in addition, Durkheim failed to give consciousness an active role in the social process. he treated the actor and the actor's mental processes as secondary factors or, more commonly, as dependent variables to be explained by the independent and decisive variables social fact. individuals are, in general, controlled by social forces in his theories, they do not actively control those forces. autonomy, for Durkheim, meant nothing more than freely accepting those social forces. however, even if we accept that consciousness and some mental processes are types of social fact, there is no reason to suppose that they cannot develop the same autonomy that Durkheim recognized in other social facts. just as science has developed its own autonomous rules, making its religious roots almost unrecognizable, couldn't consciousness do the same