Early Reviews of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life

Cambridge, Massachusetts

June 1, 1914

Dear Professor Santayana:

It has been two years since you left Harvard for your ancestral home in Ávila. Your departure, coming soon after the passing of Professor William James (I was fortunate to have heard him before his retirement in 1907), has certainly left a void in the philosophical life of our university. To regain some of the intellectual ferment, I spent last fall in Paris and, remembering the high esteem that Professor James had for him, went to hear the lectures of Henri Bergson at the Collège de France. I did find his lectures very exciting, though a bit florid, and his Creative Evolution most absorbing. Since everyone, in France and Great Britain, and now, after his Columbia lectures, in the United States as well, is talking about Bergson, I am sure you may already be in contact with him. What I wish to inform you about is a recent discovery I made in Paris, on the eve of my return home.

I went to my favorite bookstore, the Librairie Alcan at 108 Boulevard Saint-Germain, and M. Félix Alcan himself was there. Although about 70, he is sprite, with a keen mind, and knows the contents of all the books his firm publishes. I told him I was looking for something interesting, challenging, innovative. He smiled, took from a shelf a thick (647 pages) volume, and said ‘Voilà, jeune homme!’ Having faith in his judgment, I paid him the list price of ten francs, and since my parents had sent me enough to buy myself a Christmas present in Paris, I gave Monsieur Alcan an additional fifteen francs for the latest volume of what he assured me was a great companion piece, volume 12 of L’Année Sociologique, which covers three years of publications of varied materials.

Let me say, dear Professor Santayana, that Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse (I will hereafter simply refer to this as FEVR) is a must-read, more complex than anything of Bergson, and perhaps not as convincing upon first reading, but more challenging for philosophy, as well as for modern religion. It is not yet available to English readers, although I understand that a J.W. Swain has obtained the translation rights and is preparing it for publication next year with Allen & Unwin. Before telling you what I have found exciting in Durkheim’s study, I thought of mentioning some early reviews of this work before there is an English translation available. After all, as you have said in one of your famous aphorisms, ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ So lest they be forgotten, I will first lay out five reviews each published last year before proceeding to my own.

Les Formes Élémentaires de la Vie Religieuse. Le Système Totémique en Australie.

Par Émile Durkheim. Paris : Librairie Félix Alcan. 1912.

Reviewed by :

René Maunier in Revue Internationale de Sociologie 21 (1913) : 276.

B. Malinowski in Folk-Lore 24 (1913): 525–531.

A. van Gennep in Mercure de France 101 (January–February 1913): 389–393.

Hutton Webster in American Journal of Sociology 18(6) (May 1913): 843–846.

Émile Durkheim in L’Année Sociologique 12 (1913) : 33–37.

René Maunier [1887–1951], a young ethnologist specializing in French North Africa, has a brief, one-page review of FEVR, taking its core thesis to be that the force of religion comes from the superior strength that society really exercises on individuals; hence, religion is not an illusion. Maunier views this approach as extending to religion the scientific spirit of ‘positivism,’ namely, placing facts above a researcher’s personal ideals and prejudices. Regardless of its conclusions, Maunier sees this work as the first complete application of the scientific method to religious phenomena.

Perhaps the most notable thing about this succinct summary is that it appears in the journal edited by René Worms [1869–1926], begun the same year that Worms founded the Institut International de Sociologie (1893), and who also launched in 1895 the Société de Sociologie de Paris. I understand that although they shared similar views in the Dreyfus affaire, Worms and Durkheim are far apart regarding the sociological enterprise, and so Maunier’s brief and polite review is to the credit of Worms’ journal, especially since Maunier is on its editorial board.

B (for Bronislaw) Malinowski [1884–1942] is a very promising Polish ethnologist studying for the Ph.D. at the London School of Economics, after already receiving a Ph.D. in Krakow. I understand that for his dissertation he has embarked very recently to Papua New Guinea to do fieldwork. Although his review is critical (as I shall shortly indicate), it also shows his familiarity with the entire Durkheimian school and its ‘remarkable success’ in treating primitive religion; in fact, he concludes lauding FEVR for its analyses rendering the book ‘a contribution to science of the greatest importance’ (1913: 531). He begins by noting that Durkheim treats the ‘origin’ of religion as a social phenomenon, hence in terms of ‘things.’ Malinowski sees this approach in FEVR as contrasting with the psychological evolutionary approach of British anthropology expressed in James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, which everyone is talking about. (Let me note in passing, dear Professor Santayana, that Durkheim and his school have taken to ethnologist Robert Marett [1866–1943], who this year is starting the Department of Anthropology at Oxford and has theorized a ‘preanimist’ theory of religion. It stresses at the origin of religion an impersonal force, mana, before animism.)

Malinowski is methodologically critical of Durkheim proposing an account of religious evolution that presupposes a theory of totemism as the most primitive or elementary form of religion, and making it a universal, solely from facts limited to the beliefs of the Central Australians. Further in his critique, he quotes Durkheim treating society as the real substance, the materia prima, of men’s conception of divinity. This, asserts Malinowski, is a metaphysical conception of society as a collective being, to be rejected even by those, like McDougall, Ellwood, and partly by Simmel and Wundt, who view ‘collective consciousness’ as a sum of conscious states. When Durkheim states that society speaks to us through the mouth of its interlocutors (FEVR: 297), does he mean a simple empirical proposition that individuals have ideas about society which they express, or is he implying that society exerts a non-empirical action on individual consciousness, a statement scientifically worthless?

There is another bite to Malinowski’s critique of Durkheim’s account of the special conditions that give rise to religion. For Durkheim, since religion is a social phenomenon, it is social conditions that cause. it: social gatherings. Society furnishes the external conditions in which ideas about the divine may and must originate (Malinowski, 1913: 529). So, in the last analysis, is society in its crowd-aspect nothing more than the environment in which individuals create religious ideas? That, for Malinowski, may be the only ‘scientifically admissible interpretation of the obscure manner in which M. Durkheim expounds the essence of his theories’ (1913: 529). However much Durkheim stresses treating social facts as things, Malinowski avers he is really using individual psychological explanations to account for changes in consciousness in gatherings of ‘mental effervescence’, and he faults Durkheim for making all religious phenomena as stemming from the ‘mental effervescence’ of a large social gathering.

I found Malinowski’s review balanced for an ethnologist viewing a sociological intrusion on a domain – the origins of religion—which anthropology now seems to claim as its discovery. However, a much harsher treatment of FEVR is given by Arnold Van Gennep [1873–1957]. Right away he begins saying Durkheim does not demonstrate tight-knit logic in his argument or discuss details in his proofs. FEVR has two juxtaposed parts, one a general theoretical, the other an ethnographic account. Van Gennep states he has searched the same documents (presumably, the many publications of W.B. Spencer and F.J. Gillen on the tribes of Australia) as Durkheim, but unlike the latter, who treats them with reverence as sacred text, he has found them of limited theoretical value, and for the most part unreliable. FEVR, he adds, is a literary ethnography and should be treated the way that one treats Greek and Latin texts by accepting that its documents come from disparate informers, like police agents, colonial settlers, missionaries, and the like. Scrutinizing Durkheim’s analysis based on this information, Van Gennep interjects, the impartial ethnographer must ask as he reads along, ‘Is this certain? How trustworthy is the informer? What is the worth of this document?’ In ten years, Van Gennep, predicts, all of Durkheim’s systematic account of Australia will be rejected, as will be the generalizations he has constructed from flimsy ethnographic data. The more one knows the Australian materials, the more one sees that those societies are very complex and far from being simple and primitive. Van Gennep lashes at Durkheim for setting up numerous ingenious hypotheses which cover up the lacunae of documentation. If one does not accept Durkheim’s hypotheses, he affirms assuredly, the whole thing crumbles, as it did for (criminologist) Cesare Lombroso [1835–1909] and his numerous hypotheses that were lacking in fact and in logic.

There are other parts of FEVR which catch Van Gennep’s attention. While the chapter dealing with theories of totemism (such as those of Frazer, Boas, Tylor, Lang) are incisive and concise, the next chapter (on the origins of beliefs in totemism) offers nothing really theoretical. To say that totemism as religion is an impersonal sort of force found in all beings – that is, mana – applies only to a substratum of totemism; it is to give the latter the meaning of the word ‘fetichism.’ What is the real totemism, asks Van Gennep, and why so many forms? What Durkheim says about this impersonal force and the dynamic primitive conceptions (‘des conceptions dynamistes primitives’, p. 390 of the review) will astonish readers. Yet, Van Gennep here agrees with Durkheim on one point: all religions – and not just totemism – have energetic conceptions. Where they differ is in the name they give to the sources and forms of energy, and the figure which represent these.

These remarks lead Van Gennep to fulminate about Durkheim’s personal bias in favor of the collectivity and his corresponding neglect of the formative influence of diverse individuals in religious beliefs. Of course, in the simplest of societies, social action is more pressing than individual action, but not forever; Durkheim dreams of the recognition of society as a natural reality, subject to laws as necessary as physical-chemical ones. Has Durkheim found in Australia a monocellular organism? While professing ethnographic care, he only has a metaphysical feel, that of a scholastic who grants reality to concepts and words. To deny reality to the individual in the evolution of civilizations is only a step from his lack of a sense for life, that is, the sense of biology and ethnography, which leads him to render living phenomena and beings into scientifically dried-up plants. Lastly, Van Gennep does see religion as a social phenomenon at lower stages of social evolution, one encompassing (as the Durkheimian school avers) law, science, everything. But as, with further civilization, individuals gained greater self-awareness in laïcization, human progress grew with mental and practical activities separating and negating religion. It is neither necessary nor possible to replace religion with another sociological imperative.

That is the end of Van Gennep’s highly critical book review. What to make of it? It has a personal, biting note to it, whereas Malinowski’s critique seems more objective, though severe. Perhaps this is a reflection of the French academic scene: Monsieur Van Gennep is an acknowledged leader of the folklorist school of ethnography, which has been marginalized in the prestigious École Normale Supérieure and the Sorbonne by the Durkheimians. They have not given proper due to his magnum opus, the Rites de Passage, and he has had to take a position in Switzerland; that his review appears in a literary magazine and not a scientific one is indicative of his marginality in the academic world. Perhaps, one might be tempted to say, that is why Rites de Passage makes much of the transition stage of liminality, but I will not go further with this.

The most appreciative review is that of Hutton Webster, who is laudatory of the analyses, original essays, and reviews of Durkheim and associates in L’Année Sociologique. The monographs and supplements of that enterprise are contributions to social anthropology which sharply contrast with the principles of mainstream English social anthropology, held by Tylor, Frazer, and others. Professor Webster is Professor of Social Anthropology (at the University of Nebraska), as well as an historian, and endorses the methodology of French sociologists. Social facts, he argues, should be studied in situ, and not loosely juxtaposed together from different settings, as in the defective comparative method of Herbert Spencer and Edward Westermarck (Webster, 1913: 844). Webster credits the French sociological emphasis on studying social function as well as social structure, and showing how a particular institution functions under given circumstances. He sees the school’s most original methodological contribution to be its theory of ‘collective representations,’ as applied to a wide range of social phenomena, freed from psychological reductionism. This is obviously in marked contrast to the perspective I have noted in the preceding reviews.

Where Professor Webster distances himself from Durkheim is not in the latter’s stress on the religious life being the genesis of everything of importance to society; others have done so, but without the careful gathering, sifting, and analysis of the sociological method of investigation for which FEVR serves as a model study in social anthropology. His caveat – a polite chiding – is similar to others who are skeptical of giving primacy to totemism and the mana idea: Webster is skeptical of explaining the totality of primitive religion by a single factor, whether it be held to be ‘ancestor worship,’ ‘the incest taboo,’ or ‘totemism.’ More empirical evidence needs to be presented in FEVR to make a strong case.

Since you are an eminent philosopher, dear Professor Santayana, I also include in my list of reviews Professor Durkheim’s own epistemological reflection of his FEVR in the latest volume of L’Année Sociologique, which appears in the section ‘Sociological Conditions of Knowledge.’ It is not an ‘author-meets-the-critic’ response to the others’ reviews, or a justification for the choice of totemism and its energizing force. Durkheim’s initial discussion is about a 1910 work of his colleague at the Sorbonne, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl [1857–1939], Les Fonctions Mentales dans les Sociétés Inférieures. Perhaps you might know Professor Lévy-Bruhl (hereafter L.-B.) from his earlier works in modern philosophy, but in recent years contacts with Durkheim and the Durkheimians have taken him to study the thinking processes of non-Western peoples, which he sees as following an entirely different logic from the Cartesian mentality of our Western civilization.

So Durkheim outlines carefully the argument of L.-B. and the latter’s contention that the logic of ‘inferior’ or ‘primitive’ mentality is more of a mystical sort than an objective, rational kind. The logic of those societies, as L.-B. sees it based on various print sources at his disposal, is entirely different from the principle of contradiction of Western logic: beyond empirical evidence, beings and phenomena, however they appear to us different, may be interlinked through a sharing of forces. This general mindset of ‘primitives’ is what has led L.-B. to term it ‘pre-logical’: it violates the basic premise of contradiction (that A cannot both be A and non-A at the same time).

Durkheim finds much of interest in this line of analysis: the study of primitive religion – of its elementary forms – calls for understanding the mentality of those who practice it. The predominant notions of collective representations are religious, and, as such, are social, as FEVR has tried to demonstrate. Where Durkheim differs from L.-B. is that the latter is concerned with differentiating sharply the ‘primitive’ mentality from our modern, scientific one. For Durkheim, the two forms of human mentality do not derive from two different sources, but from a single source of the human mind at different moments of the same evolution. The basic philosophical categories of time, space, causality, and personality, which are so basic to our logic, have been elaborated from religion, and it is from religion that science has taken them. There is not an abrupt break between them. But Durkheim is emphatic that not only are the categories of our modern mindset religious in their origin, but also they are ‘in the image of social things’ (Durkheim, 1913: 36). Thus: global space is fundamentally built on the model of social space, that is, on the territory occupied by society; time expresses the rhythm of collective life, and so on.

Durkheim goes on to discuss the development of concepts, which seem out of place with primitive mentality. Concepts are impersonal; they are impersonal representations we use in communicating with one another; they are the work of the societal community, the product of all the experience and science which the collectivity has accumulated over centuries. The intellectual life of society is infinitely greater than that of the individual, the product of the collaboration of generations.

I don’t think there is much new in Professor Durkheim’s review of his own work that he has not noted elsewhere, but since you might not have yet read this work, I have included it here. Now, dear Professor Santayana, I will tax your patience a bit longer to give you my perspective of FEVR.

I am not, as you know, trained in anthropology or ethnology, nor have I even been to Central Australia, which furnished the empirical materials for Durkheim (via the data provided by Spencer and Gillen). ¹ So I will gloss over a lot of anthropological details regarding the description of Australian Aborigines and the various controversies regarding the origins of religion. I would like to focus on what I found exciting and challenging. Essentially, it is in three areas: religion, social change, and philosophy.

FEVR is a very bold sociological inquiry of religious life, which had become in previous years an important preoccupation of Professor Durkheim. What he had noted earlier, he tells us in a footnote in FEVR (p. 65), was that religious beliefs had the quality of being unquestioned truths held in common; this was a formal characteristic of obligation but lacked substantive elements. His new, definitive definition is given in Chapter 1 as (I will translate it as best I can):

A religion is an integrated system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., set apart, forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite in the same moral community named a Church all those who adhere to these.

(p. 65)

His argument (one might say, his basic assumption) is that religion is binding because it is a product of the collectivity, and that the latter is superior in authority to the individual; hence, a very large part of this volume is a probing examination of how a number of key religious beliefs of the Western religious tradition – such as the notion of the soul treated in Book II, Chapter 8 – have their origins in the collective life of ‘primitive’ societies, which he ascribes to the tribes of Central Australia.

How he peels off layer upon layer of religious beliefs and practices with which we are familiar from ethnographic data is a marvel of sociological ingenuity. But since you have taught me, dear Professor Santayana, to look critically at presuppositions, such as those embodied in a definition, I have found something anomalous in Professor Durkheim’s definition. The notion of ‘Church’ does not make sense applied to the Australian Aborigines. There is no sacred text, like our Bible, or the Koran, or the Upanishads and the Baghavita Gita. Nor is there a notion of charisma as developed by the noted German legal and sociological scholar Rudolf Sohm [1841–1917] in his seminal study of charismatic organizations, Kirchenrecht (1892). This is a very individualistic idea but it is central to all our monotheistic heritage, as we understand Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Luther – exceptional leaders and teachers. However complex Australian society is, and however full of basic forms of religious life it contains, I did not find in FEVR anything approaching charismatic leadership capable of taking the Arunta into new paths, into new channels of social change; yet, is this not a destined role of individual charisma, to break with the past in leading the collectivity to a new vision of salvation? Incidentally, a rising figure in German sociology, Max Weber, has picked up on this notion of charisma, and I’ll refer to him shortly.

But first I would like to point out another feature of Professor Durkheim’s sociology of religion which the previous reviewers have not mentioned. In his detailed discussion of beliefs and rituals, he, unwittingly or not, provides a sociological grounding for core structures of Catholic and Jewish faith. Do look when you have the occasion at Book III, ‘The Major Forms of Ritual Conduct’ (‘Les Principales Attitudes Rituelles’). His first two chapters on ‘The Negative Cult and Its Functions’ and ‘The Positive Cult’ are prescriptions which in the Catholic tradition, as I understand it, are invoked as ‘acts of omission’ and ‘acts of commission.’ Similarly, rituals of asceticism are followed by Catholics, Jews, and Moslems, with different names in the liturgical calendar (including special times of the year such as Lent, Yom Kippur, Ramadan). The framework of Professor Durkheim around the sharp dichotomy of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ enables him to cover a vast amount of the religious life common to a variety of societies at different stages of civilization; there is, for him, no sharp break between the civilized and the primitive.

And that is both the virtue and the fault that I find in his sociology of religion. His sociological mentor, Auguste Comte, developed a comprehensive sociological system which some sharp tongues have said is ‘The Catholic Church without the Pope.’ Durkheim’s sociology of religion at present (1914) is very comprehensive in applying the sociological method to all things important to Durkheim and his associates. It might have meaning for traditional Catholics and to orthodox Jews, and one may well ask how it will be regarded by his secular-minded colleagues at the Sorbonne and by President Raymond Poincaré and the Ministry of Education. It will not be very meaningful to contemporary German social science scholars, especially those having Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in their background thinking. I have limited exposure to their works, most of which are waiting translation, but I believe their best writings in the sociology of religion are those of Ernest Troeltsch [1865–1923] and Max Weber [1864–1920], both at Heidelberg. Perhaps you might have met Weber when he came to Harvard in late October 1904 to visit his friend, whom he had seen the month before at the St. Louis Exposition, the great psychologist Professor Hugo Münsterberg, also a good friend of William James – if I have the time to go to the Harvard archives, I will check on records of Weber’s visit to Cambridge.

In any case, if you want a contrast in a sociological approach to religion, one more in keeping with the individualistic emphasis of Protestantism, you will find it in the two-part historical essays of Max Weber, ‘Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus,’ published in the journal he co-founded, the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (20, 1904: 1–54 and 21, 1905: 1–110). It is also a bold interpretive analysis of the coming into history of the ‘spirit,’ of inner-wordly asceticism, introduced by the Protestant Reformation and transforming the meaning of salvation into the notion of the ‘calling’ to worldly occupations. Ingeniously, Weber sees this psychological transformation as a key ingredient for the rise of modern capitalism. He mentions ‘charisma’ in passing in this process, but I understand he is developing this notion more fully in his present research in the sociology of religion.

Perhaps, dear Professor Santayana, if you find this field of the sociology of religion provocative for philosophy, you may find the occasion to visit both Durkheim in Paris and Weber in Heidelberg. I should warn you that neither Durkheim nor Weber has cited the other in his writings, as far as I know, although the sociological journals associated with each and the sociological gatherings in Paris and Berlin should make them know of each other. This might be a sign of antipathy, and certainly relations today between France and Germany are at a low ebb; even if the Morocco Crisis of 1911 is behind us, there is still anxiety that the bellicose tendencies of the Kaiser might lead Europe to unrestrained warfare. In any case, I am sure that as a distinguished Harvard professor in a country with a distinguished intellectual as president of the republic, you would find both Paris and Berlin cordially open to you. Although, with your encouragement, I might have more to say about Weber’s sociology of religion in a subsequent letter, let me add a bit more to what I have found of interest in FEVR.

In Chapter 7 of Book II, the concluding chapter of the origin of beliefs, Durkheim has some remarkable things to say about large-scale social change. It has two complementary parts. First is a discussion of the moral forces generated by society – not just that of Australian primitives but equally of our own modern society – forces which act as external constraints (as in public opinion and social pressures) but which are also internalized as moral authority (fn. 2, p. 298). Even the authority of science, Durkheim argues, depends upon public opinion, even if science engages in debunking the latter (p. 298).

He goes on to argue that the multiple forces of society, underlying our actions and invisible to the naked eye, not only constrain us as individuals but also can uplift us to engage in heroic and altruistic actions which we would not do as individuals. He draws on French history to evoke the night of August 4, 1789, when the French National Assembly in a scene of wild enthusiasm voted to abolish all traditional privileges of the ancien régime; something like that happened in our own country when Patrick Henry in March 1775 made that stirring speech in the Virginia Convention asking ‘Give me Liberty or give me Death!’ Durkheim makes much of such moments of, shall we say, collective enthusiasm, which are not sustainable; yet, they have imprinted the groups marked by them, either in symbols of collective identity or in periodic gatherings which renew the sentiments underlying the social ties of the group. I’ll comment on that in a minute, but first let me note that in the same paragraph (p. 300) after mentioning the night of August 4 he also talks in the abstract about the individual able to enter into communion with a crowd. His language, Durkheim notes, becomes bombastic and might seem ridiculous in an ordinary setting; his gestures are overbearing, and he gives the impression of being dominated by a moral force which is beyond him and of which he is only the interpreter. Perhaps Durkheim had in mind the ancient prophets, or perhaps he had in mind Danton and Robespierre during the French Revolution, but his discussion would also aptly characterize what Troeltsch and Weber might term a charismatic figure.

Later on in this chapter he discusses what he sees as a prototype of social change, the special occasion when the entire tribe gathers, leaving aside the quotidian life for the exceptional occasion of a corrobbori festival. The pace of change quickens, individual identities of ordinary life merge into that of a collectivity with heightened emotions and a grand climax of ‘collective effervescence,’ where antinomianism prevails, and sexual taboos are broken. Dear Professor Santayana, I think some readers of this part of FEVR might be shocked, but last fall when I was in Paris, people were still talking about the scandale that the Ballets Russes of Serge Diaghilev had caused with the staging of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps: Durkheim’s text of 1912 might well serve as the libretto for Diaghilev’s 1913 ballet!

I believe there is a function to Durkheim’s analysis of social change, alternating between the dull moments of social life where there is loss of meaning there are ultimately pathologies (he had in earlier and more youthful writings warned of what he called anomie, a void in central moral direction) and moments of great collective enthusiasm. I think that, writing in 1912, Professor Durkheim felt that there had been a waning of the great wave of ‘collective efferverscence’ that had animated the French republican tradition during the peak of the Dreyfus affair, especially among intellectuals ‘of the left’, and that had successfully led to laïcization of public education. Instead, French political life, from what I judged during my stay last fall, is badly splintered between the left and the right, and within each faction. I do not know how long Gaston Doumergue will stay in office as Prime Minister, but France’s parliamentary system does not make for the stability of our presidential system.

As a person who cares deeply about the French republic and its famous principles of 1789 (an early writing of his was ‘Les Principes de 1789 et la Sociologie,’ Revue Internationale de l’Enseignement, 19 (1890): 450–456), Professor Durkheim is concerned with a moral renewal of France. Although his parental home region is since 1870 in German hands, he does not support the conservative nationalist party of Maurice Barrès demanding a restoration of Alsace-Lorraine to France – in fact Durkheim has even been accused of being pro-German in some scurrilous attacks. No, his idea of a societal renewal is strongly suggested in the ‘Conclusion’ of his book, especially on page 610, where he tells readers that all societies have the need to periodically reaffirm the collective feelings and ideals which give each its unity and personality. This awakening, or reawakening, takes place in reunions, assemblies, or gatherings in which individuals in close proximity to one another reaffirm their common ties. The processes by which this feeling of unity is generated, Durkheim advances, are no different from the Christian celebrations of the major phases of Christ’s life or the Jewish celebrations of Passover and of the Decalogue.

If, Durkheim postulates, we have difficulty seeing what the festivals and ceremonies of the future will be, it is because we are in a period of transition and moral mediocrity. We are no longer sustained by the great deeds of the past which generated the enthusiasm of our fathers (perhaps Durkheim meant the great eras of exploration and medical conquests, and hopefully not the colonial conquests of the nineteenth century, and similarly for the United States, the technological marvels shown at the 1904 Exposition and our soon-to-be-completed Panama Canal). There is a bit of the visionary in Professor Durkheim when he states rather bleakly that ‘the old deities are aging or dying and new ones are not yet born’ (p. 611) – which makes me think of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, that you warned me about. But then follows a more optimistic turn, and he sees the present period of anxiety and uncertainty yielding to a new cycle of creative effervescence, with new ideals, followed by their institutionalization – if I may introduce that term – in new festivals, new symbols of collective identity. What will these be, opines Durkheim, is for the future, not for us here and now, to decide. Professor Durkheim’s sociology of religion does not pretend to be a religious sociology.

However, his conclusion also has passing remarks which should intrigue sociologists more than philosophers. On page 635 he states that a new kind of society has developed: international society, which has already universalized religious beliefs. As it spreads, the collective horizon widens. Society no longer seems to be the totality par excellence of social life; it becomes a part of something greater, with undetermined frontiers that can greatly recede.

How to develop a far broader sociological conceptual framework to do justice to the emergent society and its moral frame – shall we call it global society, or perhaps, dear Professor Santayana, may I for this occasion use globalization as a neologism? – is not in the conclusion of FEVR. Perhaps this is what Professor Durkheim and his team are presently seeking to develop, and in this spirit, one can only hope that Professor Albion Small [1854–1926] and his colleagues at Chicago can collaborate with French sociology. They have much to offer one another, including much political overlap, and the door for exchanges was already opened as far back as 1898 in a letter of Durkheim to the Editor of the American Journal of Sociology (3: 848–849) published by Professor Small. You will recall that is the journal in which Hutton Webster’s review of FEVR appears, and which I mentioned was the most positive of the ones I cited.

Now for some remarks about how this impressive study connects Durkheim with philosophy. His ties to philosophy are very deep, in epistemology and ethics; he had as teachers at the École Normale Supérieure some of the best minds in French philosophy and in turn, I am told, he is active preparing students at the ENS for their examination in philosophy in the agrégation. He has kept his contacts in the field by attending and participating in meetings of philosophical associations (such as the French Philosophical Society), and publishing in journals read by philosophers (notably the Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale). He is aware of new trends in philosophy, as indicated by his giving a course this winter (1913–1914) on Pragmatism. I wish I had stayed to hear it since there may be overlap between the approaches to reality of Durkheim and that of Peirce, James, G.H. Mead (whom you might have had as an undergraduate student at Harvard), and of course yourself, dear Professor Santayana.

From his introduction to his conclusion, Durkheim is grappling with key areas of philosophy as frames for the sociology of religion. And there is in the background a silent interlocutor: Immanuel Kant, who seemed to get renewed attention in French philosophical circles. From what I have read in Durkheim, he welcomes the challenges Kant offers in metaphysics and the theory of knowledge, in the notion of antinomies, in the notion of duty, and, broadly, in the analysis of ethics or morale. Since you, dear Professor Santayana, are a renowned philosopher with a thorough knowledge of Kant (despite your differences with him), I will not bother you with an amateurish discussion of Kantian metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Let me simply indicate the points of entry that I find challenging.

One such opening is with the theory of knowledge, epistemology. Right away in his introduction to FEVR, Durkheim announces his study is not merely a scientific study of religion but has a broader scope: to tackle problems which have been the domain of philosophy. Basic are the categories of understanding, the notions of time, space, kind, cause, substance, personality, and so on (p. 13), and a bit later he adds to that list even the notion of contradiction (p. 17) – all these (except personality) were for Kant a priori categories of understanding which made possible knowing of phenomena. Durkheim then plunges in the Australian cognitive mapping of the world and demonstrates that the framework for experiencing reality consists of collective representations that transcend individuals, but this is not Kant’s transcendental idealism. Transcendence, if I have understood him correctly, is the reality of society, which makes possible objective knowledge. Collective representations, such as those of the a priori, are at the heart of impersonal concepts; they are derivatives of social organization.

Durkheim returns to this at the conclusion of FEVR in some critical passages in which he discusses the role of society in the genesis of logical thought. Logic became possible when men began to imagine a world of stable ideals (‘un monde d’idéaux stables, p. 622), superior to the representations coming from sentient experience, which they could share in common. Being impersonal and being stable are characteristic of the realm of concepts, of truth (p. 623), but Durkheim does not stop at what might seem like Plato’s vision. He argues that if concepts are taken as true and basic to logic, their universality comes from language, and language is an experience we share in common, whose structures can be methodically studied (p. 625). I may add here that Durkheim has keenly followed the seminal linguistic studies of the late Ferdinand de Saussure [1857–1913] and Antoine Meillet [1866–1936], and that the latter has been a valuable contributor to the Année Sociologique. Concepts, Durkheim continues, are not only true but also have to fit in with other beliefs, other opinions that are part of a totality of collective representations. Even science rests upon opinion, and one can scientifically study opinion – that is a major endeavor for sociology (p. 626).

Durkheim pauses to state that it isn’t the sociology of opinion that makes opinion itself, although a critical sociology might make public opinion more aware of itself or reflexive. Still, science (here sociology) does not legislate opinion for it draws from opinion the strength (resources?) to act upon opinion. To be sure, Durkheim has spent much time discussing concepts and logic, core elements of philosophy, to demonstrate that our human cognitive apparatus – if I may interject this phrase – is neither something that individuals construct in a random or chaotic way, nor a transcendental endowment beyond the reach of scientific investigation, but has a collective origin in social reality, the reality of society. It is, he continues, that reality which is the experience of totality as the basis of classifications (p. 629), for each individual can have only a finite awareness of reality. The concept of totality is essential to subsume all other concepts; it is the abstract form of the concept of society (p. 630), for all purpose what Durkheim might have termed an ‘imagined community.’ Periodically, the whole must be renewed – re-energized – and that is what I have mentioned earlier in terms of periodic gatherings. What Australian natives undertake are the solemn occasions of the corrobbori, but may I point out, dear Professor Santayana, that we have in our American culture not only the political gatherings at conventions but also, in keeping with Durkheim’s analysis of the role of religion, great periods of religious revivals, such as the Great Awakening and the new urban revival of Pentecostalism. The latter, incidentally, started a few years ago in Los Angeles but has not yet come to Cambridge; from some reports in the sensational press it seems that Australian Aborigines would find themselves quite at home at these emotional California gatherings!

Professor Durkheim is not just interested in going to the origins of our basic cognitive framework; he is also keen on providing a sociological account of another great side of Kant: ethics or morale. I understand that since the publication of FEVR he has been giving a great deal of attention to preparing a thorough sociological analysis of morality. Kant’s notion of duty greatly appeals to Durkheim, and, of course, so does Kant’s rejection of utilitarianism as the basis of morality: that is, of morality as a function of what benefits the individual. In his doctoral dissertation, De la Division du Travail Social (1894, rev. edn 1902), Durkheim had already lashed at utilitarianism in his refutation of Herbert Spencer’s economic individualism. Now that he has analyzed how fundamentally religion is at the core of social organization, he is looking at the necessary complement of religion, ethics or morality. There is no religion without morality. For Durkheim, both have their objectivity in the reality of society, in the ideals which society carries, along with its empirical manifestations. But Durkheim is well aware of what the pragmatists have stressed: that change takes place, that the universe is evolving materially, as modern astronomy reveals, and so does society. So, what are the religious and ethical forms that may be slowly emerging? Durkheim poses this in concluding his FEVR. The question of what may be the evolved forms of the religious life of the twentieth century and beyond has also led him to start analyzing the appropriate forms of moral conduct for contemporary civil society.

I don’t know when he will be able to complete his work on ethics, which will be the crowning jewel of his sociology. He has taken time off, so to speak, to address an additional perennial philosophical question, the dualism of human nature. M. Félix Alcan has kindly sent me the second issue of the current volume of a multidisciplinary, multilingual Italian journal, Scientia. It has a fascinating essay by Durkheim, ‘Le dualisme de la nature humaine et ses conditions sociales’ (Scientia 15(34) (1914): 206–221), in which he extends his discussion in FEVR by proposing that the mind–body dualism is related to the sacred–profane dichotomy so central to the study of the sociology of religion, and to the place of civilization in the modern world. If we as individuals feel the benefits of civilization, we also feel its pressures. That tension is likely to continue, for our social self will continue to make demands on our individual self no less for ‘moderns’ as for ‘primitives,’ although the forms of these social pressures will of course vary.

Well, dear Professor Santayana, I have barely begun to do justice to FEVR. I do highly recommend you will read it yourself in its entirety and judge for yourself as to its merits. I understand you are planning to go this month for a visit to Sarajevo, the ‘Jerusalem of Europe’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina. I will remain here for the commencement exercises, and I trust you will have an exciting stay in the Balkans.

Your devoted

E.T.