Durkheim on
the Idea of the Soul
Sections 4, 5, and 6 of Chapter 8, Book 2 ("The Elementary
Beliefs") of his Elementary Forms of Religious
Life, as
translated by Joseph Swain (1915). Durkheim has just spent nearly 150 pages
on "Totemic Beliefs" in Australia, and another 20 on the idea of the soul
and reincarnation. I've included only the substantive footnotes.
These are among the most significant passages in the book.
4
Thus the notion of the soul is a particular application
of the beliefs relative to sacred beings. This is the explanation of the
religious character which this idea has had from the moment when it first
appeared in history, and which it still retains to-day. In fact, the soul
has always been considered a sacred thing; on this ground, it is opposed
to the body which is, in itself, profane. It is not merely distinguished
from its material envelope as the inside from the outside; it is not merely
represented as made out of more subtle and fluid matter; but more than
this, it inspires those sentiments which are everywhere reserved for that
which is divine. If it is not made into a god, it is at least regarded
as a spark of the divinity. This essential characteristic would be inexplicable
if the idea of the soul were only a pre-scientific solution given to the
problem of dreams; for there is nothing in the dream to awaken religious
emotions, so the cause by which these are explained could not have such
a character. But if the soul is a part of the divine substance, it represents
something not ourselves that is within us; if it is made of the same mental
matter as the sacred beings, it is natural that it should become the object
of the same sentiments.
And the sacred character which men thus attribute
to themselves is not the product of a pure illusion either; like the notions
of religious force and of divinity, the notion of the soul is not without
a foundation in reality. It is perfectly true that we are made up of two
distinct parts, which are opposed to one another as the sacred to the profane,
and we may say that, in a certain sense, there is divinity in us. For society,
this unique source of all that is sacred, does not limit itself to moving
us from without and affecting us for the moment; it establishes itself
within us in a durable manner. It arouses within us a whole world of ideas
and sentiments which express it but which, at the same time, form an integral
and permanent part of ourselves. When the Australian goes away from a religious
ceremony, the representations
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which this communal life has aroused or re-aroused within him are not obliterated
in a second. The figures of the great ancestors, the heroic exploits whose
memory these rites perpetuate, the great deeds of every sort in which he,
too, has participated through the cult, in a word, all these numerous ideals
which he has elaborated with the co-operation of his fellows, continue
to live in his consciousness and, through the emotions which are attached
to them and the ascendancy which they hold over his entire being, they
are sharply distinguished from the vulgar impressions arising from his
daily relations with external things. Moral ideas have the same character.
It is society which forces them upon us, and as the respect inspired by
it is naturally extended to all that comes from it, its imperative rules
of conduct are invested, by reason of their origin, with an authority and
a dignity which is shared by none of our internal states: therefore, we
assign them a place apart in our psychical life. Although our moral conscience
is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality
with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders
and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very
tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within
us that is not of ourselves. This is the objective foundation of the idea
of the soul: those representations whose flow constitutes our interior
life are of two different species which are irreducible one into another.
Some concern themselves with the external and material world; others, with
an ideal world to which we attribute a moral superiority over the first.
So are realIy made up of two beings facing in different and almost contrary
directions, one of whom exercises a real pre-eminence over the other. Such
is the profound meaning of the antithesis which all men have more or less
clearly conceived between the body and the soul, the material and the spiritual
beings who coexist within us. Moralists and preachers have often maintained
that no one can deny the reality of duty and its sacred character without
falling into materialism. And it is true that if we have no idea of moral
and religious imperatives, our psychical life will all be reduced to one
level,* all our states of consciousness
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will be on the same plane, and all feeling of duality will perish. To make
this duality intelligible, it is, of course, in no way necessary to imagine
a mysterious and unrepresentable substance, under the name of the soul,
which is opposed to the body. But here, as in regard to the idea of sacredness,
the error concerns the letter of the symbol employed, not the reality of
the fact symbolized. It remains true that our nature is double; there really
is a particle of divinity in us because there is within us a particle of
these great ideas which are the soul of the group.
*Even if we believe that religious
and moral representations constitute the essential elements of the idea
of the soul, still we do not mean to say that they are the only ones. Around
this central nucleus are grouped other states of consciousness having the
same character, though to a slighter degree. This is the case with all
the superior forms of the intellectual life, owing to the special price
and dignity attributed to them by society. When we devote our lives to
science or art, we feel that we are moving in a circle of things that are
above bodily sensations, as we shall have occasion to show more precisely
in our conclusion. This is why the highest functions of the intelligence
have always been considered specific manifestations of the soul. But they
would probably not have been enough to establish the idea of it.
So the individual soul is only a portion of the
collective soul of the group; it is the anonymous force at the basis of
the cult, but incarnated in an individual whose personality it espouses;
it is mana individualized. Perhaps dreams aided in determining certain
secondary characteristics of the idea. The inconsistency and instability
of the images which fill our minds during sleep, and their remarkable aptitude
for transforming themselves into one another, may have furnished the model
for this subtle, transparent and Protean matter out of which the soul is
believed to be made. Also, the facts of swooning, catalepsy, etc., may
have suggested the idea that the soul was mobile, and quitted the body
temporarily during this life; this, in its turn, has served to explain
certain dreams. But all these experiences and observations could have had
only a secondary and complementary influence, whose very existence it is
difficult to establish. All that is really essential in the idea comes
from elsewhere.
But does this genesis of the idea of the soul misunderstand
its essential characteristic? If the soul is a particular form of the impersonal
principle which is diffused in the group, the totemic species and all the
things of every sort which are attached to these, at bottom it is impersonal
itself. So, with differences only of degree, it should have the same properties
as the force of which it is a special form, and particularly, the same
diffusion, the same aptitude for spreading itself contagiously and the
same ubiquity. But quite on the contrary, the soul is voluntarily represented
as a concrete, definite being, wholly contained within itself and not communicable
to others; it is made the basis of our personality.
But this way of conceiving the soul is the product
of a late and philosophic elaboration. The popular representation, as it
is spontaneously formed from common experience, is very different, especially
at first. For the Australian, the soul is a very vague
265
thing, undecided and wavering in form, and spread over the whole organism.
Though it manifests itself especially at certain points, there are probably
none from which it is totally absent. So it has a diffusion, a contagiousness
and an omnipresence comparable to those of the mana. Like the mana,
it is able to divide and duplicate itself infinitely, though remaining
entire in each of its parts; it is from these divisions and duplications
that the plurality of souls is derived. On the other hand, the doctrine
of reincarnation, whose generality we have established, shows how many
impersonal elements enter into the idea of the soul and how essential those
are. For if the same soul is going to clothe a new personality in each
generation, the individual forms in which it successively develops itself
must all be equally external to it, and have nothing to do with its true
nature. It is a sort of generic substance which individualizes itself only
secondarily and superficially. Moreover, this conception of the soul is
by no means completely gone. The cult of relics shows that for a host of
believers even to-day, the soul of a saint, with all its essential powers,
continues to adhere to his different bones; and this implies that he is
believed to be able to diffuse himself, subdivide himself and incorporate
himself in all sorts of different things simultaneously.
Just as the characteristic attributes of the mana
are found in the soul, so secondary and superficial changes are enough
to enable the mana to individualize itself in the form of a soul. We pass
from the first idea to the second with no break of continuity. Every religious
force which is attached in a special way to a determined being participates
in the characteristics of this being, takes on its appearance and becomes
its spiritual double. Tregear, in his Maori-Polynesian dictionary, has
thought it possible to connect the word mana with another group
of words, such as manawa, manamana, etc., which seem to belong to
the same family, and which signify heart, life, consciousness. Is this
not equivalent to saying that some sort of kinship ought to exist between
the corresponding ideals as well, that is to say, between the idea of impersonal
force and those of internal life, mental force and, in a word, of the soul?
This is why the question whether the churinga is sacred because it serves
as the residence of a soul, as Spencer and Gillen believe, or because
it has impersonal virtues, as Strehlow thinks, seems to us to have little
interest and to be without sociological importance. Whether the efficacy
of a sacred object is represented in an abstract form in the mind or is
attributed to some personal agent does not really matter. The psychological
roots of both beliefs are identical: an object
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is sacred because it is sacred, in one way or another, a collective sentiment
of respect which removes it from profane touches. In order to explain this
sentiment, men sometimes fall back on to a vague and imprecise cause, and
sometimes on to a determined spiritual being endowed with a name and a
history; but these different interpretations are superadded to one fundamental
phenomenon which is the same in both cases.
This, moreover, is what explains the singular confusions,
examples of which we have met with as we have progressed. The individual,
the soul of the ancestor which he reincarnates or from which his own is
an emanation, his churinga and the animals of the totemic species are,
as we have said, partially equivalent and interchangeable things. This
is because in certain connections, they all affect the collective consciousness
in the same way. If the churinga is sacred, it is because of the collective
sentiments of respect inspired by the totemic emblem carved upon its surface;
now the same sentiment attaches itself to the animals or plants whose outward
form is reproduced by the totem, to the soul of the individual, for it
is thought of in the form of the totemic being, and finally to the ancestral
soul, of which the preceding one is only a particular aspect. So all these
various objects, whether real or ideal, have one common element by which
they arouse a single affective state in the mind, and through this, they
become confused. In so far as they are expressed by one and the same representation,
they are indistinct. This is how the Arunta has come to regard the churinga
as the body common to the individual, the ancestor and even the totemic
being. It is his way of expressing the identity of the sentiments of which
these different things are the object.
However, it does not follow from the fact the idea
of the soul is derived from the idea of mana that the first has a relatively
later origin, or that there was a period in history when men were acquainted
with religious forces only in their impersonal forms. When some wish to
designate by the word preanimist an historical period during which animism
was completely unknown, they build up an arbitrary hypothesis; for there
is no people among whom the ideas of the soul and of mana do not coexist
side by side. So there is no ground for imagining that they were formed
at two distinct times; everything, on the contrary, goes to show that the
two are coeval. Just as there is no society without individuals, so those
impersonal forces which are disengaged from the group cannot establish
themselves
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without incarnating themselves in the individual consciousness where they
individualize themselves. In reality, we do not have two different developments,
but two different aspects of one and the same development. It is true that
they do not have an equal importance; one is more essential than the other.
The idea of mana does not presuppose the idea of the soul; for if the mana
is going to individualize itself and break itself up into the particular
souls, it must first of all exist, and what it is in itself does not depend
upon the forms it takes when individualized. But on the contrary, the idea
of the soul cannot be understood except when taken in connection with the
idea of mana. So on this ground, it is possible to say that it is the result
of a secondary formation but we are speaking of a secondary formation in
the logical, not the chronological, sense of the word.
5
But how does it come that men have believed that the
soul survives the body and is even able to do so for an indefinite length
of time?
From the analysis which we have made, it is evident
that the belief in immortality has not been established under the influence
of moral ideas. Men have not imagined the prolongation of their existence
beyond the tomb in order that a just retribution for moral acts may be
assured in another life, if it fails in this one; for we have seen that
all considerations of this sort are foreign to the primitive conception
of the beyond.
Nor is the other hypothesis any better, according
to which the other life was imagined as a means of escaping the agonizing
prospect of annihilation. In the first place, it is not true that the need
of personal survival was actively felt at the beginning. The primitive
generally accepts the idea of death
with a sort of indifference. Being trained to count his own individuality
for little, and being accustomed to exposing his life constantly, he gives
it up easily enough. More than that, the immortality promised by the religions
he practices is not personal. In a large number of cases, the soul does
not continue the personality of the dead man, or does not continue it long,
for, forgetful of its previous existence, it goes away after a while, to
animate another body and thus becomes the vivifying principle of a new
personality. Even among the most advanced peoples, it was only a pale and
sad existence that shades led in Sheol or Erebus, and could hardly attenuate
the regrets occasioned by the memories of the life lost.
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A more satisfactory explanation is the one attaching
the conception of a posthumous life to the experiences of dreams. Our dead
friends and relatives reappear to us in dreams: we see them act, we hear
them speak; it is natural to conclude that they continue to exist. But
if these observations were able to confirm the idea after it had once been
born, they hardly seem capable of creating it out of nothing. Dreams in
which we see departed persons living again are too rare and too short and
leave only too vague recollections of themselves, to have been able to
suggest so important a system of beliefs to men all by themselves. There
is a remarkable lack of proportion between the effect and the cause to
which it is attributed.
What makes this question embarrassing is the fact
that in itself, the idea of the soul does not imply that of its survival,
but rather seems to exclude it. In fact, we have seen that the soul, though
being distinguished from the body, is believed, nevertheless, to be closely
united to it: it ages along with the body, it feels a reaction from all
the maladies that fall upon the body; so it would seem natural that it
should die with the body. At least, men ought to have believed that it
ceased to exist from the moment when it definitely lost its original form,
and when it was no longer what it had been. Yet it is at just this moment
that a new life opens out before it.
The myths which we have already described give the
only possible explanation of this belief. We have seen that the souls of
new-born children are either emanations of the ancestral souls, or these
souls themselves reincarnated. But in order that they may either reincarnate
themselves, or periodically give off new emanations, they must have survived
their first holders. So it seems as though they admitted the survival of
the dead in order to explain the birth of the living. The primitive does
not have the idea of an all-powerful god who creates souls out of nothing.
It seems to him that souls cannot be made except out of souls. So those
who are born can only be new forms of those who have been; consequently,
it is necessary that these latter continue to exist in order that others
may be born. In fine, the belief in the immortality of the soul is the
only way in which men were able to explain a fact which could not fail
to attract their attention; this fact is the perpetuity of the life of
the group. Individuals die, but the clan survives. So the forces which
give it life must have the same perpetuity. Now these forces are the souls
which animate individual bodies; for it is in them and through them that
the group is realized. For this reason, it is necessary that they endure.
It is even necessary that in enduring, they remain always the same; for,
as the clan always keeps its
269
characteristic appearance, the spiritual substance out of which it is made
must be thought of as qualitatively invariable. Since it is always the
same clan with the same totemic principle, it is necessary that the souls
be the same, for souls are only the totemic principle broken up and particularized.
Thus there is something like a germinative plasm, of a mystic order, which
is transmitted from generation to generation and which makes, or at least
is believed to make, the spiritual unity of the clan through all time.
And this belief, in spite of its symbolic character is not without a certain
objective truth. For though the group may not be immortal in the absolute
sense of the word, still it is true that it endures longer than the individuals
and that it is born and incarnated afresh in each new generation.
A fact confirms this interpretation. We have seen
that according to the testimony of Strehlow, the Arunta distinguish two
sorts of souls: on the one hand are those of the ancestors of the Alcheringa,
on the other, those of the individuals who actually compose the active
body of the tribe at each moment in history. The second sort only survive
the body for a relatively short time; they are soon totally annihilated.
Only the former are immortal; as they are uncreated, so they do not perish.
It is also to be noticed that they are the only ones whose immortality
is necessary to explain the permanence of the group; for it is upon them,
and upon them alone, that it is incumbent to assure the perpetuity of the
clan, for every conception is their work. In this connection, the others
have no part to play. So souls are not said to be immortal except in so
far as this immortality is useful in rendering intelligible the continuity
of the collective life.
Thus the causes leading to the first beliefs in
a future life had no connections with the functions to be filled at a later
period by the institutions beyond the tomb. But when that had once appeared,
they were soon utilized for other purposes besides those which had been
their original reasons for existence. Even in the Australian societies,
we see them beginning to organize themselves for this other purpose. Moreover,
there was no need of any fundamental transformation for this. How true
it is that the same social institution can successively fulfil different
functions without changing its nature!
6
The idea of the soul was for a long time, and still
is in part, the popular form of the idea of personality.* So the
genesis
270
of the former of these ideas should aid us in understanding how the second
was formed.
*It may be objected perhaps
that unity is the characteristic of the personality, while the soul has
always been conceived as multiple, and as capable of dividing and subdividing
itself almost to infinity. But we know to-day that the unity of the person
is also made up of parts and that it, too, is capable of dividing and decomposing.
Yet the notion of personality does not vanish because of the fact that
we no longer think of it as a metaphysical and indivisible atom. It is
the same with the popular conceptions of personality which find their expression
in the idea of the soul. These show that men have always felt that the
human personality does not have that absolute unity attributed to it by
certain metaphysicians.
From what has already been said, it is clear that
the notion of person is the product of two sorts of factors. One of these
is essentially impersonal: it is the spiritual principle serving as the
soul of the group. In fact, it is this which constitutes the very substance
of individual souls. Now this is not the possession of anyone in particular:
it is a part of the collective patrimony; in it and through it, all consciousnesses
communicate. But on the other hand, in order to have separate personalities,
it is necessary that another factor intervene to break up and differentiate
this principle: in other words, an individualizing factor is necessary.
It is the body that fulfills this function. As bodies are distinct from
each other, and as they occupy different points of space and time, each
of them forms a special centre about which the collective representations
reflect and colour themselves differently. The result is that even if all
the consciousnesses in these bodies are directed towards the same world,
to wit, the world of ideas and sentiments which brings about the moral
unity of the group, they do not all see it from the same angle; each one
expresses it in its own fashion.
Of these two equally indispensable factors, the
former is certainly not the less important, for this is the one which furnishes
the original matter for the idea of the soul. Perhaps some will be surprised
to see so considerable a role attributed to the impersonal element in the
genesis of the idea of personality. But the philosophical analysis of the
idea of person, which has gone far ahead of the sociological analysis,
has reached analogous results on this point. Among all the philosophers,
Leibniz is one of those who have felt most vividly what a personality is;
for before all, the monad is a personal and autonomous being. Yet, for
Leibniz, the contents of all the monads is identical. In fact, all are
consciousnesses which express one and the same object, the world; and as
the world itself is only a system of representations, each particular consciousness
is really only the reflection of the universal consciousness. However,
each one expresses it from its own point of view, and in its own manner.
We know how this difference of perspectives comes from the
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fact that the monads are situated differently in relation to each other
and to the whole system which they constitute.
Kant expresses the same sentiment, though in a different
form. For him, the corner-stone of the personality is the will. Now the
will is the faculty of acting in conformity with reason, and the reason
is that which is most impersonal within us. For reason is not my reason;
it is human reason in general. It is the power which the mind has of rising
above the particular, the contingent and the individual, to think in universal
forms. So from this point of view, we may say that what makes a man a personality
is that by which he is confounded with other men, that which makes him
a man, not a certain man. The senses, the body and, in a word, all that
individualizes, is, on the contrary, considered as the antagonist of the
personality by Kant.
This is because individuation is not the essential
characteristic of the personality. A person is not merely distinguished
from all the others. It is especially a being to which is attributed a
relative autonomy in relation to the environment with which it is most
immediately in contact. It is represented as capable of moving itself,
to a certain degree: this is what Leibniz expressed in an exaggerated way
when he said that the monad was completely closed to the outside. Now our
analysis permits us to see how this conception was formed and to what it
corresponds.
In fact, the soul, a symbolic representation of
the personality, has the same characteristic. Although closely bound to
the body, it is believed to be profoundly distinct from it and to enjoy,
in relation to it, a large degree of independence. During life, it may
leave it temporarily, and it definitely withdraws at death. Far from being
dependent upon the body, it dominates it from the higher dignity which
is in it. It may well take from the body the outward form in which it individualizes
itself, but it owes nothing essential to it. Nor is the autonomy which
all peoples have attributed to the soul a pure illusion; we know now what
its objective foundation is. It is quite true that the elements which serve
to form the idea of the soul and those which enter into the representation
of the body come from two different sources that are independent of one
another. One sort are made up of the images and impressions coming from
all parts of the organism; the others consist in the ideas and sentiments
which come from and express society. So the former are not derived from
the latter. There really is a part of ourselves which is not placed in
immediate dependence upon the organic factor: this is all that which represents
society in us.
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The general ideas which religion or science fix in our minds, the mental
operations which these ideas suppose, the beliefs and sentiments which
are at the basis of our moral life, and all these superior forms of psychical
activity which society awakens in us, these do not follow in the trail
of our bodily states, as our sensations and our general bodily consciousness
do. As we have already shown, this is because the world of representations
in which social life passes is superimposed upon its material substratum
far from arising from it; the determinism which reigns there is much more
supple than the one whose roots are in the constitution of our tissues
and it leaves with the actor a justified impression of the greatest liberty.
The medium in which we thus move is less opaque and less resistant: we
feel ourselves to be, and we are, more at our ease there. In a word, the
only way we have of freeing ourselves from physical forces is to oppose
them with collective forces.
But whatever we receive from society, we hold in
common with our companions. So it is not at all true that we are more personal
as we are more individualized. The two terms are in no way synonymous:
in one sense, they oppose more than they imply one another. Passion individualizes,
yet it also enslaves. Our sensations are essentially individual; yet we
are more personal the more we are freed from our senses and able to think
and act with concepts. So those who insist upon all the social elements
of the individual do not mean by that to deny or debase the personality.
They merely refuse to confuse it with the fact of individuation.*
*For all this, we do not deny
the importance of the individual factor: this is explained from our point
of view just as easily as its contrary. If the essential element of the
personality is the social part of us, on the other hand there can be no
social life unless distinct individuals are associated, and this is richer
the more numerous and different from each other they are. So the individual
factor is a condition of the impersonal factor. And the contrary is no
less true, for society itself is an important source of individual differences.
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