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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      CHAPTER III

       LEADING CONCEPTIONS OF THE ELEMENTARY RELIGION — continued

       Table of Contents

      II. — Naturism

The spirit of the naturistic school is quite different. In the first place, it is recruited in a different environment. The animists are, for the most part, ethnologists or anthropologists. The religions which they have studied are the crudest which humanity has ever known. Hence comes the extraordinary importance which they attribute to the souls of the dead, to spirits and to demons, and, in fact, to all spiritual beings of the second order: it is because these religions know hardly any of a higher order.135 On the contrary, the theories which we are now going to describe are the work of scholars who have concerned themselves especially with the great civilizations of Europe and Asia.

      Ever since the work of the Grimm brothers, who pointed out the interest that there is in comparing the different mythologies of the Indo-European peoples, scholars have been struck by the remarkable similarities СКАЧАТЬ