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.
Emile DurkheimRead
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
ReligionBeliefScienceUnderstandingSociety
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.
Emile DurkheimRead
If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.
Emile DurkheimRead
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.
Emile DurkheimRead
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.
Emile DurkheimRead
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.
Emile DurkheimRead
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