“At the roots of all our judgments there are a certain number of essential ideas which dominate all our intellectual life; they are what philosophers since Aristotle have called the categories of the understanding: ideas of time, space, class, number, cause, substance, personality, etc. They correspond to the most universal properties of things. They are like the solid frame which encloses all thought: this does not seem to be able to liberate itself from them without destroying itself.”

— Émile Durkheim , book The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Source: The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 1912, p. 9

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Émile Durkheim 43

French sociologist (1858-1917) 1858–1917

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