One of the constitutive elements in any national character consists in a certain way of conceiving the value of life. There is a collective mood, as there is an individual mood, that inclines nations to sadness or merriment and makes them see things in cheerful or sombre colours. Indeed, society alone is able to pass a general judgement on the value of human life, something that the individual is not competent to do. He knows only himself and his narrow horizon, so his experience is too limited to serve as the basis for a general assessment. Certainly, he may judge that his own life has no point, but he cannot say anything that applies to others. Society on the other hand can generalize the feeling that it has about itself, its state of health or sickness, without sophistry. For individuals are too closely involved in the life of society for it to be sick without their being affected. Its suffering inevitably becomes theirs. Because it is the whole, the harm that it feels is communicated to the parts of which it is made. But then it cannot disintegrate without being aware that the regular conditions of general life are disturbed to the same extent. Because it is the end to which the best part of us is attached, society cannot feel that we are escaping from it without realizing at the same time that our activity is aimless. Since we are its work, it cannot have a sense of its own decline without feeling that from henceforth this work no longer serves any purpose. This is how currents of depression and disillusion are created that do not arise from any individual in particular but with express the state of disintegration of the society as a whole. What they demonstrate is the loosening of social bonds, a sort of collective asthenia, a social ill, like individual depression, which, when it is chronic, expresses in its own way the poor organic state of the individual. This is when we see the appearance of those metaphysical and religious systems that, by reducing these vague feelings to formulae, set out to prove to mankind that life has no meaning and that one is deceiving oneself by giving it one. This is when new moralities arise which, making a law out of the fact, recommend suicide or, at least, tend in that direction by advising that one should live as short a time as possible. At the moment when these appear, it seems that they have been conjured up from nothing by their creators and the latter are sometimes blamed for the discouragement that they preach. In reality, they are an effect rather than the cause, merely symbolizing the psychological deprivation of the social body in abstract language or in a systematic form [this is why it is unfair to accuse those who theorize about sadness of generalizing personal impressions: they are echoing a general state]. And since these currents are collective, they derive an authority from that which allows them to impose themselves on the individual and to drive him still more forcibly in the direction towards which he as already be tending as a result of the state of moral disorientation brought about in him by the disintegration of society. Thus at the very moment when he is breaking away from the social environment, he is still subject to its influence. However individualized a person may be, there is always something collective that remains, which is the feeling of depression and melancholy that arises from this exaggerated individualism. When one has nothing else to share, one participates through sadness.

— Émile Durkheim, 1897