Chapter 5: A CHANGE IN IDEAS.

The article focuses on the concept of Collective consciousness, morphology, and collective representations put forwarded by French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim characterizes conscience collective as the totality of representations, which are collective in the sense that they are present in several minds. He used conscience collective in this way in a famous note, which was subsequently invoked by those who saw in Durkheim a theoretician of the group mind. Conscience collective is not a specific mode of integration but a general condition of society. In the course of the slow change in Durkheim's thought, religion acquired a paramount position and the new concept of conscience collective was developed in accordance with the new role of religion as a central example. In "The Division of Labor," Durkheim supposed that there was a general morphological or socio-ecological determination of ideas. The overall theory supposed that a belief system and a particular morphological constellation were functional alternatives.