HKB
nothing surprising about it, if they are generally thought of as outside of the beings in which they reside. Now this is just what the theory we have proposed implies.
In fact, they are only collective forces hypostatized, that is to say, moral forces; they are made up of the ideas and sentiments awakened in us by the spectacle of society, and not of sensations coming from the physical world. So they are not homogeneous with the visible things among which we place them. They may well take from these things the outward and material forms in which they are represented, but they owe none of their efficacy to them. They are not united by external bonds to the different supports upon which they alight; they have no roots there; according to an expression we have already used[1098] and which serves best for characterizing them, they are added to them. So there are no objects which are predestined to receive them, to the exclusion of all others; even the most insignificant and vulgar may do so; accidental circumstances decide which are the chosen ones. The terms in which Codrington speaks of the mana should be borne in mind: it is a force, he says, which "is not fixed in anything and can be conveyed in almost anything."[1099] Likewise, the Dakota of Miss Fletcher represented the wakan as a sort of surrounding force which is always coming and going through the world, alighting here and there, but definitely fixing itself nowhere.[1100] Even the religious character inherent in men does not have a different character. There is certainly no other being in the world of experience which is closer to the very source of all religious life; none participates in it more directly, for it is in human consciousnesses that it is elaborated. Yet we know that the religious principle animating men, to wit, the soul, is partially external.
But if religious forces have a place of their own nowhere, their mobility is easily explained. Since nothing attaches them to the things in which we localize them, it is natural that they should escape on the slightest contact, in spite of themselves, so to speak, and that they should spread afar. Their intensity incites them to this spreading, which everything favours. This is why the soul itself, though holding to the body by very personal bonds, is constantly threatening to leave it: all the apertures and pores of the body are just so many ways by which it tends to spread and diffuse itself into the outside.[1101]
But we shall account for this phenomenon which we are trying to understand, still better if, instead of considering the notion of religious forces as it is when completely formulated, we go back to the mental process from which it results.