Journey Without Maps

I am reading Graham Greene's Journey Without Maps, an account of his trek through Liberia in the mid 1930s and came across the following passage:

Legend belongs naturally to primitive communities where minds are so little differentiated, by work or play or education, that a story can move quickly from brain to brain uncriticized. But sometimes these conditions arise artificially. A common danger, purpose or way of life can very nearly destroy differences of intellect and class; then you get the angels of Mons and the miracles at a shrine.

Could he have been reading Durkheim?