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What indeed is a thing? The thing stands in opposition to the idea, just as what is known from the outside stands in opposition to what is known from the inside. A thing is any object of knowledge which is not naturally penetrable by the understanding. It is all that which we cannot conceptualise adequately as an idea by the simple process of intellectual analysis. It is all that which the mind cannot understand without going outside itself, proceeding progressively by way of observation and experimentation from those features which are the most external and the most immediately accessible to those which 'are the least visible and the most profound. To treat facts of a certain order as things is therefore not to place them in this or that category of reality; it is to observe towards them a certain attitude of mind. It is to embark upon the study of them by adopting the principle that one is entirely ignorant of what they are, that their characteristic properties, like the unknown causes upon which they depend, cannot be discovered by even the most careful form of introspection. (pp. 35-36).

as Garfinkel would put it later, these "things" are discoverable, not imaginable---the proof being in the continuing surprises human beings provide for other human beings who believe they can predict what they will do. Note also that, if one translates "thing" into "the material," then Durkheim here is explicating Marx.

Thoughts to be found in the consciousness of each individual and movem"ents which are repeated by all individuals are not for this reason social facts. If some have been content with using this characteristic in order to define them it is because they have been confused, wrongly, with what might be termed their individual incarnations. ... But the forms that these collective states may assume when they are 'refracted' through individuals are things of a different kind. ... Indeed some of these ways of acting or thinking acquire, by dint of repetition, a sort of consistency which, so to speak, separates them out, isolating them from the particular events which reflect them. Thus they assume a shape, a tangible form peculiar to them and constitute a reality sui generis vastly distin.ct from the individual facts which manifest that reality. Collective custom does not exist only in a state of immanence in the successive actions which it determines, but, ... expresses itself once and for all in a formula repeated by word of mouth, transmitted by education and even enshrined in the written word. (pp 54-5)

this would be restated by Lévi-Strauss when he wrote that all individual works are potential myths that only transform into myths when they are adopted on the collective mode (1971: 560)

A social fact is identifiable through the power of external co-ercion which it exerts or is capable of exerting upon individuals. (p. 56)