Maniacal suicide. βThis is due to hallucinations or delirious conceptions. The patient kills himself to escape from an imaginary danger or disgrace, or to obey a mysterious order from on high, etc.
Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Durkheim suggests that humans have inherently created ideas about religion before academics began to systematically study and compare them.
In this quote, Emile Durkheim highlights the intrinsic human tendency to develop personal understandings and definitions of religion even in the absence of formal scientific inquiry into the subject. It emphasizes the pre-existing notions and individual interpretations that shape our understanding of religion, indicating that people's beliefs and concepts of spirituality often arise organically from human experience rather than from structured academic analysis.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on sociology, you could use this quote to emphasize the foundational role of personal belief systems.
More from Emile Durkheim
All quotes βMan cannot become attached to higher aims and submit to a rule if he sees nothing above him to which he belongs. To free him from all social pressure is to abandon him to himself and demoralize him.
If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
A person is not merely a single subject 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.
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
A society whose members are united by the fact that they think in the same way in regard to the sacred world and its relations with the profane world, and by the fact that they translate these common ideas into common practices, is what is called a Church. In all history, we do not find a single religion without a Church.
Similar quotes
Sometimes I thank God for unanswered prayers. Remember when you're talkin' to the man upstairs; that just because he doesn't answer doesn't mean he don't care. Some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers
The most powerful prayer, one wellnigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is.
Each of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.
When we are thirsty, we drink the white waters of the pool, the sweetness of our mournful childhood.
Occasionally, the whole class struggle may be summed up in the struggle for one word against another word. Certain words struggle amongst themselves as enemies. Other words are the site of an ambiguity: the stake in a decisive but undecided battle
In my solitude I have pondered much on the incomprehensible subjects of space, eternity, life and death.