ABSTRACT
The science of sociology that Durkheim wished to develop was concerned, perhaps above all, to distance itself from explanations of the social which referred to any aspect of individual psychology. This part of the critique against his rivals was particularly evident in his sociology of religion and bore especially on the so-called 'intellectualist' school of Herbert Spencer, Edward Tylor, James Frazer, etc. This approach tended to ground beliefs in man's perceptions of the world around him and his reflections about them, and it was at the root of the view that magic was merely false science, the result of reasoning from false premises. But it also promoted the argument that religion, like magic (from which it was distinguished), was primarily a belief in ghosts and spirits. This itself was supposed to have arisen as a reasoned but false response to the fear aroused by the phenomenon of death: the individual survived as a soul, even though his or her body decayed. For Spencer, the ghosts of ancestors were at the root of all religion, the earliest form of which was ancestor worship. Tylor generalized this to a belief in spiritual beings of all kinds, though he continued to distinguish souls from other sorts of spirits. Because of the plethora of spirits and souls which must have rapidly come into existence, the origins of religion were necessarily polytheistic.
