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What I propose is a man's trip good stiff walking. We could strike off through Metz and Kaiserslautern, hit the Rhine valley somewhere about Dürkheim, pass through Mannheim with our eyes shut, and get to Heidelberg and the Neckar. Then we could float down the Rhine into Holland. That's the toy-country of the world. Great place to make you smile." Lewis's eyes watered. "When when shall we start?"
June is everywhere the suicide month, and December is everywhere the month in which self-destruction is least frequent. Durkheim gives tabulated statistics for seven of the principal countries of Europe, which show conclusively that, in point of predisposing tendency to suicide, the four seasons stand in the following order: summer first, spring second, autumn third, and winter last.
Smith, in the Religion of the Semites, emphasizes, as the fundamental conception of ancient religion, "the solidarity of the gods and their worshipers as part of an organic society." Durkheim goes beyond this. There are not at the beginning men and gods, but only the social group and the collective emotions and representations which are generated through membership in the group.
Some investigators have suggested that the suicidal tendency is dependent on heat; but June is not the hottest month, nor is December the coldest. Durkheim has tested this conjecture by comparing temperatures with suicides in France, Italy, and Prussia.
Von Bülow says that the German people have a passion for logic, and that this passion amounts to fanaticism: that when an intellectual form or system has been found for anything, they insist with obstinate perseverance on fitting realities into the system. Durkheim says that the Germans' organized system of ideas is a cause of war.
From Schönebeck to Dürkheim lies an immense bed of salt, and this the Celtic population of the district dug and condensed by aid of fires fed by huge logs cut from the giant trees of the vast and mysterious forests which have from time immemorial shadowed the whole existence of the German race. The salt, moulded or cut into blocks, was transported to Gaul as an article of commerce.
Suppose now the Sociological Society, or some considerable proportion of it, were to adopt this view, that sociology is the description of the Ideal Society and its relation to existing societies, would not this give the synthetic framework Professor Durkheim, for example, has said to be needed?
Crossing the Rhine, at Mannheim, they stopped, on the 12th, at Dürkheim, where they became acquainted with Ludwig Fitz, a man of a frank and inquiring disposition. For three years, writes J.Y., he has held meetings in his house; in the commencement he had to suffer no little persecution. On his entering our room he observed that it was the Lord who had thus brought us together.
It is true that Herbert Spencer, in order to get classification somehow, did, as Professor Durkheim has pointed out, separate human society into societies, and made believe they competed one with another and died and reproduced just like animals, and that economists, following List, have for the purposes of fiscal controversy discovered economic types; but this is a transparent device, and one is surprised to find thoughtful and reputable writers off their guard against such bad analogy.
And this higher-than-self is not just a collective naturalism, a social consciousness, as Durkheim and Overstreet and Miss Harrison would say. The simplest introspective act will prove that. For a man cannot ignore self-condemnation as if it were only a natural difficulty, nor disparage it as though it were merely humanly imposed.
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