Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think
Author’s Introduction
The representations which are termed collective, defined as a whole without entering into detail, may be recognized by the following signs.
They are common to the members of a given social group; they are transmitted from one generation to another; they impress themselves upon its individual members, and awaken in them sentiments of respect, fear, adoration, and so on, according to the circumstances of the case.
Their existence does not depend upon the individual; not that they imply a collective unity distinct from the individuals composing the social group, but because they present themselves in aspects which cannot be accounted for by considering individuals merely as such.
Thus it is that a language, although, properly speaking, it exists only in the minds of the individuals who speak it, is none the less an incontestable social reaUty, founded upon an ensemble of collective representations, for it imposes its claims on each one of these individuals; it is in existence before his day, and it survives him.
This fact leads at once to a very important result, one on which sociologists have rightly insisted, but which had escaped the notice of anthropologists.
To be able to understand the processes by which institutions have been established (especially among undeveloped peoples), we must first rid our minds of the prejudice which consists in beUeving that collective representations in general, and those of inferior races in particular, obey the laws of a psychology based upon the analysis of the individual subject.
Collective representations have their own laws, and these (at any rate in dealing
with primitives^) cannot be discovered by studying the “adult, civilized, white man.”
On the contrary, it is undoubtedly the study of the collective representations and their connections in uncivilized peoples that can throw some hght upon the genesis of our categories and our logical principles.
Durkheim and his collaborators have already given examples of what may be obtained by following this course, and it will doubtless lead to a theory of knowledge, both new and positive, founded upon the comparative method.
This great task cannot be accompHshed save by a series of successive attempts.
Perhaps their inception will be rendered easier if we determine which are the most general laws governing collective representations in undeveloped peoples.
To find out exactly what are the guiding principles of primitive mentality, and how these make themselves felt in the primitive institutions and customs, is the preliminary problem with which we have to deal in this volume.
Without the labours of those who have preceded me—the anthropologists and ethnologists of various countries—and more particularly without the information afforded me by the French sociological school I have just mentioned, I could never have hoped to solve this problem, or even to present it in practical terms.
The analysis by that school of numerous collective representations, and of the most important among them, such as the group ideas of what is sacred, of “mana,” totem, magic and rehgious symbols, etc., has alone rendered possible this attempt
to co-ordinate and systematize these representations among primitives.
Basing my conclusions on those labours, I have been able to show that the mental processes of “primitives” do not coincide with those which we are accustomed to
describe in men of our own type; I believe I have even been able to discover wherein the difference between them lies, and to establish the most general laws pecuUar to the mentality of primitives.
I have received practical help, too, from the fairly large number of psychologists who, following Ribot, aim at showing the importance of the emotional and the motor elements ^
By this term, an incorrect one, yet rendered almost indispensable through
common usage, we simply mean members of the most elementary social aggregates with which we are acquainted.
of mental life in general and extending to the intellectual life, properly so called.
To quote but two works, both Ribot’s Logique des Sentiments and Heinrich Maier’s Psychologic des emotionalen Denkens show how narrow were the limits within
which traditional psychology, under the influence of formal logic, sought to confine the life of thought.
Mental processes are infinitely more elastic, complex, and subtle, and they comprise more elements of the psychic life than a too “simplisf* inteUectualism would allow.
Ribot’s observations on psychology, therefore, have been very valuable to me.
Nevertheless, the research I have undertaken differs widely from his.
His analysis bears mainly upon subjects which are interesting from the emotional, passionate, or even pathological standpoint of our social aggregates, and hardly gives a glance at the collective phenomena to be found among other peoples.
I, on the other hand, propose to determine which are the most general laws governing collective representations (including their affective and motor elements) in the most imdeveloped peoples known to us.
That the higher mental functions should be studied by the comparative, that is, the sociological, method, is no new idea.
Auguste Comte had already distinctly advocated it in his Cours de Philosophic positive.
He would divide the study of these functions between biology and sociology.
His wellknown dictum: “Humanity is not to be defined through man, but on the contrary, man through humanity** is designed to show that the highest mental functions remain unintelligible as long as they are studied from the individual alone.
If we are to understand them we must take the development of the race into consideration.
In a man’s mental Ufe everything which is not merely the reaction of the organism to the stimuli it receives is necessarily of a social character.
The idea was a fertile one, but it did not bear fruit immediately, ither in Comte or in his more or less direct followers.
In Comte it found the way barred, so to speak, by a sociology that he believed he had constructed in its entirety, but which actually was a philosophy of history.
He thought he had shown that the law of the three stages exactly expresses the intellectual evolution of humanity considered as a whole, and also that of any particular community.
In establishing the science of the higher mental functions, therefore, he does not consider it necessary to begin with a comparative study of these functions in different types of human societies.
In the same way, when constructing his “cerebral chart,” he is not guided by physiology, so sure is he that the work of the physiologists will confirm a priori his classification and location of the faculties.
So too, when formulating the essential features of his theory of the higher mental functions, the law of the three stages suffices him, since the more special laws cannot fail to come into line with that one.
Similarly, he constructed his theory according to the development of Mediterranean civilization, but without suspecting a priori that the laws thus discovered may not hold good of all the races of humanity.
In one sense, then, Comte is the initiator of a positive science of the mental functions, and to a large extent the merit of having conceived it and of having shown it to-be a sociological science ought to be accorded him.
But he did not xmdertake the investigation of phenomena which such a science demands.
He did not even attempt it, and at the time he wrote his Politique positive, he would doubtless have condemned it as “useless.’*
Nevertheless, the patient and meticulous study of mental phenomena in differing types of human societies, the necessity of which Comte had not perceived, had been begun by others, and they pursued it perseveringly, not as philosophers but as experts, with the straightforward aim of discerning and classifying facts.
I mean the anthropologists and ethnologists and the English school of anthropology in particular.
Primitive Culture, the important work of its head, E. B. Tylor, which appeared in 1871, and marks an epoch in the history of anthropological science, led the way for a large number of zealous and well-trained collaborators, whose work is not unworthy of their leader.
Thanks to their zeal, an immense mass of documents dealing with the institutions, customs, and languages of so-called savage or primitive races, and with the group ideas governing these, has been accumulated.
Work of a similar kind has been carried on in Germany and in France.
In the United States, the Ethnological Bureau of the Smithsonian Institute published some excellent monographs on the Indian tribes of North America.
Now as the documents increased in number, a certain unifonnity in the phenomena of which they treated became continually more evident.
As fast as undeveloped peoples were discovered, or more thoroughly studied, in the most distant quarters of the globe, sometimes at the very antipodes of each other, extraordinary likenesses, sometimes even exact resemblances, down to the smallest details, were found to exist.
There were the same institutions; the same religious or magical ceremonies; the same beUefs and customs relating to birth and death; the same myths, and so on.
Thus the comparative method estabUshed itself, as it were.
Tylor makes continual and very felicitous use of it in his Primitive Culture; so, too, does Frazer in The Golden Bough, and so also do other representatives of the school, such as Sydney Hartland and Andrew Lang.
By so doing, these writers have been the necessary precursors of the positive science of the higher mental functions, but they did not originate it, any more than Comte, though the reasons in their case were not the same.
Why did not the use of the comparative method lead them to it?
Was it for want of having regarded the problem as universal, and, having once compared primitive races with each other, comparing them with our own? Not at aU.
The English school of anthropology, on the contrary, following the example of its
head, is perpetually trying to show the relation between “savage” and “civilized” mentality, and to explain it.
And it is just this explanation which has prevented their going any further.
They had it ready-made.
They did not look for it in the facts themselves, but imposed it on them.
While testifying to the existence of primitive institutions and beliefs so entirely different from our own, they did not ask themselves whether, to account for them, they ought not to examine various hypotheses.
They took it for granted that the facts could be explained in one way only.
Do the collective representations of the communities in question arise out of higher
mental functions identical with our own, or must they be referred to a mentality which differs from ours to an extent yet to be determined?
Such an alternative as the latter did not occur to their minds. ~Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, Page 3-7
