er individuals under similar
conditions, and by it he will, as an impartial third person, appraise
the conduct of the contending parties. The formation of such rules,
resting as it does on the power of framing and applying general
conceptions, is the prime differentia of human morality from animal
behavior. The fact that they arise and are handed on from generation to
generation makes social tradition at once the dominating factor in the
regulation of human conduct. Without such rules we can scarcely conceive
society to exist, since it is only through the general conformity to
custom that men can understand each other, that each can know how the
other will act under given circumstances, and without this amount of
understanding the reciprocity, which is the vital principle of society,
disappears.

4. Collective Representation and Intellectual Life[89]

Logical thought is made up of concepts. Seeking how society can have
played a role in the genesis of logical thought thus reduces itself to
seeking how it can have taken a part in the formation of concepts.

The concept is opposed to sensual representations of every
order--sensations, perceptions, or images--by the following properties.

Sensual representations are in a perpetual flux; they come after each
other like the waves of a river, and even during the time that they last
they do not remain the same thing. Each of them is an integral part of
the precise instant when it takes place. We are never sure of again
finding a perception such as we experienced it the first time; for if
the thing perceived has not changed, it is we who are no longer the
same. On the contrary, the concept is, as it were, outside of time and
change; it is in the depths below all this agitation; it might be said
that it is in a different portion of the mind, which is serener and
calmer. It does not move of itself, by an internal and spontaneous
evolution, but, on the contrary, it resists change. It is a manner of
thinking that, at every moment of time, is fixed and crystallized. In so
far as it is what it ought to be, it is immutable. If it changes, it is
not because it is its nature to do so, but because we have discovered
some imperfection in it; it is because it had to be rectified. The
system of concepts with which we think in everyday life is that
expressed by the vocabulary of our mother-tongue; for every word
translates a concept. Now language is something fixed; it changes but
very