The Questing Animal

Without language social institutions would be as inconceivable as language without society; their interdependence is a primary condition of human existence. Our examination of language thus brings us back to consideration of society as the matrix both of communal religious experience and of the individual quest that can never leave this primal model and source far behind. Saussure’s conception of langue as a superpersonal, passively registered “collective inertia” immune to individual variation closely accords with Durkheim’s exaltation of society as a transcendent entity to which its submissive constituents pay homage. No elementary religious form could work more pervasively toward the