The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Unabridged). Durkheim Émile

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СКАЧАТЬ serve, nor what they answer to in reality. If a man prays, if he makes sacrifices and offerings, if he submits to the multiple privations which the ritual prescribes, it is because a sort of constitutional eccentricity has made him take his dreams for perceptions, death for a prolonged sleep, and dead bodies for living and thinking beings. Thus not only is it true, as many have held, that the forms under which religious powers have been represented to the mind do not express them exactly, and that the symbols with the aid of which they have been thought of partially hide their real nature, but more than that, behind these images and figures there exists nothing but the nightmares of primitive minds. In fine, religion is nothing but a dream, systematized and lived, but without any foundation in reality.134 Thence it comes about that the theorists of animism, when looking for the origins of religious thought, content themselves with a small outlay of energy. When they think that they have explained how men have been induced to imagine beings of a strange, vaporous form, such as those they see in their dreams, they think the problem is resolved.

      In reality, it is not even approached. It is inadmissible that systems of ideas like religions, which have held so considerable a place in history, and to which, in all times, men have come to receive the energy which they must have to live, should be made up of a tissue of illusions. To-day we are beginning to realize that law, morals and even scientific thought itself were born of religion, were for a long time confounded with it, and have remained penetrated with its spirit. How could a vain fantasy have been able to fashion the human consciousness so strongly and so durably? Surely it ought to be a principle of the science of religions that religion expresses nothing which does not exist in nature; for there are sciences only of natural phenomena. The only question is to learn from what part of nature these realities come and what has been able to make men represent them under this singular form which is peculiar to religious thought. But if this question is to be raised, it is necessary to commence by admitting that they are real things which are thus represented. When the philosophers of the eighteenth century made religion a vast error imagined by the priests, they could at least explain its persistence by the interest which the sacerdotal class had in deceiving the people. But if the people themselves have been the artisans of these systems of erroneous ideas at the same time that they were its dupes, how has this extraordinary dupery been able to perpetuate itself all through the course of history?

      One might even demand if under these conditions the words of science of religions can be employed without impropriety. A science is a discipline which, in whatever manner it is conceived, is always applied to some real data. Physics and chemistry are sciences because physico-chemical phenomena are real, and of a reality which does not depend upon the truths which these sciences show. There is a psychological science because there are really consciousnesses which do not hold their right of existence from the psychologist. But on the contrary, religion could not survive the animistic theory and the day when its truth was recognized by men, for they could not fail to renounce the errors whose nature and origin would thus be revealed to them. What sort of a science is it whose principal discovery is that the subject of which it treats does not exist?

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." СКАЧАТЬ