Reviews. 93
In the former M. Durkheim discusses the definitions of religion associated with the names of Max Miiller, Spencer, and Reville, and shows their inexactitude by comparison of the objective facts of various religions. He argues that these distinguished writers have begun at the wrong end. Their common blunder is to endeavour to express at the outset the whole contents of religious life. But these contents vary infinitely with the time and the society, and they can only be determined slowly and progressively with the advance of science. It is, in fact, the object of religious sociology to ascertain them ; they cannot, therefore, furnish the matter of an initial definition. The exterior and apparent form of religious phenomena is alone immediately accessible to observa- tion ; and it is to that we must address ourselves. He then pro- ceeds to propound and defend his own definition of religious phenomena. They consist, he tells us, in obligatory beliefs con- nected with definite practices relating to objects presented in these beliefs. Religion is a totality more or less organised and systematised of phenomena of this kind. We must seek its origin, not in individual sentiments, but, since the obligation of the beliefs is social in its origin, in the states of the collective soul ; and it varies as they vary. Personal religion is only the subjective aspect of the external, impersonal, and public religion. The beliefs and practices which are the fruit of individual spontaneity concern similar objects to those of the obligatory beliefs and practices. To make the definition complete and correct we must include under the name of religious phenomena these voluntary beliefs and practices. The notion of sacredness remains in its origin social, and can only be explained sociologically.
From this thoughtful methodological dissertation I turn to Messrs. Hubert and Mauss' essay. It is the exposition of a provisional hypothesis on the nature and function of sacrifice different from those enunciated by Tylor, Robertson Smith, and Frazer. Theories of sacrifice are as old as the religions ; but it is to the British anthropologists just mentioned and their followers that are due the first really scientific theories. Objecting that Professor Tylor has well described the phases of the moral development of sacrifice, but has totally overlooked the development of its mechanism, and that the fault of the school of Robertson Smith is the attempt to reduce the manifold forms of sacrifice to the unity of a principle chosen arbitrarily and resting on no historical
