The totality of beliefs and sentiments common to the average members of a society forms a determinate system with a life of its own. It can be termed the collective or creative consciousness.

Man seeks to learn, and man kills himself because of the loss of cohesion in his religious society; he does not kill himself because of his learning. It is certainly not the learning he acquires that disorganizes religion; but the desire for knowledge wakens because religion becomes disorganized.

Men have been obliged to make for themselves a notion of what religion is, long before the science of religions started its methodical comparisons.

It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.

At this point, an urgent question arises: [...] Is it our duty to seek to become a thorough and complete human being, one quite sufficient unto himself; or, on the contrary, to be only a part of a whole, the organ of an organism? Briefly, is the division of labor, at the same time that it is a law of nature, also a moral rule of human conduct; and, if it has this latter character, why and in what degree?

One does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.

It is science, and not religion, which has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand.