[672] "All things," says Miss Fletcher, "are filled with a common principle of life," Smiths. Rep. for 1897, p. 579.
[673] Hewitt, in American Anthropologist, 1902, p. 36.
[674] The Melanesians, pp. 118-120.
[675] Ibid., p. 119.
[676] See above, p. 103.
[677] Pickler, in the little work above mentioned, had already expressed, in a slightly dialectical manner, the sentiment that this is what the totem essentially is.
[678] See our Division du travail social, 3rd ed., pp. 64 ff.
[679] Ibid., p. 76.
[680] This is the case at least with all moral authority recognized as such by the group as a whole.
[681] We hope that this analysis and those which follow will put an end to an inexact interpretation of our thought, from which more than one misunderstanding has resulted. Since we have made constraint the outward sign by which social facts can be the most easily recognized and distinguished from the facts of individual psychology, it has been assumed that according to our opinion, physical constraint is the essential thing for social life. As a matter of fact, we have never considered it more than the material and apparent expression of an interior and profound fact which is wholly ideal: this is moral authority. The problem of sociology—if we can speak of a sociological problem—consists in seeking, among the different forms of external constraint, the different sorts of moral authority corresponding to them and in discovering the causes which have determined these latter. The particular question which we are treating in this present work has as its principal object, the discovery of the form under which that particular variety of moral authority which is inherent in all that is religious has been born, and out of what elements it is made. It will be seen presently that even if we do make social pressure one of the distinctive characteristics of sociological phenomena, we do not mean to say that it is the only one. We shall show another aspect of the collective life, nearly opposite to the preceding one, but none the less real (see p. 212).