ely the apparent externality of the religious command seems
to belong to a fairly common type of experience, in which the
personality is divided, so that first one part of it and then another
emerges into consciousness. If you forget an engagement, sometimes your
peace is disturbed for quite a long time by a vague external annoyance
or condemnation, which at last grows to be a distinct
judgement--'Heavens! I ought to be at the Committee on So-and-so.' But
apart from this criticism, there is obviously much historical truth in
Professor Durkheim's theory, and it is not so different as it seems at
first sight from the ordinary beliefs of religious men. The tribe to
primitive man is not a mere group of human beings. It is his whole
world. The savage who is breaking the laws of his tribe has all his
world--totems, tabus, earth, sky and all--against him. He cannot be at
peace with God.

The position of the hero or martyr who defies his tribe for the sake of
what he thinks the truth or the right can easily be thought out on these
lines. He defies this false temporary Cosmos in loyalty to the true and
permanent Cosmos.

See Durkheim, 'Les Formes elementaires de la vie religieuse', in
_Travaux de l'Annee Sociologique_, 1912; or G. Davy, 'La Sociologie de
M. Durkheim', in _Rev. Philosophique_, xxxvi, pp. 42-71 and 160-85.

[8:1] I suspect that most reforms pass through this stage. A man somehow
feels clear that some new course is, for him, right, though he cannot
marshal the arguments convincingly in favour of it, and may even admit
that the weight of obvious evidence is on the other side. We read of
judges in the seventeenth century who believed that witches ought to be
burned and that the persons before them were witches, and yet would not
burn them--evidently under the influence of vague half-realized
feelings. I know a vegetarian who thinks that, as far as he can see,
carnivorous habits are not bad for human health and actually tend to
increase the happiness of the species of animals eaten--as the adoption
of Swift's _Modest Proposal_ would doubtless relieve the economic
troubles of the human race, and yet feels clear that for him the
ordinary flesh meal (or 'feasting on corpses') would 'partake of the
nature of sin'. The path of progress is paved with inconsistencies,
though it would be an error to imagine that the people who habitually
reject any higher promptings that come to them are really any more
consistent.

[9:1