The first and most basic rule is to consider social facts as things.

Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves.

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

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 is a moral being, only because he lives in society. Let all social life disappear and morality will disappear with it.

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.

Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces which really exist only in our own minds.