[91] This statement of fact does not touch the question whether exterior and public religion is not merely the development of an interior and personal religion which was the primitive fact, or whether, on the contrary, the second is not the projection of the first into individual consciences. The problem will be directly attacked below (Bk. II, ch. v, § 2, cf. the same book, ch. vi and vii, § 1). For the moment, we confine ourselves to remarking that the individual cult is presented to the observer as an element of, and something dependent upon, the collective cult.
[92] It is by this that our present definition is connected to the one we have already proposed in the Année Sociologique. In this other work, we defined religious beliefs exclusively by their obligatory character; but, as we shall show, this obligation evidently comes from the fact that these beliefs are the possession of a group which imposes them upon its members. The two definitions are thus in a large part the same. If we have thought it best to propose a new one, it is because the first was too formal, and neglected the contents of the religious representations too much. It will be seen, in the discussions which follow, how important it is to put this characteristic into evidence at once. Moreover, if their imperative character is really a distinctive trait of religious beliefs, it allows of an infinite number of degrees; consequently there are even cases where it is not easily perceptible. Hence come difficulties and embarrassments which are avoided by substituting for this criterium the one we now employ.
[93] We thus leave aside here those theories which, in whole or in part, make use of super-experimental data. This is the case with the theory which Andrew Lang exposed in his book, The Making of Religion, and which Father Schmidt has taken up again, with variations of detail, in a series of articles on The Origin of the Idea of God (Anthropos, 1908, 1909). Lang does not set animism definitely aside, but in the last analysis, he admits a sense or intuition of the divine directly. Also, if we do not consider it necessary to expose and discuss this conception in the present chapter, we do not intend to pass it over in silence; we shall come to it again below, when we shall ourselves explain the facts upon which it is founded (Bk. II, ch. ix, § 4).
[94] This is the case, for example, of Fustel de Coulanges who accepts the two conceptions together (The Ancient City, Bk. I and Bk. III, ch. ii).
[95] This is the case with Jevons, who criticizes the animism taught by Tylor, but accepts his theories on the origin of the idea of the soul and the anthropomorphic instinct of man. Inversely, Usener, in his Götternamen, rejects certain hypotheses of Max Müller which will be described below, but admits the principal postulates of naturism.
[96] Primitive Culture, chs. xi-xviii.
[97] Principles of Sociology, Parts I and VI.
[98] This is the word used by Tylor. It has the inconvenience of seeming to imply that men, in the proper sense of the term, existed before there was a civilization. However, there is no proper term for expressing the idea; that of primitive, which we prefer to use, lacking a better, is, as we have said, far from satisfactory.
[99] Tylor, op. cit., I, pp. 455 f.
[100] See Spencer, Principles of Sociology, I, pp. 143 ff., and Tylor, op. cit., I, pp. 434 ff., 445 ff.