He admits that the individual savage often uses the same process of reasoning under a given set of circumstances that any one of us would use. But the "representations collectives" are governed by entirely different laws, and contain "emotional elements and definitely felt mystic relationships."
The larger portion of the book treats of the relation of "prelogical" mentality to language, to enumeration, the connection of the law of participation with hunting, fishing, war, totemism, etc. All of the familiar matter of social anthropology is reinterpreted in the light of this view. What this all amounts to is that savage peoples seem to make habitual use of certain illogical conceptions and associations in their everyday life, and that they have a dominating feeling of close relationship with their environment, — a "mystic symbiosis." This psychic solidarity is the natural concomitant of primitive communism.
The chapter in which M. Levy-Bruhl explains the transition from "prelogical" mentality to the higher forms is interesting. In the primitive social group, where mental processes are prevailingly collective and the feeling of unity with the environment is absolute, as in certain totemic tribes of Central Australia, the normal state is one of implicit " participation." But with the development of society comes the differentiation of the individual consciousness, which lessens the feeling of symbiosis and demands its renewal in explicit representation. Hence ritual. Myth is the mystic verbal environment of one of those "representations collectives." The content of the myth is originally meaningless. It is the emotional value of the associations which the words recall that is of primary importance. Later, when the particular words and phrases become disassociated from their proper mystic relationships, the aetiological myth comes into being. This smacks of Max Müller.
M. Lévy-Bruhl has not convinced me that " representations collectives " are subject to laws of psychology entirely peculiar to themselves. Even admitting the nebulous " law of participation," the mystic feeling of communion so dominant in primitive societies, there seems to be no need to construct an entirely new and separate psychology. This "participation" is merely a specialized group of associations grown up under the fostering influence of
