In three successive volumes over the period 1905–7, the Catholic philosophy journal Revue néo-scolastique published a series of essays collectively titled “Le Conflit de la morale et de la sociologie.” These essays, published as a book in 1911, were written by the Belgian priest and neo-Thomist philosopher Simon Deploige, and they contained a sharp attack on the social realism of Durkheim and his disciples. “All these views,” Deploige observed after summarizing Durkheim's sociology, “pass in France as M. Durkheim's own. But they are of German origin” (1911: 122).

Durkheim was deeply offended. Had Deploige “wanted to convince people that I have abused my compatriots,” he replied on October 20, 1907, “he could hardly have expressed himself in any other way.” Deploige's language seemed to imply that Durkheim had made “carefully concealed borrowings among certain German writers.” “I owe much to the Germans,” Durkheim admitted, but “the real influence that Germany has exercised on me is quite different from what he says” (1907: 606–7). Within four days, Deploige replied with explicit references to Durkheim's alleged indebtedness to Schaeffle, Wagner, Schmoller, Wundt, Simmel, Lazarus and Steinthal; and a second letter from Durkheim, dated November 8, contained not only a detailed refutation of Deploige's “errors,” “inaccuracies,” and “insinuations,” but what has surely become the most famous autobiographical passage in all of Durkheim's writings – i.e., the statement that it was only in 1895, under the influence “of the works of Robertson Smith and his school,” that he had first discovered “the means to approach the study of religion sociologically” (1913b: 326).