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 DurkheimRead
For a long time it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin. There is no religion that is not a cosmology at the same time that it is a speculation upon divine things. If philosophy and the sciences were born of religion, it is because religion began by taking the place of the sciences and philosophy.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the foundational role of religion in the development of human understanding and knowledge systems.
Emile Durkheim suggests that the early systems of thought that helped humans understand their existence and the universe originated from religious beliefs. This statement posits that religion not only provides a framework for cosmological views but also predated and influenced both philosophy and the sciences as they emerged as distinct fields of knowledge.
Themes
ReligionPhilosophyScienceCosmologyUnderstanding
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a philosophy class when discussing the origins of human thought.
More from Emile Durkheim
All quotes →Man 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
Similar quotes
Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.
Lord ActonRead
In time of war, the loudest patriots are the greatest profiteers.
August BebelRead
We must distinguish between the kind of structural transformation that would leave in place (even increase) the realities of the exploitation of labor, and one that would undo this kind of exploitation or at least radically reduce it
Immanuel WallersteinRead
What did I know best that I had not written about_x000D_ and Lost? What did I know about truly and care for the most?
Ernest HemingwayRead
It is impossible - now, at this point in the long journey of human culture - to avoid the sense that pain is necessity; that it is neither accident, nor malformation, nor malice, nor misunderstanding, that it is integral to the human character both in its inflicting and in its suffering, this terrible sense Tragedy alone has articulated, and will continue to articulate, and in so doing, make beautiful...
Howard BarkerRead
When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.
MontesquieuRead