Durkheim defined religion as: "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, i.e., things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite in one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them."In this definition, Durkheim avoids references to supernatural or God. Durkheim rejected earlier definitions by Tylor that religion was "belief in supernatural beings," finding that primitive societies such as the Australian aborigines (following the ethnologies of Spencer and Gillen, largely discredited later) did not divide reality into "natural" vs. "supernatural" realms, but rather into realms of the "sacred" and the "profane," which were not moral categories, since both could include what was good or evil. Durkheim argues we are left with the following three concepts: The sacred: ideas and sentiments kindled by the spectacle of society and which inspire awe, spiritual devotion or respect; The beliefs & practices: creating an emotional state of collective effervescence, investing symbols with sacred importance; The moral community: a group of people sharing a common moral philosophy. Out of those three concepts, Durkheim focused on the sacred, noting that it is at the very core of a religion:They are only collective forces hypostasized, that is to say, moral forces; they are made up of the ideas and sentiments awakened in us by the spectacle of society, and not of sensations coming from the physical world.Durkheim saw religion as the most fundamental social institution of humankind, and one that gave rise to other social forms. It was religion that gave humanity the strongest sense of collective consciousness. Durkheim saw religion as a force that emerged in the early hunter and gatherer societies, as the emotions collective effervescence run high in the growing groups, forcing them to act in a new ways, and giving them a sense of some hidden force driving them. Over time, as emotions became symbolized and interactions ritualized, religion became more organized, giving a rise to the division between the sacred and the profane. However, Durkheim also believed that religion was becoming less important, as it was being gradually superseded by science and the cult of an individual.Thus there is something eternal in religion which is destined to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself.However, even if the religion was losing its importance for Durkheim, it still laid the foundation of modern society and the interactions that governed it.