432 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
and industrial implements, to each workman the possibility of giving all his technical skill and obtaining a greater wage within the limits set by the collective contract.
The obstacles opposing the diffusion of the collective contract, especially in France, are principally two the insufficiency of the agencies able to bring about the collective contract, and the judicial instability of this contract in the present state of legislation. The collective contract is far from finding in France, as in England, its necessary support in professional organization. Another cause of the restricted development of the collective contract must be sought in the legislation which prohibited coalition and association, and in the state of mind maintained by that state of mind among employers and workmen. What I should wish to see is the legal recognition of the collective contract. M. B. RAYNARD, in Reforme socialc, June 16, 1903. A. B.
The Genesis and Basis of the Religious Conscience. Some sociologists of great authority have attributed to religion a preponderant function, considering it the pedestal of the whole social edifice. F. de Coulanges, in his Ancient City, wished to show us that from religion all institutions are derived. Kidd, in his Social Evolution, considers religion the prime factor of human evolution ; as the function which subordinates reason and individual interests to the collective organism. In these conceptions there is not only an exchange of cause and effect, since the entire form of religious thought is subordinate to existing social con- ditions, and not the latter to the former, but a generalization from one particular fact, religion being but one function of human society.
Certain other writers do not recognize in religion a general phenomenon in- dispensable to the social constitution. Religiosity, according to Broca, is for the most part a passive manifestation, the result of education, often destroyed with the highest development of reason. Many sociologists and ethnologists attest that with some savage tribes there is no true trace of religion.
The belief in spiritual beings or, as Tyler has rightly styled it, animism is the fundamental element, the principle, of the religious conscience. It may be conceived as the belief in a peculiar soul, of which the existence is supposed durable even after death, as the belief in other spirits exercising a beneficent or maleficent action on human events, and considered in consequence objects of pro- pitiation and of cult. These two tendencies of animism give place to the two great doctrines which exercise an all-powerful influence on the life of individuals and peoples the doctrines of the immortality of the soul and of divine direction.
The hallucination of insanity, the phenomena of apoplexy, of catalepsy, of sleep, and in general all the transitory forms of insensibility, aided the tendency to make a distinction between soul and body. Other spirits were conceived of as existing, and some became divinities. By ascribing human passions to divinity, a god became an expansion of the human personality. In like manner the cult was an expansion of human society. From the social relation which is an exchange of service, a certain reciprocity between man and divinity was imagined, a true com- merce between heaven and earth.
An important element which contributes to form the character of some religions is morality. It has been supposed to be the humble servant of religion, the tie between the two being so strong that it was commonly thought that an irreligious man must necessarily be an immoral man. Morality and religion, how- ever, are two distinct elements, both being shaped by the influence of social con- ditions. P. FRANCESCO COSENTINI, in Humanite nouvelle, June, 1903. A. B.
