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Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

Emile Durkheim

Sadness does not inhere in things; it does not reach us from the world and through mere contemplation of the world. It is a product of our own thought. We create it out of whole cloth.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Cloth Creation Ourselves Reach Sadness World
It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Analysis Built Himself History Make Up Man
The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Belief Collection Creative Emotion Sentiment System
It is not human nature which can assign the variable limits necessary to our needs. They are thus unlimited so far as they depend on the individual alone. Irrespective of any external regulatory force, our capacity for feeling is in itself an insatiable and bottomless abyss.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Assign Capacity Feeling Human Nature Ourselves Variable
Melancholy suicide. – This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him. Pleasures no longer attract.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Attract Connection Depression Melancholy Patience Pleasure Realize Suicide
The Christian conceives of his abode on Earth in no more delightful colors than the Jainist sectarian. He sees in it only a time of sad trial; he also thinks that his true country is not of this world.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Country Delight Earth Sadness Time Trial True World
Religious representations are collective representations which express collective realities.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Expression Reality Religious Representation
Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Comparison Man Obligation Religion
Our excessive tolerance with regard to suicide is due to the fact that, since the state of mind from which it springs is a general one, we cannot condemn it without condemning ourselves; we are too saturated with it not partly to excuse it.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Fact Mindset Oneself Regard Tolerance
There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Character History Name Sociology Worth
Maniacal suicide. -This 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 DURKHEIM

Death Escape Grace Hallucination Imagination Kill Mystery Obedience Patient Suicide
When man discovered the mirror, he began to lose his soul.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Beginning Discover Lose Man Mindset Mirror
It is too great comfort which turns a man against himself. Life is most readily renounced at the time and among the classes where it is least harsh.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Comfortable Greatness Harsh Time
Faith is not uprooted by dialectic proof; it must already be deeply shaken by other causes to be unable to withstand the shock of argument.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Argument Evidence Faith Reason Shock
Man could not live if he were entirely impervious to sadness. Many sorrows can be endured only by being embraced, and the pleasure taken in them naturally has a somewhat melancholy character.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Character Live Man Melancholy Sadness Sorrow
At first sight, one does not see what relations there can be between religion and logic.
EMILE DURKHEIM

Logic Relation Religion

Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

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Science cannot describe individuals, but only types. If human societies cannot be classified, they must remain inaccessible to scientific description.

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Popular Authors

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