Материал: Durkheim, Emile - The Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life

emanating from a material object, we do not completely misunderstand their nature. Of course they do not come from the specific thing to which we connect them, but nevertheless, it is true that their origin is outside of us. If the moral force sustaining the believer does not come from the idol he adores or the emblem he venerates, still it is from outside of him, as he is well aware. The objectivity of its symbol only translates its externalness.

Thus social life, in all its aspects and in every period of its history, is made possible only by a vast symbolism. The material

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emblems and figurative representations with which we are more especially concerned in our present study, are one form of this ; but there are many others. Collective sentiments can just as well become incarnate in persons or formulae : some formulae are flags, while there are persons, either real or mythical, who are symbols. But there is one sort of emblem which should make an early appearance without reflection or calculation : this is tattooing. Indeed, well-known facts demonstrate that it is produced almost automatically in certain conditions. When men of an inferior culture are associated in a common life, they are frequently led, by an instinctive tendency, as it were, to paint or cut upon the body, images that bear witness to their common existence. According to a text of Procopius, the early Christians printed on their skin the name of Christ or the sign of the cross;1 for a long time, the groups of pilgrims going to Palestine were also tattooed on the arm or wrist with designs representing the cross or the monogram of Christ.2 This same usage is also reported among the pilgrims going to certain holy places in Italy.3 A curious case of spontaneous tattooing is given by Lombroso : twenty young men in an Italian college, when on the point of separating, decorated themselves with tattoos recording, in various ways, the years they had spent together.4 The same fact has frequently been observed among the soldiers in the same barracks, the sailors in the same boat, or the prisoners in the same jail.5 It will be understood that especially where methods are still rudimentary, tattooing should be the most direct and expressive means by which the communion of minds can be affirmed. The best way of proving to one's self and to others that one is a member of a certain group is to place a distinctive mark on the body. The proof that this is the reason for the existence of the totemic image is the fact, which we have already mentioned, that it does not seek to reproduce the aspect of the thing it is supposed to represent. It is made up of lines and points to which a wholly conventional significance is attributed.6 Its object is not to represent or bring to mind a determined object, but to bear witness to the fact that a certain number of individuals participate in the same moral life.

Moreover, the clan is a society which is less able than any other to do without an emblem or symbol, for there is almost

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no other so lacking in consistency. The clan cannot be defined by its chief, for if central authority is not lacking, it is at least uncertain and unstable.1 Nor can it be denned by the territory it occupies, for the population, being nomad,2 is not closely attached to any special locality. Also, owing to the exogamic law, husband and wife must be of different totems ; so wherever the totem is transmitted in the maternal line—and this system of filiation is still the most general one3 —the children are of

1Procopius of Gaza, Commenlarii in Isaiam, 496.

2See Thevenot, Voyage au Levant, Paris, 1689, p. 638. The fact was still iound in 1862.

3Lacassagne, Les Tatouages, p. 10.

4Lombroso, L'homme criminal, I, p. 292.

5Lombroso, ibid., I, pp. 268, 285, 291 f. ; Lacassagne, op. cit., p. 97.

6See above, p. 127.

1For the authority of the chiefs, see Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 10 ; Nor, Tr., p. 25 ; Howitt, Nat. Tr., pp. 295 ff.

2At least in Australia. In America, the population is more generally sedentary ; but the American clan represents a relatively advanced form of organization.

3To make sure of this, it is sufficient to look at the chart arranged by Thomas, Kinship and Marriage in Australia, p.

40.To appreciate this chart properly, it should be remembered that the author has extended, for a reason unknown to us, the system of totemic filiation in the paternal line clear to the western coast of Australia, though we have almost no

a different clan from their father, though living near to him. Therefore we find representatives of a number of different clans in each family, and still more in each locality. The unity of the group is visible, therefore, only in the collective name borne by all the members, and in the equally collective emblem reproducing the object designated by this name. A clan is essentially a reunion of individuals who bear the same name and rally around the same sign. Take away the name and the sign which materializes it, and the clan is no longer representable. Since the group is possible only on this condition, both the institution of the emblem and the part it takes in the life of the group are thus explained.

It remains to ask why these names and emblems were taken almost exclusively from the animal and vegetable kingdoms, but especially from the former.

It seems probable to us that the emblem has played a more important part than the name. In any case, the written sign still holds a more central place in the life of the clan to-day than does the spoken sign. Now the basis of an emblematic image can be found only in something susceptible of being represented by a design. On the other hand, these things had to be those with which the men of the clan were the most immediately and habitually coming in contact. Animals fulfilled this condition to a pre-eminent degree. For these nations of hunters and fishers, the animal constituted an essential element of the economic environment. In this connection plants had only a secondary place, for they can hold only a secondary place

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as food as long as they are not cultivated. Moreover, the animal is more closely associated with the life of men than the plant is, if only because of the natural kinship uniting these two to each other. On the other hand, the sun, moon and stars are too far away, they give the effect of belonging to another world.1 Also, as long as the constellations were not distinguished and classified, the starry vault did not offer a sufficient diversity of clearly differentiated things to be able to mark all the clans and sub-clans of a tribe ; but, on the contrary, the variety of the flora, and especially of the fauna, was almost inexhaustible. Therefore celestial bodies, in spite of their brilliancy and the sharp impression they make upon the senses, were unfitted for the role of totems, while animals and plants seemed predestined to it.

An observation of Strehlow even allows us to state precisely the way in which these emblems were probably chosen. He says that he has noticed that the totemic centres are generally situated near a mountain, spring or gorge where the animals serving as totems to the group gather in abundance, and he cites a certain number of examples of this fact.2 Now these totemic centres are surely the consecrated places where the meetings of the clan are held. So it seems as though each group had taken as its insignia the animal or plant that was the commonest in the vicinity of the place where it had the habit of meeting.3

VI

This conception of totemism will give us the explanation of a very curious trait of human mentality which, even though more marked formerly than to-day, has not yet disappeared and which, in any case, has been of considerable importance in the history of human thought. It will furnish still another occasion for showing how logical evolution is closely connected with religious evolution and how it, like this latter, depends upon social conditions.4

information about the tribes of this region, which is, moreover, largely a desert.

1The stars are often regarded, even by the Australians, as the land of souls and mythical personages, as will be established in the next chapter : that means that they pass as being a very different world from that of the living.

2Op. cit., I, p. 4. Cf. Schuize, toe. tit., p. 243.

3Of course it is to be understood that, as we have already pointed out (see above, p. 155), this choice was not made without a more or less formal agreement between the groups that each should take a different emblem from its neighbours.

4The mental state studied in this paragraph is identical to the one called by Levy-Bruhl the law of participation (Les functions mentales dans les societes inferieures, pp. 76 ff.). The following pages were written when this work appeared and we publish them without change ; we confine ourselves to adding certain explanations showing in what we diner from M. Levy-Bruhl in our understanding of the facts.

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If there is one truth which appears to be absolutely certain to-day, it is that beings differing not only in their outward appearance but also in their most essential properties, such as minerals, plants, animals and men, cannot be considered equivalent and interchangeable. Long usage, which scientific culture has still more firmly embedded in our minds, has taught us to establish barriers between the kingdoms, whose existence transformism itself does not deny ; for though this admits that life may have arisen from non-living matter and men from animals, still, it does not fail to recognize the fact that living beings, once formed, are different from minerals, and men different from animals. Within each kingdom the same barriers separate the different classes : we cannot conceive of one mineral having the same distinctive characteristics as another, or of one animal species having those of another species. But these distinctions, which seem so natural to us, are in no way primitive. In the beginning, all the kingdoms are confounded with each other. Rocks have a sex ; they have the power of begetting ; the sun, moon and stars are men or women who feel and express human sentiments, while men, on the contrary, are thought of as animals or plants. This state of confusion is found at the basis of all mythologies. Hence comes the ambiguous character of the beings portrayed in the mythologies; they can be classified in no definite group, for they participate at the same time in the most opposed groups. It is also readily admitted that they can go from one into another; and for a long time men believed that they were able to explain the origin of things by these transmutations.

That the anthropomorphic instinct, with which the animists have endowed primitive men, cannot explain their mental condition is shown by the nature of the confusions of which they are guilty. In fact, these do not come from the fact that men have immoderately extended the human kingdom to the point of making all the others enter into it, but from the fact that they confound the most disparate kingdoms. They have not conceived the world in their o-.vn image any more than they have conceived themselves in the world's image : they have done both at the same time. Into the idea they have formed of things, they have undoubtedly made human elements enter; but into the idea they have formed of themselves, they have made enter elements coming from things.

Yet there is nothing in experience which could suggest these connections and confusions. As far as the observation of the senses is able to go, everything is different and disconnected. Nowhere do we really see beings mixing their natures and

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metamorphosing themselves into each other. It is therefore necessary that some exceptionally powerful cause should have intervened to transfigure reality in such a way as to make it appear under an aspect that is not really its own.

It is religion that was the agent of this transfiguration ; it is religious beliefs that have substituted for the world, as it is perceived by the senses, another different one. This is well shown by the case of totemism. The fundamental thing in this religion is that the men of the clan and the different beings whose form the totemic emblems reproduce pass as being made of the same essence. Now when this belief was once admitted, the bridge between the different kingdoms was already built. The man was represented as a sort of animal or plant; the plants and animals were thought of as the relatives of men, or rather, all these beings, so different for the senses, were thought of as participating in a single nature. So this remarkable aptitude for confusing things that seem to be obviously distinct comes from the fact that the first forces with which the human intellect has peopled the world were elaborated by religion. Since these were made up of elements taken from the different kingdoms, men conceived a principle common to the most heterogeneous things, which thus became endowed with a sole and single essence.

But we also know that these religious conceptions are the result of determined social causes. Since the clan cannot exist without a name and an emblem, and since this emblem is always before the eyes of men, it is upon this, and the objects whose image it is, that the sentiments which society arouses in its members are fixed. Men were thus compelled to represent the collective force, whose action they felt, in the form of the thing serving as flag to the group. Therefore, in the idea of this force were mixed up the most different kingdoms ; in one sense, it was essentially human, since it

was made up of human ideas and sentiments ; but at the same time, it could not fail to appear as closely related to the animate or inanimate beings who gave it its outward form. Moreover, the cause whose action we observe here is not peculiar to totemism ; there is no society where it is not active. In a general way, a collective sentiment can become conscious of itself only by being fixed upon some material object;1 but by this very fact, it participates in the nature of this object, and reciprocally, the object participates in its nature. So it was social necessity which brought about the fusion of notions appearing distinct at first, and social life has facilitated this fusion by the great mental effervescences it

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determines.1 This is one more proof that logical understanding is a function of society, for it takes the forms and attitudes that this latter presses upon it.

It is true that this logic is disconcerting for us. Yet we must be careful not to depreciate it : howsoever crude it may appear to us, it has been an aid of the greatest importance in the intellectual evolution of humanity. In fact, it is through it that the first explanation of the world has been made possible. Of course the mental habits it implies prevented men from seeing reality as their senses show it to them ; but as they show it, it has the grave inconvenience of allowing of no explanation. For to explain is to attach things to each other and to establish relations between them which make them appear to us as functions of each other and as vibrating sympathetically according to an internal law founded in their nature. But sensations, which see nothing except from the outside, could never make them disclose these relations and internal bonds ; the intellect alone can create the notion of them. When I learn that A regularly precedes B, my knowledge is increased by a new fact; but my intelligence is not at all satisfied with a statement which does not show its reason. I commence to understand only if it is possible for me to conceive В in a way that makes it appear to me as something that is not foreign to A, and as united to A by some relation of kinship. The great service that religions have rendered to thought is that they have constructed a first representation of what these relations of kinship between things may be. In the circumstances under which it was attempted, the enterprise could obviously attain only precarious results. But then, does it ever attain any that are definite, and is it not always necessary to reconsider them ? And also, it is less important to succeed than to try. The essential thing was not to leave the mind enslaved to visible appearances, but to teach it to dominate them and to connect what the senses separated ; for from the moment when men have an idea that there are internal connections between things, science and philosophy become possible. Religion opened up the way for them. But if it has been able to play this part, it is only because it is a social affair. In order to make a law for the impressions of the senses and to substitute a new way of representing reality for them,

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thought of a new sort had to be founded: this is collective thought. If this alone has had this efficacy, it is because of the fact that to create a world of ideals through which the world of experienced realities would appear transfigured, a super-excitation of the intellectual forces was necessary, which is possible only in and through society.

So it is far from true that this mentality has no connection with ours. Our logic was born of this logic. The explanations of contemporary science are surer of being objective because they are more methodical and because they rest on more carefully controlled observations, but they do not differ in nature from those which satisfy primitive thought. To-day, as formerly, to explain is to show how one thing participates in one or several others. It has been said that the participations of this sort implied by the mythologies violate the principle of contradiction and that they are by that

1 See above, p. 230.

1 Another cause has contributed much to this fusion ; this is the extreme contagiousness of religious forces. They seize upon every object within their reach, whatever it may be. Thus a single religious force may animate the most diverse things which, by that very fact, become closely connected and classified within a single group. We shall return again to this contagiousness, when we shall show that it comes from the social origins of the idea of sacredness (Bk. Ill, ch. i, »я fane).