[3] It is seen that we give a wholly relative sense to this word "origins," just as to the word "primitive." By it we do not mean an absolute beginning, but the most simple social condition that is actually known or that beyond which we cannot go at present. When we speak of the origins or of the commencement of religious history or thought, it is in this sense that our statements should be understood.
[4] We say that time and space are categories because there is no difference between the rôle played by these ideas in the intellectual life and that which falls to the ideas of class or cause (on this point see, Hamelin, Essai sur les éléments principaux de la représentation, pp. 63, 76).
[5] See the support given this assertion in Hubert and Mauss, Mélanges d'Histoire des Religions (Travaux de l'Année Sociologique), chapter on La Représentation du Temps dans la Religion.
[6] Thus we see all the difference which exists between the group of sensations and images which serve to locate us in time, and the category of time. The first are the summary of individual experiences, which are of value only for the person who experienced them. But what the category of time expresses is a time common to the group, a social time, so to speak. In itself it is a veritable social institution. Also, it is peculiar to man; animals have no representations of this sort.
This distinction between the category of time and the corresponding sensations could be made equally well in regard to space or cause. Perhaps this would aid in clearing up certain confusions which are maintained by the controversies of which these questions are the subject. We shall return to this point in the conclusion of the present work (§ 4).
[7] Op. cit., pp. 75 ff.
[8] Or else it would be necessary to admit that all individuals, in virtue of their organo-physical constitution, are spontaneously affected in the same manner by the different parts of space: which is more improbable, especially as in themselves the different regions are sympathetically indifferent. Also, the divisions of space vary with different societies, which is a proof that they are not founded exclusively upon the congenital nature of man.
[9] See Durkheim and Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, in Année Sociologique, VI, pp. 47 ff.
[10] See Durkheim and Mauss, De quelques formes primitives de classification, in Année Sociologique, VI, p. 34.
[11] Zuñi Creation Myths, in 13th Rep. of the Bureau of Amer. Ethnol., pp. 367 ff.