and sharp-pointed sticks, the women battering one another's heads with fighting clubs, no one attempting to ward off either cuts or blows. Finally, after about an hour, a torchlight procession started off across the plain, to a tree in whose branches the body was left.[1238] Howsoever great the violence of these manifestations may be, they are strictly regulated by etiquette. The individuals who make bloody incisions in themselves are designated by usage: they must have certain relations of kinship with the dead man. Thus, in the case observed by Spencer and Gillen among the Warramunga, those who slashed their thighs were the maternal grandfather of the deceased, his maternal uncle, and the maternal uncle and brother of his wife.[1239] Others must cut their whiskers and hair, and then smear their scalps with pipe-clay. Women have particularly severe obligations. They must cut their hair and cover the whole body with pipe-clay; in addition to this, a strict silence is imposed upon them during the whole period of mourning, which may last as long as two years. It is not rare among the Warramunga that, as a result of this interdiction, all the women of a camp are condemned to the most absolute silence. This becomes so habitual to them that even after the expiration of the period of mourning, they voluntarily renounce all spoken language and prefer to communicate with gestures--in which, by the way, they acquire a remarkable ability. Spencer and Gillen knew one old woman who had not spoken for over twenty-four years.[1240] The ceremony which we have described opens a long series of rites which succeed one another for weeks and even for months. During the days which follow, they are renewed in various forms. Groups of men and women sit on the ground, weeping and lamenting, and kissing each other at certain moments. These ritual kissings are repeated frequently during the period of mourning. It seems as though men felt a need of coming close together and communicating most closely; they are to be seen holding to each other and wound together so much as to make one single mass, from which loud groans escape.[1241] Meanwhile, the women commence to lacerate their heads again, and, in order to intensify the wounds they make, they even go so far as to burn them with the points of fiery sticks.[1242] Practices of this sort are general in all Australia. The funeral rites, that is, the ritual cares given to the corpse, the way in which it is buried, etc., change with different tribes,[1243] and in a single tribe they vary with the age, sex and social importance of the individual.[1244] But the real ceremonies of mourning repeat the same theme everywhere; the variations are only in the details. Everywhere we find this same silence interrupted by groans,[1245] the same obligation of cutting the hair and beard,[1246] or of covering one's head with pipe-clay or cinders, or perhaps even with excrements;[1247] everywhere, finally, we find this same frenzy for beating one's self, lacerating one's self and burning one's self. In central Victoria, "when death visits a tribe there is great weeping and lamentation amongst the women, the elder portion of whom lacerate their temples with their nails. The parents of the deceased lacerate themselves fearfully, especially if it be an only son whose loss they deplore. The father beats and cuts his head with a tomahawk until he utters bitter groans, the mother sits by the fire and burns her breasts and abdomen with a small fire-stick. Sometimes the burns thus inflicted are so severe as to cause death."[1248] According to an account of Brough Smyth, here is what happens in one of the southern tribes of the same state. As the body is lowered into the grave, "the widow begins her sad ceremonies. She cuts off her hair above her forehead, and becoming frantic, seizes fire-sticks, and burns her breasts, arms, legs and thighs. She seems to delight in the self-inflicted torture. It would be rash and vain to interrupt her. When exhausted, and when she can hardly walk, she yet endeavours to kick the embers of the fire, and to throw them about. Sitting down, she takes the ashes into her hands, rubs them into her wounds, and then scratches her face (the only part not touched by the fire-sticks) until the blood mingles with the ashes, which partly hide her cruel wounds. In this plight, scratching her face continually, she utters howls and lamentations."[1249] The description which Howitt gives of the rites of mourning among the Kurnai is remarkably similar to these others. After the body has been wrapped up in opossum skins and put in a shroud of bark, a hut is built in which the relatives assemble. "There they lay lamenting their loss, saying, for instance, 'Why did you leave us?' Now and then their grief would be intensified by some one, for instance, the wife, uttering an ear-piercing wail, 'My spouse is dead,' or another would say, 'My child is dead.' All the others would then join in with the proper term of relationship, and they would gash themselves with sharp stones and tomahawks until their heads and bodies streamed with blood. This bitter wailing and weeping continued all night."[1250] Sadness is not the only sentiment expressed during these ceremonies; a sort of anger is generally mixed with it. The relatives feel a need of avenging the death in some way or other. They are to be seen throwing themselves upon one another and trying to wound each other. Sometimes the attack is real; sometimes it is only pretended.[1251] There are even cases when these peculiar combats are organized. Among the Kaitish, the hair of the deceased passes by right to his son-in-law. But he, in return, must go, in company with some of his relatives and friends, and provoke a quarrel with one of his tribal brothers, that is, with a man belonging to the same matrimonial class as himself and one who might therefore have married the daughter of the dead man. This provocation cannot be refused and the two combatants inflict serious wounds upon each other's shoulders and thighs. When the duel is terminated, the challenger passes on to his adversary the hair which he had temporarily inherited. This latter then provokes and fights with another of his tribal brothers, to whom the precious relic is next transmitted, but only provisionally; thus it passes from hand to hand and circulates from group to group.[1252] Also, something of these same sentiments enters into that sort of rage with which each relative beats himself, burns himself or slashes himself: a sorrow which reaches such a paroxysm is not without a certain amount of anger. One cannot fail to be struck by the resemblances which these practices present to those of the vendetta. Both proceed from the same principle that death demands the shedding of blood. The only difference is that in one case the victims are the relatives, while in the other they are strangers. We do not have to treat especially of the vendetta, which belongs rather to the study of juridic institutions; but it should be pointed out, nevertheless, how it is connected with the rites of mourning, whose end it announces.[1253] In certain societies, the mourning is terminated by a ceremony whose effervescence reaches or surpasses that produced by the inaugural ceremonies. Among the Arunta, this closing rite is called _Urpmilchima_. Spencer and Gillen assisted at two of these rites. One was celebrated in honour of a man, the other of a woman. Here is the description they give of the latter.[1254] They commence by making some ornaments of a special sort, called _Chimurilia_ by the men and _Aramurilia_ by the women. With a kind of resin, they fixed small animal bones, which had previously been gathered and set aside, to locks of hair furnished by the relatives of the dead woman. These are then attached to one of the head-bands which women ordinarily wear and the feathers of black cockatoos and parrots are added to it. When these preparations are completed, the women assemble in their camp. They paint their bodies different colours, according to their degree of kinship with the deceased. After being embraced by one another for some ten minutes, while uttering uninterrupted groans, they set out for the tomb. At a certain distance, they meet a brother by blood of the dead woman, who is accompanied by some of his tribal brothers. Everybody sits down on the ground, and the lamentations recommence. A _pitchi_[1255] containing the Chimurilia is then presented to the elder brother, who presses it against his stomach; they say that this is a way of lessening his sorrow. They take out one of the Chimurilia and the dead woman's mother puts it on her head for a little while; then it is put back into the _pitchi_, which each of the other men presses against his breast, in his turn. Finally, the brother puts the Chimurilia on the heads of two elder sisters and they set out again for the tomb. On the way, the mother throws herself on the ground several times, and tries to slash her head with a pointed stick. Every time, the other women pick her up, and seem to take care that she does not hurt herself too much. When they arrive at the tomb, she throws herself on the knoll and endeavours to destroy it with her hands, while the other women literally dance upon her. The tribal mothers and aunts (sisters of the dead woman's father) follow her example; they also throw themselves on the ground, and mutually beat and tear each other; finally their bodies are all streaming with blood. After a while, they are dragged aside. The elder sisters then make a hole in the earth of the tomb, in which they place the Chimurilia, which had previously been torn to pieces. Once again the tribal mothers throw themselves on the ground and slash each other's heads. At this moment, "the weeping and wailing of the women who were standing round seemed to drive them almost frenzied, and the blood, streaming down their bodies over the white pipe-clay, gave them a ghastly appearance. At last only the old mother was left crouching alone, utterly exhausted and moaning weakly on the grave."[1256] Then the others raised her up and rubbed off the pipe-clay with which she was covered; this was the end of the ceremony and of the mourning.[1256] Among the Warramunga, the final rite presents some rather particular characteristics. There seems to be no shedding of blood here, but the collective effervescence is translated in another manner. Among his people, before the body is definitely interred, it is exposed upon a platform placed in the branches of a tree; it is left there to decompose slowly, until nothing remains but the bones. Then these are gathered together and, with the exception of the humerus, they are placed inside an ant-hill. The humerus is wrapped up in a bark box, which is decorated in different manners. The box is then brought to camp, amid the cries and groans of the women. During the following days, they celebrate a series of totemic rites, concerning the totem of the deceased and the mythical history of the ancestors from whom the clan is descended. When all these ceremonies have been terminated, they proceed to the closing rite. A trench one foot deep and fifteen feet long is dug in the field of the ceremony. A design representing the totem of the deceased and certain spots where the ancestor stopped is made on the ground a little distance from it. Near this design, a little ditch is dug in the ground. Ten decorated men then advance, one behind another, and with their hands crossed behind their heads and their legs wide apart they stand astraddle the trench. At a given signal, the women run from the camp in a profound silence; when they are near, they form in Indian file, the last one holding in her hands the box containing the humerus. Then, after throwing themselves on the ground, they advance on their hands and knees, and pass all along the trench, between the legs of the men. The scene shows a state of great sexual excitement. As soon as the last woman has passed, they take the box from her, and take it to the ditch, near which is an old man; he breaks the bone with a sharp blow, and hurriedly buries it in the debris. During this time, the women have remained at a distance, with their backs turned upon the scene, for they must not see it. But when they hear the blow of the axe, they flee, uttering cries and groans. The rite is accomplished; the mourning is terminated.[1257] II These rites belong to a very different type from those which we have studied hitherto. We do not mean to say that important resemblances cannot be found between the two, which we shall have to note; but the differences are more apparent. Instead of happy dances, songs and dramatic representations which distract and relax the mind, they are tears and groans and, in a word, the most varied manifestations of agonized sorrow and a sort of mutual pity, which occupy the whole scene. Of course the shedding of blood also takes place in the Intichiuma, but this is an oblation made with a movement of pious enthusiasm. Even though the motions may be the same, the sentiments expressed are different and even opposed. Likewise, the ascetic rites certainly imply privations, abstinences and mutilations, but ones which must be borne with an impassive firmness and serenity. Here, on the contrary, dejection, cries and tears are the rule. The ascetic tortures himself in order to prove, in his own eyes and those of his fellows, that he is above suffering. During mourning, men injure themselves to prove that they suffer. By all these signs, the characteristic traits of the piacular rites are to be recognized. But how are they to be explained? One initial fact is constant: mourning is not the spontaneous expression of individual emotions.[1258] If the relations weep, lament, mutilate themselves, it is not because they feel themselves personally affected by the death of their kinsman. Of course, it may be that in certain particular cases, the chagrin expressed is really felt.[1259] But it is more generally the case that there is no connection between the sentiments felt and the gestures made by the actors in the rite.[1260] If, at the 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. Moreover, this obligation is sanctioned by mythical or social penalties. They believe, for example, that if a relative does not mourn as is fitting, then the soul of the departed follows upon his steps and kills him.[1262] In other cases, society does not leave it to the religious forces to punish the negligent; it intervenes itself, and reprimands the ritual faults. If a son-in-law does not render to his father-in-law the funeral attentions which are due him, and if he does not make the prescribed incisions, then his tribal fathers-in-law take his wife away from him and give him another.[1263] Therefore, in order to square himself with usage, a man sometimes forces tears to flow by artificial means.[1264] Whence comes this obligation? Ethnographers and sociologists are generally satisfied with the reply which the natives themselves give to this question. They say that the dead wish to be lamented, that by refusing them the tribute of sorrow which is their right, men offend them, and that the only way of preventing their anger is to conform to their will.[1265] But this mythological interpretation merely modifies the terms of the problem, without resolving it; it is still necessary to explain why the dead imperatively reclaim the mourning. It may be said that it is natural for men to wish to be mourned and regretted. But in making this sentiment explain the complex system of rites which make up mourning, we attribute to the Australian affective exigencies of which the civilized man himself does not always give evidence. Let us admit--as is not evident _a priori_--that the idea of not being forgotten too readily is pleasing to a man who thinks of the future. It is still to be established that it has ever had enough importance in the minds of the living for one to attribute to the dead a state of mind proceeding almost entirely from this preoccupation. It seems especially improbable that such a sentiment could obsess and impassion men who are seldom accustomed to thinking beyond the present moment. So far is it from being a fact that the desire to survive in the memory of those who are still alive is to be regarded as the origin of mourning, that we may even ask ourselves whether it was not rather mourning itself which, when once established, aroused the idea of and the taste for posthumous regrets. The classic interpretation appears still more unsustainable when we know what the primitive mourning consists in. It is not made up merely of pious regrets accorded to him who no longer is, but also of severe abstinences and cruel sacrifices. The rite does not merely demand that one think of the deceased in a melancholy way, but also that he beat himself, bruise himself, lacerate himself and burn himself. We have even seen that persons in mourning sometimes torture themselves to such a degree that they do not survive their wounds. What reason has the dead man for imposing such torments upon them? Such a cruelty on his part denotes something more than a desire not to be forgotten. If he is to find pleasure in seeing his own suffer, it is necessary that he hate them, that he be thirsty for their blood. This ferocity would undoubtedly appear natural to those for whom every spirit is necessarily an evil and redoubted power. But we know that there are spirits of every sort; how does it happen that the soul of the dead man is necessarily an evil spirit? As long as the man is alive, he loves his relatives and exchanges services with them. Is it not strange that as soon as it is freed from his body, his soul should instantly lay aside its former sentiments and become an evil and tormenting genius? It is a general rule that the dead man retains the personality of the living, and that he has the same character, the same hates and the same affections. So this metamorphosis is not easily understandable by itself. It is true that the natives admit it implicitly when they explain the rite by the exigencies of the dead man, but the question now before us is to know whence this conception came. Far from being capable of being regarded as a truism, it is as obscure as the rite itself, and consequently cannot account for it. Finally, even if we had found the reasons for this surprising transformation, we would still have to explain why it is only temporary. For it does not last beyond the period of mourning; after the rites have once been accomplished, the dead man becomes what he was when alive, an affectionate and devoted relation. He puts the new powers which he receives from his new condition at the service of his friends.[1266] Thenceforth, he is regarded as a good genius, always ready to aid those whom he was recently tormenting. Whence come these successive transfers? If the evil sentiments attributed to the soul come solely from the fact that it is no longer in life, they should remain invariable, and if the mourning is due to this, it should be interminable. These mythical explanations express the idea which the native has of the rite, and not the rite itself. So we may set them aside and face the reality which they translate, though disfiguring it in doing so. If mourning differs from the other forms of the positive cult, there is one feature in which it resembles them: it, too, is made up out of collective ceremonies which produce a state of effervescence among those who take part in them. The sentiments aroused are different; but the arousal is the same. So it is presumable that the explanation of the joyous rites is capable of being applied to the sad rites, on condition that the terms be transposed. 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. But the affective state in which the group then happens to be only reflects the circumstances through which it is passing. Not only do the relatives, who are effected the most directly, bring their own personal sorrow to the assembly, but the society exercises a moral pressure over its members, to put their sentiments in harmony with the situation. To allow them to remain indifferent to the blow which has fallen upon it and diminished it, would be equivalent to proclaiming that it does not hold the place in their hearts which is due it; it would be denying itself. A family which allows one of its members to die without being wept for shows by that very fact that it lacks moral unity and cohesion: it abdicates; it renounces its existence. An individual in his turn, if he is strongly attached to the society of which he is a member, feels that he is morally held to participating in its sorrows and joys; not to be interested in them would be equivalent to breaking the bonds uniting him to the group; it would be renouncing all desire for it and contradicting himself. When the Christian, during the ceremonies commemorating the Passion, and the Jew, on the anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem, fast and mortify themselves, it is not in giving way to a sadness which they feel spontaneously. Under these circumstances, the internal state of the believer is out of all proportion to the severe abstinences to which they submit themselves. If he is sad, it is primarily because he consents to being sad, and he consents to it in order to affirm his faith. The attitude of the Australian during mourning is to be explained in the same way. If he weeps and groans, it is not merely to express an individual chagrin; it is to fulfil a duty of which the surrounding society does not fail to remind him. 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. When pain reaches this degree of intensity, it is mixed with a sort of anger and exasperation. One feels the need of breaking something, of destroying something. He takes this out either upon himself or others. He beats himself, burns himself, wounds himself or else he falls upon others to beat, burn and wound them. Thus it became the custom to give one's self up to the veritable orgies of tortures during mourning. It seems very probable that blood-revenge and head-hunting have their origin in this. If every death is attributed to some magic charm, and for this reason it is believed that the dead man ought to be avenged, it is because men must find a victim at any price, upon whom the collective pain and anger may be discharged. Naturally this victim is sought outside the group; a stranger is a subject _minoris resistentiæ_; as he is not protected by the sentiments of sympathy inspired by a relative or neighbour, there is nothing in him which subdues and neutralizes the evil and destructive sentiments aroused by the death. It is undoubtedly for this same reason that women serve more frequently than men as the passive objects of the cruellest rites of mourning; since they have a smaller social value, they are more obviously designated as scapegoats. We see that this explanation of mourning completely leaves aside all ideas of souls or spirits. The only forces which are really active are of a wholly impersonal nature: they are the emotions aroused in the group by the death of one of its members. But the primitive does not know the psychical mechanism from which these practices result. So when he tries to account for them, he is obliged to forge a wholly different explanation. All he knows is that he must painfully mortify himself. As every obligation suggests the notion of a will which obliges, he looks about him to see whence this constraint which he feels may come. Now, there is one moral power, of whose reality he is assured and which seems designated for this rôle: this is the soul which the death has liberated. For what could have a greater interest than it in the effects which its own death has on the living? So they imagine that if these latter inflict an unnatural treatment upon themselves, it is to conform to its exigencies. It was thus that the idea of the soul must have intervened at a later date into the mythology of mourning. But also, since it is thus endowed with inhuman exigencies, it must be supposed that in leaving the body which it animated, the soul lays aside every human sentiment. 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 foundation of mourning is the impression of a loss which the group feels when it loses one of its members. But this very impression results in bringing individuals together, in putting them into closer relations with one another, in 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. In fact, whenever the social sentiment is painfully wounded, it reacts with greater force than ordinarily: one never holds so closely to his family as when it has just suffered. This surplus energy effaces the more completely the effects of the interruption which was felt at first, and thus dissipates the feeling of coldness which death always brings with it. 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. When one is in the period of dejection and agony, he represents the soul with the traits of an evil being, whose sole occupation is to persecute men. But when he feels himself confident and secure once more, he must admit that it has retaken its former nature and its former sentiments of tenderness and solidarity. Thus we explain the very different ways in which it is conceived at different moments of its existence.[1267] Not only do the rites of mourning determine certain of the secondary characteristics attributed to the soul, but perhaps they are not foreign to the idea that it survives the body. If he is to understand the practices to which he submits on the death of a parent, a man is obliged to believe that these are not an indifferent matter for the deceased. The shedding of blood which is practised so freely during mourning is a veritable sacrifice offered to the dead man.[1268] So something of the dead man must survive, and as this is not the body, which is manifestly immobile and decomposed, it can only be the soul. Of course it is impossible to say with any exactness what part these considerations have had in the origin of the idea of immortality. But it is probable that here the influence of the cult is the same as it is elsewhere. Rites are more easily explicable when one imagines that they are addressed to personal beings; so men have been induced to extend the influence of the mythical personalities in the religious life. In order to account for mourning, they have prolonged the existence of the soul beyond the tomb. This is one more example of the way in which rites react upon beliefs. III But death is not the only event which may disturb a community. Men have many other occasions for being sorry and lamenting, so we might foresee that even the Australians would know and practise other piacular rites besides mourning. However, it is a remarkable fact that only a small number of examples are to be found in the accounts of the observers. One rite of this sort greatly resembles those which have just been studied. It will be remembered that among the Arunta, each local group attributes exceptionally important virtues to its collection of churinga: this is this collective palladium, upon whose fate the fate of the community itself is believed to depend. So when enemies or white men succeed in stealing one of these religious treasures, this loss is considered a public calamity. This misfortune is the occasion of a rite having all the characteristics of mourning: men smear their bodies with white pipe-clay and remain in camp, weeping and lamenting, during a period of two weeks.[1269] This is a new proof that mourning is determined, not by the way in which the soul of the dead is conceived, but by impersonal causes, by the moral state of the group. In fact, we have here a rite which, in its structure, is indistinguishable from the real mourning, but which is, nevertheless, independent of every notion of spirits or evil-working demons.[1270] Another circumstance which gives occasion for ceremonies of the same nature is the distress in which the society finds itself after an insufficient harvest. "The natives who live in the vicinity of Lake Eyre," says Eylmann, "also seek to prevent an insufficiency of food by means of secret ceremonies. But many of the ritual practices observed in this region are to be distinguished from those which have been mentioned already: it is not by symbolic dances, by imitative movements nor dazzling decorations that they try to act upon the religious powers or the forces of nature, but by means of the suffering which individuals inflict upon themselves. In the northern territories, it is by means of tortures, such as prolonged fasts, vigils, dances persisted up to the exhaustion of the dancers, and physical pains of every sort, that they attempt to appease the powers which are ill-disposed towards men."[1271] The torments to which the natives submit themselves for this purpose sometimes leave them in such a state of exhaustion that they are unable to follow the hunt for some days to come.[1272] These practices are employed especially for fighting against drought. This is because a scarcity of water results in a general want. To remedy this evil, they have recourse to violent methods. One which is frequently used is the extraction of a tooth. Among the Kaitish, for example, they pull out an incisor from one man, and hang it on a tree.[1273] Among the Dieri, the idea of rain is closely associated with that of bloody incisions made in the skin of the chest and arms.[1274] Among this same people, whenever the drought is very great, the great council assembles and summons the whole tribe. It is really a tribal event. Women are sent in every direction to notify men to assemble at a given place and time. After they have assembled, they groan and cry in a piercing voice about the miserable state of the land, and they beg the _Mura-mura_ (the mythical ancestors) to give them the power of making an abundant rain fall.[1275] In the cases, which, by the way, are very rare, when there has been an excessive rainfall, an analogous ceremony takes place to stop it. Old men then enter into a veritable frenzy,[1276] while the cries uttered by the crowd are really painful to hear.[1277] Spencer and Gillen describe, under the name of Intichiuma, a ceremony which may well have the same object and the same origin as the preceding ones: a physical torture is applied to make an animal species multiply. Among the Urabunna, there is one clan whose totem is a variety of snake called _wadnungadni_. This is how the chief of the clan proceeds, to make sure that these snakes may never be lacking. After having been decorated, he kneels down on the ground, holding his arms straight out. An assistant pinches the skin of his right arm between his fingers, and the officiant forces a pointed bone five inches long through the fold thus formed. This self-mutilation is believed to produce the desired result.[1278] An analogous rite is used among the Dieri to make the wild-hens lay: the operators pierce their scrotums.[1279] In certain of the Lake Eyre tribes, men pierce their ears to make yams reproduce.[1280] But these partial or total famines are not the only plagues which may fall upon a tribe. Other events happen more or less periodically which menace, or seem to menace, the existence of the group. This is the case, for example, with the southern lights. The Kurnai believe that this is a fire lighted in the heavens by the great god Mungan-ngaua; therefore, whenever they see it, they are afraid that it may spread to the earth and devour them, so a great effervescence results in the camp. They shake a withered hand, to which the Kurnai attribute various virtues, and utter such cries as "Send it away; do not let us be burned." At the same time, the old men order an exchange of wives, which always indicates a great excitement.[1281] The same sexual licence is mentioned among the Wiimbaio whenever a plague appears imminent, and especially in times of an epidemic.[1282] Under the influence of these ideas, mutilations and the shedding of blood are sometimes considered an efficient means of curing maladies. If an accident happens to a child among the Dieri, his relations beat themselves on the head with clubs or boomerangs until the blood flows down over their faces. They believe that by this process, they relieve the child of the suffering.[1283] Elsewhere, they imagine that they can obtain the same end by means of a supplementary totemic ceremony.[1284] We may connect with these the example already given of a ceremony celebrated specially to efface the effects of a ritual fault.[1285] Of course there are neither wounds nor blows nor physical suffering of any sort in these two latter cases, yet the rite does not differ in nature from the others: the end sought is always the turning aside of an evil or the expiation of a fault by means of an extraordinary ritual prestation. Outside of mourning, such are the only cases of piacular rites which we have succeeded in finding in Australia. To be sure, it is probable that some have escaped us, while we may presume equally well that others have remained unperceived by the observers. But if those discovered up to the present are few in number, it is probably because they do not hold a large place in the cult. We see how far primitive religions are from being the daughters of agony and fear from the fact that the rites translating these painful emotions are relatively rare. Of course this is because the Australian, while leading a miserable existence as compared with other more civilized peoples, demands so little of life that he is easily contented. All that he asks is that nature follow its normal course, that the seasons succeed one another regularly, that the rain fall, at the ordinary time, in abundance and without excess. Now great disturbances in the cosmic order are always exceptional; thus it is noticeable that the majority of the regular piacular rites, examples of which we have given above, have been observed in the tribes of the centre, where droughts are frequent and constitute veritable disasters. It is still surprising, it is true, that piacular rites specially destined to expiate sins, seem to be completely lacking. However, the Australian, like every other man, must commit ritual faults, which he has an interest in redeeming; so we may ask if the silence of the texts on this point may not be due to insufficient observation. But howsoever few the facts which we have been able to gather may be, they are, nevertheless, instructive. When we study piacular rites in the more advanced religions, where the religious forces are individualized, they appear to be closely bound up with anthropomorphic conceptions. When the believer imposes privations upon himself and submits himself to austerities, it is in order to disarm the malevolence attributed by him to certain of the sacred beings upon whom he thinks that he is dependent. To appease their hatred or anger, he complies with their exigencies; he beats himself in order that he may not be beaten by them. So it seems as though these practices could not arise until after gods and spirits were conceived as moral persons, capable of passions analogous to those of men. For this reason, Robertson Smith thought it possible to assign a relatively late date to expiatory sacrifices, just as to sacrificial oblations. According to him, the shedding of blood which characterizes these rites was at first a simple process of communion: men poured forth their blood upon the altar in order to strengthen the bonds uniting them to their god. The rite acquired a piacular and penal character only when its original significance was forgotten and when the new idea which was formed of sacred beings allowed men to attribute another function to it.[1286] But as piacular rites are met with even in the Australian societies, it is impossible to assign them so late an origin. Moreover, all that we have observed, with one single exception,[1287] are independent of all anthropomorphic conceptions: there is no question of either spirits or gods. Abstinences and effusions of blood stop famines and cure sicknesses directly and by themselves. No spiritual being introduces his action between the rite and the effect it is believed to produce. So mythical personalities intervened only at a late date. After the mechanism of the ritual had once been established, they served to make it more easily representable in the mind, but they are not conditions of its existence. It is for other reasons that it was founded; it is to another cause that it owes its efficacy. It acts through the collective forces which it puts into play. Does a misfortune which menaces the group appear imminent? Then the group unites, as in the case of mourning, and it is naturally an impression of uneasiness and perplexity which dominates the assembled body. Now, as always, the pooling of these sentiments results in intensifying them. By affirming themselves, they exalt and impassion themselves and attain a degree of violence which is translated by the corresponding violence of the gestures which express them. Just as at the death of a relative, they utter terrible cries, fly into a passion and feel that they must tear and destroy; it is to satisfy this need that they beat themselves, wound themselves, and make their blood flow. When emotions have this vivacity, they may well be painful, but they are not depressing; on the contrary, they denote a state of effervescence which implies a mobilization of all our active forces, and even a supply of external energies. It matters little that this exaltation was provoked by a sad event, for it is real, notwithstanding, and does not differ specifically from what is observed in the happy feasts. Sometimes it is even made manifest by movements of the same nature: there is the same frenzy which seizes the worshippers and the same tendency towards sexual debauches, a sure sign of great nervous over-excitement. Robertson Smith had already noticed this curious influence of sad rites in the Semitic cults: "in evil times," he says, "when men's thoughts were habitually sombre, they betook themselves to the physical excitement of religion as men now take refuge in wine.... And so in general when an act of Semitic worship began with sorrow and lamentation--as in the mourning for Adonis, or the great atoning ceremonies which became common in later times--a swift revulsion of feeling followed, and the gloomy part of the service was presently succeeded by a burst of hilarious revelry."[1288] In a word, even when religious ceremonies have a disquieting or saddening event as their point of departure, they retain their stimulating power over the affective state of the group and individuals. By the mere fact that they are collective, they raise the vital tone. When one feels life within him--whether it be in the form of painful irritation or happy enthusiasm--he does not believe in death; so he becomes reassured and takes courage again, and subjectively, everything goes on as if the rite had really driven off the danger which was dreaded. This is how curing or preventive virtues come to be attributed to the movements which one makes, to the cries uttered, to the blood shed and to the wounds inflicted upon one's self or others; and as these different tortures necessarily make one suffer, suffering by itself is finally regarded as a means of conjuring evil or curing sickness.[1289] Later, when the majority of the religious forces had taken the form of moral personalities, the efficacy of these practices was explained by imagining that their object was to appease an evil-working or irritated god. But these conceptions only reflect the rite and the sentiments it arouses; they are an interpretation of it, not its determining cause. A negligence of the ritual acts in the same way. It, too, is a menace for the group; it touches it in its moral existence for it touches it in its beliefs. But if the anger which it causes is affirmed ostensibly and energetically, it compensates the evil which it has caused. For if it is acutely felt by all, it is because the infraction committed is an exception and the common faith remains entire. So the moral unity of the group is not endangered. Now the penalty inflicted as an expiation is only a manifestation of the public anger, the material proof of its unanimity. So it really does have the healing effect attributed to it. At bottom, the sentiment which is at the root of the real expiatory rites does not differ in nature from that which we have found at the basis of the other piacular rites: it is a sort of irritated sorrow which tends to manifest itself by acts of destruction. Sometimes it is assuaged to the detriment of him who feels it; sometimes it is at the expense of some foreign third party. But in either case, the psychic mechanism is essentially the same.[1290] IV One of the greatest services which Robertson Smith has rendered to the science of religions is to have pointed out the ambiguity of the notion of sacredness. Religious forces are of two sorts. Some are beneficent, guardians of the physical and moral order, dispensers of life and health and all the qualities which men esteem: this is the case with the totemic principle, spread out in the whole species, the mythical ancestor, the animal-protector, the civilizing heroes and the tutelar gods of every kind and degree. It matters little whether they are conceived as distinct personalities or as diffused energies; under either form they fulfil the same function and affect the minds of the believers in the same way: the respect which they inspire is mixed with love and gratitude. The things and the persons which are normally connected with them participate in the same sentiments and the same character: these are holy things and persons. Such are the spots consecrated to the cult, the objects which serve in the regular rites, the priests, the ascetics, etc.--On the other hand, there are evil and impure powers, productive of disorders, causes of death and sickness, instigators of sacrilege. The only sentiments which men have for them are a fear into which horror generally enters. Such are the forces upon which and by which the sorcerer acts, those which arise from corpses or the menstrual blood, those freed by every profanation of sacred things, etc. The spirits of the dead and malign genii of every sort are their personified forms. Between these two categories of forces and beings, the contrast is as complete as possible and even goes into the most radical antagonism. The good and salutary powers repel to a distance these others which deny and contradict them. Therefore the former are forbidden to the latter: any contact between them is considered the worst of profanations. This is the typical form of those interdicts between sacred things of different species, the existence of which we have already pointed out.[1291] Women during menstruation, and especially at its beginning, are impure; so at this moment they are rigorously sequestered; men may have no relations with them.[1292] Bull-roarers and churinga never come near a dead man.[1293] A sacrilegious person is excluded from the society of the faithful; access to the cult is forbidden him. Thus the whole religious life gravitates about two contrary poles between which there is the same opposition as between the pure and the impure, the saint and the sacrilegious, the divine and the diabolic. But while these two aspects of the religious life oppose one another, there is a close kinship between them. In the first place, both have the same relation towards profane beings: these must abstain from all contact with impure things just as from the most holy things. The former are no less forbidden than the latter: they are withdrawn from circulation alike. This shows that they too are sacred. 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. Among certain Semitic peoples, pork was forbidden, but it was not always known exactly whether this was because it was a pure or an impure thing[1294] and the same may be said of a very large number of alimentary interdictions. But there is more to be said; it very frequently happens that an impure thing or an evil power becomes a holy thing or a guardian power, without changing its nature, through a simple modification of external circumstances. We have seen how the soul of a dead man, which is a dreaded principle at first, is transformed into a protecting genius as soon as the mourning is finished. Likewise, the corpse, which begins by inspiring terror and aversion, is later regarded as a venerated relic: funeral anthropophagy, which is frequently practised in the Australian societies, is a proof of this transformation.[1295] The totemic animal is the pre-eminently sacred being; but for him who eats its flesh unduly, it is a cause of death. In a general way, the sacrilegious person is merely a profane one who has been infected with a benevolent religious force. This changes its nature in changing its habitat; it defiles rather than sanctifies.[1296] The blood issuing from the genital organs of a woman, though it is evidently as impure as that of menstruation, is frequently used as a remedy against sickness.[1297] The victim immolated in expiatory sacrifices is charged with impurities, for they have concentrated upon it the sins which were to be expiated. Yet, after it has been slaughtered, its flesh and blood are employed for the most pious uses.[1298] On the contrary, though the communion is generally a religious operation whose normal function is to consecrate, it sometimes produces the effects of a sacrilege. In certain cases, the persons who have communicated are forced to flee from one another as from men infected with a plague. One would say that they have become a source of dangerous contamination for one another: the sacred bond which unites them also separates them. Examples of this sort of communion are numerous in Australia. One of the most typical has been observed among the Narrinyeri and the neighbouring tribes. When an infant arrives in the world, its parents carefully preserve its umbilical cord, which is believed to conceal a part of its soul. Two persons who exchange the cords thus preserved communicate together by the very act of this exchange, for it is as though they exchanged their souls. But, at the same time, they are forbidden to touch or speak to or even to see one another. It is just as though they were each an object of horror for the other.[1299] So the pure and the impure are not two separate classes, but two varieties of the same class, which includes all sacred things. 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. But even if Robertson Smith did have an active sentiment of this ambiguity, he never gave it an express explanation. He confined himself to remarking that, as all religious forces are indistinctly intense and contagious, it is wise not to approach them except with respectful precautions, no matter what direction their action may be exercised in. It seemed to him that he could thus account for the air of kinship which they all present, in spite of the contrasts which oppose them otherwise. But the question was only put off; it still remains to be shown how it comes that the powers of evil have the same intensity and contagiousness as the others. In other words, how does it happen that they, too, are of a religious nature? Also, the energy and force of expansion which they have in common do not enable us to understand how, in spite of the conflict which divides them, they may be transformed into one another or substituted for each other in their respective functions, and how the pure may contaminate while the impure sometimes serves to sanctify.[1300] The explanation of piacular rites which we have proposed enables us to reply to this double question. We have seen, in fact, that the evil powers are the product of these rites and symbolize them. When a society is going through circumstances which sadden, perplex or irritate it, it exercises a pressure over its members, to make them bear witness, by significant acts, to their sorrow, perplexity or anger. It imposes upon them the duty of weeping, groaning or inflicting wounds upon themselves or others, for these collective manifestations, and the moral communion which they show and strengthen, restore to the group the energy which circumstances threaten to take away from it, and thus they enable it to become settled. This is the experience which men interpret when they imagine that outside them there are evil beings whose hostility, whether constitutional or temporary, can be appeased only by human suffering. These beings are nothing other than collective states objectified; they are society itself seen under one of its aspects. But we also know that the benevolent powers are constituted in the same way; they, too, result from the collective life and express it; they, too, represent the society, but seen from a very different attitude, to wit, at the moment when it confidently affirms itself and ardently presses on towards the realization of the ends which it pursues. Since these two sorts of forces have a common origin, it is not at all surprising that, though facing in opposite directions, they should have the same nature, that they are equally intense and contagious and consequently forbidden and sacred. From this we are able to understand how they change into one another. Since they reflect the abjective state in which the group happens to be, it is enough that this state change for their character to change. After the mourning is over, the domestic group is re-calmed by the mourning itself; it regains confidence; the painful pressure which they felt exercised over them is relieved; they feel more at their ease. So it seems to them as though the spirit of the deceased had laid aside its hostile sentiments and become a benevolent protector. The other transmutations, examples of which we have cited, are to be explained in the same way. As we have already shown, the sanctity of a thing is due to the collective sentiment of which it is the object. If, in violation of the interdicts which isolate it, it comes in contact with a profane person, then this same sentiment will spread contagiously to this latter and imprint a special character upon him. But in spreading, it comes into a very different state from the one it was in at first. Offended and irritated by the profanation implied in this abusive and unnatural extension, it becomes aggressive and inclined to destructive violences: it tends to avenge itself for the offence suffered. Therefore the infected subject seems to be filled with a mighty and harmful force which menaces all that approaches him; it is as though he were marked with a stain or blemish. Yet the cause of this blemish is the same psychic state which, in other circumstances, consecrates and sanctifies. But if the anger thus aroused is satisfied by an expiatory rite, it subsides, alleviated; the offended sentiment is appeased and returns to its original state. So it acts once more as it acted in the beginning; instead of contaminating, it sanctifies. As it continues to infect the object to which it is attached, this could never become profane and religiously indifferent again. But the direction of the religious force with which it seems to be filled is inverted: from being impure, it has become pure and an instrument of purification. In résumé, the two poles of the religious life correspond to the two opposed states through which all social life passes. 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. This ambiguity, moreover, is not peculiar to the idea of sacredness alone; something of this characteristic has been found in all the rites which we have been studying. Of course it was essential to distinguish them; to confuse them would have been to misunderstand the multiple aspects of the religious life. But, on the other hand, howsoever different they may be, there is no break of continuity between them. Quite on the contrary, they overlap one another and may even replace each other mutually. We have already shown how the rites of oblation and communion, the imitative rites and the commemorative rites frequently fulfil the same function. One might imagine that the negative cult, at least, would be more sharply separated from the positive cult; yet we have seen that the former may produce positive effects, identical with those produced by the latter. The same results are obtained by fasts, abstinences and self-mutilations as by communions, oblations and commemorations. Inversely, offerings and sacrifices imply privations and renunciations of every sort. The continuity between ascetic and piacular rites is even more apparent: both are made up of sufferings, accepted or undergone, to which an analogous efficacy is attributed. Thus the practices, like the beliefs, are not arranged in two separate classes. Howsoever complex the outward manifestations of the religious life may be, at bottom it is one and simple. It responds everywhere to one and the same need, and is everywhere derived from one and the same mental state. In all its forms, its object is to raise man above himself and to make him lead a life superior to that which he would lead, if he followed only his own individual whims: beliefs express this life in representations; rites organize it and regulate its working. CONCLUSION At the beginning of this work we announced that the religion whose study we were taking up contained within it the most characteristic elements of the religious life. The exactness of this proposition may now be verified. Howsoever simple the system which we have studied may be, we have found within it all the great ideas and the principal ritual attitudes which are at the basis of even the most advanced religions: the division of things into sacred and profane, the notions of the soul, of spirits, of mythical personalities, and of a national and even international divinity, a negative cult with ascetic practices which are its exaggerated form, rites of oblation and communion, imitative rites, commemorative rites and expiatory rites; nothing essential is lacking. We are thus in a position to hope that the results at which we have arrived are not peculiar to totemism alone, but can aid us in an understanding of what religion in general is. It may be objected that one single religion, whatever its field of extension may be, is too narrow a base for such an induction. We have not dreamed for a moment of ignoring the fact that an extended verification may add to the authority of a theory, but it is equally true that when a law has been proven by one well-made experiment, this proof is valid universally. If in one single case a scientist succeeded in finding out the secret of the life of even the most protoplasmic creature that can be imagined, the truths thus obtained would be applicable to all living beings, even the most advanced. Then if, in our studies of these very humble societies, we have really succeeded in discovering some of the elements out of which the most fundamental religious notions are made up, there is no reason for not extending the most general results of our researches to other religions. In fact, it is inconceivable that the same effect may be due now to one cause, now to another, according to the circumstances, unless the two causes are at bottom only one. A single idea cannot express one reality here and another one there, unless the duality is only apparent. If among certain peoples the ideas of sacredness, the soul and God are to be explained sociologically, it should be presumed scientifically that, in principle, the same explanation is valid for all the peoples among whom these same ideas are found with the same essential characteristics. Therefore, supposing that we have not been deceived, certain at least of our conclusions can be legitimately generalized. The moment has come to disengage these. And an induction of this sort, having at its foundation a clearly defined experiment, is less adventurous than many summary generalizations which, while attempting to reach the essence of religion at once, without resting upon the careful analysis of any religion in particular, greatly risk losing themselves in space. I The theorists who have undertaken to explain religion in rational terms have generally seen in it before all else a system of ideas, corresponding to some determined object. This object has been conceived in a multitude of ways: nature, the infinite, the unknowable, the ideal, etc.; but these differences matter but little. In any case, it was the conceptions and beliefs which were considered as the essential elements of religion. As for the rites, from this point of view they appear to be only an external translation, contingent and material, of these internal states which alone pass as having any intrinsic value. This conception is so commonly held that generally the disputes of which religion is the theme turn about the question whether it can conciliate itself with science or not, that is to say, whether or not there is a place beside our scientific knowledge for another form of thought which would be specifically religious. But the believers, the men who lead the religious life and have a direct sensation of what it really is, object to this way of regarding it, saying that it does not correspond to their daily experience. In fact, they feel that the 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; he believes that he is saved from evil, under whatever form he may conceive this evil. The first article in every creed is the belief in salvation by faith. But it is hard to see how a mere idea could have this efficacy. An idea is in reality only a part of ourselves; then how could it confer upon us powers superior to those which we have of our own nature? Howsoever rich it might be in affective virtues, it could add nothing to our natural vitality; for it could only release the motive powers which are within us, neither creating them nor increasing them. From the mere fact that we consider an object worthy of being loved and sought after, it does not follow that we feel ourselves stronger afterwards; it is also necessary that this object set free energies superior to these which we ordinarily have at our command and also that we have some means of making these enter into us and unite themselves to our interior lives. Now for that, it is not enough that we think of them; it is also indispensable that we place ourselves within their sphere of action, and that we set ourselves where we may best feel their influence; in a word, it is necessary that we act, and that we repeat the acts thus necessary every time we feel the need of renewing their effects. From this point of view, it is readily seen how that group of regularly repeated acts which form the cult get their importance. 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. Our entire study rests upon this postulate that the unanimous sentiment of the believers of all times cannot be purely illusory. Together with a recent apologist of the faith[1301] we admit that these religious beliefs rest upon a specific experience whose demonstrative value is, in one sense, not one bit inferior to that of scientific experiments, though different from them. We, too, think that "a tree is known by its fruits,"[1302] and that fertility is the best proof of what the roots are worth. But from the fact that a "religious experience," if we choose to call it this, does exist and that it has a certain foundation--and, by the way, is there any experience which has none?--it does not follow that the reality which is its foundation conforms objectively to the idea which believers have of it. The very fact that the fashion in which it has been conceived has varied infinitely in different times is enough to prove that none of these conceptions express it adequately. If a scientist states it as an axiom that the sensations of heat and light which we feel correspond to some objective cause, he does not conclude that this is what it appears to the senses to be. Likewise, even if the impressions which the faithful feel are not imaginary, still they are in no way privileged intuitions; there is no reason for believing that they inform us better upon the nature of their object than do ordinary sensations upon the nature of bodies and their properties. In order to discover what this object consists of, we must submit them to an examination and elaboration analogous to that which has substituted for the sensuous idea of the world another which is scientific and conceptual. This is precisely what we have tried to do, and we have seen that this reality, which mythologies have represented under so many different forms, but which is the universal and eternal objective cause of these sensations _sui generis_ out of which religious experience is made, is society. We have shown what moral forces it develops and how it awakens this sentiment of a refuge, of a shield and of a guardian support which attaches the believer to his cult. It is that which raises him outside himself; it is even that which made him. For that which makes a man is the totality of the intellectual property which constitutes civilization, and civilization is the work of society. Thus is explained the preponderating rôle of the cult in all religions, whichever they may be. This is because society cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is not in action unless the individuals who compose it are assembled together and act in common. It is by common action that it takes consciousness of itself and realizes its position; it is before all else an active co-operation. The collective ideas and sentiments are even possible only owing to these exterior movements which symbolize them, as we have established.[1303] Then it is action which dominates the religious life, because of the mere fact that it is society which is its source. In addition to all the reasons which have been given to justify this conception, a final one may be added here, which is the result of our whole work. As we have progressed, we have established the fact that the fundamental categories of thought, and consequently of science, are of religious origin. We have seen that the same is true for magic and consequently for the different processes which have issued from it. On the other hand, it has long been known that up until a relatively advanced moment of evolution, moral and legal rules have been indistinguishable from ritual prescriptions. In summing up, then, it may be said that nearly all the great social institutions have been born in religion.[1304] Now in 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: they have thus acquired a sort of physical nature; in this way they have come to mix themselves with the life of the material world, and then have considered themselves capable of explaining what passes there. But when they are considered only from this point of view and in this rôle, only their most superficial aspect is seen. In reality, the essential elements of which these collective sentiments are made have been borrowed by the understanding. It ordinarily seems that they should have a human character only when they are conceived under human forms;[1305] but even the most impersonal and the most anonymous are nothing else than objectified sentiments. It is only by regarding religion from this angle that it is possible to see its real significance. If we stick closely to appearances, rites often give the effect of purely manual operations: they are anointings, washings, meals. To consecrate something, it is put in contact with a source of religious energy, just as to-day a body is put in contact with a source of heat or electricity to warm or electrize it; the two processes employed are not essentially different. Thus understood, religious technique seems to be a sort of mystic mechanics. But these material man[oe]uvres are only the external envelope under which the mental operations are hidden. 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, it is said, what society is it that has thus made the basis of religion? Is it the real society, such as it is and acts before our very eyes, with the legal and moral organization which it has laboriously fashioned during the course of history? This is full of defects and imperfections. In it, evil goes beside the good, injustice often reigns supreme, and the truth is often obscured by error. How could anything so crudely organized inspire the sentiments of love, the ardent enthusiasm and the spirit of abnegation which all religions claim of their followers? These perfect beings which are gods could not have taken their traits from so mediocre, and sometimes even so base a reality. But, on the other hand, does someone think of a perfect society, where justice and truth would be sovereign, and from which evil in all its forms would be banished for ever? No one would deny that this is in close relations with the religious sentiment; for, they would say, it is towards the realization of this that all religions strive. But that society is not an empirical fact, definite and observable; it is a fancy, a dream with which men have lightened their sufferings, but in which they have never really lived. It is merely an idea which comes to express our more or less obscure aspirations towards the good, the beautiful and the ideal. Now these aspirations have their roots in us; they come from the very depths of our being; then there is nothing outside of us which can account for them. Moreover, they are already religious in themselves; thus it would seem that the ideal society presupposes religion, far from being able to explain it.[1306] 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; even if he is an impure being, he is not a profane one. The anti-god, is a god, inferior and subordinated, it is true, but nevertheless endowed with extended powers; he is even the object of rites, at least of negative ones. Thus religion, far from ignoring the real society and making abstraction of it, is in its image; it reflects all its aspects, even the most vulgar and the most repulsive. All is to be found there, and if in the majority of cases we see the good victorious over evil, life over death, the powers of light over the powers of darkness, it is because reality is not otherwise. If the relation between these two contrary forces were reversed, life would be impossible; but, as a matter of fact, it maintains itself and even tends to develop. But if, in the midst of these mythologies and theologies we see reality clearly appearing, it is none the less true that it is found there only in an enlarged, transformed and idealized form. In this respect, the most primitive religions do not differ from the most recent and the most refined. For example, we have seen how the Arunta place at the beginning of time a mythical society whose organization exactly reproduces that which still exists to-day; it includes the same clans and phratries, it is under the same matrimonial rules and it practises the same rites. But the personages who compose it are ideal beings, gifted with powers and virtues to which common mortals cannot pretend. Their nature is not only higher, but it is different, since it is at once animal and human. The evil powers there undergo a similar metamorphosis: evil itself is, as it were, made sublime and idealized. The question now raises itself of whence this idealization comes. Some reply that men have a natural faculty for idealizing, that is to say, of substituting for the real world another different one, to which they transport themselves by thought. But that is merely changing the terms of the problem; it is not resolving it or even advancing it. This systematic idealization is an essential characteristic of religions. Explaining them by an innate power of idealization is simply replacing one word by another which is the equivalent of the first; 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. The explanation of religion which we have proposed has precisely this advantage, that it gives an answer to this question. For our definition of the sacred is that it is something added to and above the real: now the ideal answers to this same definition; we cannot explain one without explaining the other. In fact, we have seen that if collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is because it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity. 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. In a word, above the real world where his profane life passes he has placed another which, in one sense, does not exist except in thought, but to which he attributes a higher sort of dignity than to the first. Thus, from a double point of view it is an ideal world. The formation of the ideal world is therefore not an irreducible fact which escapes science; it depends upon conditions which observation can touch; it is a natural product of social life. For a society to become conscious of itself and maintain at the necessary degree of intensity the sentiments which it thus attains, it must assemble and concentrate itself. Now this concentration brings about an exaltation of the mental life which takes form in a group of ideal conceptions where is portrayed the new life thus awakened; 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. 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. 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. But these conflicts which break forth are not between the ideal and reality, but between two different ideals, that of yesterday and that of to-day, that which has the authority of tradition and that which has the hope of the future. There is surely a place for investigating whence these ideals evolve; but whatever solution may be given to this problem, it still remains that all passes in the world of the ideal. Thus the collective ideal which religion expresses is far from being due to a vague innate power of the individual, but it is rather at the school of collective life that the individual has learned to idealize. It is in assimilating the ideals elaborated by society that he has become capable of conceiving the ideal. It is society which, by leading him within its sphere of action, has made him acquire the need of raising himself above the world of experience and has at the same time furnished him with the means of conceiving another. For society has constructed this new world in constructing itself, since it is society which this expresses. Thus both with the individual and in the group, the faculty of idealizing has nothing mysterious about it. It is not a sort of luxury which a man could get along without, but a condition of his very existence. He could not be a social being, that is to say, he could not be a man, if he had not acquired it. It is true that in incarnating themselves in individuals, collective ideals tend to individualize themselves. Each understands them after his own fashion and marks them with his own stamp; he suppresses certain elements and adds others. Thus the personal ideal disengages itself from the social ideal in proportion as the individual personality develops itself and becomes an autonomous source of action. But if we wish to understand this aptitude, so singular in appearance, of living outside of reality, it is enough to connect it with the social conditions upon which it depends. Therefore it is necessary to avoid seeing in this theory of religion a simple restatement of historical materialism: that would be misunderstanding our thought to an extreme degree. In showing that religion is something essentially social, we do not mean to say that it confines itself to translating into another language the material forms of society and its immediate vital necessities. It is true that we take it as evident that social life depends upon its material foundation and bears its mark, just as the mental life of an individual depends upon his nervous system and in fact his whole organism. But collective consciousness is something more than a mere epiphenomenon of its morphological basis, just as individual consciousness is something more than a simple efflorescence of the nervous system. In order that the former may appear, a synthesis _sui generis_ of particular consciousnesses is required. Now this synthesis has the effect of disengaging a whole world of sentiments, ideas and images which, once born, obey laws all their own. They attract each other, repel each other, unite, divide themselves, and multiply, though these combinations are not commanded and necessitated by the condition of the underlying reality. The life thus brought into being even enjoys so great an independence that it sometimes indulges in manifestations with no purpose or utility of any sort, for the mere pleasure of affirming itself. We have shown that this is often precisely the case with ritual activity and mythological thought.[1307] But if religion is the product of social causes, how can we explain the individual cult and the universalistic character of certain religions? If it is born _in foro externo_, how has it been able to pass into the inner conscience of the individual and penetrate there ever more and more profoundly? If it is the work of definite and individualized societies, how has it been able to detach itself from them, even to the point of being conceived as something common to all humanity? In the course of our studies, we have met with the germs of individual religion and of religious cosmopolitanism, and we have seen how they were formed; thus we possess the more general elements of the reply which is to be given to this double question. We have shown how the religious force which animates the clan particularizes itself, by incarnating itself in particular consciousnesses. Thus secondary sacred beings are formed; each individual has his own, made in his own image, associated to his own intimate life, bound up with his own destiny; it is the soul, the individual totem, the protecting ancestor, etc. These beings are the object of rites which the individual can celebrate by himself, outside of any group; this is the first form of the individual cult. To be sure, it is only a very rudimentary cult; but since the personality of the individual is still only slightly marked, and but little value is attributed to it, the cult which expresses it could hardly be expected to be very highly developed as yet. But as individuals have differentiated themselves more and more and the value of an individual has increased, the corresponding cult has taken a relatively greater place in the totality of the religious life and at the same time it is more fully closed to outside influences. Thus the existence of individual cults implies nothing which contradicts or embarrasses the sociological interpretation of religion; for the religious forces to which it addresses itself are only the individualized forms of collective forces. Therefore, even when religion seems to be entirely within the individual conscience, it is still in society that it finds the living source from which it is nourished. We are now able to appreciate the value of the radical individualism which would make religion something purely individual: 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? 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. Now these beliefs are active only when they are partaken by many. A man cannot retain them any length of time by a purely personal effort; it is not thus that they are born or that they are acquired; it is even doubtful if they can be kept under these conditions. In fact, a man who has a veritable faith feels an invincible need of spreading it: therefore he leaves his isolation, approaches others and seeks to convince them, and it is the ardour of the convictions which he arouses that strengthens his own. It would quickly weaken if it remained alone. It is the same with religious universalism as with this individualism. Far from being an exclusive attribute of certain very great religions, we have found it, not at the base, it is true, but at the summit of the Australian system. Bunjil, Daramulun or Baiame are not simple tribal gods; each of them is recognized by a number of different tribes. In a sense, their cult is international. This conception is therefore very near to that found in the most recent theologies. So certain writers have felt it their duty to deny its authenticity, howsoever incontestable this may be. And we have been able to show how this has been formed. Neighbouring tribes of a similar civilization cannot fail to be in constant relations with each other. All sorts of circumstances give an occasion for it: besides commerce, which is still rudimentary, there are marriages; these international marriages are very common in Australia. In the course of these meetings, men naturally become conscious of the moral relationship which united them. They have the same social organization, the same division into phratries, clans and matrimonial classes; they practise the same rites of initiation, or wholly similar ones. Mutual loans and treaties result in reinforcing these spontaneous resemblances. The gods to which these manifestly identical institutions were attached could hardly have remained distinct in their minds. Everything tended to bring them together and consequently, even supposing that each tribe elaborated the notion independently, they must necessarily have tended to confound themselves with each other. Also, it is probable that it was in inter-tribal assemblies that they were first conceived. For they are chiefly the gods of initiation, and in the initiation ceremonies, the different tribes are usually represented. So if sacred beings are formed which are connected with no geographically determined society, that is not because they have an extra-social origin. It is because there are other groups above these geographically determined ones, whose contours are less clearly marked: they have no fixed frontiers, but include all sorts of more or less neighbouring and related tribes. The particular social life thus created tends to spread itself over an area with no definite limits. Naturally the mythological personages who correspond to it have the same character; their sphere of influence is not limited; they go beyond the particular tribes and their territory. They are the great international gods. Now there is nothing in this situation which is peculiar to Australian societies. There is no people and no state which is not a part of another society, more or less unlimited, which embraces all the peoples and all the States with which the first comes in contact, either directly or indirectly; there is no national life which is not dominated by a collective life of an international nature. In proportion as we advance in history, these international groups acquire a greater importance and extent. 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. II 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. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments; hence come ceremonies which do not differ from regular religious ceremonies, either in their object, the results which they produce, or the processes employed to attain these results. What essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians celebrating the principal dates of the life of Christ, or of Jews remembering the exodus from Egypt or the promulgation of the decalogue, and a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral or legal system or some great event in the national life? If we find a little difficulty to-day in imagining what these feasts and ceremonies of the future could consist in, it is because we are going through a stage of transition and moral mediocrity. The great things of the past which filled our fathers with enthusiasm do not excite the same ardour in us, either because they have come into common usage to such an extent that we are unconscious of them, or else because they no longer answer to our actual aspirations; but as yet there is nothing to replace them. We can no longer impassionate ourselves for the principles in the name of which Christianity recommended to masters that they treat their slaves humanely, and, on the other hand, the idea which it has formed of human equality and fraternity seems to us to-day to leave too large a place for unjust inequalities. 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. A day will come when our societies will know again those hours of creative effervescence, in the course of which new ideas arise and new formulæ are found which serve for a while as a guide to humanity; and when these hours shall have been passed through once, men will spontaneously feel the need of reliving them from time to time in thought, that is to say, of keeping alive their memory by means of celebrations which regularly reproduce their fruits. We have already seen how the French Revolution established a whole cycle of holidays to keep the principles with which it was inspired in a state of perpetual youth. If this institution quickly fell away, it was because the revolutionary faith lasted but a moment, and deceptions and discouragements rapidly succeeded the first moments of enthusiasm. 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 surpasses the human faculty of foresight and which does not appertain to the principal question. But feasts and rites, in a word, the cult, are not the whole religion. This is not merely a system of practices, but also a system of ideas whose object is to explain the world; we have seen that even the humblest have their cosmology. Whatever connection there may be between these two elements of the religious life, they are still quite different. The one is turned towards action, which it demands and regulates; the other is turned towards thought, which it enriches and organizes. Then they do not depend upon the same conditions, and consequently it may be asked if the second answers to necessities as universal and as permanent as the first. When specific characteristics are attributed to religious thought, and when it is believed that its function is to express, by means peculiar to itself, an aspect of reality which evades ordinary knowledge as well as science, one naturally refuses to admit that religion can ever abandon its speculative rôle. But our analysis of the facts does not seem to have shown this specific quality of religion. The religion which we have just studied is one of those whose symbols are the most disconcerting for the reason. There all appears mysterious. These beings which belong to the most heterogeneous groups at the same time, who multiply without ceasing to be one, who divide without diminishing, all seem, at first view, to belong to an entirely different world from the one where we live; some have even gone so far as to say that the mind which constructed them ignored the laws of logic completely. Perhaps the contrast between reason and faith has never been more thorough. Then if there has ever been a moment in history when their heterogeneousness should have stood out clearly, it is here. But contrary to all appearances, as we have pointed out, the realities to which religious speculation is then applied are the same as those which later serve as the subject of reflection for philosophers: they are nature, man, society. The mystery which appears to surround them is wholly superficial and disappears before a more painstaking observation: it is enough merely to set aside the veil with which mythological imagination has covered them for them to appear such as they really are. Religion sets itself to translate these realities into an intelligible language which does not differ in nature from that employed by science; the attempt is made by both to connect things with each other, to establish internal relations between them, to classify them and to systematize them. We have even seen that the essential ideas of scientific logic are of religious origin. It is true that in order to utilize them, science gives them a new elaboration; it purges them of all accidental elements; in a general way, it brings a spirit of criticism into all its doings, which religion ignores; it surrounds itself with precautions to "escape precipitation and bias," and to hold aside the passions, prejudices and all subjective influences. But these perfectionings of method are not enough to differentiate it from religion. In this regard, both pursue the same end; scientific thought is only a more perfect form of religious thought. Thus it seems natural that the second should progressively retire before the first, as this becomes better fitted to perform the task. And there is no doubt that this regression has taken place in the course of history. Having left religion, science tends to substitute itself for this latter in all that which concerns the cognitive and intellectual functions. Christianity has already definitely consecrated this substitution in the order of material things. Seeing in matter that which is profane before all else, it readily left the knowledge of this to another discipline, _tradidit mundum hominum disputationi_, "He gave the world over to the disputes of men"; it is thus that the natural sciences have been able to establish themselves and make their authority recognized without very great difficulty. But it could not give up the world of souls so easily; for it is before all over souls that the god of the Christians aspires to reign. That is why the idea of submitting the psychic life to science produced the effect of a sort of profanation for a long time; even to-day it is repugnant to many minds. However, experimental and comparative psychology is founded and to-day we must reckon with it. But the world of the religious and moral life is still forbidden. The great majority of men continue to believe that here there is an order of things which the mind cannot penetrate except by very special ways. Hence comes the active resistance which is met with every time that someone tries to treat religious and moral phenomena scientifically. But in spite of these oppositions, these attempts are constantly repeated and this persistence even allows us to foresee that this final barrier will finally give way and that science will establish herself as mistress even in this reserved region. That is what the conflict between science and religion really amounts to. It is said that science denies religion in principle. But religion exists; it is a system of given facts; in a word, it is a reality. How could science deny this reality? Also, in so far as religion is action, and in so far as it is a means of making men live, science could not take its place, for even if this expresses life, it does not create it; it may well seek to explain the faith, but by that very act it presupposes it. Thus there is no conflict except upon one limited point. Of the two functions which religion originally fulfilled, there is one, and only one, which tends to escape it more and more: that is its speculative function. That which science refuses to grant to religion is not its right to exist, but its right to dogmatize upon the nature of things and the special competence which it claims for itself for knowing man and the world. As a matter of fact, it does not know itself. It does not even know what it is made of, nor to what need it answers. It is itself a subject for science, so far is it from being able to make the law for science! And from another point of view, since there is no proper subject for religious speculation outside that reality to which scientific reflection is applied, it is evident that this former cannot play the same rôle in the future that it has played in the past. However, it seems destined to transform itself rather than to disappear. We have said that there is something eternal in religion: it is the cult and the faith. Men cannot celebrate ceremonies for which they see no reason, nor can they accept a faith which they in no way understand. To spread itself or merely to maintain itself, it must be justified, that is to say, a theory must be made of it. A theory of this sort must undoubtedly be founded upon the different sciences, from the moment when these exist; first of all, upon the social sciences, for religious faith has its origin in society; then upon psychology, for society is a synthesis of human consciousnesses; and finally upon the sciences of nature, for man and society are a part of the universe and can be abstracted from it only artificially. 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 are possible only when the practical exigencies and the vital necessities which we feel without distinctly conceiving them push thought in advance, beyond that which science permits us to affirm. Thus religions, even the most rational and laicized, cannot and never will be able to dispense with a particular form of speculation which, though having the same subjects as science itself, cannot be really scientific: the obscure intuitions of sensation and sentiment too often take the place of logical reasons. On one side, this speculation resembles that which we meet with in the religions of the past; but on another, it is different. While claiming and exercising the right of going beyond science, it must commence by knowing this and by inspiring itself with it. Ever since the authority of science was established, it must be reckoned with; one can go farther than it under the pressure of necessity, but he must take his direction from it. He can affirm nothing that it denies, deny nothing that it affirms, and establish nothing that is not directly or indirectly founded upon principles taken from it. From now on, the faith no longer exercises the same hegemony as formerly over the system of ideas that we may continue to call religion. A rival power rises up before it which, being born of it, ever after submits it to its criticism and control. And everything makes us foresee that this control will constantly become more extended and efficient, while no limit can be assigned to its future influence. III But if the fundamental notions of science are of a religious origin, how has religion been able to bring them forth? At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic. Or, since the reality which religious thought expresses is society, the question can be stated in the following terms, which make the entire difficulty appear even better: what has been able to make social life so important a source for the logical life? It seems as though nothing could have predestined it to this rôle, for it certainly was not to satisfy their speculative needs that men associated themselves together. Perhaps we shall be found over bold in attempting so complex a question here. To treat it as it should be treated, the sociological conditions of knowledge should be known much better than they actually are; we are only beginning to catch glimpses of some of them. However, the question is so grave, and so directly implied in all that has preceded, that we must make an effort not to leave it without an answer. Perhaps it is not impossible, even at present, to state some general principles which may at least aid in the solution. Logical thought is made up of concepts. Seeking how society can have played a rôle in the genesis of logical thought thus reduces itself to seeking how it can have taken a part in the formation of concepts. If, as is ordinarily the case, we see in the concept only a general idea, the problem appears insoluble. By his own power, the individual can compare his conceptions and images, disengage that which they have in common, and thus, in a word, generalize. Then it is hard to see why this generalization should be possible only in and through society. But, in the first place, it is inadmissible that logical thought is characterized only by the greater extension of the conceptions of which it is made up. If particular ideas have nothing logical about them, why should it be different with general ones? The general exists only in the particular; it is the particular simplified and impoverished. Then the first could have no virtues or privileges which the second has not. Inversely, if conceptual thought can be applied to the class, species or variety, howsoever restricted these may be, why can it not be extended to the individual, that is to say, to the limit towards which the conception tends, proportionately as its extension diminishes? As a matter of fact, there are many concepts which have only individuals as their object. In every sort of religion, gods are individualities distinct from each other; however, they are conceived, not perceived. Each people represents its historic or legendary heroes in fashions which vary with the time. Finally, every one of us forms an idea of the individuals with whom he comes in contact, of their character, of their appearance, their distinctive traits and their moral and physical temperaments: these notions, too, are real concepts. It is true that in general they are formed crudely enough; but even among scientific concepts, are there a great many that are perfectly adequate for their object? In this direction, there are only differences of degree between them. Therefore the concept must be defined by other characteristics. It is opposed to sensual representations of every order--sensations, perceptions or images--by the following properties. Sensual representations are in a perpetual flux; 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 does not move of itself, by an internal and spontaneous evolution, but, on the contrary, it resists change. It is a manner of thinking that, at every moment of time, is fixed and crystallized.[1308] In so far as it is what it ought to be, it is immutable. If it changes, it is not because it is its nature to do so, but because we have discovered some imperfection in it; it is because it had to be rectified. The system of concepts with which we think in everyday life is that expressed by the vocabulary of our mother tongue; for every word translates a concept. Now language is something fixed; it changes but very slowly, and consequently it is the same with the conceptual system which it expresses. The scholar finds himself in the same situation in regard to the special terminology employed by the science to which he has consecrated himself, and hence in regard to the special scheme of concepts to which this terminology corresponds. It is true that he can make innovations, but these are always a sort of violence done to the established ways of thinking. And at the same time that it is relatively immutable, the concept is universal, or at least capable of becoming so. A concept is not my concept; I hold it in common with other men, or, in any case, can communicate it to them. It is impossible for me to make a sensation pass from my consciousness into that of another; 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] The nature of the concept, thus defined, bespeaks its origin. If it is common to all, it is the work of the community. Since it bears the mark of no particular mind, it is clear that it was elaborated by a unique intelligence, where all others meet each other, and after a fashion, come to nourish themselves. If it has more stability than sensations or images, it is because the collective representations are more stable than the individual ones; for while an individual is conscious even of the slight changes which take place in his environment, only events of a greater gravity can succeed in affecting the mental status of a society. Every time that we are in the presence of a _type_[1310] of thought or action which is imposed uniformly upon particular wills or intelligences, this pressure exercised over the individual betrays the intervention of the group. Also, as we have already said, the concepts with which we ordinarily think are those of our vocabulary. Now it is unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of language are thus collective representations. Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning does not pass, to a greater or less extent, the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have never been the witnesses. Even when we know some of the objects which it concerns, it is only as particular examples that they serve to illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each? This remark enables us to determine the sense in which we mean to say that concepts are collective representations. If they belong to a whole social group, it is not because they represent the average of the corresponding individual representations; for in that case they would be poorer than the latter in intellectual content, while, as a matter of fact, they contain much that surpasses the knowledge of the average individual. They are not abstractions which have a reality only in particular consciousnesses, but they are as concrete representations as an individual could form of his own personal environment: they correspond to the way in which this very special being, society, considers the things of its own proper experience. If, as a matter of fact, the concepts are nearly always general ideas, and if they express categories and classes rather than particular objects, it is because the unique and variable characteristics of things interest society but rarely; because of its very extent, it can scarcely be affected by more than their general and permanent qualities. Therefore it is to this aspect of affairs that it gives its attention: it is a part of its nature to see things in large and under the aspect which they ordinarily have. But this generality is not necessary for them, and, in any case, even when these representations have the generic character which they ordinarily have, they are the work of society and are enriched by its experience. That is what makes conceptual thought so valuable for us. If concepts were only general ideas, they would not enrich knowledge a great deal, for, as we have already pointed out, the general contains nothing more than the particular. But if before all else they are collective representations, they add to that which we can learn by our own personal experience all that wisdom and science which the group has accumulated in the course of centuries. Thinking by concepts, is not merely seeing reality on its most general side, but it is projecting a light upon the sensation which illuminates it, penetrates it and transforms it. Conceiving something is both learning its essential elements better and also locating it in its place; for each civilization has its organized system of concepts which characterizes it. Before this scheme of ideas, the individual is in the same situation as the [Greek: noûs] of Plato before the world of Ideas. He must assimilate them to himself, for he must have them to hold intercourse with others; but the assimilation is always imperfect. Each of us sees them after his own fashion. There are some which escape us completely and remain outside of our circle of vision; 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. This is possible only from the moment when, above the fugitive conceptions which they owe to sensuous experience, men have succeeded in conceiving a whole world of stable ideas, the common ground of all intelligences. In fact, logical thinking is always impersonal thinking, and is also thought _sub species ætrnitatis_--as though for all time. Impersonality and stability are the two characteristics of truth. Now logical life evidently presupposes that men know, at least confusedly, that there is such a thing as truth, distinct from sensuous appearances. But how have they been able to arrive at this conception? We generally talk as though it should have spontaneously presented itself to them from the moment they opened their eyes upon the world. However, there is nothing in immediate experience which could suggest it; everything even contradicts it. Thus the child and the animal have no suspicion of it. History shows that it has taken centuries for it to disengage and establish itself. In our Western world, it was with the great thinkers of Greece that it first became clearly conscious of itself and of the consequences which it implies; when the discovery was made, it caused an amazement which Plato has translated into magnificent language. But if it is only at this epoch that the idea is expressed in philosophic formulæ, it was necessarily pre-existent in the stage of an obscure sentiment. Philosophers have sought to elucidate this sentiment, but they have not succeeded. In order that they might reflect upon it and analyse it, it was necessary that it be given them, and that they seek to know whence it came, that is to say, in what experience it was founded. This is in collective experience. It is under the form of collective thought that impersonal thought is for the first time revealed to humanity; we cannot see by what other way this revelation could have been made. From the mere fact that society exists, there is also, outside of the individual sensations and images, a whole system of representations which enjoy marvellous properties. By means of them, men understand each other and intelligences grasp each other. They have within them a sort of force or moral ascendancy, in virtue of which they impose themselves upon individual minds. Hence the individual at least obscurely takes account of the fact that above his private ideas, there is a world of absolute ideas according to which he must shape his own; he catches a glimpse of a whole intellectual kingdom in which he participates, but which is greater than he. This is the first intuition of the realm of truth. From the moment when he first becomes conscious of these higher ideas, he sets himself to scrutinizing their nature; he asks whence these pre-eminent representations hold their prerogatives and, in so far as he believes that he has discovered their causes, he undertakes to put these causes into action for himself, in order that he may draw from them by his own force the effects which they produce; that is to say, he attributes to himself the right of making concepts. Thus the faculty of conception has individualized itself. But to understand its origins and function, it must be attached to the social conditions upon which it depends. It may be objected that we show the concept in one of its aspects only, and that its unique rôle is not the assuring of a harmony among minds, but also, and to a greater extent, their harmony with the nature of things. It seems as though it had a reason for existence only on condition of being true, that is to say, objective, and as though its impersonality were only a consequence of its objectivity. It is in regard to things, thought of as adequately as possible, that minds ought to communicate. Nor do we deny that the evolution of concepts has been partially in this direction. The concept which was first held as true because it was collective tends to be no longer collective except on condition of being held as true: we demand its credentials of it before according it our confidence. But we must not lose sight of the fact that even to-day the great majority of the concepts which we use are not methodically constituted; we get them from language, that is to say, from common experience, without submitting them to any criticism. The scientifically elaborated and criticized concepts are always in the very slight minority. Also, between them and those which draw all their authority from the fact that they are collective, there are only differences of degree. A collective representation presents guarantees of objectivity by the fact that it is collective: for it is not without sufficient reason that it has been able to generalize and maintain itself with persistence. If it were out of accord with the nature of things, it would never have been able to acquire an extended and prolonged empire over intellects. At bottom, the confidence inspired by scientific concepts is due to the fact that they can be methodically controlled. But a collective representation is necessarily submitted to a control that is repeated indefinitely; the men who accept it verify it by their own experience. Therefore, it could not be wholly inadequate for its subject. It is true that it may express this by means of imperfect symbols; but scientific symbols themselves are never more than approximative. It is precisely this principle which is at the basis of the method which we follow in the study of religious phenomena: we take it as an axiom that religious beliefs, howsoever strange their appearance may be at times, contain a truth which must be discovered.[1311] On the other hand, it is not at all true that concepts, even when constructed according to the rules of science, get their authority uniquely from their objective value. It is not enough that they be true to be believed. If they are not in harmony with the other beliefs and opinions, or, in a word, with the mass of the other collective representations, they will be denied; minds will be closed to them; consequently it will be as though they did not exist. To-day it is generally sufficient that they bear the stamp of science to receive a sort of privileged credit, because we have faith in science. But this faith does not differ essentially from religious faith. 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; it can only observe them and make them more conscious of themselves. It is true that by this means it can lead them to change, but science continues to be dependent upon opinion at the very moment when it seems to be making its laws; for, as we have already shown, it is from opinion that it holds the force necessary to act upon opinion.[1312] Saying that concepts express the manner in which society represents things is also saying that conceptual thought is coeval with humanity itself. We refuse to see in it the product of a more or less retarded culture. A man who did not think with concepts would not be a man, for he would not be a social being. If reduced to having only individual perceptions, he would be indistinguishable from the beasts. If it has been possible to sustain the contrary thesis, it is because concepts have been defined by characteristics which are not essential to them. They have been identified with general ideas[1313] and with clearly limited and circumscribed general ideas.[1314] In these conditions it has possibly seemed as though the inferior societies had no concepts properly so called; for they have only rudimentary processes of generalization and the ideas which they use are not generally very well defined. But the greater part of our concepts are equally indetermined; we force ourselves to define them only in discussions or when doing careful work. We have also seen that conceiving is not generalizing. Thinking conceptually is not simply isolating and grouping together the common characteristics of a certain number of objects; it is relating the variable to the permanent, the individual to the social. And since logical thought commences with the concept, it follows that it has always existed; there is no period in history when men have lived in a chronic confusion and contradiction. To be sure, we cannot insist too much upon the different characteristics which logic presents at different periods in history; it develops like the societies themselves. But howsoever real these differences may be, they should not cause us to neglect the similarities, which are no less essential. IV We are now in a position to take up a final question which has already been raised in our introduction[1315] and which has been taken as understood in the remainder of this work. We have seen that at least some of the categories are social things. The question is where they got this character. Undoubtedly it will be easily understood that since they are themselves concepts, they are the work of the group. It can even be said that there are no other concepts which present to an equal degree the signs by which a collective representation is recognized. In fact, their stability and impersonality are such that they have often passed as being absolutely universal and immutable. Also, as they express the fundamental conditions for an agreement between minds, it seems evident that they have been elaborated by society. But the problem concerning them is more complex, for they are social in another sense and, as it were in the second degree. They not only come from society, but the things which they express are of a social nature. Not only is it society which has founded them, but their contents are the different aspects of the social being: the category of class was at first indistinct from the concept of the human group; it is the rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time; the territory occupied by the society furnished the material for the category of space; it is the collective force which was the prototype of the concept of efficient force, an essential element in the category of causality. However, the categories are not made to be applied only to the social realm; they reach out to all reality. Then how is it that they have taken from society the models upon which they have been constructed? It is because they are the pre-eminent concepts, which have a preponderating part in our knowledge. In fact, the function of the categories is to dominate and envelop all the other concepts: they are permanent moulds for the mental life. Now for them to embrace such an object, they must be founded upon a reality of equal amplitude. Undoubtedly the relations which they express exist in an implicit way in individual consciousnesses. The individual lives in time, and, as we have said, he has a certain sense of temporal orientation. He is situated at a determined point in space, and it has even been held, and sustained with good reasons, that all sensations have something special about them.[1316] He has a feeling of resemblances; similar representations are brought together and the new representation formed by their union has a sort of generic character. We also have the sensation of a certain regularity in the order of the succession of phenomena; even an animal is not incapable of this. However, all these relations are strictly personal for the individual who recognizes them, and consequently the notion of them which he may have can in no case go beyond his own narrow horizon. The generic images which are formed in my consciousness by the fusion of similar images represent only the objects which I have perceived directly; there is nothing there which could give me the idea of a class, that is to say, of a mould including the _whole_ group of all possible objects which satisfy the same condition. Also, it would be necessary to have the idea of group in the first place, and the mere observations of our interior life could never awaken that in us. But, above all, there is no individual experience, howsoever extended and prolonged it may be, which could give a suspicion of the existence of a whole class which would embrace every single being, and to which other classes are only co-ordinated or subordinated species. This idea of _all_, which is at the basis of the classifications which we have just cited, could not have come from the individual himself, who is only a part in relation to the whole and who never attains more than an infinitesimal fraction of reality. And yet there is perhaps no other category of greater importance; for as the rôle of the categories is to envelop all the other concepts, the category _par excellence_ would seem to be this very concept of _totality_. The theorists of knowledge ordinarily postulate it as if it came of itself, while it really surpasses the contents of each individual consciousness taken alone to an infinite degree. For the same reasons, the space which I know by my senses, of which I am the centre and where everything is disposed in relation to me, could not be space in general, which contains all extensions and where these are co-ordinated by personal guide-lines which are common to everybody. In the same way, the concrete duration which I feel passing within me and with me could not give me the idea of time in general: the first expresses only the rhythm of my individual life; the second should correspond to the rhythm of a life which is not that of any individual in particular, but in which all participate.[1317] In the same way, finally, the regularities which I am able to conceive in the manner in which my sensations succeed one another may well have a value for me; they explain how it comes about that when I am given the first of two phenomena whose concurrence I have observed, I tend to expect the other. But this personal state of expectation could not be confounded with the conception of a universal order of succession which imposes itself upon all minds and all events. Since the world expressed by the entire system of concepts is the one that society regards, society alone can furnish the most general notions with which it should be represented. Such an object can be embraced only by a subject which contains all the individual subjects within it. Since the universe does not exist except in so far as it is thought of, and since it is not completely thought of except by society, it takes a place in this latter; it becomes a part of society's interior life, while this is the totality, outside of which nothing exists. The concept of totality is only the abstract form of the concept of society: it is the whole which includes all things, the supreme class which embraces all other classes. Such is the final principle upon which repose all these primitive classifications where beings from every realm are placed and classified in social forms, exactly like men.[1318] But if the world is inside of society, the space which this latter occupies becomes confounded with space in general. In fact, we have seen how each thing has its assigned place in social space, and the degree to which this space in general differs from the concrete expanses which we perceive is well shown by the fact that this localization is wholly ideal and in no way resembles what it would have been if it had been dictated to us by sensuous experience alone.[1319] For the same reason, the rhythm of collective life dominates and embraces the varied rhythms of all the elementary lives from which it results; consequently the time which it expresses dominates and embraces all particular durations. It is time in general. For a long time the history of the world has been only another aspect of the history of society. The one commences with the other; the periods of the first are determined by the periods of the second. This impersonal and total duration is measured, and the guide-lines in relation to which it is divided and organized are fixed by the movements of concentration or dispersion of society; or, more generally, the periodical necessities for a collective renewal. If these critical instants are generally attached to some material phenomenon, such as the regular recurrence of such or such a star or the alternation of the seasons, it is because objective signs are necessary to make this essentially social organization intelligible to all. In the same way, finally, the causal relation, from the moment when it is collectively stated by the group, becomes independent of every individual consciousness; it rises above all particular minds and events. It is a law whose value depends upon no person. We have already shown how it is clearly thus that it seems to have originated. Another reason explains why the constituent elements of the categories should have been taken from social life: it is because the relations which they express could not have been learned except in and through society. If they are in a sense immanent in the life of an individual, he has neither a reason nor the means for learning them, reflecting upon them and forming them into distinct ideas. In order to orient himself personally in space and to know at what moments he should satisfy his various organic needs, he has no need of making, once and for all, a conceptual representation of time and space. Many animals are able to find the road which leads to places with which they are familiar; they come back at a proper moment without knowing any of the categories; sensations are enough to direct them automatically. They would also be enough for men, if their sensations had to satisfy only individual needs. To recognize the fact that one thing resembles another which we have already experienced, it is in no way necessary that we arrange them all in groups and species: the way in which similar images call up each other and unite is enough to give the feeling of resemblance. The impression that a certain thing has already been seen or experienced implies no classification. To recognize the things which we should seek or from which we should flee, it would not be necessary to attach the effects of the two to their causes by a logical bond, if individual conveniences were the only ones in question. Purely empirical sequences and strong connections between the concrete representations would be as sure guides for the will. Not only is it true that the animal has no others, but also our own personal conduct frequently supposes nothing more. The prudent man is the one who has a very clear sensation of what must be done, but which he would ordinarily be quite incapable of stating as a general law. It is a different matter with society. This is possible only when the individuals and things which compose it are divided into certain groups, that is to say, classified, and when these groups are classified in relation to each other. Society supposes a self-conscious organization which is nothing other than a classification. This organization of society naturally extends itself to the place which this occupies. To avoid all collisions, it is necessary that each particular group have a determined portion of space assigned to it: in other terms, it is necessary that space in general be divided, differentiated, arranged, and that these divisions and arrangements be known to everybody. On the other hand, every summons to a celebration, a hunt or a military expedition implies fixed and established dates, and consequently that a common time is agreed upon, which everybody conceives in the same fashion. Finally, the co-operation of many persons with the same end in view is possible only when they are in agreement as to the relation which exists between this end and the means of attaining it, that is to say, when the same causal relation is admitted by all the co-operators in the enterprise. It is not surprising, therefore, that social time, social space, social classes and causality should be the basis of the corresponding categories, since it is under their social forms that these different relations were first grasped with a certain clarity by the human intellect. In summing up, then, we must say that society is not at all the illogical or a-logical, incoherent and fantastic being which it has too often been considered. Quite on the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousnesses. Being placed outside of and above individual and local contingencies, it sees things only in their permanent and essential aspects, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas. At the same time that it sees from above, it sees farther; at every moment of time, it embraces all known reality; that is why it alone can furnish the mind with the moulds which are applicable to the totality of things and which make it possible to think of them. It does not create these moulds artificially; it finds them within itself; it does nothing but become conscious of them. They translate the ways of being which are found in all the stages of reality but which appear in their full clarity only at the summit, because the extreme complexity of the psychic life which passes there necessitates a greater development of consciousness. Attributing social origins to logical thought is not debasing it or diminishing its value or reducing it to nothing more than a system of artificial combinations; on the contrary, it is relating it to a cause which implies it naturally. But this is not saying that the ideas elaborated in this way are at once adequate for their object. If society is something universal in relation to the individual, it is none the less an individuality itself, which has its own personal physiognomy and its idiosyncrasies; it is a particular subject and consequently particularizes whatever it thinks of. Therefore collective representations also contain subjective elements, and these must be progressively rooted out, if we are to approach reality more closely. But howsoever crude these may have been at the beginning, the fact remains that with them the germ of a new mentality was given, to which the individual could never have raised himself by his own efforts: by them the way was opened to a stable, impersonal and organized thought which then had nothing to do except to develop its nature. Also, the causes which have determined this development do not seem to be specifically different from those which gave it its initial impulse. If logical thought tends to rid itself more and more of the subjective and personal elements which it still retains from its origin, it is not because extra-social factors have intervened; it is much rather because a social life of a new sort is developing. It is this international life which has already resulted in universalizing religious beliefs. As it extends, the collective horizon enlarges; the society ceases to appear as the only whole, to become a part of a much vaster one, with indetermined frontiers, which is susceptible of advancing indefinitely. 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 the same source. Kant understood this very well, and therefore he made the speculative reason and the practical reason two different aspects of the same faculty. According to him, what makes their unity is the fact that the two are directed towards the universal. Rational thinking is thinking according to the laws which are imposed upon all reasonable beings; acting morally is conducting one's self according to those maxims which can be extended without contradiction to all wills. In other words, science and morals imply that the individual is capable of raising himself above his own peculiar point of view and of living an impersonal life. In fact, it cannot be doubted that this is a trait common to all the higher forms of thought and action. What Kant's system does not explain, however, is the origin of this sort of contradiction which is realized in man. Why is he forced to do violence to himself by leaving his individuality, and, inversely, why is the impersonal law obliged to be dissipated by incarnating itself in individuals? Is it answered that there are two antagonistic worlds in which we participate equally, the world of matter and sense on the one hand, and the world of pure and impersonal reason on the other? That is merely repeating the question in slightly different terms, for what we are trying to find out is why we must lead these two existences at the same time. Why do these two worlds, which seem to contradict each other, not remain outside of each other, and why must they mutually penetrate one another in spite of their antagonism? The only explanation which has ever been given of this singular necessity is the hypothesis of the Fall, with all the difficulties which it implies, and which need not be repeated here. On the other hand, all mystery disappears the moment that it is recognized that impersonal reason is only another name given to collective thought. For this is possible only through a group of individuals; it supposes them, and in their turn, they suppose it, for they can continue to exist only by grouping themselves together. The kingdom of ends and impersonal truths can realize itself only by the co-operation of particular wills, and the reasons for which these participate in it are the same as those for which they co-operate. In a word, there is something impersonal in us because there is something social in all of us, and since social life embraces at once both representations and practices, this impersonality naturally extends to ideas as well as to acts. Perhaps some will be surprised to see us connect the most elevated forms of thought with society: the cause appears quite humble, in consideration of the value which we attribute to the effect. Between the world of the senses and appetites on the one hand, and that of reason and morals on the other, the distance is so considerable that the second would seem to have been able to add itself to the first only by a creative act. But attributing to society this preponderating rôle in the genesis of our nature is not denying this creation; for society has a creative power which no other observable being can equal. In fact, all creation, if not a mystical operation which escapes science and knowledge, is the product of a synthesis. 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. Then it is not surprising that a higher life disengages itself which, by reacting upon the elements of which it is the product, raises them to a higher plane of existence and transforms them. Thus sociology appears destined to open a new way to the science of man. Up to the present, thinkers were placed before this double alternative: either explain the superior and specific faculties of men by connecting them to the inferior forms of his being, the reason to the senses, or the mind to matter, which is equivalent to denying their uniqueness; or else attach them to some super-experimental reality which was postulated, but whose existence could be established by no observation. What put them in this difficulty was the fact that the individual passed as being the _finis naturæ_--the ultimate creation of nature; it seemed that there was nothing beyond him, or at least nothing that science could touch. But from the moment when it is recognized that above the individual there is society, and that this is not a nominal being created by reason, but a system of active forces, a new manner of explaining men becomes possible. To conserve his distinctive traits it is no longer necessary to put them outside experience. At least, before going to this last extremity, it would be well to see if that which surpasses the individual, though it is within him, does not come from this super-individual reality which we experience in society. To be sure, it cannot be said at present to what point these explanations may be able to reach, and whether or not they are of a nature to resolve all the problems. But it is equally impossible to mark in advance a limit beyond which they cannot go. What must be done is to try the hypothesis and submit it as methodically as possible to the control of facts. This is what we have tried to do. INDEX _Alatunja_, 327. _Alcheringa_, or mythical period, 247. Ambiguity of sacredness, 409 ff.; explanation of, 412 ff. Animal-worship, totemism not, 94, 139, 170 f. Animism, as expounded by Tylor and Spencer, 49 ff.; how it explains the origin of the idea of the soul, 50 f.; of spirits, 51 f.; their cult, 52; and the nature-cult, 53 f.; criticism of these theories, 55 ff.; implies that religions are systems of hallucinations, 68; which is its best refutation, 70. Anthropomorphism, not found among primitives, 67 f.; denied by Spencer, 53 ff., 65; cannot explain totemic view of world, 235, or primitive rites, 406 f. Apriorism, philosophical, 14 f., 368. Art, why principal forms of, have been born in religion, 381; dramatic, in totemic ceremonies, 373, 380; totemic emblems first form of, 127 and n. 4. _Arungquiltha_, or magic force, in Australia, 197 f.; how it enables us to understand totemic principle, 198. Asceticism, nature of, 39, 311; based on negative rites, 311; essential element of religious life, 311 f.; religious function of, 314 ff.; sociological import of, 316; implied in the notion of sacredness, 317, its antagonism to the profane, 39 f., 317, and its contagiousness, 318; not dependent upon idea of divine personalities, 321; positive effects of, 312 ff., 386. Atonement for faults by rites, 385, 405, 408. Authority, moral, of society, 207 f., 208 n. 4; based on social opinion, 208, 213. Beliefs, how related to rites, 101, 403; translate social facts, 431, what they seem destined to become, 429 ff.; all contain an element of truth, 438. Blood, human, sacredness of, 126, 137, 330 f. Body, essentially profane, 262; explanation of this, 263. Bull-roarers, definition of, 119. Categories of the understanding, religious origin of, 9 ff.; social origin of, 10 ff., 439; necessity of, explained, 17 ff.; real function of, 440; only social necessity for, 443; modelled on social forms, 18 ff., 144 ff., 440. Causality, law of, 362 ff.; first stated in imitative rites, 363; social origin, 363, 367 f., 443; imposed by society, 368; sociological theory of, and classical theories, 368 f., 443; varying statements of, 369 and n. 1. Charms, magic, explanation of, 356. Church, essential to religion, 44 ff. _Churinga_, definition of, 119; eminently sacred character of, 120; due to totemic mark, 122 f.; as religious force, 198 and n. 4. Civilizing heroes, 283 ff.; common to whole tribe, 284; tribal rites personified, 285; moral rôle of, 285; connecting link between spirits and gods, 290 f. Clan, characteristics of, 102; basis of simplest social system known, 96, 167; how recruited, 106 f.; totem as name of, 102 f.; symbolized by totem, 206; implied by totemism, 167; basis for classification of natural things, 141 ff. Classes, logical, religious origin of, 148 ff.; in higher religions, 144; based on social classifications, 141 ff.; collective life basis of, 147 ff., 443. Communion, alimentary, essential to sacrifice, 337; found in Australia, 334 f., 337, 340; positive effects of, 337 f. Concept, society's rôle in the genesis of, 432 ff.; not equivalent to general idea, 432; distinguished from sensations, 433; immutability of, 433; universality of, 433; essentially social nature of, 435; coeval with humanity, 438; objective truth of, 437 ff. Contagiousness of sacredness, 222; at basis of ascetic rites, 318 ff.; not due to associations of ideas, 321, but to the externality of religious forces, 323 f.; at basis of logical classifications, 324 f. Contradiction, idea of, religious nature of, 38 f.; social nature of, 12 f.; based on social life, 146; origin of, 234 ff. Contraries, logical, nature of primitive, 235, 238 f. _Corrobbori_, 215 n. 2, 380. Cosmology of totemism, 141 ff.; in all religions, 9, 428 ff. Cult, needed by gods, 345 ff.; moral reasons for, 63, 346, 417 f.; social interpretation of, 347 ff.; real function of, 386; periodical nature of, 63; imitative rites first form of, 387; æsthetic nature of, 382. Death, insufficiency of, to make a soul into a spirit, 60 f., 398, or give sacredness, 62. Deity. See _Gods_, _Spiritual Beings_. Dreams, as origin of idea of double or soul, 50 f., 58 f., 264; inadequacy of this theory, 56 f.; as suggesting posthumous life, 268. Ecstasy, in religion, explained, 226 f. Efficacy, idea of, social origin of, 363 f. Emblem, totem as, of clan, 206, 219 ff.; psychological need for, 220, 230; creates unity of group, 230; and maintains it, 231; incarnates collective sentiments, 232; why primitives chose theirs in animal or vegetable worlds, 233 f. Empiricism, philosophical, 13 f., 368. _Ertnatulunga_, 120, 247. Eschatology, Australian, 245, 287. Evil spirits, 281 ff., 420. Expiatory rites, 406 ff. Faith, religious, nature of, 360 f., 430 f. Family group, based on totemism, 106 n. 2. Fear, religion not based on, 223 ff., 406. Fetishism, 175. Folk-lore, how related to religion, 41, 83 n. 1; related to totemism, 90. Force, religious, ambiguity of, 222; why outside object in which it resides, 229; as collective force, 221, 229; takes form from society, 336; represents how collective consciousness acts on individuals, 223; idea of, precedes that of scientific force, 203 f., 363; collective force as prototype of physical force, 365. See _Sacred_, _Totemic Principle_. Formalism, religious, explanation of, 35; first form of legal, 35 f. Free-will, doctrine of, how explained, 271 f. Games, born in religion, 381 and n. 1. Gods, religions without, 30 ff.; in Australia, 285 ff.; immortal, 286; creators, 287; benefactors, 287; connected with initiation rites, 288; international character of, 288, 294 f., 425 ff.; of indigenous origin, 289 f.; developed form of civilizing heroes, 290 f., 295; closely connected with totemic system, 191, 291 f.; first conceived in tribal assemblies, 293; expressions of tribal unity, 294, 426. Hair, human, sacredness of, 64, 137 f. Hazing, sociological import of, 313 n. 4. Ideal, the, in religion, 420 ff.; formation of, a natural and necessary product of collective life, 422. Idealism, essential, of social and religious worlds, 228, 345, 347. Imitative Rites, 351 ff.; in Australia, 351 ff.; based on so-called sympathetic magic, 355 ff.; distinguished from charms, 356; reasons for, 357 ff.; material efficacy attributed to, 359; explained by moral efficacy of, 359 f.; first expression of law of causality, 363; original form of cult, 387. Immortality of soul, idea of, not established for moral purposes, 267; nor to escape annihilation, 267; influence of dreams, 268; but this not enough to account for doctrine, 268; doctrine of, invented to explain origin of souls, 268 f., and expresses the immortality of society, 268 f.; moral value of, an after-thought, 269; doctrine of future judgment in Australia, 245, 287; influence of mourning upon, 402 f. Individual totem, 157 ff.; relations of, to individual, 158 f.; his _alter ego_, 159; individual, not a species, 160; how related to collective totem, 161; how acquired, 161 ff.; how related to _genius_, 279; origin of, 280 f., 281 n. 1. See _Totemism, Individual_. Individualism, religious, 157 ff., 172 ff., 179 f.; importance attributed to, by some, 45 ff., 172; how explained, 424 f. Infinite, conception of, in religion, 74; not equivalent to sacred, 85; the, not characteristic of religion, 25. Initiation into tribe by religious ceremonies, 39, 384; no special rites for, 385 n. 2. Interdictions, or taboos, various sorts of, 300 ff.; forms of, in Australia, 302 ff.; of touch, 302; of eating, 303; of seeing, 304; of speech, 305; sexual, 304 and n. 1; of all temporal activity on certain days, 306 f., 334; ideas at the basis of, 308; positive effects of, 309 ff.; implied in notion of sacredness, 317. _Intichiuma_, 326 ff.; description of among the Australians, 327-336; as elementary form of sacrifice, 336; material efficacy expected of, 331, 333; alimentary communion in, 334 f., 337; imitative elements in, 353; commemorative nature of, 371 f.; used for initiating young men into tribe, 385 and n. 1. Knowledge, theory of. See _Apriorism_, _Empiricism_, _Sociological_. Language, importance of, for logical thought, 75 ff., 434; social character of, 434. Logic, related to religion and society, 234, 237 ff.; basis for, furnished by society, 18 ff., 148, 431 ff. Magic, based on religious ideas, 42 ff., 361 f., 362 n. 1; distinguished from religion, 43 ff.; hostility of, towards religion, 43; sympathetic, 355 ff. Majesty, essentially religious nature of idea of, 62, cf. 213. Man, sacred character of, 134, explained, 221 f.; partakes of nature of totemic animal, 134 ff.; sacred to varying degrees, 138 ff.; double nature of, 263 f., 444 ff. Mana, of the Melanesians, 194 f. See _Totemic Principle_. Matrimonial classes, definition of, 109. Metempsychosis, not found in Australia, 169, cf. 261 f. Mourning, 390 ff.; nature of, determined by etiquette, 391; especially severe for women, 391 ff., 400 ff.; anger as well as sorrow expressed in, 393; how related to vendetta, 394; not the expression of individual emotions, 397, but a duty imposed by group, 397; classic interpretation of, unsustainable, 398 f.; not connected with ideas of souls or spirits, 398, 401; social interpretation of, 399 ff. Mystery in religion, 25; idea of, not primitive, 25; absent from many religions, 29. Myths, essential element of religious life, 82; distinguished from fables, 83 n. 1; as work of art, 82, 101; interpret rites, 101, 130; as a society's representation of man and the world, 375. _Nanji_, rock or tree, 250 f. Naturism, as expounded by Max Müller, 73 ff.; seeks to establish religion in reality, 73; teaches that gods are personifications of natural phenomena, 73; distinguishes between religion and mythology, 81; but makes religion a fabric of errors, 79 ff.; cannot account for origin of sacredness, 84 ff. Negative rites, nature of, in Australia, 302 ff.; see also _Interdictions_; positive effects of, 309 ff.; as preparation for positive rites, 310 f.; basis of asceticism, 311; in mourning, 390. _Nurtunja_, 124; as rallying-centre for group, 125. Oblations, essential to sacrifice, 341; this denied by Smith, 340 f.; found in Australia, 341 f.; vicious circle implied in, 340 f., explained, 344 ff.; profound reasons for, 344 f. _Orenda_, of the Iroquois, 193 f., 198. See _Totemic Principle_. Origins, definition of, 8 n. 1. Pantheism, totemic, 153 f. Part equal to whole, religious principle that, explained, 229; in magic, 229 n. 3; in sacrificial communions, 338. Personality, idea of, double origin of, 270; impersonal elements in, 271; its alleged autonomy explained, 271; importance of social elements in, 272; represented by individual totem, 280. Phratry, definition of, 107 ff.; predecessor of clan, 108 and n. 9, 109, 145; as basis for classifications of natural things, 141 ff., 145. Piacular rites, definition of, 389; distinguished from ascetic rites, 396; based on same needs as positive rites, 399-403; material benefits expected of, 404 f.; as expiation for ritual faults, 405 f.; social function of, 407 f. _Pitchi_, 334. Primitives, definition of, 1 n. 1; best studied in Australia, 95; why especially important for us, 3 ff. Profane, absolute distinction of, from sacred, 38 f. Ratapa, or soul-germs, 251, 252. Recreative elements of religion, 379 ff., 382 f. Reincarnation of souls, doctrine of, in Australia, 169, 250, 253 f., 256, 265. Religion, must have a foundation in reality, 2, 70, 225; none are false, 3, 417, 438; real purpose of, 416; eternal elements of, 427 ff.; as source of all civilization, 9, 70, 223, 418 f., 419 n. 1; source of science and philosophy, 9, 203, 238, 325, 362 ff.; so-called conflict of, with science, 416 ff.; speculative functions of, 430; recreative and æsthetic elements of, 379 ff.; as pre-eminent expression of social life, 419 ff.; said to be characterized by supernatural, 24 ff., or by idea of spiritual beings, 29 ff.; not based on fear, 223 ff., but happy confidence, 224; characterized by that which is sacred, 37; distinguished from magic, 42 ff.; none proceeds on any unique principle, 41; importance of primitive, 3 ff.; totemism most elementary form of, 167 f.; definition of, 47. Representative rites, 370 ff.; value of, for showing real reasons for cult, 371, 378 f.; as dramatic representations, 373, 376 ff., 380; moral purpose of, evident, 375; expect no material benefits, 377 ff. Respect, inspired by society, 207 f. Rites, how related to beliefs, 101; totemic principle attached to, 200; social function of, 226; material efficacy attributed to, due to moral efficacy of, 346, 359 f.; moral and social significance of, 370 ff.; reasons for, as given by Australians, 371; as form of dramatic art, 373, 380; æsthetic nature of, 381; interchangeability of, 384 ff. Sacred, the, characteristic of all that is religious, 37; not characterized by its exalted position, 37, but by its distinction from the profane, 38; superimposed upon its basis, 229; created by society, 206 ff. See _Totemic Principle_; double nature of, 301, 320, 409 ff. Sacrifice, forms of, in Australia, 327 ff., 336; see _Intichiuma_; theory of Robertson Smith of, 336 ff., 340; alimentary communion essential part of, 337; how this strengthens one's religious nature, 337 f.; sacrilege inherent in, explained, 338 f.; oblations essential to, 341; why gods have need of, 38, 346; social function of, 347 ff. Science, so-called conflict of, with religion, 416 ff., 430, 445; religious origin of, 9, 203, 238, 325, 362 ff.; supplants religious speculation, 429 ff.; but cannot do so completely, 431; authority of, 208, 431. Sexual totems, 165 f. Social life, basis for religious representations, 221, 316, 347; rhythm of, and religion, 219, 349; model for philosophical representations, 18, 19 n. 2, 144 ff. Society, how forms of, determine character of religion, 94, 196 f., 234; characterized by institutions, 366 n. 1; ideal nature of, 288, 345, 420 ff., 422 f.; not an illogical or a-logical being, 444; how it recasts animal nature into human nature, 66; how it arouses sensations of divine, 206 ff., of dependence, 206 f., of respect, 207, of moral authority, 207 f., of an external moral force, 209, of kindly external forces, 212, of the sacred, 212 ff., 218; stimulating and sustaining action of, 209 ff.; how it gives men their most characteristic attributes, 212; how it exists only through its individual members, 221, 347; how this gives men their sacred character, 221 f.; foundation of religious experience, 418. Sociological theory of knowledge, 13, 15 ff., 18 ff., 144 ff., 203 f., 234 ff., 269 ff., 321 ff., 362 ff., 431 ff., 439 ff. Soul, idea of, found in all religions, 240; various representations of, 241 ff.; relation of, to body, 242 ff.; after death, 244 ff.; origin of, according to the Arunta, 247 ff.; reincarnation of, 250, 253 ff., 265; as totemic principle incarnate in the individual, 248 ff., 254 ff., 259 ff.; or parts of totemic divinity, 65, 249; close relations of, with totemic animal, 259 f; sacred character of, 262; notion of, founded in reality, 262 f.; represents the social part of our nature, 262 f.; reality of our double nature, 263 f., 444 ff.; coeval with notion of mana, 266 f.; how a secondary formation, 266; idea of immortality of, explained, 267 ff., see _Immortality_; how related to idea of personality, 269 ff., see _Personality_; distinguished from spirit, 273; form in which human force is represented, 366; social elements of, 366; how employed to explain mourning, 401; origin of idea of, according to animism, 50 f. Space, category of, religious and social origin of, 11 f., 441 and n. 1. Spirits, distinguished from souls, 273; from ghosts, 274; related to Roman _genius_, 275; relations of, to things, 275 f.; how derived from idea of soul, 277 f.; objective basis of idea of, 280 f.; spirits of evil, 281 f., 420; animistic theory of origin of, 51 f. Spiritual beings, as characteristic of religion, 29; absent from many religions, 30, 137, or strictly religious rites, 35; not sufficient to explain religion, 35. See _Soul_, _Spirits_. Spiritualism, Lang's theory of, as origin of idea of soul, 60 n. 1. Suffering, religious rôle of, in inferior societies, 312 ff.; believed to give extra strength, 314; how this idea is well founded, 315. Supernatural, the, as characteristic of religion, 24 ff.; conception of, quite modern, 26; not the essential element of religion, 28. Sympathetic magic, so-called, at basis of imitative rites, 355 ff.; fundamental principles of, 356; why this term is inexact, 361 f. Taboo, derivation of word, 300. See _Interdictions_. Tattooings, totemic, 117, 232. Time, category of, religious and social origin of, 10 f., 440 f., 441 n. 1. Totality, concept of, could never be suggested by individual experience, 441; related to concepts of society and divinity, 442 n. 1. Totem, derivation of word, 103; as name of clan, 102 f.; nature of things serving as, 103 ff.; species, not individuals, 104 f.; how inherited, 106 ff.; of phratries, 107 ff., 112; of matrimonial classes, 109 ff.; as emblem or coat-of-arms of group, 113; religious nature of, 119; relations of, with men and things, 150; sub-totems, 151; individual totems, 157 ff.; symbol of totemic principle of clan, 206; clan inseparable from, 167. Totemic animals, interdiction against eating by men of that clan, 128 ff.; or by those of other clans of the same phratry, 131 and n. 1; and against killing, 132; less sacred and powerful than totemic emblems, 133; related to men, 134, 139, 259 ff.; sacredness of, due to resemblance to emblem, 222. Totemic emblem, as collective emblem, 113; sacred character of, 122, 126; conventional nature of, 126 f.; more sacred and powerful than totemic animal, 133; as first form of art, 127 n. 4. Totemic principle, or Mana, cause of the sacredness of things, 62 ff., 188, 199 f.; totem material representation of, 189, 206; as a force, 190; as source of moral life of clan, 190; compared to totemic god, 189; personified in gods of higher religions, 191, 199, 291 f.; as Wakan, 192 f.; as Orenda, 193 f.; as Mana, 194 f.; ubiquity of, 189, 193, 194; multiformity of, 193; used in magic, 198, 201 f.; attached to rites, words, etc., 200; as representation of clan, 206, 214 ff.; first conceived in the midst of great social effervescence, 218 f.; how it comes to be symbolized by totem, 219 ff. Totemic system, unity of, 295 f.; work of whole tribe, 154 f., 283, 295. Totemism, early theoricians of, 88 ff.; Australia as classic land of, 93 f.; importance of American, 96 f.; as most elementary religion, 88, 167; former universality of, unimportant, 95; religious nature of, unquestionable, 167; not animal-worship, 139, 170 f., nor nature-cult, 171 f.; contains all the elements of the religious life, 415; conceptional totemism, inadequacies of, 180 ff. Tribe, totemic system work of whole, 154 f., 283, 295; unity of, expressed by great gods, 294 f. Universalism, religious, 294 f.; how explained, 425 ff. Vendetta, how related to rites of mourning, 394. _Wakan_, or "great spirit" of Sioux, 192 f., 195 f., 199. See _Totemic Principle_. _Waninga_, 124. FOOTNOTES: [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 ([Greek: Zeus ktêsios, Zeus herkeios]). 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. [93] We thus leave aside here those theories which, in whole or in part, make use of super-experimental data. This is the case with the theory which Andrew Lang exposed in his book, _The Making of Religion_, and which Father Schmidt has taken up again, with variations of detail, in a series of articles on _The Origin of the Idea of God_ (_Anthropos_, 1908, 1909). Lang does not set animism definitely aside, but in the last analysis, he admits a sense or intuition of the divine directly. Also, if we do not consider it necessary to expose and discuss this conception in the present chapter, we do not intend to pass it over in silence; we shall come to it again below, when we shall ourselves explain the facts upon which it is founded (Bk. II, ch. ix, § 4). [94] This is the case, for example, of Fustel de Coulanges who accepts the two conceptions together (_The Ancient City_, Bk. I and Bk. III, ch. ii). [95] This is the case with Jevons, who criticizes the animism taught by Tylor, but accepts his theories on the origin of the idea of the soul and the anthropomorphic instinct of man. Inversely, Usener, in his _Götternamen_, rejects certain hypotheses of Max Müller which will be described below, but admits the principal postulates of naturism. [96] _Primitive Culture_, chs. xi-xviii. [97] _Principles of Sociology_, Parts I and VI. [98] This is the word used by Tylor. It has the inconvenience of seeming to imply that men, in the proper sense of the term, existed before there was a civilization. However, there is no proper term for expressing the idea; that of primitive, which we prefer to use, lacking a better, is, as we have said, far from satisfactory. [99] Tylor, _op. cit._, I, pp. 455 f. [100] See Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_, I, pp. 143 ff., and Tylor, _op. cit._, I, pp. 434 ff., 445 ff. [101] Tylor, II, pp. 113 ff. [102] Tylor, I, pp. 481 ff. [103] _Principles of Sociology_, I, p. 126. [104] _Ibid._, pp. 322 ff. [105] _Ibid._, pp. 366-367. [106] _Ibid._, p. 346. Cf. p. 384. [107] See below, Bk. II, ch. viii. [108] See Spencer and Gillen, _The Native Tribes of Central Australia_, pp. 123-127; Strehlow, _Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral Australien_, II, pp. 52 ff. [109] _The Melanesians_, pp. 249-250. [110] Howitt, _The Native Tribes of South-Eastern Australia_, p. 358. [111] _Ibid._, pp. 434-442. [112] Of the negroes of southern Guinea, Tylor says that "their sleeping hours are characterized by almost as much intercourse with the dead as their waking are with the living" (_Primitive Culture_, I, p. 443). In regard to these peoples, the same author cites this remark of an observer: "_All their dreams_ are construed into visits from the spirits of their deceased friends" (_ibid._, p. 443). This statement is certainly exaggerated; but it is one more proof of the frequency of mystic dreams among the primitives. The etymology which Strehlow proposes for the Arunta word _altjirerama_, which means "to dream," also tends to confirm this theory. This word is composed of _altjira_, which Strehlow translates by "god" and _rama_, which means "see." Thus a dream would be the moment when a man is in relations with sacred beings (_Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme_, I, p. 2). [113] Andrew Lang, who also refuses to admit that the idea of the soul was suggested to men by their dream experiences, believes that he can derive it from other empirical data: these are the data of spiritualism (telepathy, distance-seeing, etc.). We do not consider it necessary to discuss the theory such as it has been exposed in his book _The Making of Religion_. It reposes upon the hypothesis that spiritualism is a fact of constant observation, and that distance-seeing is a real faculty of men, or at least of certain men, but it is well known how much this theory is scientifically contested. What is still more contestable is that the facts of spiritualism are apparent enough and of a sufficient frequency to have been able to serve as the basis for all the religious beliefs and practices which are connected with souls and spirits. The examination of these questions would carry us too far from what is the object of our study. It is still less necessary to engage ourselves in this examination, since the theory of Lang remains open to many of the objections which we shall address to that of Tylor in the paragraphs which follow. [114] Jevons has made a similar remark. With Tylor, he admits that the idea of the soul comes from dreams, and that after it was created, men projected it into things. But, he adds, the fact that nature has been conceived as animated like men does not explain how it became the object of a cult. "The man who believes the bowing tree or the leaping flame to be a living thing like himself, does not therefore believe it to be a supernatural being--rather, so far as it is like himself, it, like himself, is not supernatural" (_Introduction to the History of Religions_, p. 55). [115] See Spencer and Gillen, _Nor. Tr._, p. 506, and _Nat. Tr._, p. 512. [116] This is the ritual and mythical theme which Frazer studies in his _Golden Bough_. [117] _The Melanesians_, p. 119. [118] _Ibid._, p. 125. [119] There are sometimes, as it seems, even funeral offerings. (See Roth, _Superstition, Magic and Medicine_, in _North Queensland Ethnog._, Bulletin No. 5, § 69 c., and _Burial Customs_, in _ibid._, No. 10, in _Records of the Australian Museum_, Vol. VI, No. 5, p. 395). But these offerings are not periodical. [120] Spencer and Gillen, _Nat. Tr._, pp. 538, 553, and _Nor. Tr._, pp. 463, 543, 547. [121] See especially, Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes_, ch. vi, vii, ix. [122] _The Religions of Primitive Peoples_, pp. 47 ff. [123] _Myth, Ritual and Religions_, p. 123. [124] _Les Religions des peuples non civilisés_, II, _Conclusion_. [125] _The Religion of the Semites_, 2 ed., pp. 126, 132. [126] This is the reasoning of Westermarck (_Origins of Human Marriage_, p. 6). [127] By sexual communism we do not mean a state of promiscuity where man knows no matrimonial rules: we believe that such a state has never existed. But it has frequently happened that groups of men have been regularly united to one or several women. [128] See our _Suicide_, pp. 233 ff. [129] Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_, I, pp. 129 f. [130] _The Melanesians_, p. 123. [131] Dorsey, _A Study of Siouan Cults_, in _XIth Annual Report of the Bureau of Amer. Ethnology_, pp. 431 ff., and _passim_. [132] _La religion des peuples non civilisés_, I, p. 248. [133] V. W. de Visser, _De Graecorum diis non referentibus speciem humanam_. Cf. P. Perdrizet, _Bulletin de correspondance hellénique_, 1899, p. 635. [134] However, according to Spencer, there is a germ of truth in the belief in spirits: this is the idea that "the power which manifests itself inside the consciousness is a different form of power from that manifested outside the consciousness" (_Ecclesiastical Institutions_, § 659). Spencer understands by this that the notion of force in general is the sentiment of the force which we have extended to the entire universe; this is what animism admits implicitly when it peoples nature with spirits analogous to our own. But even if this hypothesis in regard to the way in which the idea of force is formed were true--and it requires important reservations which we shall make (Bk. III, ch. iii, § 3)--it has nothing religious about it; it belongs to no cult. It thus remains that the system of religious symbols and rites, the classification of things into sacred and profane, all that which is really religious in religion, corresponds to nothing in reality. Also, this germ of truth, of which he speaks, is still more a germ of error, for if it be true that the forces of nature and those of the mind are related, they are profoundly distinct, and one exposes himself to grave misconceptions in identifying them. [135] This is undoubtedly what explains the sympathy which folk-lorists like Mannhardt have felt for animistic ideas. In popular religions as in inferior religions, these spiritual beings of a second order hold the first place. [136] In the essay entitled _Comparative Mythology_ (pp. 47 ff). [137] _Herabkunft des Feuers und G[=o]ttertranks_, Berlin, 1859 (a new edition was given by Ernst Kuhn in 1886). Cf. _Der Schuss des Wilden Jägers auf den Sonnen-hirsch_, Zeitschrift f. d. Phil., I, 1869, pp. 89-169. _Entwickelungsstufen des Mythus_, Abhandl. d. Berl. Akad., 1873. [138] _Der Ursprung der Mythologie_, Berlin, 1860. [139] In his book _Hercule et Cacus_. _Étude de mythologie comparée._ Max Müller's _Comparative Mythology_ is there signalized as a work "which marks a new epoch in the history of Mythology" (p. 12). [140] _Die Griechischen Kulte und Mythen_, I, p. 78. [141] Among others who have adopted this conception may be cited Renan. See his _Nouvelles études d'histoire religieuse_, 1884, p. 31. [142] Aside from the _Comparative Mythology_, the works where Max Müller has exposed his general theories on religion are: _Hibbert Lectures_ (1878) under the title _The Origin and Development of Religion; Natural Religion_ (1889); _Physical Religion_ (1890); _Anthropological Religion_ (1892); _Theosophy, or Psychological Religion_ (1893); _Contributions to the Science of Mythology_ (1897). Since his mythological theories are closely related to his philosophy of language, these works should be consulted in connection with the ones consecrated to language or logic, especially _Lectures on the Science of Language_, and _The Science of Thought_. [143] _Natural Religion_, p. 114. [144] _Physical Religion_, pp. 119-120. [145] _Ibid._, p. 121; cf. p. 304. [146] _Natural Religion_, pp. 121 ff., and 149-155. [147] "The overwhelming pressure of the infinite" (_ibid._, p. 138). [148] _Ibid._, pp. 195-196. [149] Max Müller even goes so far as to say that until thought has passed this first stage, it has very few of the characteristics which we now attribute to religion (_Physic. Rel._, p. 120). [150] _Physic. Rel._, p. 128. [151] _The Science of Thought_, p. 30. [152] _Natural Religion_, pp. 393 ff. [153] _Physic. Rel._, p. 133; _The Science of Thought_, p. 219; _Lectures on the Science of Language_, II, pp. 1 ff. [154] _The Science of Thought_, p. 272. [155] _The Science of Thought_, I, p. 327; _Physic. Rel_., pp. 125 ff. [156] _Mélanges de mythologie et de linguistique_, p. 8. [157] _Anthropological Religion_, pp. 128-130. [158] This explanation is not as good as that of Tylor. According to Max Müller, men could not admit that life stopped with death; therefore they concluded that there were two beings within them, one of which survived the body. But it is hard to see what made them think that life continued after the body was decomposed. [159] For the details, see _Anthrop. Rel._, pp. 351 ff. [160] _Anthrop. Rel._, p. 130.--This is what keeps Max Müller from considering Christianity the climax of all this development. The religion of ancestors, he says, supposes that there is something divine in man. Now is that idea not the one at the basis of the teaching of Christ? (_ibid._, pp. 378 ff.). It is useless to insist upon the strangeness of the conception which makes Christianity the latest of the cults of the dead. [161] See the discussion of the hypothesis in Gruppe, _Griechishen Kulte und Mythen_, pp. 79-184. [162] See Meillet, _Introduction à l'étude comparative des langues indo-européennes_, p. 119. [163] Oldenberg, _Die Religion des Vedas_, pp. 59 ff.; Meillet, _Le dieu Iranien Mythra_, in _Journal Asiatique_, X, No. 1, July-August, 1907, pp. 143 ff. [164] In this category are a large number of the maxims of popular wisdom. [165] It is true that this argument does not touch those who see in religion a code (especially of hygiene) whose provisions, though placed under the sanction of imaginary beings, are nevertheless well founded. But we shall not delay to discuss a conception so insupportable, and which has, in fact, never been sustained in a systematic manner by persons somewhat informed upon the history of religions. It is difficult to see what good the terrible practices of the initiation bring to the health which they threaten; what good the dietetic restrictions, which generally deal with perfectly clean animals, have hygienically; how sacrifices, which take place far from a house, make it more solid, etc. Undoubtedly there are religious precepts which at the same time have a practical utility; but they are lost in the mass of others, and even the services which they render are frequently not without some drawbacks. If there is a religiously enforced cleanliness, there is also a religious filthiness which is derived from these same principles. The rule which orders a corpse to be carried away from the camp because it is the seat of a dreaded spirit is undoubtedly useful. But the same belief requires the relatives to anoint themselves with the liquids which issue from a corpse in putrefaction, because they are supposed to have exceptional virtues.--From this point of view, magic has served a great deal more than religion. [166] _Contributions to the Science of Mythology_, I, pp. 68 f. [167] _Lectures on the Science of Language_, II, p. 456 ff.; _Physic. Rel._, pp. 276 ff.--Also Bréal, _Mélanges_, p. 6, "To bring the necessary clarity into this question of the origin of mythology, it is necessary to distinguish carefully the _gods_, which are the immediate product of the human intelligence, from the _fables_, which are its indirect and involuntary product." [168] Max Müller recognized this. See _Physic. Rel._, p. 132, and _Comparative Mythology_, p. 58. "The gods are _nomina_ and not _numina_, names without being and not beings without name." [169] It is true that Max Müller held that for the Greeks, "Zeus was, and remained, in spite of all mythological obscurations, the name of the Supreme Deity" (_Science of Language_, II, p. 478). We shall not dispute this assertion, though it is historically contestable; but in any case, this conception of Zeus could never have been more than a glimmer in the midst of all the other religious beliefs of the Greeks. Besides this, in a later work, Max Müller went so far as to make even the notion of god in general the product of a wholly verbal process and thus of a mythological elaboration (_Physic. Rel._, p. 138). [170] Undoubtedly outside the real myths there were always fables which were not believed, or at least were not believed in the same way and to the same degree, and hence had no religious character. The line of demarcation between fables and myths is certainly floating and hard to determine. But this is no reason for making all myths stories, any more than we should dream of making all stories myths. There is at least one characteristic which in a number of cases suffices to differentiate the religious myth: that is its relation to the cult. [171] See above, p. 28. [172] More than that, in the language of Max Müller, there is a veritable abuse of words. Sensuous experience, he says, implies, at least in certain cases, "beyond the known, _something unknown, something which I claim the liberty to call infinite_" (_Natural Rel._, p. 195; cf. p. 218). The unknown is not necessarily the infinite, any more than the infinite is necessarily the unknown if it is in all points the same, and consequently like the part which we know. It would be necessary to prove that the part of it which we perceive differs in nature from that which we do not perceive. [173] Max Müller involuntarily recognizes this in certain passages. He confesses that he sees little difference between Agni, the god of fire, and the notion of ether, by which the modern physicist explains light and heat (_Phys. Rel._, pp. 126 f.). Also, he connects the notion of divinity to that of agency (p. 138) or of a causality which is not natural and profane. The fact that religion represents the causes thus imagined, under the form of personal agents, is not enough to explain how they got a sacred character. A personal agent can be profane, and also, many religious forces are essentially impersonal. [174] We shall see below, in speaking of the efficacy of rites and faith, how these illusions are to be explained (Bk. III, ch. ii). [175] _Voyages and Travels of an Indian Interpreter._ [176] This idea was so common that even M. Réville continued to make America the classic land of totemism (_Religions des peuples non civilisés_, I, p. 242). [177] _Journals of Two Expeditions in North-West and Western Australia_, II, p. 228. [178] _The Worship of Animals and Plants._ _Totems and Totemism_ (1869, 1870). [179] This idea is found already very clearly expressed in a study by Gallatin entitled _Synopsis of the Indian Tribes_ (_Archæologia Americana_, II, pp. 109 ff.), and in a notice by Morgan in the _Cambrian Journal_, 1860, p. 149. [180] This work had been prepared for and preceded by two others by the same author: _The League of the Iroquois_ (1851), and _Systems of Consanguinity_ and _Affinity of the Human Family_ (1871). [181] _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, 1880. [182] In the very first volumes of the _Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology_ are found the study of Powell, _Wyandot Government_ (I, p. 59), that of Cushing, _Zuñi Fetiches_ (II, p. 9), Smith, _Myths of the Iroquois_ (_ibid._, p. 77), and the important work of Dorsey, _Omaha Sociology_ (III, p. 211), which are also contributions to the study of totemism. [183] This first appeared, in an abridged form, in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (9th ed.). [184] In his _Primitive Culture_, Tylor had already attempted an explanation of totemism, to which we shall return presently, but which we shall not give here; for by making totemism only a particular case of the ancestor-cult, he completely misunderstood its importance. In this chapter we mention only those theories which have contributed to the progress of the study of totemism. [185] Published at Cambridge, 1885. [186] First edition, 1889. This is the arrangement of a course given at the University of Aberdeen in 1888. Cf. the article _Sacrifice_ in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_ (9th edition). [187] London, 1890. A second edition in three volumes has since appeared (1900) and a third in five volumes is already in course of publication. [188] In this connection must be mentioned the interesting work of Sidney Hartland, _The Legend of Perseus_, 3 vols., 1894-1896. [189] We here confine ourselves to giving the names of the authors; their works will be indicated below, when we make use of them. [190] If Spencer and Gillen have been the first to study these tribes in a scientific and thorough manner, they were not the first to talk about them. Howitt had already described the social organization of the Wuaramongo (Warramunga of Spencer and Gillen) in 1888 in his _Further Notes on the Australian Classes_ in _The Journal of the Anthropological Institute_ (hereafter, _J.A.I._), pp. 44 f. The Arunta had already been briefly studied by Schulze (_The Aborigines of the Upper and Middle Finke River_, in _Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia_, Vol. XIV, fasc. 2): the organization of the Chingalee (the Tjingilli of Spencer and Gillen), the Wombya, etc., by Mathews (_Wombya Organization of the Australian Aborigines_, in _American Anthropologist_, New Series, Vol. II, p. 494; _Divisions of some West Australian Tribes_, _ibid._, p. 185; _Proceedings Amer. Philos. Soc._, XXXVII, pp. 151-152, and _Journal Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales_, XXXII, p. 71 and XXXIII, p. 111). The first results of the study made of the Arunta had also been published already in the _Report on the Work of the Horn Scientific Expedition to Central Australia_, Pt. IV (1896). The first part of this _Report_ is by Stirling, the second by Gillen; the entire publication was placed under the direction of Baldwin Spencer. [191] London, 1899. Hereafter, _Native Tribes_ or _Nat. Tr._ [192] London, 1904. Hereafter, _Northern Tribes_ or _Nor. Tr._ [193] We write the Arunta, the Anula, the Tjingilli, etc., without adding the characteristic _s_ of the plural. It does not seem very logical to add to these words, which are not European, a grammatical sign which would have no meaning except in our languages. Exceptions to this rule will be made when the name of the tribe has obviously been Europeanized (the Hurons for example). [194] Strehlow has been in Australia since 1892; at first he lived among the Dieri, and from them he went to the Arunta. [195] _Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral Australien._ Four fascicules have been published up to the present. The last appeared at the moment when the present book was finished, so it could not be used. The two first have to do with the myths and legends, and the third with the cult. It is only just to add to the name of Strehlow that of von Leonhardi, who has had a great deal to do with this publication. Not only has he charged himself with editing the manuscripts of Strehlow, but by his judicious questions he has led the latter to be more precise on more than one point. It would be useful also to consult an article which von Leonhardi gave the _Globus_, where numerous extracts from his correspondence with Strehlow will be found (_Ueber einige religiöse und totemistische Vorstellungen der Aranda und Loritja in Zentral Australien_, in _Globus_, XCI, p. 285). Cf. an article on the same subject by N. W. Thomas in Folk-lore, XVI, pp. 428 ff. [196] Spencer and Gillen are not ignorant of it, but they are far from possessing it as thoroughly as Strehlow. [197] Notably by Klaatsch, _Schlussbericht über meine Reise nach Australien_, in _Zeitschrift f. Ethnologie_, 1907, pp. 635 ff. [198] The book of K. Langloh Parker, _The Euahlayi Tribe_, that of Eylmann, _Die Eingeborenen der Kolonie Südaustralien_; that of John Mathews, _Two Representative Tribes of Queensland_, and certain recent articles of Mathews all show the influence of Spencer and Gillen. [199] A list of these publications will be found in the preface to his _Nat. Tr._, pp. 8-9. [200] London, 1904. Hereafter we shall cite this work by the abbreviation _Nat. Tr._, but always mentioning the name of Howitt, to distinguish it from the first work of Spencer and Gillen, which we abbreviate in the same manner. [201] _Totemism and Exogamy_, 4 vols., London, 1910. The work begins with a re-edition of _Totemism_, reproduced without any essential changes. [202] It is true that at the end and at the beginning there are some general theories on totemism, which will be described and discussed below. But these theories are relatively independent of the collection of facts which accompanies them, for they had already been published in different articles in reviews, long before this work appeared. These articles are reproduced in the first volume (pp. 89-172). [203] _Totemism_, p. 12. [204] _Ibid._, p. 15. [205] _Ibid._, p. 32. [206] It should be noted that in this connection, the more recent work, _Totemism and Exogamy_, shows an important progress in the thought as well as the method of Frazer. Every time that he describes the religious or domestic institutions of a tribe, he sets himself to determine the geographic and social conditions in which this tribe is placed. Howsoever summary these analyses may be, they bear witness nevertheless to a rupture with the old methods of the anthropological school. [207] Undoubtedly we also consider that the principal object of the science of religions is to find out what the religious nature of man really consists in. However, as we do not regard it as a part of his constitutional make-up, but rather as the product of social causes, we consider it impossible to find it, if we leave aside his social environment. [208] We cannot repeat too frequently that the importance which we attach to totemism is absolutely independent of whether it was ever universal or not. [209] This is the case with the phratries and matrimonial classes; on this point, see Spencer and Gillen, _Northern Tribes_, ch. iii; Howitt, _Native Tribes_, pp. 109 and 137-142; Thomas, _Kinship and Marriage in Australia_, ch. vi and vii. [210] _Division du Travail social_, 3rd ed., p. 150. [211] It is to be understood that this is not always the case. It frequently happens, as we have already said, that the simpler forms aid to a better understanding of the more complex. On this point, there is no rule of method which is applicable to every possible case. [212] Thus the individual totemism of America will aid us in understanding the function and importance of that in Australia. As the latter is very rudimentary, it would probably have passed unobserved. [213] Besides, there is not one unique type of totemism in America, but several different species which must be distinguished. [214] We shall leave this field only very exceptionally, and when a particularly instructive comparison seems to us to impose itself. [215] This is the definition given by Cicero: _Gentiles sunt qui inter se eodem nomine sunt_ (_Top._ 6). (Those are of the same gens who have the same name among themselves.) [216] It may be said in a general way that the clan is a family group, where kinship results solely from a common name; it is in this sense that the _gens_ is a clan. But the totemic clan is a particular sort of the class thus constituted. [217] In a certain sense, these bonds of solidarity extend even beyond the frontiers of the tribe. When individuals of different tribes have the same totem, they have peculiar duties towards each other. This fact is expressly stated for certain tribes of North America (see Frazer, _Totemism and Exogamy_, III, pp. 57, 81, 299, 356-357). The texts relative to Australia are less explicit. However, it is probable that the prohibition of marriage between members of a single totem is international. [218] Morgan, _Ancient Society_, p. 165. [219] In Australia the words employed differ with the tribes. In the regions observed by Grey, they said _Kobong_; the Dieri say _Murdu_ (Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, p. 91); the Narrinyeri, _Ngaitye_ (Talpin, _in_ Curr, II, p. 244); the Warramunga, _Mungái_ or _Mungáii_ (_Nor. Tr._, p. 754), etc. [220] _Indian Tribes of the United States_, IV, p. 86. [221] This fortune of the word is the more regrettable since we do not even know exactly how it is written. Some write _totam_, others _toodaim_, or _dodaim_, or _ododam_ (see Frazer, _Totemism_, p. 1). Nor is the meaning of the word determined exactly. According to the report of the first observer of the Ojibway, J. Long, the word _totam_ designated the protecting genius, the individual totem, of which we shall speak below (Bk. II, ch. iv) and not the totem of the clan. But the accounts of other explorers say exactly the contrary (on this point, see Frazer, _Totemism and Exogamy_, III, pp. 49-52). [222] The _Wotjobaluk_ (p. 121) and the _Buandik_ (p. 123). [223] The same. [224] The _Wolgal_ (p. 102), the _Wotjobaluk_ and the _Buandik_. [225] The _Muruburra_ (p. 117), the _Wotjobaluk_ and the _Buandik_. [226] The _Buandik_ and the _Kaiabara_ (p. 116). It is to be remarked that all the examples come from only five tribes. [227] Thus, out of 204 kinds of totems, collected by Spencer and Gillen out of a large number of tribes, 188 are animals or plants. The inanimate objects are the boomerang, cold weather, darkness, fire, lightning, the moon, red ochre, resin, salt water, the evening star, a stone, the sun, water, the whirlwind, the wind and hail-stones (Nor. Tr., p. 773. Cf. Frazer, _Totemism and Exogamy_, I, pp. 253-254). [228] Frazer (_Totemism_, pp. 10 and 13) cites a rather large number of cases and puts them in a special group which he calls _split-totems_, but these are taken from tribes where totemism is greatly altered, such as in Samoa or the tribes of Bengal. [229] Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, p. 107. [230] See the tables collected by Strehlow, _op. cit._, II, pp. 61-72 (cf. III, pp. xiii-xvii). It is remarkable that these fragmentary totems are taken exclusively from animal totems. [231] Strehlow, II, pp. 52 and 72. [232] For example, one of these totems is a cave where an ancestor of the Wild Cat totem rested; another is a subterranean gallery which an ancestor of the Mouse clan dug, etc. (_ibid._, p. 72). [233] _Nat. Tr._, pp. 561 ff. Strehlow, II, p. 71, note 2. Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, pp. 426 ff.; _On Australian Medicine Men_, _J.A.I._, XVI, p. 53; _Further Notes on the Australian Class Systems_, _J.A.I._, XVIII, pp. 63 ff. [234] Thaballa means "laughing boy," according to the translation of Spencer and Gillen. The members of the clan which bear this name think they hear him laughing in the rocks which are his residence (_Nor. Tr._, pp. 207, 215, 226 note). According to a myth given on p. 422, there was an initial group of mythical Thaballa (cf. p. 208). The clan of the Kati, "full-grown men," as Spencer and Gillen say, seems to be of the same sort (_Nor. Tr._, p. 207). [235] _Nor. Tr._, pp. 226 ff. [236] Strehlow, II, pp. 71 f. He mentions a totem of the Loritja and Arunta which is very close to the serpent Wollunqua: it is the totem of a mythical water-snake. [237] This is the case with Klaatsch, in the article already cited (see above, p. 92, n. 3). [238] As we indicated in the preceding chapter, totemism is at the same time of interest for the question of religion and that of the family, for the clan is a family. In the lower societies, these two problems are very closely connected. But both are so complex that it is indispensable to treat them separately. Also, the primitive family organization cannot be understood before the primitive religious beliefs are known; for the latter serve as the basis of the former. This is why it is necessary to study totemism as a religion before studying the totemic clan as a family group. [239] See Taplin, _The Narrinyeri Tribe_, in Curr, II, pp. 244 f.; Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, p. 131. [240] _Nor. Tr._, pp. 163, 169, 170, 172. It is to be noted that in all these tribes, except the Mara and the Anula, the transmission of the totem in the paternal line is only a general rule, which has exceptions. [241] According to Spencer and Gillen (Nat. Tr., pp. 123 ff.), the soul of the ancestor becomes reincarnate in the body of the mother and becomes the soul of the child; according to Strehlow (II, pp. 51 ff.), the conception, though being the work of the ancestor, does not imply any reincarnation; but in neither interpretation does the totem of the child necessarily depend upon that of the parents. [242] _Nat. Tr._, p. 133; Strehlow, II, p. 53. [243] It is in large part the locality where the mother believes that she conceived which determines the totem of the child. Each totem, as we shall see, has its centre and the ancestors preferably frequent the places serving as centres for their respective totems. The totem of the child is therefore that which belongs to the place where the mother believes that she conceived. As this should generally be in the vicinity of the place which serves as totemic centre for her husband, the child should generally follow the totem of his father. It is undoubtedly this which explains why the greater part of the inhabitants of a given locality belong to the same totem (_Nat. Tr._, p. 9). [244] _The Secret of the Totem_, pp. 159 ff. Cf. Fison and Howitt, _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, pp. 40 f.; John Mathews, _Eaglehawk and Crow_; Thomas, _Kinship and Marriage in Australia_, pp. 52 ff. [245] Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, p. 124. [246] Howitt, pp. 121, 123, 124; Curr, III, p. 461. [247] Howitt, p. 126. [248] Howitt, pp. 98 ff. [249] Curr, II, p. 165; Brough Smyth, I, p. 423; Howitt, _op. cit._, p. 429. [250] Howitt, pp. 101, 102. [251] J. Mathews, _Two Representative Tribes of Queensland_, p. 139. [252] Still other reasons could be given in support of this hypothesis, but it would be necessary to bring in considerations relative to the organization of the family, and we wish to keep these two studies separate. Also this question is only of secondary interest to our subject. [253] For example, Mukwara, which is the name of a phratry among the Barkinji, the Paruinji and the Milpulko, designates the eagle-hawk, according to Brough Smyth; now one of the clans of this phratry has the eagle-hawk as totem. But here the animal is designated by the word Bilyara. Many cases of the same thing are cited by Lang, _op. cit._, p. 162. [254] Spencer and Gillen, _Nat. Tr._, p. 115. According to Howitt (_op. cit._, pp. 121 and 454), among the Wotjobaluk, the clan of the pelican is found in the two phratries equally. This fact seems doubtful to us. It is very possible that the two clans may have two varieties of pelicans as totems. Information given by Mathews on the same tribe seems to point to this (_Aboriginal Tribes of N.S. Wales and Victoria_, in _Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of N.S. Wales_, 1904, pp. 287 f.). [255] In connection with this question, see our memoir on _Le Totémisme_, in the _Année Sociologique_, Vol. V, pp. 82 ff. [256] On the question of Australian matrimonial classes in general, see our memoir on _La Prohibition de l'inceste_, in the _Année Soc._, I, pp. 9 ff., and especially for the tribes with eight classes, _L'Organisation matrimoniale des societés Australiennes_, in _Année Soc._, VIII, pp. 118-147. [257] This principle is not maintained everywhere with an equal strictness. In the central tribes of eight classes notably, beside the class with which marriage is regularly permitted, there is another with which a sort of secondary concubinage is allowed (Spencer and Gillen, _Nor. Tr._, p. 106). It is the same with certain tribes of four classes. Each class has a choice between the two classes of the other phratry. This is the case with the Kabi (see Mathews, _in_ Curr, III, 162). [258] See Roth, _Ethnological Studies among the North-West-Central Queensland Aborigines_, pp. 56 ff.; Palmer, _Notes on some Australian Tribes_, _J.A.I._, XIII (1884), pp. 302 ff. [259] Nevertheless, some tribes are cited where the matrimonial classes bear the names of animals or plants: this is the case with the Kabi (Mathew, _Two Representative Tribes_, p. 150), the tribes observed by Mrs. Bates (_The Marriage Laws and Customs of the West Australian Aborigines_, in _Victorian Geographical Journal_, XXIII-XXIV, p. 47), and perhaps in two tribes observed by Palmer. But these facts are very rare and their significance badly established. Also, it is not surprising that the classes, as well as the sexual groups, should sometimes adopt the names of animals. This exceptional extension of the totemic denominations in no way modifies our conception of totemism. [260] Perhaps the same explanation is applicable to certain other tribes of the South-East and the East where, if we are to believe the informers of Howitt, totems specially attached to each matrimonial class are to be found. This is the case among the Wiradjuri, the Wakelbura and the Bunta-Murra on the Bulloo River (Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, pp. 210, 221, 226). However, the evidence collected is suspect, according to his own admission. In fact, it appears from the lists which he has drawn up, that many totems are found equally in the two classes of the same phratry. The explanation which we propose, after Frazer (_Totemism and Exogamy_, pp. 531 ff.), raises one difficulty. In principle, each clan and consequently each totem, is represented equally in the two classes of a single phratry, since one of the classes is that of the children and the other that of the parents from whom the former get their totems. So when the clans disappeared, the totemic interdictions which survived should have remained in both matrimonial classes, while in the actual cases cited, each class has its own. Whence comes this differentiation? The example of the Kaiabara (a tribe of southern Queensland) allows us to see how it may have come about. In this tribe, the children have the totem of their mother, but it is particularized by some distinctive mark. If the mother has the black eagle-hawk as totem, the child has the white eagle-hawk (Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, p. 229). This appears to be the beginning of a tendency for the totems to differentiate themselves according to the matrimonial classes. [261] A tribe of only a few hundred members frequently has fifty or sixty clans, or even many more. On this point, see Durkheim and Mauss, _De quelques formes primitives de classification_, in the _Année Sociologique_, Vol. VI, p. 28, n. 1. [262] Except among the Pueblo Indians of the South-West, where they are more numerous. See Hodge, _Pueblo Indian Clans_, in _American Anthropologist_, 1st series, Vol. IX, pp. 345 ff. It may always be asked whether the groups which have these totems are clans or sub-clans. [263] See the tables arranged by Morgan, _Ancient Society_, pp. 153-185. [264] Krause, _Die Tlinkit-Indianer_, p. 112; Swanton, _Social Condition, Beliefs and Linguistic Relationship of the Tlingit Indians_, in _XXVIth Rep._, p. 308. [265] Swanton, _Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida_, p. 62. [266] "The distinction between the two clans is absolute in every respect," says Swanton, p. 68; he gives the name clan to what we call phratries. The two phratries, he says elsewhere, are like two foreign nations in their relations to each other. [267] Among the Haida at least, the totem of the real clans is altered more than that of the phratries. In fact, usage permits a clan to sell or give away the right of bearing its totem, as a result of which each clan has a number of totems, some of which it has in common with other clans (see Swanton, pp. 107 and 268). Since Swanton calls the phratries clans, he is obliged to give the name of _family_ to the real clans, and of _household_ to the regular families. But the real sense of his terminology is not to be doubted. [268] _Journals of two Expeditions in N.W. and W. Australia_, II, p. 228. [269] _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 165. [270] _Indian Tribes_, I, p. 420; cf. I, p. 52. This etymology is very doubtful. Cf. _Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico_ (_Smithsonian Inst. Bur. of Ethnol._, Pt. II, _s.v._, Totem, p. 787). [271] Schoolcraft, _Indian Tribes_, III, 184; Garrick Mallery, _Picture Writing of the American Indians_, in _Tenth Report_, 1893, p. 377. [272] Hearne, _Journey to the Northern Ocean_, p. 148 (quoted from Frazer, _Totemism_, p. 30). [273] Charlevoix, _Histoire et description de la Nouvelle France_, V, p. 329. [274] Krause, _Tlinkit-Indianer_, p. 248. [275] Erminnie A. Smith, _Myths of the Iroquois_, in _Sec. Rep. of the Bur. of Ethnol._, p. 78. [276] Dodge, _Our Wild Indians_, p. 225. [277] Powell, _Wyandot Government_, in _First Rep. of the Bur. of Ethnol._, 1881, p. 64. [278] Dorsey, _Omaha Sociology_, in _Third Rep._, pp. 229, 240, 248. [279] Krause, _op. cit._, pp. 130 f. [280] Krause, p. 308. [281] See a photograph of a Haida village in Swanton, _op. cit._, Pl. IX. Cf. Tylor, _Totem Post of the Haida Village of Masset_, _J.A.I._, New Series I, p. 133. [282] Hill Tout, _Report on the Ethnology of the Statlumh of British Columbia_, _J.A.I._, XXXV, p. 155. [283] Krause, _op. cit._, p. 230; Swanton, _Haida_, pp. 129, 135 ff.; Schoolcraft, _op. cit._, I, pp. 52-53, 337, 356. In the latter case the totem is represented upside down, in sign of mourning. Similar usages are found among the Creek (C. Swan, _in_ Schoolcraft, V, p. 265) and the Delaware (Heckewelder, _An Account of the History, Manners and Customs of the Indian Nations who once inhabited Pennsylvania_, pp. 246-247). [284] Spencer and Gillen, _Nor. Tr._, pp. 168, 537, 540. [285] _Ibid._, p. 174. [286] Brough Smyth, _The Aborigines of Victoria_, I, p. 99 n. [287] Brough Smyth, I, p. 284. Strehlow cites a fact of the same sort among the Arunta (III, p. 68). [288] _An Account of the English Colony in N.S. Wales_, II, p. 381. [289] Krause, p. 237. [290] Swanton, _Social Condition, Beliefs and Linguistic Relationship of the Tlingit Indians, in XXVIth Rep._, pp. 435 ff.; Boas, _The Social Organization and Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians_, p. 358. [291] Frazer, _Totemism_, p. 26. [292] Bourke, _The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona_, p. 229; J. W. Fewkes, _The Group of Tusayan Ceremonials called Katcinas_, in _XVth Rep._, 1897, pp. 151-263. [293] Müller, _Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen_, p. 327. [294] Schoolcraft, _op. cit._, III, p. 269. [295] Dorsey, _Omaha Sociol._, _Third Rep._, pp. 229, 238, 240, 245. [296] Spencer and Gillen, _Nat. Tr._, p. 451. [297] Spencer and Gillen, _Nat. Tr._, p. 257. [298] The meaning of these relations will be seen below (Bk. II, ch. iv). [299] Spencer and Gillen, _Nor. Tr._, p. 296. [300] Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, pp. 744-746; cf. p. 129. [301] _Kamilaroi and Kurnai_, p. 66 n. It is true that other informers contest this fact. [302] Howitt, _Nat. Tr._, p. 744. [303] Swanton, _Contributions to the Ethnology of the Haida_, pp. 41 ff., Pl. XX and XXI; Boas, _The Social Organization of the Kwakiutl_, p. 318; Swanton, _Tlingit_, Pl. XVI ff.--In one place, outside the two ethnographic regions which we are specially studying, these tattooings are put on the animals which belong to the clan. The Bechuana of South Africa are divided into a certain number of clans; there are the people of the crocodile, the buffalo, the monkey, etc. Now the crocodile people, for example, make an incision in the ears of their cattle whose form is like the jaws of this animal (Casalis, _Les Basoutos_, p. 221). According to Robertson Smith, the same custom existed among the ancient Arabs (_Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia_, pp. 212-214). [304] However, according to Spencer and Gillen, there are some which have no religious sense (see _Nat. Tr._, pp. 41 f.; _Nor. Tr._, pp. 45, 54-56). [305] Among the Arunta, this rule has exceptions which will be explained below. [306] Spencer and Gillen, _Nat. Tr._, p. 162; _Nor. Tr._, pp. 179, 259, 292, 295 f.; Schulze, _loc. cit._, p. 221. The thing thus represented is not always the totem itself, but one of those things which, being associated to this totem, are regarded as being in the same family of things. [307] This is the case, for example, among the Warramunga, the Walpari, the Wulmala, the Tjingilli, the Umbaia and the Unmatjera (_Nor. Tr._, 339, 348). Among the Warramunga, at the moment when the design is executed, the performers address the initiated with the following words: "That mark belongs to your place; do not look out along another place." "This means," say Spencer and Gillen, "that the young man must not interfere with ceremonies belonging to other totems than his own: it also indicates the very close association which is supposed to exist between a man and his totem and any spot especially connected with the totem" (_Nor. Tr._, p. 584 and n.). Among the Warramunga, the totem is transmitted from father to child, so each locality has its own. [308] Spencer and Gillen, _Nat. Tr._, pp. 215, 241, 376. [309] It will be remembered (see above, p. 107) that in this tribe, the child may have a different totem than his father, his mother, or his relatives in general. Now the relatives on both sides are the performers designated for the ceremonies of initiation. Consequently, since in principle a man can have the quality of performer or officiant only for the ceremonies of his own totem, it follows that in certain cases the rites by which the young man is initiated must be in connection with a totem that is not his own. That is why the paintings made on the body of the novice do not necessarily represent his own totem: cases of this sort will be found in Spencer and Gillen, _Nat. Tr._, p. 229. That there is an anomaly here is well shown by the fact that the circumcision falls to the totem which predominates in the local group of the initiate, that is to say, to the one which would be the totem of the initiate himself, if the totemic organization were not disturbed, if among the Arunta it were what it is among the Warramunga (see Spencer and Gillen, _ibid._, p. 219). The same disturbance has had another consequence. In a general way, its effect is to extend a little the bonds attaching each totem to a special group, since each totem may have members in all the local groups possible, and even in the two phratries. The idea that these ceremonies of a totem might be celebrated by an individual of another totem--an idea which is contrary to the very principles of totemism, as we shall see better after a while--has thus been accepted without too much resistance. It has been admitted that a man to whom a spirit revealed the formula for a ceremony had the right of presiding over it, even when he was not of the totem in question himself (_Nat. Tr._, p. 519). But that this is an exception to the rule and the product of a sort of toleration is proved by the fact that the beneficiary of the formula does not have the free disposition of it; if he transmits it--and these transmissions are frequent--it can be only to a member of the totem which the rite concerns (_Nat. Tr._, _ibid._). [310] _Nat. Tr._, p. 140. In this case, the novice keeps the decoration with which he has thus been adorned until it disappears of itself by the effect of time. [311] Boas, _General Report on the Indians of British Columbia in British Association for the Advancement of Science, Fifth Rep. of the Committee on the N.W. Tribes of the Dominion of Canada_, p. 41. [312] There are also some among the Warramunga, but in smaller numbers than among the Arunta; they do not figure in the totemic ceremonies, though they do have a place in the myths (_Nor. Tr._, p. 163). [313] Other names are used by other tribes. We give a generic sense to the Arunta term because it is in this tribe that the churinga have the most important place and have been studied the best. [314] Strehlow, II, p. 81. [315] There are a few which have no apparent design (see Spencer and Gillen, _Nat. Tr._, p. 144). [316] _Nat. Tr._, pp. 139 and 648; Strehlow, II, p. 75. [317] Strehlow, who writes _tjurunga_, gives a slightly different translation to the word. "This word," he says, "means that which is secret and personal _(der eigene geheime_). _Tju_ is an old word which means hidden or secret, and _runga_ means that which is my own." But Kempe, who has more authority than Strehlow in this matter, translates _tju_ by great, powerful, sacred (_Kempe, Vocabulary of the Tribes inhabiting Macdonell Ranges_, s.v. _Tju_, in _Transactions of the R. Society of Victoria_, Vol. XIII). At bottom, the translation of Strehlow is not so different from the other as might appear at first glance, for what is secret is hidden from the knowledge of the profane, that is, it is sacred. As for the meaning given to _runga_, it appears to us very doubtful. The ceremonies of the emu belong to all the members of that clan; all may participate in them; therefore they are not personal to any one of them. [318] _Nat. Tr._, pp. 130-132; Strehlow, II, p. 78. A woman who has seen a churinga or a man who has shown one to her are both put to death. [319] Strehlow calls this place, defined in exactly the same terms as by Spencer and Gillen, _arknanaua_ instead of _ertnatulunga_ (Strehlow, II, p. 78). [320] _Nor. Tr._, p. 270; _Nat. Tr._, p. 140. [321] _Nat. Tr._, p. 135. [322] Strehlow, II, p. 78. However, Strehlow says that if a murderer takes refuge near an ertnatulunga, he is unpityingly pursued there and put to death. We find some difficulty in conciliating this fact with the privilege enjoyed by animals, and ask ourselves if the rigour with which a criminal is treated is not something recent and should not be attributed to a weakening of the taboo which originally protected the ertnatulunga. [323] _Nat. Tr._, p. 248. [324] _Ibid._, pp. 545 f. Strehlow, II, p. 79. For example, the dust detached by rubbing a churinga with a stone, when dissolved in water, forms a potion which restores health to sick persons. [325] _Nat. Tr._, pp. 545 f. Strehlow (II, p. 79) contests this fact. [326] For example, the churinga of the yam totem, if placed in the soil, make the yams grow (_Nor. Tr.,_ p. 275). It has the same power over animals (Strehlow, II, pp. 76, 78; III, pp. 3, 7). [327] _Nat. Tr._, p. 135; Strehlow, II, p. 79. [328] _Nor. Tr._, p. 278. [329] _Ibid._, p. 180. [330] _Nor. Tr._, pp. 272 f. [331] _Nat. Tr._, p. 135. [332] One group borrows the churinga of another with the idea that these latter will communicate some of the virtues which are in them and that their presence will quicken the vitality of the individuals and of the group (_Nat. Tr._, pp. 158 ff.). [333] _Ibid._, p. 136. [334] Each individual is united by a particular bond to a special churinga which assures him his life, and also to those which he has received as a heritage from his parents. [335] _Nat. Tr._, p. 154; _Nor. Tr._, p. 193. The churinga are so thoroughly collective that they take the place of the "message-sticks" with which the messengers of other tribes are provided, when they are sent to summon foreign groups to a ceremony (_Nat. Tr._, pp. 141 f.). [336] _Ibid._, p. 326. It should be remarked that the bull-roarers are used in the same way (Mathews, _Aboriginal Tribes of N.S. Wales and Victoria_, in _Jour. of Roy. Soc. of N.S. Wales_, XXXVIII, pp. 307 f.). [337] _Nat. Tr._, pp. 161, 259 ff. [338] _Ibid._, p. 138. [339] Strehlow, I, _Vorwort. in fine_; II, pp. 76, 77 and 82. For the Arunta, it is the body of the ancestor itself; for the Loritja, it is only an image. [340] When a child has just been born, the mother shows the father the spot where she believes that the soul of the ancestor entered her. The father, accompanied by a few relatives, goes to this spot and looks for the churinga which the ancestor is believed to have left at the moment that he reincarnated himself. If it is found there, some old man of the group undoubtedly put it there (this is the hypothesis of Spencer and Gillen). If they do not find it, a new churinga is made in a determined manner (_Nat. Tr._, p. 132. Cf. Strehlow, II, p. 80). [341] This is the case among the Warramunga, the Urabunna, the Worgaia, the Umbaia, the Tjingilli and the Guangi (_Nor. Tr._, pp. 258, 275 f.). Then, say Spencer and Gillen, "_they were regarded as of especial value because of their association with a totem_" (_ibid._, p. 276). There are examples of the same fact among the Arunta (_Nat. Tr._, 156). [342] Strehlow writes _tnatanja_ (I, pp. 4-5). [343] The Kaitish, the Ilpirra, the Unmatjera; but it is rare among the latter. [344] The pole is sometimes replaced by very long churinga, placed end to end. [345] Sometimes another smaller one is hung from the top of the nurtunja. In other cases, the nurtunja is in the form of a cross or a T. More rarely, the central support is lacking (_Nat. Tr._, pp. 298-300, 360-364, 627). [346] Sometimes there are even three of these cross-bars. [347] _Nat. Tr,_, pp. 231-234, 306-310, 627. In addition to the nurtunja and the waninga, Spencer and Gillen distinguish a third sort of sacred post or flag, called the kanana (_Nat. Tr._, pp. 364, 370, 629), whose functions they admit they have been unable to determine. They merely note that it "is regarded as something common to the members of all the totems." According to Strehlow (II, p. 23, n. 2) the kanana of which Spencer and Gillen speak, is merely the nurtunja of the Wild Cat totem. As this animal is the object of a tribal cult, the veneration of which it is the object might easily be common to all the clans. [348] _Nor. Tr._, p. 342; _Nat. Tr._, p. 309. [349] _Nat. Tr._, p. 255. [350] _Ibid._, ch. x and xi. [351] _Ibid._, pp. 138, 144. [352] See Dorsey, _Siouan Cults, XIth Rep._, p. 413; _Omaha Sociology, Third Rep._, p. 234. It is true that there is only one sacred post for the tribe, while there is a nurtunja for each clan. But the principle is the same. [353] _Nat. Tr._, pp. 232, 308, 313, 334, etc.; _Nor. Tr._, 182, 186, etc. [354] _Nat. Tr._, p. 346. It is true that some say that the nurtunja represents the lance of the ancestor who was at the head of each clan in Alcheringa times. But it is only a symbolic representation of it; it is not a sort of relic, like the churinga, which is believed to come from the ancestor himself. Here the secondary character of the explanation is very noticeable. [355] _Nat. Tr._, pp. 614 ff., esp. p. 617; _Nor. Tr._, p. 749. [356] _Nat. Tr._, p. 624. [357] _Ibid._, p. 179. [358] _Ibid._, p. 181. [359] See the examples given in Spencer and Gillen, _Nat. Tr._, Fig.