A Category of the Human Spirit*

The indulgence of my listeners and readers needs to be great because the subject is truly immense and because the fifty-five minutes at my disposal at this time allow me to offer only an idea of how to treat it. The problem concerns nothing less than explaining to you how one of the categories of the human spirit—one of those ideas which we believe to be innate—was born and raised very slowly in the course of many centuries, and has passed through numerous vicissitudes, “person,” the idea of the “ego.”

Everyone finds the idea natural and precise at the back of his consciousness, all equipped at the back of the morality which is deduced from it. It is a matter of substituting for this naive view of its history and of its current value a more precise view.

A Word on the Principle of These Types of Investigations

My attempt will provide you with a sample—perhaps an inferior one to what you expect—of the works of the French school of sociology. We apply ourselves above all to the social history of the categories of the human spirit. We attempt to explain them one by one, beginning quite simply and provisionally with the list of the Aristotelian categories.2 We describe their particular forms in particular