THE UNIVERSITY ^OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY Return this book on or before the Latest Date stamped below. University of Illinois Library Oft -r 2013(3 *UL pob OEC311(I7? JAM! 5 4 MAY 07 2001 «AY J k 1980 NOV 232002 L161— H41 THE LAWS OF IMITATION BY GABRIEL TARDE Professor in the College de France, Member of the Institute TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND FRENCH EDITION BY ^ ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS Lecturer on Sociology in Barnard College WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS Professor of Sociology in Columbia University NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1903 COPYRIGHT, 1903 BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY Published September, 1903 THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS RAHWAY, N. J. \ INTRODUCTION GABRIEL TARDE, whose most interesting and important book is here given to American readers, is Professor of Modern Philosophy in the College de France, and a member of the Lnstitut. A true philosopher, but also a man of af- fairs, with wide intellectual sympathies, M. Tarde is a writer of great charm, and his influence among his own countrymen and abroad has steadily increased since he began, in 1880, to contribute to the Revue philosophique. American scholars, long familiar with M. Tarde's suggestive works, have felt that his thought should be made more accessible to English-speaking readers. Hitherto only a little book, Les Lois sociales, presenting a mere outline of his philos- ophy, has been translated. 4 M. Tarde was born in 1843, at Sarlat, Dordogne. After 2 school days were over, instead of entering upon university 1® life at Bordeaux, or Montpellier, or Paris, he took up legal ^ studies, and presently became juge d 'instruction in his native town. This office he held for nearly eighteen years, years of keen observation, but also of much solitude, of patient reflection, of the gradual unfolding of original ideas O of man, of society, and of the world, which were presently ^ to combine in a complete philosophical scheme. A born student of human nature, M. Tarde was from the first interested in that oldest of philosophical problems, the explanation of motive. He early perceived not only that motive may be resolved into terms of belief and desire, but v? also that it may be measured. This discovery had, of course, been made before by Bentham, Cournot, Menger, Walras, and Jevons, but Tarde's presentation of the sub- fO ject in his first contribution to the Revue philosophique, on La Croyance et le desir, possibility de leur mesure, was independent and original. iii 302723 iv Introduction But motives, and those impersonal forces that are not motives, work out results in an orderly fashion, by definite modes, which are the chief subject-matter of scientific study, and to the explanation of modes of activity M. Tarde was to make noteworthy contributions. Among the phenomena that early arrested his attention was imitation. From his office of magistrate he observed the large part that imitation plays in criminal conduct. Does it play a smaller part in normal conduct? Very rapidly M. Tarde's ardent mind ranged over the field of history, followed the spread of Western civilisation, and reviewed the development of lan- guage, the evolution of art, of law, and of institutions. The evidence was overwhelming that in all the affairs of men, whether of good or of evil report, imitation is an ever-pres- ent factor; and to a philosophical mind the implication was obvious, that there must be psychological or sociolog- ical laws of imitation, worthy of most thorough study. At this time sociology was represented in France by dis- ciples of Comte and by a few interested readers of Herbert Spencer. The thoughts of the Comtists did not range far beyond the " hierarchy of the sciences," and the " three stages " of history. To demonstrate the place of sociology in the " hierarchy," or to show that a social fact belonged to one or another " stage," was very nearly the limit of Comtist sociological ambition. The Spencerians, on the other hand, seizing upon Spencer's proposition that society is an organism, — but neglecting most of the psychological and historical elements of his system, — were busy elaborat- ing biological analogies. With such notions M. Tarde had, and could have, no sympathy. He felt that if the study of society was to be erected into a science, a beginning must be made, not by demonstrating the logical and rightful place of sociology in the sisterhood of sciences, and not by exploiting the anal- ogy of institutions to organic life, but rather by thoroughly examining the nature and combinations of some distinc- tively social phenomenon. The fact — the relationship or activity — if such there be, in virtue of which society is Introduction v itself, a differentiated thing, and not merely a part of some- thing else, that fact the sociologist should understand through and through, and in all its bearings, and should make it the corner-stone of his system. That elemental social fact M. Tarde believed he had discovered in the phenomenon of imitation. Too profoundly philosophical, however, to view any fact in even partial isolation, M. Tarde perceived that imitation, as a social form, is only one mode of a universal activity, of that endless repetition, throughout nature, which in the physical realm we know as the undulations of ether, the vibrations of material bodies, the swing of the planets in their orbits, the alternations of light and darkness, and of seasons, the succession of life and death. Here, then, was not only a fundamental truth of social science, but also a first principle of cosmic philosophy. His first tentative studies of the laws of universal repeti- tion in physical nature and in history, and of imitation as the distinctive social fact, M. Tarde published between 1882 and 1884 in the Revue philosophique. Among articles which, in substance, afterwards reappeared as chapters of Les Lois de V imitation, were those entitled Les Traits communs de la nature et de I'histoire, L'Archeologie et la statistique, and Qu'est-ce qu'une societe? Other articles, setting forth the same underlying principles, but having a more practical aim, and presenting views born of the author's professional experience as a magistrate, were afterwards incorporated in the volumes, La Criminalite comparee and La Philosophic penale (1891). Of these and other writings by our author on criminology, Havelock Ellis says : " He touches on all the various problems of crime with ever-ready intelligence and acuteness, and a rare charm of literary style, illuminating with suggestive criticism everything that he touches." 1 The first edition of Les Lois de limitation appeared in 1890; a second in 1895. M. Tarde had now conceived a complete philosophy of phenomenal existence, and he 1 The Criminal, p. 42. vi Introduction rapidly converted it into literary embodiment. Unlike philosophers in general, M. Tarde is compact and brief in his systematic work; discursive in his varied writings illus- trative of principles or practical by application. His whole philosophical system is set forth in three volumes of mod- erate dimensions. Les Lois de I3 imitation is an exposition of the facts and laws of universal repetition. In La Logique sociale, which appeared in 1895, we have our author's explanation of the way in which elemental phe- nomena, undergoing endless repetition, are combined in con- crete groups, bodies, systems, especially mental and social systems. This process is a logic, a synthesis, of repetitions. It includes adaptation, invention, and organisation. The chapters on the laws of invention are brilliant examples of M. Tarde's originality and many-sided knowledge. The third volume of the system, L'Opposition universelle, was published in 1897. Here was developed the theory of a third universal form and aspect of natural phenomena — namely, conflict. The chronological: order of these publications did not correspond exactly to their logical order, as parts of a sys- tem. The latter was presented in a series of lectures in 1897 at tne College Libre des Sciences Sociales. The order there given was " The Repetition of Phenomena," " The Opposition of Phenomena," " The Adaptation of Phenom- ena." These lectures were published in 1898, under the title already mentioned, Les Lois sociales. M. Tarde's abilities, and in particular his knowledge of criminal statistics and penology, had ere this drawn atten- tion to him as a man whom the state could not overlook, and in 1894 he was called to Paris to assume charge of the Bureau of Statistics of the Ministry of Justice. This posi- tion he held until his election as Professor of Modern Philos- ophy in the College de France in 1900. In this latter year he was elected also a member of the Institute of France. M. Tarde's later writings present his philosophical and sociological views under many aspects. They include: Les Transformations du droit, Les Transformations du Introduction vii pouvoir, L* Opinion et la joule, Etudes penales et sociales, Essais et Melanges sociologiques, Etudes de psychologic penale, and Psychologic economique. It is not the purpose of these brief lines of introduction to attempt any estimate of M. Tarde's place in philosophy, or to offer any criticism of his sociological views. The object is rather to indicate the place which " The Laws of Imitation" holds among the many writings of a gifted and widely influential author, in the belief that those who read this volume will wish to look into at least some of the others. Of the quality of Mrs. Parsons' translation the reader himself will judge. It is enough here to say that Mrs. Parsons has sought with painstaking fidelity to convey to English readers the exact meaning of the original text. FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS Columbia University PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION IN this work I have endeavoured to point out as clearly as possible the purely social side of human phenomena, as dis- tinct from their vital and physical characteristics. It just happens, however, that the point of view which is helpful in noting this distinction is the very one which presents the greatest number of the closest and most natural analogies between the facts of society and the facts of nature. Many years ago I formulated and partly developed in the Revue philosophique my fundamental thought, — " the key to almost every lock," as one of our greatest philosophers of history graciously wrote to me; — and as the plan of the present work was already in my mind at that time, many of those articles have been readily incorporated as chapters of this book.1 I am but setting them in the place for which they were originally intended. Sociologists who have already honoured these fragmentary expositions with their notice, now have the opportunity, if they desire it, to criti- cise my point of view in its entirety. Any harsh treatment of myself I will forgive, providing my thought be received with leniency. This is not at all impossible. In fact, my conception might have a grievance against me just as seed might complain of its soil. But then I hope that through this publication it will reach someone better fitted to develop it than I am. I have tried, then, to outline a pure sociology. This is 1 They have been modified, or amplified, as Chapters I, III, IV, V. Chapter I was published in September, 1882; Chapter III, in 1884; Chapter IV, in October and November, 1883; Chapter V, in 1888. Several other sociological articles were published in the same collection and were also intended for future revision, but it has seemed unneces- sary to embody them in this volume. In another work, La Philosophie penale, I have developed the applica- tion of my point of view to social crime and punishment. My Crimi- nalite comparee is an earlier attempt in the same direction. x Preface to the First Edition tantamount to saying a general sociology. The laws of such a science, as I understand it, apply to every society, past, present, or future, just as the laws of general physi- ology apply to every species, living, extinct, or conceivable. The simplicity of such principles equals their generality, and I grant that it is much easier to lay them down and even to prove them, than to follow them through the labyrinth of their particular applications. Their formulation is nevertheless necessary. Formerly, a philosophy of history or nature meant a nar- row system of historical or scientific interpretation. It sought to explain the whole group or series of historic facts or natural phenomena, as presented in some inevitable order or sequence. Such attempts were bound to fail. The actual can be explained only as a part of the vast contingent, that is, of that which, given certain conditions, is necessary. In this it swims, like a star in infinite space. The very idea of law rests upon the conception of such a firmament of facts. Given certain unknown primordial conditions, existence was, of course, bound to be as it is. But why were these conditions given and no others? There is something irra- tional here at the bottom of the inevitable. Moreover, in the worlds of life and matter, as well as in that of society, the actual seems to be a mere fragment of the potential. Witness the character of the heavens, dotted arbitrarily with suns and nebulae. Witness the strange nature of cer- tain faunas and floras. Witness the distorted and disjointed aspects of those societies that lie heaped up side by side under social ruins and abortions. In this respect, as in many others which I shall indicate in passing, the three great divi- sions of existence are very much alike. Chapter V, on the Logical Laws of Imitation, is merely the toothing-stone of a future work which is intended to complete this one. A proper development of the subject would have led me beyond the limits of this volume. The ideas which I have presented may supply new solu- tions for the political or other questions upon which we now1 Preface to the First Edition xi stand divided. But it seemed to me that it was unnecessary to undertake to deduce them. It would, moreover, have taken me away from my immediate subject. Nor will the class of readers for whom I am writing reproach me for resisting the charm of such concrete subjects. Besides, I could not have succumbed to it without going beyond the limits of this work. One word more in justification of my dedication. I am not the pupil, or even the disciple, of Cournot. I have never met him. But I take it as one of the happy chances of my life that I read a great deal of this writer after I left college. I have often thought that he needed only to have been born in England or Germany and to have had his work trans- lated into a French teeming with solecisms to be famous among us all. Above all, I shall never forget that at a dreary period of my youth, when I was suffering from my eyes, and limited of necessity to one book, it was Cournot who saved me from mental starvation. But I shall certainly be ridiculed unless I add another much less disinterested sentiment to this old-fashioned one of intellectual gratitude. If my book fail of a welcome, — a contingency for which a philosopher must always be prepared in France, even if he have hitherto had but to congratulate himself upon the good will of the public, — this dedication will prove a consolation to me. Cournot was the Sainte-Beuve of philosophic crit- icism; possessed of originality and discrimination, he was a thinker of universal erudition as well as insight; he was a profound geometrician, an unparalleled logician, and as an economist he was the unrecognised precursor of modern economists; to sum it all up, Cournot was an Auguste Comte, purified, condensed, and refined. In realising, then, that such a man continued to be obscure during his lifetime, and that even since his death he has not been very well known, in realising this how could I ever dare to complain of not having had greater success? PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION SINCE the first edition of this book I have published its sequel and complement under the title of La Logique sociale. In saying this I think that I have implicitly answered certain objections which the reader of The Laws of Imita- tion might have raised. However, it will not be useless to give a few brief points of explanation on this subject. I have been criticised here and there " for having often called by the name of imitation certain facts which this name did not at all fit." This criticism, coming from a philo- sophic pen, astonishes me. In fact, when a philosopher needs a word to express a new generalisation, he must choose between two things; he must choose a neologism, if he is put to it, or he must decide, and this is unquestionably better, to stretch the meaning of some old term. The whole question is one of finding out whether I have overstretched — I do not say from the point of view of the dictionary def- inition, but from that of a deeper conception of things — the meaning of the word imitation. Now I am well aware that I am not conforming to ordi- nary usage when I say that when a man unconsciously and involuntarily reflects the opinion of others, or allows an action of others to be suggested to him, he imitates this idea or act. And yet, if he knowingly and deliberately borrows some trick of thought or action from his neighbour, people agree that in this case the use of the word in question is legitimate. Nothing, however, is less scientific that the establishment of this absolute separation, of this abrupt break, between the voluntary and the involuntary, between the conscious and the unconscious. Do we not pass by insensible degrees from deliberate volition to almost me- chanical habit? And does the same act absolutely change its nature during this transition? I do not mean to say xiv Preface to the Second Edition that I deny the importance of the psychological change that is produced in this way. But on its social side the phe- nomenon has remained the same. No one has a right to criticise the extension of the meaning of the word in question as unjustifiable unless in extending it I have de- formed or obscured its sense. But I have always given it a very precise and characteristic meaning, that of the action at a distance of one mind upon another, and of action which consists of a quasi-photographic reproduction of a cerebral image upon the sensitive plate of another brain.1 If the photographic plate became conscious at a given mo- ment of what was happening to it, would the nature of the phenomenon be essentially changed? By imitation I mean every impression of an inter-psychical photography, so to speak, willed or not willed, passive or active. If we observe that wherever there is a social relation between two living beings, there we have imitation in this sense of the word (either of one by the other or of others by both, when, for example, a man converses with another in a common language, making new verbal proofs from very old nega- tives), we shall have to admit that a sociologist was justified in taking this notion as a look-out post. I might have been much more justly criticised for having overstretched the meaning of the word invention. I have certainly applied this name to all individual initiatives, not only without considering the extent in which they are self- conscious — for the individual often innovates unconsciously, and, as a matter of fact, the most imitative man is an inno- vator on some side or other — but without paying the slight- est attention in the world to the degree of difficulty or merit of the innovation in question. This is not because I have failed to recognise the importance of this last consideration. Some inventions are so easy to conceive of that we may admit the fact that they have arisen of themselves, without 1 Or of the same brain, if it is a question of imitation of self ; for memory or habit, its two branches, must be connected, in order to be well understood, with imitation of others', the only kind of imitation which we are concerned with here. The psychological is explained by the social just because the social sprang from the psychological. Preface to the Second Edition xv borrowing, in almost all primitive societies, and that their first accidental appearance here or there has little signifi- cance. Other discoveries, on the contrary, are so difficult that the happy advent of the genius who made them may be considered a pre-eminently singular and important chance of fortune. Well, in spite of all this, I think that even here I have been justified in doing some slight violence to common speech in characterising as inventions or discoveries the most simple innovations, all the more so because the easiest are not always the least fruitful nor the most difficult the least useless. What is really unjusti- fiable, on the other hand, is the elastic meaning that is given by many naturalistic sociologists to the word heredity. They use this word indifferently to express the transmission of vital characteristics through reproduction and the trans- mission of ideas and customs, of social things, by ancestral tradition, by domestic education, and by custom-imitation. Let me add that a neologism from the Greek would have been the easiest thing in the world to conceive of. Instead of saying invention or imitation I might have readily forged two new words. Now let me dismiss this petty and unin- teresting quibble. I have been sometimes charged with exaggeration, and this is a more serious thing, in the use of the two notions in question. It is rather a commonplace criticism, to be sure, and one which every innovator must expect even when he has erred on the side of too much re- serve in the expression of his thoughts. We may be sure that if a Greek philosopher had undertaken to say that the sun might possibly be as big as the Peloponnesus, his best friends would have been unanimous in recognising the fact that there was something true at the bottom of his ingenious paradox, but that he was evidently exaggerating. In gen- eral, my critics did not consider the end which I had in view. I desired to unfold the purely sociological side of human facts, intentionally ignoring their biological side, although I am well aware that the latter is inseparable from the former. My plan allowed me to indicate, without devel- oping to any extent, the relations of the three principal xvi Preface to the Second Edition forms of universal repetition, especially the relation of heredity to imitation. But I have said enough, I think, to leave no doubt as to my views on the importance of race and physical environment. Besides, if I say that the distinctive character of every social relation, of every social fact, is to be imitated, is this saying, as certain superficial readers have seemed to believe, that in my eyes there is no social relation, no social fact, no social cause, but imitation? One might as well say that every function of life could be reduced to reproduction and every vital phenomenon to heredity be- cause in every living being everything is a matter of genera- tion and inheritance. Social relations are as manifold, as numerous, and as diverse, as the objects of the desires and ideas of man, and as the helps or hindrances that each of these desires and ideas lends or presents to the similar or dissimilar tendencies and opinions of others. In the midst of this infinite complexity we may note that these varied social relations (talking and listening, beseeching and being beseeched, commanding and obeying, producing and con- suming, etc.) belong to two groups; the one tends to transmit from one man to another, persuasively or authori- tatively, willingly or unwillingly, a belief; the other, a desire. In other words, the first group consists of various kinds or degrees of instruction; the second, of various kinds or de- grees of command. And it is precisely because the human acts which are imitated have this dogmatic or com- manding character that imitation is a social tie, for it is either dogma1 or power which binds men together. (Peo- ple have seen only the half of this truth, and seen that badly, when they have said that social facts were distinguished by their constrained and coercive character. In saying this, they have failed to recognise the spontaneity of the greater part of popular credulity and docility.) Therefore I think that I have not erred through exag- 1 Dogma, that is to say, any idea, religious or otherwise, political, fot example, which takes root in the mind of any social unit through the pressure of his environment. Preface to the Second Edition xvii geration in this book; and so I have reprinted it without eliminating anything. I have sinned rather through omis- sion. I have said nothing at all about a form of imitation which plays a big role in societies, particularly in contempo- rary societies, and I shall make haste here to make good this omission. There are two ways of imitating, as a matter of fact, namely, to act exactly like one's model, or to do exactly the contrary. Hence the necessity of those diver- gences which Spencer points out, without explaining, in his law of progressive differentiation. Nothing can be affirmed without suggesting, no matter how simple the social en- vironment, not only the idea that is affirmed, but the nega- tion of this idea as well. This is the reason why the supernatural, in asserting itself through theologies, suggests naturalism, its negation. (See Espinas on this subject.) This is the reason why the affirmation of idealism gives birth to the idea of materialism; why the establishment of monarchy engenders the idea of republicanism, etc. Let us say, then, from this wider point of view, that a society is a group of people who display many resemblances produced either by imitation or by counter-imitation. For men often counter-imitate one another, particularly when they have neither the modesty to imitate directly nor the power to invent. In counter-imitating one another, that is to say, in doing or saying the exact opposite of what they observe being done or said, they are becoming more and more assimilated, just as much assimilated as if they did or said precisely what was being done or said around them. Next to conforming to custom in the matter of funerals, marriages, visits, and manners, there is nothing more imita- tive than fighting against one's natural inclination to follow the current of these things, or than pretending to go against it. In the Middle Ages the black mass arose from a counter- imitation of the Catholic mass. In his book on the expres- sion of the emotions, Darwin very properly gives a large place to the need of counter-expression. When a dogma is proclaimed, when a political pro- gramme is announced, men fall into two unequal classes ; xviii Preface to the Second Edition there are those who are enthusiastic about it and those who are not enthusiastic. There is no manifestation which does not recruit supporters and which does not provoke the for- mation of a group of non-supporters. Every positive affir- mation, at the same time that it attracts to itself mediocre and sheep-like minds, arouses somewhere or other in a brain that is naturally rebellious, — this does not mean naturally inventive, — a negation that is diametrically opposite and of about equal strength. This reminds one of inductive currents in physics. But both kinds of brains have the same content of ideas and purposes. They are associated, although they are adversaries, or, rather, because they are adver- saries. Let us clearly distinguish between the imitative propagation of questions and that of solutions. Because a certain solution spreads in one place and another else- where, this does not prevent the problem from having spread in both places. Is it not evident that in every period, among people in constant communication, particularly in our own day because international relations have never be- fore been so manifold, is it not evident that the calendar of social and political debates is always the same? And is not this resemblance due to a current of imitation that may itself be explained by a diffusion of wants and ideas through prior contagions of imitation? Is not this the reason why labour questions are being agitated at the present moment throughout Europe? No opinion is dis- cussed by the press, about which, I repeat, the public is not daily divided into two camps, those who agree with the opinion and those who disagree. But the latter as well as the former admit that it is impossible to be concerned for the time being with anything other than the question which is thus forced upon them. Only some wild and undisciplined spirit will ruminate, now and then, in the whirl of the social sea in which he is plunged, over strange and absolutely hypothetical problems. Such men are the inventors of the future. We must be very careful not to confuse counter-imitation with invention, its dangerous counterfeit. I do not mean Preface to the Second Edition xix that the former is worthless. Although it fosters the spirit of partisanship, the spirit of either peaceful or warlike divi- sion between men, it introduces them to the wholly social pleasure of discussion. It is a witness to the sympathetic origin of contradiction itself; the back currents themselves are caused by the current. Nor must we confuse counter- imitation with systematic non-imitation, a subject about which I should also have spoken in this book. Non-imi- tation is not always a simple negative fact. The fact of not imitating when there is no contact — no social contact through the practical impossibility of communication — is merely a non-social relation, but the fact of not imitating the neighbour who is in touch with us, puts us upon a foot- ing of really anti-social relations with him. The refusal of a people, a class, a town or a village, of a savage tribe iso- lated on a civilised continent, to copy the dress, customs, language, industry, and arts which make up the civilisation of their neighbourhood is a continual declaration of antip- athy to the form of society in question. It is thereby de- clared absolutely and forever alien. Similarly, when a peo- ple deliberately undertakes not to reproduce the examples of its forefathers in the matter of rights, usages, and ideas, we have a veritable disassociation of fathers and sons, a rupture of the umbilical cord between the old and the new society. Voluntary and persistent non-imitation in this sense has a purgative role which is quite analagous to that rilled by what I have called the logical duel. Just as the latter tends to purge the social mass of mixed ideas and volitions, to elimi- nate inequalities and discords, and to facilitate in this way the synthetic action of the logical union; so non-imitation of extraneous and heterogeneous models makes it possible for the harmonious group of home models to extend and prolong themselves, to entrench themselves in the custom- imitation of which they are the object; and for the same reason non-imitation of anterior models, when the moment has come for civilising revolution, cuts a path for fashion- imitation. It no longer finds any hindrance in the way of its conquering activity. xx Preface to the Second Edition Is the unique or principal cause of this invincible obsti- nacy— momentarily invincible — of non-imitation, as the naturalistic school was led to think some years ago, racial difference? Not the least in the world. In the first place, in the case of non-imitation of ancestral examples, in revolu- tionary periods, it is clear that this cause could not be brought forward, since the new generation belongs to the same race as the prior generations whose traditions it casts aside. Then, in the case of non-imitation of the foreigner, historical observation shows that resistance to outside in- fluences is very far from being in proportion to the dis- similarities of the physical traits which differentiate popula- tions. Of all the nations conquered by Rome none was more allied to her through blood than the populations of Greek origin; and yet these were precisely the communities where her language failed to spread and where her culture and genius failed to be assimilated. Why was this? Because they alone, in spite of their defeat, were able to retain their fierce pride, their indelible feeling of superiority. On the side of the idea that it is impossible for separate races to borrow from one another one of the strongest arguments that could have been cited thirty years ago was the hermet- ical shutting out by the peoples of the Far East, Japan and China, of all European culture. But from the still recent day when the Japanese, foreign as they were to us in colour, lineaments, and physical constitution, felt for the first time that we were their superiors, they left off trying to shut out the imitative radiation of our civilisation by the opaque screen they had used before. They gave it, on the contrary, the warmest of welcomes. The same thing will happen to China if she ever makes up her mind to recognise that in certain respects — not in all, I hope, for her sake — we have the better of her. It is idle to argue that the transforma- tion of Japan in the direction of Europe is more apparent than real, more superficial than deep, that it is due to the initiative of certain intelligent men who are followed by a part of the upper classes, but that the great mass of the nation remains hostile to this foreign inundation. To Preface to the Second Edition xxi argue after this fashion is to ignore the fact that every intel- lectual and moral revolution that is destined to utterly recast a people always begins in this way. A chosen few have always imported the foreign examples that come little by little to spread by fashion, to be consolidated into custom, and to be developed and systematised by social logic. When Christianity first reached the Germans, the Slavs, the Finns, it started in the same way. Nothing is more consistent with the " laws of imitation." Does this mean that the action of race upon the course of civilisation is overlooked from my point of view ? Not at all. I have said that in passing from one ethnical environ- ment to another the radiation of imitation is refracted; and I add that this refraction may be enormous without its lead- ing to any consequence that is in the least contradictory to the ideas developed in this book. Only race as I see it is a national product where, in the crucible of a special civilisa- tion, different prehistoric races have been melted together, intermingled, and assimilated. For every given civilisation that is formed of ideas of genius, hailing a little from every- where and brought into logical agreement somewhere or other, creates in the long run the race, or races, in which it is for a time embodied; and the inverse of this is not true, namely, that every race makes its own civilisation. This means, at bottom, that different human races, which are quite different in this respect from different living species, are collaborators as well as competitors ; that they are called upon not only to fight and destroy each other for the good of a small number of survivors, but to aid each other in the age-long achievement of a common social work, of a great final society whose unity will be the fruit of their very diver- sity. The laws of heredity that have been so well studied by naturalists do not contradict in any respect the " laws of imitation." On the other hand, they complete them, and there is no concrete sociology that could separate these two orders of consideration. If I separate them here, it is, I re- peat, because the proper subject of this work is sociology xxii Preface to the Second Edition pure and abstract. Besides, I do not fail to point out what their place is in the biological considerations which I am pur- posely ignoring because I am leaving them to more compe- tent hands. And this place is three-fold. To begin with, in expressly developing the nation from the family — for the primitive horde is made up of emigrants or exiles from the family — I have clearly affirmed that if the social fact is a re- lation of imitation, the social tie, the social group, is both imi- tative and hereditary, in the second place, invention, from which I derive everything thac is social, is not, in my opinion, a purely social fact in its origin. It arises from the intersection of an individual genius, an intermittent and characteristic racial product, the ripe fruit of a series of happy marriages, with the currents and radiations of imi- tation which one day happened to cross each other in a more or less exceptional brain. You may agree, if you wish, with M. de Gobineau, that only the white races are invent- ive, or with a contemporary anthropologist, that this privi- lege belongs exclusively to the dolichocephalic races — all this matters little from my point of view. And I might even pretend that the radical and vital separation that is thus established between the inventiveness of certain privileged races and the imitativeness of all races is fitted to empha- sise, a little unjustifiably, as a matter of fact, the truth of my point of view. Finally, I have not only recognised the influence of the vital environment upon imitation, an envi- ronment in which it spreads while it is refracted, as I said above, but in stating the law of the normal return of fashion to custom, the rooting of innovations in customs and tradi- tions, have I not again made heredity the necessary prop of imitation? But we may accord to the biological side of social facts the highest importance without going as far as to maintain that there is a water-tight bulkhead between different races, presumably primitive and presocial, which makes any endosmosis or exosmosis of imitation impossible. And this is the only thing which I deny. Taken in this false and unjustifiable sense, the idea of race leads the soci- ologist who has taken it for a guide to conceive of the end Preface to the Second Edition xxiii of social progress as a disintegration of peoples who are walled about and shut off from one another and everlast- ingly at war with one another. This kind of naturalism is generally associated with a defence of militarism. On the other hand, if we take the ideas of invention, imitation, and social logic as a guiding thread, we are led to the more reassuring perspective of a great future confluence — alas, that it is not immediate — of multiple divisions of mankind into a single peaceful human family. The idea of indefinite progress, which is such a vague and obstinate idea, has nei- ther a clear nor precise meaning except from this point of view. The necessity of a progressive march towards a great but distant goal is an outcome of the laws of imitation. This goal, which becomes more and more accessible in spite of apparent, although only transitory, set-backs, is the birth, the development, and the universal spread, — whether under an imperial or federated form is insignificant, — of a unique society. And, as a matter of fact, among all the predic- tions of Condorcet relating to social progress, the only ones that have been realised — that, for example, relating to the extension and gradual levelling down of European civilisa- tion— are consequences of the laws in question. But if he had considered these laws he would have expressed his thought more exactly and precisely. When he predicts that the inequality of different nations will continue to diminish, he should have said social dissimilarity, and not; inequality. For between the smallest and largest states the disproportion of power, of territory, and even of wealth, goes on increasing, and yet this condition does not stand in the way of a constant progress of international assimi- lation. And is it certain that inequality between individ- uals must continually diminish in all respects as our illus- trious philosopher also predicted? Inequality of genius or talent? Not at all. Of comfort and wealth? I doubt it. It is true that their inequality before the law has disappeared or will before long disappear altogether. But why is this so? Because the growing resemblance of individuals be- tween whom all the customary barriers of reciprocal imita- xxiv Preface to the Second Edition tion have been broken down, and who imitate one another more and more freely, to be sure, and yet more and more necessarily, makes them feel with a growing and, eventually, irresistible power the injustice of privilege. Let us be sure, however, that we understand one another about this progressive resemblance of individuals. Far from smothering their true originality, it fosters and favours it. What is contrary to personal pre-eminence is the imita- tion of a single man whom people copy in everything. But when, instead of patterning one's self after one person or after a few, we borrow from a hundred, a thousand, or ten thousand persons, each of whom is considered under a par- ticular aspect, the elements of thought or action which we subsequently combine, the very nature and choice of these elementary copies, as well as their combination, expresses and accentuates our original personality. And this is, per- haps, the chief benefit that results from the prolonged action of imitation. We might demand to what extent this collective dream, this collective nightmare of society, was worth its cost in blood and tears, if this grievous discipline, this deceptive and despotic prestige, did not serve to free the individual in calling forth, little by little, from the depths of his heart, his freest impulses, his boldest introspec- tion, his keenest insight into nature, and in developing everywhere, not the savage individualities, not the clashing and brutal soul-stuffs of bygone days, but those deep and harmonious traits of the soul that are characteristic of per- sonality as well as of civilisation, the harvest of both the purest and most potent individualism and of consummate sociability. G. T. May, 1895 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION BY DR. HENRY FRANKLIN GIDDINGS, .... Hi PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, lx PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, xiii CHAPTER I.— UNIVERSAL REPETITION I. — The overlooked regularity from a certain point of view of social facts. Their analogies with natural facts. The three forms of Universal Repetition : undulation, generation, imitation. Social science and social philosophy. Animal societies, I II. — Three analogous laws in physics, in biology, in sociology. WJiy everything is number and measure, . . " . . 14 III. and IV. — Analogies between tne three forms of Repetition. They imply a cqmmon tendency towards a geometrical progression. Linguistic, mythological, etc., refractions. Happy or unhappy in- terferences of imitation. Conflict-interferences and combination- interferences (inventions). Outline of social logic, 16 V.— ^Differences between the three forms ^f Rc-nejilir " Genera- tion is unconditioned undulation, fu.iiai/ou to generation at a distance. The abbreviation of embryonic phases, . . . -33 - CHAPTER II.— SOCIAL RESEMBLANCES AND IMITATION I. — Social resmblances which are not caused by imitation and vital resemblances which are not caused by generation. A distinc- tion between analogies and homologies in comparative sociology like that in comparative anatomy. A genealogical tree of inventions derived from master-inventions. The slow and inevitable propaga- tion of examples even among sedentary and shut-in populations, 37 II. — Is there a law of civilisations which imposes upon them a common direction or, at least, a common goal, and, consequently, a law of increasing resemblances, even without imitation? Proofs of the contrary, 51 CHAPTER III.— WHAT IS A SOCIETY? I. — Inadequacy of the economic or even of the juristic concep- tion : Animal societies. Nation and society not to be confused. Definition. , 59 xxv xxvi Contents II.-, Definition of the social type, 68 III.— Perfect fnrialitv. Biological analogies. The hidden and perhaps original agents of universal repetition, .... 69 IV. — An idea of Taine's. The contagion of ex?mnle and sug- gestion. Analogies between the social and the hypnotic state. Great men. Intimidation is a nasrent social state, ... 74 CHAPTER IV.— WHAT IS HISTORY? ARCHEOLOGY AND STATISTICS I. and II. — Distinction between the anthropologists and the archaeologists. The archaeologist unconsciously holds my point of view. Barrenness of invention characteristic of primitive times. Imitation has been objective and widespread from the most remote periods. What archaeology teaches us, 89 III. — The statistician sees things, at bottom, like the archaeolo- gist. He pays exclusive attention to imitative editions of every ancient and modern invention. Analogies and differences, . . 102 IV. and V. — What Statistics ought to be; its desiderata. The interpretation of its curves, namely its rises, horizontals, and falls, is given by my point of view. The tendency of all ideas and wants to spread in a geometrical progression. The encounter, coales- cence, and rivalry of these tendencies. Examples. The desire for paternity and its variations. The desire for liberty and other desires'. A general empirical law ; three phases ; importance of the second, 109 VI. and VII. — The curves of Statistics and the flight of a bird. The eye and ear considered as numerical registers of ethereal and sonorous vibrations', representative statistics of the universe. The probable future role of Statistics. Definition of History, . . 132 CHAPTER V.— THE LOGICAL LAWS OF IMITATION The reason why, given a number of inventions, some are imi- tated and some are not. Reasons of a natural order and of a social order, and, among the latter, logical reasbns and ex^ra-logical •influences. A linguistic example, . .... . . . 140 . I. — That which is imitated is belief or desire, a fundamental antithesis. The Sper<-pn?n formula. Social progress and indi- vidual thought. The need of invention and the -need of criticism have the same source. Progress through the substitution and progress through the accumulation of inventions, . . - . . 144 II. — The logical duel. Everything in history is a duel or a union of inventions. The one always says yes and the other, no. Linguistic, legislative, judicial, political, industrial, artistic duels. Contents xxvii Developments. Every duel is twofold, every adversary affirming his own thesis at the same time that he denies that of his opponent. The moment when the roles are reversed. The individual duel and the social duel. The denouement: Three possible outcomes, . . 154 III. — The logical union. The period of accumulation which pre- cedes the period of substitution must not be confused with that which follows it. Distinction between the linguistic, religious, political, etc., grammar and dictionary. The dictionary enlarges more readily than the grammar improves, 173 Other considerations, 184 CHAPTER VI.— EXTRA-LOGICAL INFLUENCES Different characteristics of imitation: I. Its increasing precision and exactness; ceremonial and procedure. 2. Its conscious or un- conscious character. The advance of imitation : I. — From the inner to the outer man. Different physiological functions compared from the^point of view of their transmissibility by example. Primitive obedience and credulity. Dogmas are transmitted before rites. Admiration precedes envy. Ideas are communicated before expressions ; ends, before means. The ex- planation of survivals by this law. Its universality. Its application even to feminine imitation, . . . .... . . 194 II. — From the superior to the inferior. Exceptions to this law; its truth comparable with that which governs the radiation of heat i. Examples. The martinella and carroccio. The Phoeni- cians and the Venetians. The utility of aristocracies. 2. Eccle- siastical hierarchy and its effects. 3. The most superior, among vhe least distant, is the one imitated. Distance in the social sense. 4. In democratic periods nobilities are replaced by great cities which resemble them for good and evil. 5. In what social super- iority consists; in subjective or objective characteristics which favor the exploitation of inventions at a given time. 6. Applica- tion to the problem of the origins of the feudal system, ., f ,' 213 CHAPTER VII.— EXTRA-LOGICAL INFLUENCES (CONTINUED)— CUSTOM AND FASHION Ages of custom when the ancient model, paternal or patriotic, is supreme ; ages of fashion when the advantage is often with the new, ?xotic model. Through fashion, imitation is set free from genera- tion. The relations of imitation and generation are like those of generation and undulation. Transition from custom to fashion followed by a return to a broader custom. The application of this law : I.— To languages. The rhythm of the diffusion of idioms. The xxviii Contents formation of the Romance languages. Characteristics and results of the aforesaid transformations, 255 II. — To religions. All religions proceed from exclusivism to proselytism ; they then withdraw into themselves. Reproduction of these three phases from the most remote periods. Cult of the for- eigner, not alone of the ancestor, from this time on. Worship of the foreign beast. Why very ancient gods are soomorphic. Di- vine fauna. Worship is a kind of superior domestication. Spirit- ualisation of religions which spread through fashion. Moral effects. The social importance of religions, 265 III. — To governments. The twofold origin of states, the family and the horde. In every state, from remote antiquity, there have been two parties, the party pf custom and the party of fashion. Frequency of the phenomenon of royal families of foreign blood. The fief an invention propagated by fascination; the same true of the feudal monarchy; and of the modern monarchy. Liberalism and cosmopolitanism. The final nationalisation of foreign impor- tations. The way in which the United States were formed. Augustus, Louis XIV., Pericles. Criticism of Spencer's antith- esis between militarism and industrialism compared with that of Tocqueville's between aristocracy and democracy, . . . 287 IV. — To legislations. Juridical evolution. Custom-law and statute-law. Law is very multiform and very stable in times of custom, very uniform and very changeable in times of fashion. The spread of charters from town to town. Sumner Maine's Ancient Law. The rhythm of the three phases applied to criminal procedure. Successive characteristics of legislation. Classifica- tion, 310 V. — To usages and wants (political economy). Multiformity and stability of usages. Subsequent uniformity and rapid change. Production and consumption, a distinction universally applicable. The transmissibility of wants of consumption is always more rapid than that of the wants of production. Consequences of this un- equal rate. The ulterior outlet in times of custom, the exterior outlet in times of fashion. Industry in the Middle Ages. Order of the successive forms of extensive industry. The price of fashion and the price of custom. Successive characteristics bor- rowed from the economic world and from social aspects com- pared, in changes of imitation. The reason of these changes, . 322 VI. — To morals and arts. Duties are in the beginning original inventions. Gradual enlargement of the moral public and of the art public. The art of custom is born from handicraft; it is professional and national. The art of fashion is non-utilitarian and exotic. Fashion-morality and custom-morality. Future prob- abilities. The historic phenonemon of renascences, both moral and aesthetic, .... 344 Contents xxix CHAPTER VIII.— REMARKS AND COROLLARIES Summing up and conclusion. All the laws of imitation viewed from the same standpoint. Corollaries, 366 I. — The transition from the unilateral to the reciprocal. Ex- amples: from decree to contract; from dogma to free-thought; from man-hunting to war; from court manners to urbanity. The necessity of these transformations, 371 II. — Distinction between the reversible and the irreversible in history. The irreversible in consequence of the laws of imitation, and the irreversible in consequence of the laws of invention. A word in regard to the latter subject. Changes of custom are in a certain measure irreversible as well. Great empires of the future. Final individualism, 379 V / UNIVERSAL REPETITION I CAN we have a science or only a history, or, at most, a philosophy of social phenomena? This question is always open. And yet, if social facts are closely observed from a certain point of view, they can be reduced, like other facts, to series of minute and homogeneous phenomena and to the formulas, or laws, which sum up these series. Why, then, is the science of society still unborn, or born but re- cently, among all its adult and vigorous sister sciences? The chief reason is, I think, that we have thrown away the substance for its shadow and substituted words for things. We have thought it impossible to give a scientific look to sociology except by giving it a biological or, better still, a mechanical air. This is an attempt to light up the known by the unknown. It is transforming a solar system into a non-resolvable nebula in order to understand it better. In social subjects we are exceptionally privileged in having veritable causes, positive and specific acts, at first hand; this condition is wholly lacking in every other subject of in- vestigation. It is unnecessary, therefore, to rely for an explanation of social facts upon those so-called general causes which physicists and naturalists are obliged to create under the name of force, energy, conditions of ex- istence, and other verbal palliatives of their ignorance of the real groundwork of things. But are we to consider that human acts are the sole fac- tors of history? Surely this is too simple ! And so we bind ourselves to Contrive other causes on the type of those use- ful fictions which are elsewhere imposed upon us, and we 2 Laws of Imitation congratulate ourselves upon being able at times to give an entirely impersonal colour to human phenomena by reason of our lofty, but, truly speaking, obscure, point of view. Let us ward off this vague idealism. Let us likewise ward off the vapid individualism which consists in explaining social changes as the caprices of certain great men. On the other hand, let us explain these changes through the more or less fortuitous appearance, as to time and place, of certain great ideas, or rather, of a considerable number of both major and minor ideas, of ideas which are generally anony- mous and usually of obscure birth; which are simple or abstruse; which are seldom illustrious, but which are always novel. Because of this latter attribute, I shall take the liberty of baptising them collectively inventions or discover- ies. By these two terms I mean any kind of an innovation or improvement, however slight, which is made in any pre- vious innovation throughout the range of social phenomena — language, religion, politics, law, industry, or art. At the moment when this novel thing, big or little as it may be, is conceived of, or determined by, an individual, nothing ap- pears to change in the social body, — just as nothing changes in the physical appearance of an organism which a harmful or beneficent microbe has just invaded, — and the gradual changes caused by the introduction of the new element seem to follow, without visible break, upon the anterior social changes into whose current they have glided. Hence arises the illusion which leads philosophers of history into affirming that there is a real and fundamental continuity in historic metamorphoses. The true causes can be reduced to a chain of ideas which are, to be sure, very numerous, but which are in themselves distinct and discontinuous, although they are connected by the much more numerous acts of imitation which are modelled upon them. Our starting-point lies here in the re-inspiring initiatives which bring new wants, together with new satisfactions, into the world, and which then, through spontaneous and unconscious or artificial and deliberate imitation, propagate or tend to propagate, themselves, at a more or less rapid, Universal Repetition 3 but regular, rate, like a wave of light, or like a family of termites. The regularity to which I refer is not in the least apparent in social things until they are resolved into their several elements, when it is found to lie in the simplest of them, in combinations of distinct inventions, in flashes of genius which have been accumulated and changed into commonplace lights. I confess that this is an extremely difficult analysis. Socially, everything is either invention or imitation. And invention bears the same relation to imitatio^n as a mountain to a river. There is certainly noth- ing less subtle than this point of view; but in holding to it boldly and unreservedly, in exploiting it from the most trivial detail to the most complete synthesis of facts, we may, perhaps, notice how well fitted it is to bring into relief all the picturesqueness and, at the same time, all the simplicity of history, and to reveal historic perspectives which may be characterised by the freakishness of a rock-bound landscape, or by the conventionality of a park walk. This is idealism also, if you choose to call it so; but it is the idealism which consists in explaining history through the ideas of its actors, not through those of the historian. If we consider the science of society from this point of view, we shall at once see that human sociology is related to animal sociologies, as a species to its genus, so to speak. That it is an extraordinary and infinitely superior species, I admit, but it is allied to the others, nevertheless. M. Espinas expressly states in his admirable work on Societes ani- males, a work which was written long before the first edi- tion of this book, that the labours of ants may be very well explained on the principle " of individual initiative followed by imitation" This initiative is always an innovation or invention that is equal to one of our own in boldness of spirit. To conceive the idea of constructing an arch, or a tunnel, at an appropriate point, an ant must be endowed with an innovating instinct equal to, or surpassing, that of our canal-digging or mountain-tunnelling engineers. Par- enthetically it follows that imitation by masses of ants of such novel initiatives strikingly belies the spirit of mutual 4 Laws of Imitation hatred which is alleged to exist among animals.1 M. Espinas is very frequently impressed in his observation of the societies of our lower brethren by the important role which is played in them by individual initiatives. Every herd of wild cattle has its leaders, its influential heads. De- velopments in the instincts of birds are explained by the same author as " individual inventions which are afterwards transmitted from generation to generation through direct instruction." 2 In view of the fact that modification of in- stinct is probably related to the same principle as the genesis and modification of species, we may be tempted to enquire whether the principle of the imitation of inven- tion, or of something physiologically analogous, would not be the clearest possible explanation of the ever-open problem of the origin of species. But let us leave this question and confine ourselves to the statement that both animal and human societies may be explained from this point of view. In the second place, and this is the special thesis of this chapter, the subject of social science is seen, from this standpoint, to present a remarkable analogy to the other domains of general science, and, in this way, to become re-embodied, so to speak, in the rest of the universe, where it had before this the air of an outsider. In every field of study, affirmations pure and simple enor- mously outnumber explanations. And, in all cases, the first data are simply affirmed; they are the extraordinary and accidental facts, the premises and sources from which proceeds all that which is subsequently explained. The astronomer states that certain nebulae, certain celestial 1 Among the higher species of ants, according to M. Espinas, " the individual develops an astonishing initiative " [Des Societes animates, p. 223; Alfred Espinas, Paris, 1877. The italics are M. Tarde's. — Tr.]. How do the labours and migrations of ant-swarms begin? Is it through a common, instinctive, and spontaneous impulse which starts from all the associates at the same time and under the pressure of out'ward circumstances which are experienced simultaneously by all ? On the contrary, a single ant begins by leaving the others and under- taking the work; then it strikes its neighbours with its antennae to summon their aid. and the contagion of imitation does the rest. 2 [Ibid., p. 272.— Tr.] Universal Repetition 5 bodies of a given mass and volume and at a given distance, exist, or have existed. The chemist makes the same state- ment about certain chemical substances, the physicist, about certain kinds of ethereal vibrations, which he calls light, electricity, and magnetism; the naturalist states that there are certain principal organic types, to begin with, plants and animals ; the physiographer states that there are certain mountain chains, which he calls the Alps, the Andes, et cetera. In teaching us about these capital facts from which the rest are deduced, are these investigators doing the work, strictly speaking, of scientists? They are not; they are merely affirming certain facts, and they in no way differ from the historian who chronicles the expedition of Alex- ander or the discovery of printing. If there be any dif- ference, it is, as we shall see, wholly to the advantage of the historian. What, then, do we know in the scientific sense of the word? Of course, we answer that we know causes and effects. And when we have learned that, in the case of two different events, the one is the outcome of the other, or that both collaborate towards the same end, we say that they have been explained. But let us imagine a world where there is neither resemblance nor repetition, a strange, but, if need be, an intelligible hypothesis; a world where everything is novel and unforeseen, where the crea- tive imagination, unchecked by memory, has full play, where the motions of the stars are sporadic, where the agitations of the ether are unrhythmical, and wheresuccessivegenerations are without the common traits of an hereditary type. And yet every apparition in such a phantasmagoria might be produced and determined by another, and might even, in its turn, become the cause of others. In such a world causes and effects might still exist; but would any kind of a science be possible? It would not be, because, to reiterate, neither resemblances nor repetitions would be found there. This is the essential point. Knowledge of causes is some- times sufficient for foresight; but knowledge of resem- blances always allows of enumeration and measurement, and science depends primarily upon number and measure. 6 Laws of Imitation More than this is, of course, necessary. As soon as a new science has staked out its field of characteristic resem- blances and repetitions, it must compare them and note the bond of solidarity which unites their concomitant varia- tions. But, as a matter of fact, the mind does not fully understand nor clearly recognise the relation of cause and effect, except in as much as the effect resembles or repeats the cause, as, for example, when a sound wave produces an- other sound wave, or a cell, another cell. There is noth- ing more mysterious, one may say, than such reproductions. I admit this; but when we have once accepted this mystery, there is nothing clearer than the resulting series. Whereas, every time that production does not mean reproduction of self, we are entirely in the dark.1 When like things form parts of the same or of sup- posedly the same whole, like the molecules of a volume of hydrogen, or the woody cells of a tree, or the soldiers of a regiment, the resemblance is referred to as a quantity in- stead of a group. In other words, when the things which repeat themselves remain united as they increase, like vibra- tions of heat or electricity, accumulating within some heated or electrified object, or like cells multiplying in the body of a growing child, or like proselytes to a common religion, in such cases the repetition is called a growth instead of a series. In all of this I fail to see anything which would differentiate the subject of social science. Besides, whether resemblances and repetitions are in- trinsic or extrinsic, quantities or groups, growths or series, they are the necessary themes of the differences and varia- tions which exist in all phenomena. They are the canvas of their embroidery, the measure of their music. The wonder world which I was picturing would be, at bottom, the least 1 " Scientific knowledge need not necessarily take its starting-point from the most minute hypothetical and unknown things. It begins wherever matter forms units of a like order which can be compared with and measured by one another, and wherever such units combine as units of a higher order and thus serve in themselves as a standard of comparison for the latter" (Von Naegeli. Address at the congress of German naturalists in 1877). Universal Repetition 7 richly differentiated of all possible worlds. How much greater a renovator than revolution is our modern industrial system, accumulation as it is of mutually imitative actions ! What is more monotonous than the free life of the savage in comparison with the hemmed-in life of civilised man ? Would any organic progress be possible without heredity ? Would the exuberant variety of geological ages and of living nature have sprung into existence independently of the periodicity of the heavenly motions or of the wave-like rhythm of the earth's forces? Repetition exists, then, for the sake of variation. Other- wise, the necessity of death (a problem which M. Delbceuf considers in his book upon animate and inanimate matter, almost impossible of solution), would be incomprehensible; for why should not the top of life spin on, after it was wound up, forever? But under the hypothesis that repeti- tions exist only to embody all the phases of a certain unique originality which seeks expression, death must inevitably supervene after all these variations have been fully ef- fected. I may note in this connection, in passing, that the relation of universal to particular, a relation which fed the entire philosophic controversy of the Middle Ages upon nominalism and realism, is precisely that of repetition to variation. Nominalism is the doctrine in accordance with which individual characteristics or idiosyncracies are the only significant realities. Realism, on the other hand, con- siders only those traits worthy of attention and of the name of reality through which a given individual resembles other individuals and tends to reproduce himself in them. The interest of this kind of speculation is apparent when we con- sider that in politics individualism is a special kind of nominalism, and socialism, a special kind of realism. All repetition, social, vital, or physical, i. e., imitative, hereditary, or vibratory repetition (to consider only the most salient and typical forms of universal repetition), springs from some innovation, just as every light radiates from some central point, and thus throughout science the normal appears to originate from the accidental. For the 8 Laws of Imitation propagation of an attractive force or luminous vibration from a heavenly body, or of a race of animals from an ances- tral pair, or of a national idea or desire or religious rite from a scholar or inventor or missionary, seem to us like natural and regular phenomena; whereas we are constantly surprised by the strange and partly non-formulable se- quence or juxtaposition of their respective centres, i. e., the different crafts, religions, and social institutions, the different organic types, the different chemical substances or celestial masses from which all these radiations have issued. All these admirable uniformities or series, — hydrogen, whose multitudinous, star-scattered atoms are universally homo- geneous, protoplasm, identical from one end to the other of the scale of life, the roots of the Indo-European languages, identical almost throughout civilisation, the expansion of the light of a star in the immensity of space, the unbroken sequence from geological times of incalculable generations of marine species, the wonderfully faithful transmission of words from the Coptic of the ancient Egyptians to us mod- erns, etc., — all these innumerable masses of things of like nature and of like affiliations, whose harmonious co-ex- istence or equally harmonious succession we admire, are related to physical, biological, and social accidents by a tie which baffles us. Here, also, the analogy between social and natural phe- nomena is carried out. But we should not be surprised if the former seem chaotic when we view them through the medium of the historian, or even through that of the soci- ologist, whereas the latter impress us, as they are presented by physicist, chemist, or physiologist, as very well ordered worlds. These latter scientists show us the subject of their science only on the side of its characteristic re- semblances and repetitions; they prudently conceal its cor- responding heterogeneities and transformations (or trans- substantiations). The historian and sociologist, on the contrary, veil the regular and monotonous face of social facts, — that part in which they are alike and repeat them- selves,— and show us only their accidental and interesting, Universal Repetition 9 their infinitely novel and diversified, aspect. If our subject were, for example, the Gallo-Romans, the historian, even the philosophic historian, would not think of leading us step by step through conquered Gaul in order to show us how every word, rite, edict, profession, custom, craft, law, or military manoeuvre, how, in short, every special idea or need which had been introduced from Rome had begun to spread from the Pyrenees to the Rhine, and to win its way, after more or less vigorous fighting against old Celtic customs and ideas, to the mouths and arms and hearts and minds of all the enthusiastic Gallic imitators of Rome and Caesar. At any rate, if our historian had once led us upon this long journey, he would not make us repeat it for every Latin word or grammatical form, for every ritualistic form in the Roman religion, for every military manoeuvre that was taught to the legionaries by their officer-instructors, for every variety of Roman architecture, for temple, basilica, theatre, hippodrome, aqueduct, and atriumed villa, for every school-taught verse of Virgil or Horace, for every Roman law, or for every artistic or industrial process in Roman civilisation that had been faithfully and continuously trans- mitted from pedagogues and craftsmen to pupils and ap- prentices. And yet it is only at this price that we can get at an exact estimate of the great amount of regularity which obtains in even the most fluctuating societies. Then, after the introduction of Christianity, our historian would certainly refrain from making us renew this tedious peregrination in connection with every Christian rite which propagated itself, in spite of resistance, through heathen Gaul, like a wave of sound through air that is already in vibration. Instead of this, he would inform us at what date Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, or, again, at what date certain saints came to that country to preach Christianity. He might also enumerate the diverse elements out of which the Roman civilisation and the Christian faith and morality that were introduced into the Gallic world, were composed, In this case, his problem is to understand and rationally, log- ically, and scientifically, describe the extraordinary super- io Laws of Imitation position of Christianity upon Romanism, or rather, the gradual process of Christian upon the gradual process of Roman assimilation. In the separate treatment of both Romanism and Christianity, he will meet with an equally difficult problem in giving a rational explanation of the strange juxtaposition of the very heterogeneous Etrus- can, Greek, Oriental, and other fragments which constituted the former, and of the incoherent Jewish, Egyptian, and Byzantine ideas, ideas which were incoherent even in each distinct group, which constituted the latter. This, how- ever, is the arduous task which the philosopher of history sets before himself and which he thinks that he cannot slur over if he is to do the work of a scholar. He will, therefore, wear himself out in trying to bring order out of disorder by discovering some law or reason for these historic chances and coincidences. He would do better to investigate how and why harmonies sometimes proceed from these coinci- dences and in what these harmonies consist. I will under- take to do this further on. In short, a historian of this kind is like the botanist who would feel bound to ignore everything about the generation of plants of the same species or variety, as well as every- thing about their growth or nutrition, a kind of cellular generation or regeneration of tissues; or like the physi- cist who disdained to study the propagation of light or heat or sound waves as they passed through different mediums which were themselves in vibration. Can we conceive of the former believing that the proper and exclusive object of his science was an interlinking of unlike species, beginning with the first alga and ending with the last orchid, plus a profound justification of such a con- catenation? Can we conceive of the latter convinced that the sole end of his studies was investigation into the reason why there were precisely seven known kinds of luminous undulation, and why, including electricity and magnetism, there were no other kinds of ethereal vibration? These are certainly interesting questions, but although they are open to philosophic, they are not open to scientific, discussion, Universal Repetition 1 1 since their solution does not seem capable of admitting of that high kind of probability which science exacts. It is clear that the first condition of becoming an anatomist or physiologist is the study of tissues, the aggregates of homo- geneous cells and fibres and blood vessels, or the study of functions, the accumulations of minute homogeneous con- tractions, innervations, oxidations, or deoxidations, and then, and above all, belief in the great architect of life, in heredity. It is equally clear that it is of primary im- portance to the chemist and physicist to examine many kinds of gaseous, liquid, and solid masses, masses composed of corpuscles which are absolutely alike, or of so-called physical forces which are prodigious accumulations of minute, homo- geneous vibrations. In fact, in the physical world, every- thing refers, or is in course of being referred, to vibration. Here everything is taking on more and more an essentially vibratory character, just as in the animate world the re- productive faculty, or the property of transmitting the smallest peculiarities (which are usually of unknown ori- gin) through inheritance, is coming more and more to be thought inherent in the smallest cell. And now my readers will realise, perhaps, that the social being1, in the degree that he is social, is essentially imitative, and that imitation plays a role in societies analogous to that of heredity in organic life or to that of vibration among in- organic bodies. If this is so, it ought to be admitted, in con- sequence, that a human invention, by which a new kind of imitation is started or a new series opened, — the invention of gunpowder, for example,1 or windmills, or the Morse telegraph, — stands in the same relation to social science as the birth of a new vegetal or mineral species (or, on the hypothesis of a gradual evolution, of each of the slow modi- fications to which the new species is due), to biology, or as the appearance of a new mode of motion comparable with 1 When I speak of the invention of gunpowder, of the telegraph, of railroads, etc., I mean, of course, the group of accumulated and yet dis- tinguishable and numerable inventions which have been necessary for the production of gunpowder, or telegraphy, or railroads. 12 Laws of Imitation light or electricity, or the formation of a new substance, to physics or chemistry. Therefore, if we are to make a just comparison, we must not compare the philosophic historian who strives to discover a law for the odd groups and se- quences of scientific, industrial, sesthetic, and political in- ventions, to the physiologist or physicist, as we know him, to Tyndall or Claude Bernard, but to a philosopher of nature like Schelling or like Haeckel in his hours of riotous im- agination. We should then perceive that the crude incoherence of historic facts, all of which facts are traceable to the dif- ferent currents of imitation of which they are the point of intersection, a point which is itself destined to be more or less exactly copied, is no proof at all against the funda- mental regularity of social life or the possibility of a social science. Indeed, parts of this science exist in the petty experience of each of us, and we have only to piece the frag- ments together. Besides, a group of historic events would certainly be far from appearing more incoherent than a collection of living types or chemical substances. Why then should we exact from the philosopher of history the fine symmetrical and rational order that we do not dream of demanding from the philosopher of science ? And yet there is a distinction here which is entirely to the credit of the historian. It is but recently that the naturalist has had any glimpses that were at all clear of biological evolution, where- as the historian was long ago aware of the continuity of history. As for chemists and physicists, we may pass them by. They dare not even yet forecast the time when they will be able to trace out, in their turn, the genealogy of simple substances, or when a work on the origin of atoms, as successful as Darwin's Origin of Species, will be pub- lished. It is true that M. Lecoq de Boisbaudran and M. Mendelejeff thought that they had distinguished a natural series of simple substances, and it is true that Boisbaudran's discovery of gallium was made in connection with his eminently philosophic speculations along this line. But Ipon close consideration, perhaps neither the remarkable Universal Repetition 13 attempts of these scientists nor the various systems of our evolutionists on the genealogical ramification of living types present any greater degree of precision or certainty than sparkles in the ideas of Herbert Spencer, or even in those of Vico, upon the so-called periodic and predestined evolutions of society. The origin of atoms is much more mysterious than the origin of species, and the origin of species is, in turn, more mysterious than the origin of civili- sations. We can compare extant living species with those which have preceded them, the remains of which we find in the earth's strata; but we have not the slightest trace of the chemical substances which must have preceded in prehis- toric astronomy, so to speak, in the unfathomable and un- imaginable depths of the past, the actual chemical sub- stances of the earth and stars. Consequently, chemistry, which cannot even propound a problem of origins, is less advanced, in this essential particular, than biology ; and, for like reason, biology is, in reality, less advanced than soci- ology. From the foregoing, it is evident that social science and social philosophy are distinct; that social science must deal exclusively, like every other science, with a multitude of homogeneous facts, with those facts which are carefully concealed by the historians; that new and heterogeneous facts, or historical facts, strictly speaking, are the special domain of social philosophy; that from this point of view social science might be as advanced as the other sciences, and that social philosophy is actually much more so than any other philosophy. In the present volume, we are concerned only with the science of society; moreover, we shall confine our discus- sion to imitation and its laws. Later on, we shall have to study the laws, or pseudo-laws, of invention.1 The two questions are quite different, although they cannot be wholly separated. 1 Since this was written I have outlined a theory of invention in my Logique sociale (F. Alcan, 1895). 14 Laws of Imitation II After these long preliminaries, I must develop an im- portant thesis which has so far been obscure and involved. Science, as I have said, deals only with quantities and growths, or, in more general terms, with the resemblances and repetitions of phenomena. This distinction, however, is realty superfluous and super- ficial. Every advance in knowledge tends to strengthen the conviction that all resemblance is due to repetition. I think that this may be brought out in the three follow- ing propositions : 1. All resemblances which are to be observed in the chemical, or physical, or astronomical worlds (the atoms of a single body, the waves of a single ray of light, the concen- tric strata of attraction of which every heavenly body is a centre), can be caused and explained solely by periodic, and, for the most part, vibratory motions. 2. All resemblances of vital origin in the world of life result from hereditary transmission, from either intra- or extra-organic reproduction. It is through the relationship between cells and the relationship between species that all the different kinds of analogies and homologies which com- parative anatomy points out between species, and histology, between corporeal elements, are at present explained. 3. All resemblances of social origin in society are the direct or indirect fruit of the various forms of imitation, — custom-imitation or fashion-imitation, sympathy-imita- tion or obedience-imitation, precept-imitation or education- imitation; na'ive imitation, deliberate imitation, etc. In this lies the excellence of the contemporaneous method of explaining doctrines and institutions through their his- tory. It is a method that is certain to come into more gen- eral use. It is said that great geniuses, great inventors, are apt to cross each other's paths. But, in the first place, such coincidences are very rare, and when they do occur, they are always due to the fact that Universal Repetition 15 both authors of the same invention have drawn inde- pendently from some common fund of instruction. This fund consists of a mass of ancient traditions and of experi- ences that are unorganised or that have been more or less organised and imitatively transmitted through language, the great vehicle of all imitations. In this connection we may observe that modern philolo- gists have relied so implicitly upon the foregoing proposi- tion, that they have concluded, through analogy, that San- skrit, Latin, Greek, German, Russian, and other kindred tongues, belong in reality to one family, and that it had a common progenitor in a language which was transmitted, with the exception of certain modifications, through tradi- tion. Each modification was, in truth, an anonymous lin- guistic invention which was, in turn, perpetuated by imita- tion. In the next chapter I will return to the development and re-statement of our third proposition. There is only one great class of universal resemblances which seem at first as if they could not have been produced by any form of repetition. This is the resemblance of the parts of infinite space whose juxtaposition and immobility are the very conditions of all motion whatsoever, whether vibratory, or reproductive, or propagative and subduing. But we must not pause over this apparent exception. It is enough to have mentioned it. Its discussion would lead us too far afield. Turning aside from this anomaly, which may be illusory, let us maintain the truth of our general proposition, and note one of its direct consequences. If quantity signifies resem- blance, if every resemblance proceeds from repetition, and if every repetition is a vibration (or any other periodic move- ment), a phenomenon of reproduction or an act of imitation, it follows that, on the hypothesis that no motion is, or ever has been, vibratory, no function hereditary, no act or idea learned and copied, there would be no such thing as quantity in the universe, and the science of mathematics would be without any possible use or conceivable application. It also follows upon the inverse hypothesis, that if our physical, 1 6 Laws of Imitation vital, and social spheres were to enlarge the range of their vibratory, reproductive, and propagative activities, our field of calculation would be even more extensive and profound. This fact is apparent in our European societies where the extraordinary progress of fashion in all its forms, in dress, food and housing, in wants and ideas, in institutions and arts, is making a single type of European based upon several hundreds of millions of examples. Is it not evident that it is this prodigious levelling which has from its very begin- ning made possible the birth and growth of statistical science and of what has been so well called social physics, political economy? Without fashion and custom, social quantities would not exist, there would be no values, no money, and, consequently, no science of wealth or finance. (How was it possible, then, for economists to dream of for- mulating theories of value in which the idea of imitation had no part?) But the application of number and measure to societies, which people are trying to make nowadays, cannot help being partial and tentative. In this matter the future has many surprises in store for us ! Ill At this point we might develop the striking analogies, the equally instructive differences, and the mutual relations of the three main forms of universal repetition. We might also seek for the explanation of their majestically inter- woven rhythms and symmetries; we might question whether the content of these forms resembled them or not, whether the active and underlying substance of these well-ordered phenomena shared in their sage uniformity, or whether it did not perhaps contrast with them in being essentially heterogeneous, like a people which gave no evidence in its military or administrative exterior of the tumultuous idio- syncracies which constituted it and which set its machinery in motion. This twofold subject would be too vast. In the first part of it, however, there are certain obvious analogies Universal Repetition 17 which we should note. In the first place, repetitions are also multiplications or self-spreading contagions. If a stone falls into the water, the first wave which it produces will repeat itself in circling out to the confines of its basin. If I light a match, the first undulation which I start in the ether will instantly spread throughout a vast space. If one couple of termites or of phylloxeras are transported to a continent, they will ravish it within a few years. The per- nicious erigeron of Canada, which has but quite recently been imported from Europe, flourishes already in every un- cultivated field. The well-known laws of Malthus and Darwin on the tendency of the individuals of a species to increase in geometrical progression, are true laws of human radiation through reproduction. In the same way, a local dialect that is spoken only by certain families, gradually be- comes, through imitation, a national idiom. In the begin- ning of societies, the art of chipping flint, of domesticating dogs, of making bows, and, later, of leavening bread, of working bronze, of extracting iron, etc., must have spread like a contagion; since every arrow, every flake, every morsel of bread, every thread of bronze, served both as model and copy. Nowadays the diffusion of all kinds of useful processes is brought about in the same way, except that our increasing density of population and our advance in civilisation prodigiously accelerate their diffusion, just as velocity of sound is proportionate to density of me- dium. Every social thing, that is to say, every invention or discovery, tends to expands in its social environment, an environment which itself, I might add, tends to self-expan- sion, since it is essentially composed of like things, all of which have infinite ambitions. This tendency, however, here as in external nature, often proves abortive through the competition of rival tendencies. But this fact is of little importance to theory; besides, it is metaphorical. Desire can no more be attributed to ideas than to vibrations or species, and the fact in question must be understood to mean that the scattered individual forces which are inherent in the innumerable beings composing 1 8 Laws of Imitation the environment where these forms propagate themselves, have taken a common direction. In this sense, this tend- ency towards expansion presupposes that the environment in question is homogeneous, a condition which seems to be well fulfilled by the ethereal or aerial medium of vibrations, much less so by the geographical and chemical medium of species, and infinitely less so by the social medium of ideas. But it is a mistake, I think, to express this difference by saying that the social medium is more complex than the others. On the contrary, it is perhaps because it is numer- ically much more simple, that it is farther from presenting the required homogeneity; since a homogeneity that is real on the surface merely, suffices. Besides, as the agglomera- tions of human beings increase, the spread of ideas in a regular geometrical progression is more marked. Let us exaggerate this numerical increase to an extreme degree, let us suppose that the social sphere in which an idea can expand be composed not only of a group sufficiently nu- merous to give birth to the principal moral varieties of the human species, but also of thousands of uniform repeti- tions of these groups, so that the uniformity of these repeti- tions makes an apparent homogeneity, in spite of the in- ternal complexity of each group. Have we not some reason for thinking that this is the kind of homogeneity which characterises all the simple and apparently uniform reali- ties which external nature presents to us ? On this hypoth- esis, it is evident that the success of an idea, the more or less rapid rate at which it circulated on the day of its ap- pearance, would supply the mathematical reason, in a way, of its further progression. Given this condition, producers of articles which satisfied prime needs and which were therefore destined for universal consumption, would be able to foretell from the demand in a given year, at a certain price, what would be the demand in the following year, at the same price, providing no check, prohibitive or otherwise, intervened, or no superior article of the same class were dis- covered. It has been said that the faculty of foresight is the criter- Universal Repetition 19 ion of science. Let us amend this to read, the faculty of conditional foresight. The botanist, for example, can fore- tell the form and colour of the fruit which a flower will pro- duce, provided it be not killed by drought, or provided a new and unexpected individual variety (a kind of secondary biological invention) do not develop. The physicist can state, at the moment a rifle-shot is discharged, that it will be heard in a given number of seconds, at a given distance, provided nothing intercept the sound in its passage, or provided a louder sound, a discharge of cannon, for ex- ample, be not heard during the given period. Now it is precisely on the same ground that the sociologist is, strictly speaking, a scientist. Given the centres, the approximate velocities, and the tendency to separate or concurrent motion of existing imitations, the sociologist is in a position to fore- tell the social conditions of ten or twenty years hence, pro- vided no reform or political revolution occur to hinder this expansion and provided no rival centres arise mean- while. In this case, to be sure, the conditioning of events is highly probable, more probable, perhaps, than in the others. But it is only a difference of degree. Besides, let us observe (as a matter that belongs to the philosophy and not to the science of history), that the successful discoveries and in- itiatives of the present vaguely determine the direction of those of the future. Moreover, the social forces of any real importance at any period are not composed of the nec- essarily feeble imitations that have radiated from recent inventions, but of the imitations of ancient inventions, rad- iations which are alike more intense and more widespread because they have had the necessary time in which to spread out and become established as habits, customs, or so- called physiological " race instincts."1 Our ignorance, there- fore, of the unforeseen discoveries which will be made ten, 1 1 must not be accused of the absurd idea of denying in all of this the influence of race upon social facts. But I think that on account of the number of its acquired characteristics, race is the outcome, and not the source, of these facts, and only in this hitherto ignored sense does it appear to me to come within the special province of the sociologist. 2O Laws of Imitation twenty, or fifty years hence, of the art-inspiring master- pieces which are to appear, of the battles and revolutions and deeds of violence which will be noised abroad, does not hinder us from almost accurately predicting, on the fore- going hypothesis, the depth and direction of the current of ideas and aspirations which our statesmen and our great generals, poets, and musicians will have to follow and ren- der navigable, or stem and combat. As examples in support of the geometrical progress of imitations, I might cite statistics of locomotive construc- tion, or of the consumption of coffee, tobacco, etc., from the time they were first imported, to the time they began to overstock the market.1 I will mention a dis- covery which appears to be less favourable to my argument, the discovery of America. This discovery was imitated in the sense that the first voyage from Europe to America, which was conceived of and executed by Columbus, came to be repeated more and more frequently by subsequent navigators. Every variation in these after-voyages con- stituted a little discovery, which was grafted upon that of the great Genoese, and which, in turn, found imitators. I will take advantage of this example to open a paren- thesis. America might have been discovered two centur- ies earlier, or two centuries later, by an imaginative navi- gator. If two centuries earlier, if in 1292, the opening out of a new world had been offered to Philip the Fair, during his bouts with Rome and his bold attempt at seculari- sation and administrative centralisation, his ambition would 1 The objection may be raised that increasing or diminishing series as shown in the continuous statistics of a given number of years, are never regular, and are often upset by checks and reactions. Without dwelling upon this point, I may say that, in my opinion, these checks and reactions are always indicative of the interference of some new invention, which, in its turn, is spread abroad. I explain diminishing series in the same way, and in considering them we must be careful not to infer that at the end of a certain time, after it has been imitated more and more, a social thing tends to become disimitated. On the contrary, its tendency to invade the world continues unchanged, and if there be, not any disimitation, but any continuous falling off of imita- tion, its rivals are alone to blame. Universal Repetition 21 have surely been excited, and the arrival of the Modern Age precipitated. Two centuries later, in 1692, America would unquestionably have been of greater value to the France of Henry IV. than to Spain, and the latter country, not having had this rich prey to batten upon for two hundred years, would have been, at that time, less rich and prosper- ous. Who knows whether, under the first hypothesis, the Hundred Years' War might not have been precluded and, under the second, the empire of Charles V. ? At any rate, the need of having colonies, a need which was both created and satisfied by the discovery of Christopher Columbus and one which has played such a leading role in the political life of Europe since the fifteenth century, would not have arisen until the seventeenth century, and, at the pres- ent time, South America would belong to France, and North America would not as yet amount to anything politi- cally. What a difference to us ! And to think that Chris- topher Columbus succeeded by a mere hair's breadth in his enterprise! But a truce to these speculations upon the contingencies of the past, although, in my opinion, they are as well-founded and as significant as those of the future. Here is another example, the most striking of all. The Roman Empire has perished; but, as has been well said, the conquest of Rome lives on forever. Through Chris- tianity, Charlemagne extended it to the Germans; William the Conqueror extended it to the Anglo-Saxons; and Co- lumbus, to America. The Russians and the English are extending it to Asia and to Australia, and, prospectively, to the whole of Oceanica. Already Japan wishes for her turn to be invaded; it seems as if China alone would offer any serious resistance. But if we assume that China also will become assimilated, we can say that Athens and Rome, including Jerusalem, that is to say, the type of civilisation formed by the group of their combined and co-ordinated initiatives and master-thoughts, have conquered the en- tire world. All races and nationalities will have con- tributed to this unbounded contagious imitation of Greco- Roman civilisation. The outcome would certainly have 22 Laws of Imitation been different if Darius or Xerxes had conquered Greece and reduced it to a Persian province; or if Islam had triumphed over Charles Martel and invaded Europe; or if peaceful and industrious China had been belligerent during the past three thousand years, and had turned its spirit of invention towards the art of war as well as towards the arts of peace; or if, when America was discovered, gunpowder and printing had not yet been invented and Europeans had proved to be poorer fighters than the Aztecs or Incas. But chance determined that the type to which we belong should prevail over all other types of civilisation, over all the clusters of radiant inventions which have flashed out spon- taneously in different parts of the globe. Even if our own type had not prevailed, another type would certainly have triumphed in the long run, for one type was bound to become universal, since all laid claim to universality, that is to say, since all tended to propagate themselves through imitation in a geometrical progression, like waves of light or sound, or like animal or vegetal species. IV Let me point out a new order of analogies. Imitations are modified in passing from one race or nation to another, like vibrations or living types in passing from one environ- ment to another. We see this, for example, in the transi- tion of certain words, or religious myths, or military secrets, or literary forms, from the Hindoos to the Germans, or from the Latins to the Gauls. In certain cases, the record of these modifications has been sufficiently full to suggest what their general and uniform trend has been. This is especially true of language; Grimm's, or, better still, Ray- nouard's, laws might well be called the laws of linguistic refraction. According to Raynouard, when Latin words come under Spanish or Gallic influences, they are consistently and char- acteristically transformed. According to Grimm's laws, a given consonant in German or English is equivalent to Universal Repetition 23 another given consonant in Sanskrit or Greek. This fact means, at bottom, that in passing from the primitive Aryan to the Teutonic or Hellenic or Hindoo environments, the parent-language has changed its consonants in a given order, substituting, in one case, an aspirate for a hard check, in another a hard check for an aspirate, etc. If there were as many religions as there are languages (and there are hardly enough of these to give an adequate basis of comparison to certain general observations that might be formulated into linguistic laws), and, above all, if religious ideas were as numerous in every religion as words in a language, we might have laws of mythological refraction analagous to those of language. As it is, we can only follow a given myth like that of Ceres or Apollo, for example, through the modifications which have been stamped upon it by the genius of the different peoples who have adopted it. But there are so few myths to compare in this way, that it is difficult to see any appreciable common traits in the turns which they have been given by the same people at different times, or anything more than a general family resemblance. And yet have we not much to observe in a study of the forms which the same religious ideas have taken on as they passed from the Vedas to the doc- trines of Brahma or Zoroaster, from Moses to Christ or Mahomet, or as they circulated through the dissentient Christian sects of the Greek, Roman, Anglican, and Gallic churches? Perhaps I should say that all that could be has already been observed along this line and that we have only to draw upon this material. Art critics have likewise had a confused premonition of the laws of artistic refraction, so to speak. These laws are peculiar to every people, in all epochs, and belong to every definite centre of painting, music, architecture, a'nd poetry, to Holland, Italy, France, etc. I will not press my point. But is it purely metaphorical and puerile to say that Theoc- ritus is refracted in Virgil; Menander, in Terence; Plato, in Cicero; Euripides, in Racine? Another analogy. Interferences occur between imita- 24 Laws of Imitation tions, between social things, as well as between vibrations and between living types. When two waves, two physical things which are pretty much alike, and which have spread separately from two distinct centres, meet together in the same physical being, in the same particle of matter, the impetus of each is increased or neutralised, as its direction coincides with, or is diametrically opposed to, the direction of the other. In the first case, a new and complex wave sets in which is stronger than the others and which tends to propagate itself in turn; in the second, struggle and partial destruction follow, until one of the two rivals has the better of the other. In the same way we know what happens when two specific and sufficiently near types, two vital things, which have been reproduced independently of each other, generation after generation, come into mutual contact, not merely in one place (as in the case of animals which fight or devour one another, which would be a strictly physical encounter), but, more than that, in the same living being, in a germ cell fertilised by hybrid copulation, the only kind of encounter and interference which is really vital. In this case, either the offspring has greater vitality than its parents and, being at the same time more fruitful and prolific, transmits its distinctive characteristics to a more numerous progeny, a veritable discovery of life, or it is more puny, and gives birth to a few stunted descend- ants, in whom the divorce of the incompatible characters of their unnaturally united progenitors is hastened by the distinct triumph of one in expelling the other. In the same way, when two beliefs or two desires, or a belief and a desire, in short, when two social things (in the last analysis all social facts are beliefs or desires under the different names of dogmas, sentiment, laws, wants, customs, morals, etc:), have for a certain time travelled their separate roads in the world by means of education or example, i. e., of imitation, they often end by coming into mutual contact. In order that their encounter and interference may be really psychological and social, co-existence in the same brain and participation in the same state of Universal Repetition 25 mind and heart is not only necessary, but, in addition, one must present itself either in support of, or in opposition to the other, either as a principle, of which the other is a corollary, or as an affirmative, of which the other is the nega- tive. As for the beliefs and desires which seem neither to aid nor injure, neither to confirm nor contradict, each other, they cannot interfere with each other any more than two heterogeneous waves or two livingtypes which are too distant from each other to unite. If they do appear to help or con- firm each other, they combine by the very fact of this ap- pearance or perception into a new practical or theoretic dis- covery, which is, in turn, bound to spread abroad, like its components, in contagious imitation. In this case, there has been a gain in the force of desire or belief, as in the corre- sponding cases of propitious physical or biological interfer- ence there was a gain in motor power or vitality. If, on the other hand, the interfering social things, theses or aims, dog- mas or interests, convictions or passions, are mutually hurt- ful and antagonistic in the soul of an individual, or in that of a whole people, both the individual and the community will morally stagnate in doubt and indecision, until their soul is rent in two by some sudden or prolonged effort, and the less cherished belief or passion is sacrificed. Thus life chooses between two miscoupled types. A particularly im- portant case and one which differs slightly from the preced- ing is that in which the two beliefs or desires, as well as the belief and the desire, which interfere happily or unhappily in the mind of an individual, are not experienced exclu- sively by him, but in part by him, and in part by one of his fellows. Here the interference consists in the fact that the individual is aware of the confirmation or disproof of his own idea by the idea of others, and of the advantage or injury accruing to his own will from the will of others. From this, sympathy and agreement, or antipathy and war, result.1 1 The likeness which I have pointed out between heredity and imita- tion is verified even in the relation of each of these two forms of uni- versal Repetition to its special form of Creation or Invention. As long as a society is young, vigorous, and progressive, inventions, new proj- 26 Laws of Imitation But all of this, I feel, needs to be elucidated. Let us distinguish between three hypotheses: the propitious inter- ference of two beliefs, of two desires, and of a belief and a desire; and let us subdivide each one of these divisions as the subjects of interference are, or are not, found in the same individual. Later on, I shall have a word to say about unpropitious interferences. i. If a conjecture which I have considered fairly prob- able comes into my mind while I am reading or remem- bering a fact which I think is almost certain, and if I sud- denly perceive that the fact confirms the conjecture of which it is a consequence (t. e., the particular proposition which expresses the fact is included in the general proposi- tion which expresses the conjecture), the conjecture im- mediately becomes much more probable in my eyes, and, at the same time, the fact appears to me to be an absolute certainty. So that there is a gain in belief all along the line. And the perception of this logical inclusion is a discov- ery. Newton discovered nothing more than this when, hav- ing brought his conjectured law of gravitation face to face with the calculation of the distance from the moon to the ects, and successful initiatives follow one another in rapid succession, and hasten social changes ; then, when the inventive sap is exhausted, imitation still continues upon its course. India, China, and the late Roman Empire are examples in point. Now this is also true of the world of life. For example, M. Gaudry says in referring to the crinoidea (echinoderms) [Enchainment du monde animal (secondary period)]: "They have lost that marvellous diversity of form which was one of the luxuries of the primary period ; no longer having the power of much self-mutation, they still retain that of producing indi- viduals like themselves." But this is not always so. In the geologi- cal epochs, certain families or types of animals disappeared after their most brilliant period. This was the case with the ammonite, that wonderful fossil which flourished in such exuberant variety, during the secondary period, and which was, subsequently, annihilated forever. This was also the case with those brief and brilliant civilisations which, like ephemeral stars, glittered for a day in the sky of history, and were then suddenly extinguished. I refer to the Persia of Cyrus, to some of the Greek republics, to the south of France at the time of the war of the Albigenses, to the Italian republics, etc. When the crea- tive power of these civilisations was worn out, not even the power to reproduce themselves remained. In fact, in most cases, they would have been precluded from doing so by their own violent destruction. Universal Repetition 27 earth, he perceived that this fact confirmed his hypothesis. Let us suppose that, for a century long, an entire people is led by one of its teachers, by St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, or by Arnaud or Bossuet, to prove, or to think that it is proving, that a like agreement exists between its re- ligious dogmas and the contemporaneous state of its sciences. Then we shall see such an overflowing river of faith as that which fructified the logical and inventive and warlike thirteenth and the Janseist and Gallican seventeenth centu- ries. A harmony like this is nothing less than a discovery. The Summa, the catechism of Port-Royal and the French clergy, and all the philosophic systems of the period, from Descartes himself to Leibnitz, are, in different degrees, its various expressions. Now let us somewhat modify our general proposition. Let us suppose that I am inclined to endorse a principle which the friend with whom I am talking absolutely refuses to accept. On the other hand, he tells me certain facts which he thinks are true, but which I take to be unverified. Subsequently, it seems to me, or rather, if flashes upon me, that if these facts were proved, they would fully confirm my principle. From now on, I, also, am inclined to credit them; but the only gain in belief has been one in regard to them, not in regard to my prin- ciple. Besides, this kind of discovery is incomplete; it will have no social effect until my friend either succeeds in im- parting to me, through proofs, his belief, which is greater than mine, in the reality of the facts, or I myself can prove to him the truth of my principle. Here is precisely the ad- vantage of a wide and free intellectual commerce. 2. The first mediaeval merchant who was both vain and avaricious and who, in his unwillingness to forego either commercial wealth or social position, came to perceive the possibility of making avarice serve the ends of vanity, through the purchase of a title of nobility for himself and his family, thought he had made a fine discovery. And, as a matter of fact, he had numerous imitators. Is it not true that after this unhoped-for prospect, both his passions re- doubled in strength? Did not his avarice increase because 28 Laws of Imitation gold had gained a new value in his eyes, and his vanity, because the object of his ambitious and hitherto-despaired- of dream had come within reach ? To give, perhaps, a more modern illustration, the first lawyer who reversed the usual order of things by going into politics in order to make his fortune, introduced neither a bad idea nor an ineffective initiative. Let us take other instances. Suppose that I am in love and that I also have a passion for rhyming. I turn my love to inspiring my metromania. My love quick- ens and my rhyming mania is intensified. How many poetical works have originated in this kind of an inter- ference! Suppose, again, that I am a philanthropist and that I like notoriety. In this case, I will strive to distin- guish myself in order to do more good to my fellows, and I will strive to be useful to them, in order to make a name for myself, etc., etc. In history the same phenomenon occurs. After a long period of mutual opposition, Chris- tian zeal combined with the contemporary passion for war- like expeditions and produced the outbreak of the Crusades. The invasion of Islam, the Jacqueries of '89 and of the years following, and all revolutions in which so many base pas- sions are yoked to noble ones, are notable examples. But, happily, a still more contagious example was set in the be- ginnings of social life by the first man who said : " I am hungry and my neighbour is cold ; I will offer him this gar- ment, which is useless to me, in exchange for some of the food which he has in excess, and so my need of food will help satisfy his need of clothing, and vice versa. In this ex- cellent and very simple, but, for that time, highly original, idea, industry, commerce, money, law, and all the arts origi- nated. (I do not date the birth of society from this idea, for society undoubtedly existed before exchange. It began on the day when one man first copied another). Let us note that all new forms of professional work, that all new crafts, have arisen from analogous discoveries. These discoveries have generally been anonymous, but they are none the less positive and significant. 3. In historical importance, however, no mental inter- Universal Repetition 29 ference equals that of a desire and a belief. But the numer- ous cases in which a conviction or opinion fastens itself upon an inclination, and effects it merely through inspiring another desire, must not be included in this category. After these cases have been eliminated, there still remains a con- siderable number in which the supervening idea acts directly upon the desire it has fallen in with and stimulated. Sup- pose, for example, that I would like to be an orator in the Chamber of Deputies, and I am straightway persuaded by the compliment of a friend that I have recently displayed true oratorical talent. This conviction enhances my am- bition, and my ambition itself contributed to my conviction. For the same reason, there is no historical error, no atrocious or extravagant calumny or madness, which is not readily entertained by the very political passion which it helps to inflame. A belief will also stimulate a desire, now by making its object seem mere attainable, now by stamping it with its approval. It also happens, to complete our an- alysis, that a man may realise that his own scheme will be helped by the belief of others, although he may have no share in their belief, nor they in his scheme. Such a reali- sation is a -find that many an impostor has exploited and still exploits. This special kind of interferences and the important un- named discoveries which result from them, are to be counted among the chief forces which rule the world. What was the patriotism of Greek or Roman but a passion nourished by an illusion and vice versa; what was it but ambition, avarice, and love of fame nourished by an exaggerated belief in their own superiority, by the anthropocentric prejudice, the mistake of imagining that this little point in space, the earth, was the universe, and that on this little point Rome or Athens was alone worthy of the gods' consideration? What are, in large part, the fanaticism of the Arab, the proselytism of the Christian, and the propagandism of Jacobin and revo- lutionary doctrines but prodigious outgrowths of illusion- fed passions and passion-fed illusions? And these forces always arise from one person, from a single centre, long 30 Laws of Imitation in advance, to be sure, of the moment when they break forth and take on historical importance. An enthusiast, eaten up with an impotent desire for conquest, or immortality, or human regeneration, chances upon some idea which opens an unhoped-for door to his aspirations. The idea may be that of the Resurrection or the Millennium, the dogma of popular sovereignty or some other formula of the Social Contract. He embraces the idea, it exalts him, and behold, a new apostle! In this way a political or religious contagion is spread abroad. In this way a whole people may be converted to Christianity, to Islam, and, to-morrow, perhaps, to socialism. In the preceding paragraphs we have discussed only interference-combinations, interferences which result in discovery and gain and add to the two psychological quan- tities of desire and belief. But that long sequence of opera- tions in moral arithmetic, which we call history, ushers in at least as many interference-conflicts. When these sub- jective antagonisms arise between the desires and beliefs of a single individual, and only in this case, there is an absolute diminution in the sum of those quantities. When they oc- cur obscurely, here and there, in isolated individuals, they pass by unnoticed except by psychologists. Then we have (i) on the one side, the deceptions and gradual doubts of bold theorists and political prophets as they come to see facts giving the lie to their speculations and ridiculing their pre- dictions, and the intellectual weakening of sincere and well- informed believers who perceive the contradiction between their science and their religion or philosophic systems; and, on the other side, the private and juristic and parliamen- tary discussions in which belief is rekindled instead of smothered. Again, we have (2) on the one side, the en- forced and bitter inaction, the slow suicide of a man strug- gling between two incompatible aptitudes or inclinations, between scientific ardour and literary aspirations, between love and ambition, between pride and indolence, and, on the other side, those various rivalries and competitions which put every spring into action — what we call in these days Universal Repetition 31 the struggle for existence. Finally, we have (3) on the one side, the malady of despair, a state of intense longing and intense self-doubt, the abyss of lovers and of those weary with waiting, or the anguish of scruple and remorse, the feeling of a soul which thinks ill of the object of its desire, or well of the object of its aversion; and, on the other side, the irritating resistance which is made to the under- takings and eager passions of children and innovators by parents who are convinced of their danger and impracti- cability and by people of prudence and experience. When these same phenomena (at bottom they are always the same) are enacted upon a large scale and multiplied by a large and powerful social current of imitation, they attain historical importance. Under other names, they become, ( i ) on the one hand, the enervating scepticism of a people caught between two hostile churches or religions or be- tween the contradictions of its priests and its scientists; on the other, the religious wars which are waged by one people against another merely because of differences in re- ligious belief; (2) on the one hand, the failure and inertia of a people or class which has created for itself artificial passions contrary to its natural instincts (i. e., at bottom, to passions which also began by being artificial, by being adopted from foreign sources, but which are much older than the former passions), or desires inconsistent with its per- manent interests, the desire for peace and comfort, for exam- ple, when a redoubling of military spirit was indispensable; on the other hand, the majority of external political wars; (3) on the one hand, civil warfare and oppositions strictly speaking, struggles between conservatives and revolution- ists; on the other, the despair of a people or class which is gradually sinking back into the historical oblivion whence it had been drawn by some outburst of faith and enthusiasm, or the irritation and oppression of a society distressed by a conflict between its ancient maxims and traditions and its new aspirations, between Christianity and chivalry, for ex- ample, and industrialism and utilitarianism. Now in the case of both individuals and societies, the 32 Laws of Imitation doleful states of scepticism, inertia, and despair, and, still more, the violent and more painful states of dispute, com- bat, and opposition are quick to push man on to their own undoing. Nevertheless, although man often succeeds in de- livering himself for long periods from the former, which imply the immediate weakening of his two master forces, he never overcomes the latter, or if he does free himself from them it is merely to fall into them again, since, up to a certain point, they bring with them momentary gams of belief and desire. Whence the interminable dissensions, rivalries, and contradictions which befall mankind and which each one can settle for himself only by adopting some logical system of thought and conduct. Whence the im- possibility, or the seeming impossibility, of extirpating the wars and litigations from which everybody suffers, al- though the subjective strife of desires and opinions which afflicts some people generally ends for them in definite treat- ies of peace. Whence the endless rebirth of the eternal hydra-headed social question, a question which is not pecul- iar to our own time, but which belongs to all time, for it does not investigate into the outcome of the debilitating, but into that of the violent, states of desire and belief. In other words, it does not ask whether science or religion will, or should, ultimately prevail in the great majority of minds; whether desire for social order or rebellious out- bursts of social envy, pride, and hatred will, or should, ulti- mately prove the stronger in human hearts; whether a positive and courageous resignation of old pretensions or, on the contrary, a new outburst of hope and self-confidence will help our sometime ruling classes to rid themselves to their honour of their present torpor; whether the old mo- rality will have the right and the power to influence society again, or whether the society of the future will legitimately establish a code of honour and morality in its own likeness. The solution of these problems will not be long delayed, and it is not difficult, even at present, to foresee its nature. Whereas the problems which really constitute the social question are arduous and difficult. The problems are these : Universal Repetition 33 Is it a good or a bad thing for a complete intellectual unanimity to be established through the expulsion or the more or less tyrannical conversion of a dissenting minority, and will this ever come about ? Is it a good or a bad thing for commercial or professional or personal competition be- tween individuals, as well as political and military com- petition between societies, to come to be suppressed, the one through the much-dreamed-of organisation of labour, or, at least, through state socialism, and the other through a vast, universal confederation, or, at least, through a new Euro- pean equilibrium, the first step towards the United States of Europe? Does the future hold this in store for us? Is it a good or a bad thing for a strong and free social au- thority, an absolutely sovereign authority, capable of gran- diose things, as philanthropic and intelligent as possible, to arise, untrammelled by outside control or resistance, as a supreme imperial or constitutional power in the hands of a single party or a single people? Have we any such prospect in view? This is the question, and stated thus it is a truly redoubt- able one. Mankind, as well as the individual man, always moves in the direction of the greatest truth and power, of the greatest sum of conviction and confidence, in a word, of the greatest attainable belief; and we may question whether this maximum can be reached though the development of discussion, competition, and criticism, or, inversely, through their suppression and through the boundless opening out through imitation of a single expanding and at che same time compact thought or volition. But the preceding digression has made us anticipate questions which can be discussed more advantageously else- where. Let us return to the subject of this chapter, and, after reviewing the principal analogies between the three forms of Repetition, let us note for a moment their equally instructive points of difference. In the first place, the soli- 34 Laws of Imitation darity of these forms is not reciprocal, it is one-sided. Generation depends upon undulation, but undulation does not depend upon generation. Imitation depends upon them both; but they do not depend upon imitation. After two thousand years, the manuscript of Cicero's Republic was recovered and published. It became a source of inspira- tion. This posthumous imitation would not have occurred if the molecules of the parchment had not surely continued to vibrate (if only from the effect of the surrounding tem- perature) ; and if, in addition, human reproduction had not gone on from Cicero to us without interrup- tion. It is remarkable that here, as elsewhere, the most complex and unconditioned term is always supported by those which are least so. The inequality of the three terms in this respect is, indeed, obvious. Vibrations are linked together, being both isochronous and contiguous, whereas living things are detached and separate from each other, and their duration varies considerably. More- over, the higher up in the scale they are, the more indepen- dent they become. Generation is a free kind of undulation, whose waves are worlds in themselves. Imitation does still better; its influence is exerted not only over a great distance, but over great intervals of time. It establishes a pregnant relation between the inventor and his copier, separated as they may be by thousands of years, between Lycurgus and a member of the French Convention, between the Roman painter of a Pompeiian fresco and the modern decorator whom it has inspired. Imitation is generation at a distance.1 It seems as if these three forms of repeti- tion were three undertakings of its single endeavour to ex- tend the field of its activity, to successfully cut off every 1 If, as Ribot thinks, memory is only the cerebral form of nutrition, if, on the other hand, nutrition is only an internal generation, finally, if Imitation is nothing but social memory (see my Logique sociale on this subject), it follows that there is not only an analogy, as I have shown, between Generation and Imitation, but a fundamental identity. Imitation, the elementary and persistent social phenomenon, would be the social sequel and equivalent of Generation taken in its most compre- hensive sense to include Nutrition. Universal Repetition 35 chance of revolt in elements which are always quick to over- throw the yoke of law, and by more and more ingenious and potent methods to constrain their tumultuous crowd to pro- ceed in orderly masses of constantly increasing strength and organisation. This advance may be illustrated by compar- ing it to that of a cyclone or epidemic or insurrection. A cyclone whirls from neighbourhood to neighbourhood ; none of its blast ever tears from it to leap over intervening space and carry its virus to a distance. An epidemic, on the other hand, rages in a zig-zag line; it may spare one house or vil-i lage among many, and it strikes down almost simultane- ously those which are far apart. An insurrection will spread still more freely from workshop to workshop, or from capital to capital. It may start from a telegraphic an- nouncement, or, at times, the contagion may even come from the past, out of a dead and buried epoch. There is still another important difference. In imita- tion, the product is generally in a state of complete de- velopment; it is spared the fumblings of the first workman. This artistic kind of process is consequently much more rapid than the vital process; embryonic phases and phases of infancy and adolescence are suppressed. And yet life it- self does not ignore the art of abbreviation. For if, as is thought, embryonic phases repeat (with certain restric- tions) the zoological and paleontological series of preced- ing and allied species, it is clear that this individual re- capitulation of a prolonged race elaboration must have be- come marvellously succinct at last. But during the course of the generations which pass under our own observation, periods of gestation and growth are not noticeably cur- tailed. The only fact that can be determined in this direc- tion is the reproduction of hereditary traits or diseases at an earlier age in the offspring than in the parent. Let us com- pare this slight advance with the progress of our manufac- tures. Our watches, pins, textiles, all our goods, are manu- factured in one-tenth or one-hundredth part of the time which they originally required. As for vibration, in what an infinitesimal degree it shares in this faculty of accelera- 36 Laws of Imitation tion ! Successive waves would be strictly isochronous, that is, would take the same amount of time to be born, mature, and die in, if their temperature remained constant. But their oscillation necessarily results in the heating of their medium (this fact is known, at least, in the case of sound waves, according to the correction made in Newton's for- mula by La Place), and in the consequent acceleration of their rate. This brings with it but little saving of time, however. There is infinitely more time gained from the mechanisms for repetition which characterise life and, especially, society; for the products of imitation, as I have said before, are entirely free from the obligation to traverse, even in abridgment, the steps of prior advances. Changes in the world of life are also much less rapid than those in society. The most earnest upholder of the doctrine of rapid evolution will readily admit that the wing of the bird did not replace the limb of the reptile as rapidly as our modern locomotives were substituted for stage-coaches. One of the consequences of this observation is to relegate historic naturalism to its true place. According to this view, social institutions, laws, ideas, literature, and arts must always, of necessity, spring from the very bottom of a peo- ple to slowly germinate and blossom forth like bulbs. Nothing can ever be created, complete in all its parts, in a nation's soil. This proposition holds true as long as a com- munity has not passed beyond the natural phase of its ex- istence, that in which, under the dominating rule of custom- imitation, to which I will refer later on, its changes are as much conditioned by heredity as by imitation pure and simple. But as soon as imitation becomes freer, as soon as a spirit of radicalism arises which threatens to carry out its revolutionary programme overnight, we must beware of any undue reassurance, against the possibility of such a danger, that we might base upon the alleged laws of his- toric growth. It is a mistake in politics not to believe in the improbable and never to foresee what has not already been seen. CHAPTER II SOCIAL RESEMBLANCES AND IMITATION IN the preceding chapter I merely stated, without de- veloping, the thesis that imitation is the cause of all social likeness. But this formula must not be lightly accepted; to grasp its truth and that of the two analogous formulas relating to biological and physical resemblances, it must be thoroughly understood: Upon our first glance at so- cieties, exceptions and objections seem to abound. i. In the first place, many points of anatomical or phy- siological likeness between two living species belonging to different types cannot be explained, apparently, by hered- itary repetition, because in many cases the common pro- genitor to whom they may both be traced, is, or theoretically should be, without the characteristics in question. The whale, for example, assuredly does not inherit its fishlike shape from the common hypothetical forefather from which both fish and mammals must have developed. If a bee reminds us in its flight of a bird, we have still less reason for thinking that bird and bee have inherited their wings and elytra from their very remote ancestor, who was probably a creeping and non-flying creature. The same observation may be made about the similar instincts that are displayed, according to Darwin and Romanes, by many animals of very distant species. Take, for example, the instinct to sham death as a means of escape from danger. This instinct is common to the fox, to certain insects, spi- ders, serpents, and birds. In this case, similarity of in- stinct can be accounted for only through homogeneity of physical environment. All these heterogeneous creatures have depended upon the same environment for the satisfac- tion of those fundamental wants which are essential to all life and which are identical in each one of them. Now, 37 38 Laws of Imitation homogeneity of physical environment is nothing else but the uniform propagation of homogeneous waves of light or heat 'or sound through air or water that is itself composed of atoms in constant and uniform vibration. As for the homogeneity of the fundamental functions and properties of every cell, of all protoplasm (of nutrition, for example, or of irritability), must it not be explained through the molecular constitution of the ever homogeneous chemical elements of life, that is, according to hypothesis, through the inner rhythms of their indefinitely repeated movements, rather than through the transmission of characteristics, by fission or some other kind of reproduction, from the first protoplasmic germ, admitting that in the beginning only a single germ was spontaneously formed? Therefore, al- though the above class of analogies is not due to the vital or hereditary form of repetition, it has originated in its physical or vibratory form. In like manner there are always between two separate peoples who have reached an original civilisation by inde- pendent routes, certain general resemblances in language, mythology, politics, industry, art, and literature, where mutual imitation plays no part. Quatrefages relates that " when Cook visited the New Zealanders, they were strange- ly like the Highlanders of Rob Roy and Maclvoy " (Espece humaine, p. 336). Now, resemblance between the social organisation of the Maoris and the ancient Scotch clans is certainly not due to any common ground of traditions, and no philologist would amuse himself by deriving their respec- tive tongues from a common parent language. When Cortez reached Mexico, he found that the Aztecs, like many Old- World nations, were possessed of a king and orders of nobil- ity and of agricultural and industrial classes. Their agricul- ture, with its floating islands and perfected system of irri- gation, was suggestive of China; their architecture, their painting, and their hieroglyphic writing, of Eygpt. Their calendar testified, in spite of its peculiar character, to astro- nomical knowledge which corresponded to that of contempo- rary Europeans. Although their religion was sanguinary, it Social Resemblances and Imitation 39 resembled Christianity in some of its rites, particularly in those of baptism and confession. In certain instances the coincidences of detail are so astonishing that they have led some people to believe that Old- World arts and institutions were brought over directly by shipwrecked Europeans.1 But in these comparisons and in an infinite number of others of the same kind, is it not nearer the truth to recog- nise the fundamental unity of human nature on the one hand and the uniformity of external nature on the other? In human nature, those organic wants whose satisfaction is the end of all social evolution are everywhere the same; all human beings have the same senses and the same brain struc- ture. In external nature, about the same resources are offered for the satisfaction of about the same wants, and approxi- mately the same spectacles to approximately the same eyes, consequently the world's industries, arts, perceptions, myths, and theories must be all pretty much alike. These resem- blances, like those referred to above, would be instances of the general principle that all likeness is born of repetition. But, although they are themselves social, they are caused by repetitions of a biological or physical order, by the hereditary transmission of the human functions and organs which con- stitute the human races, and by the vibratory transmission of the temperatures, colours, sounds, electrical currents, and chemical affinities which constitute the climes and soils in- habited and cultivated by man. Here we have the objection or the exception in its full 1 In fact, there are many striking points of comparison. Civilisation in America, as in Europe, has passed successively " from the age of stone to the age of bronze by the same methods and under the same forms. The teocalli of Mexico correspond to the pyramids of Egypt; the mounds of North America may be compared to the tumuli of Brittany and Scythia; the pylones of Peru reproduce those of Etruria and Egypt" (Clemence Royer, Revue scientifique, July 31, 1886). It is a still more surprising fact that the only affinities of the Basque tongue seem to be with certain of the American languages. The bearing of these resemblances is weakened by the fact that the points of com- parison are not drawn from two given civilisations, but, more artificially, from a large number of different civilisations in both the Old World and the New. 40 Laws of Imitation force. In spite of its apparent gravity, it. merely offers an op- portunity of copying in sociology a distinction that is usual in comparative anatomy between analogies and homologies. Now, resemblances such as that between the insect's elytra and the bird's wings seem superficial and meaningless to the naturalist. They may be very striking, but he pays no attention to them.1 He almost denies their existence. Whereas he attaches the highest value to resemblances between the wing of the bird, the limb of the reptile, and the fin of the fish. From his point of view these are close and deep-seated resemblances, quite different from the former kind. If this form of discrimination is legitimate for the naturalist, I do not see why the sociologist should be refused the right of treating the functional analogies of different languages, religions, governments, and civilisa- tions with equal contempt, and their anatomical homologies with equal respect. Philologists and mythologists are al- ready filled with this spirit. To the philologist there is no significance in the fact that the word for deity in Aztec is teotl, and in Greek, theos. In this he sees nothing but a coincidence; consequently he does not assert that teotl and theos are the same word. On the other hand, he does un- dertake to prove that bischop is the same word as episco- pus.z The reason of this is that no linguistic element should ever be detached at any instant in its evolution from all its anterior transformations nor considered apart from the other elements which it reflects and which reflect it. Accordingly, any likeness that may be proved to exist be- tween the isolated phases of two vocables which have been taken from their own language families and so separated 1 The phenomenon of mimicry receives more attention. Hitherto this enigma has been undecipherable ; but if the key to it were really given by natural selection, it might be explained by the ordinary laws of heredity, by the hereditary fixation and accumulation of the individual variations most favourable to the welfare of the species which, in this way, comes to take on the lineaments of another as a disguise. 2 The coincidence is the more singular, too, because the tl in teotl may be ignored, since this combination of consonants is the regular termination of Mexican words. Teo and theo (in the dative) have ab- solutely the same sense and the same sound. Social Resemblances and Imitation 41 from all that which goes to make up their real life is only a factitious connection between two abstractions and not a true link between two real things. This consideration may be generalised.1 But this answer, which is nothing more than the denial of troublesome resemblances, is inadequate. On the con- trary, I hold that there certainly are many real and impor- tant resemblances which have been spontaneously produced between civilisations without any known or probable means of intercommunication. Moreover, I admit that, in gene- ral, when the current of human genius has once set towards inventions and discoveries, it finds itself confined by a sum of subjective and objective conditions, like a river by its banks, between narrow limits of development. Accord- 1 Although customs of mutilation, circumcision, for example, tattoo- ing, or cutting the hair, in sign of religious or political subordination, are found in the most distant parts of the globe, in America and in Polynesia, as well as in the Old World ; although the totems of the South American savages remind us, if only a little, of the coats of arms of our mediaeval knights, etc. ; these coincidences and resemblances merely prove that actions are governed by beliefs, and that beliefs are largely suggested to man through the phenomena of external nature and through the innate tendencies of his own nature. The depths of human nature are the same everywhere, and in the phenomena of external nature there is, in spite of climatic variation, more similarity than dissimilarity. I admit that such analogies may not be caused by imitation. But they are at any rate only gross and indefinite. They are without sociological significance, just as the fact that insects are possessed of limbs, like vertebrates, and of eyes and wings, like birds, is insignificant from a biological point of view. On the other hand, although the bird's wing looks very different from the wing of the bat, they are really part of the same evolution and are possessed of the same past and of the possibility of experiencing the same future. In their successive transformations, these organs correspond in an endless number of particulars. They are homologous. Whereas, the bird's wing never has anything in common with the wing of the insect, except during one phase of their very unlike developments. Did the same ceremonies and the same religious meaning attach to circumcision among the Aztecs as among the Hebrews? On the con- trary, there was as much difference between them as between the Aztec rite of confession and ours. And yet this matter of ceremonies is the important thing from the social point of view; for it is the special part of the social environment which is directed by individual activity. Besides, this part is constantly on the increase. 42 Laws of Imitation ingly, even in distant regions there may be a certain approx- imate similarity between its channels. It may even chance to show, less often, however, than we might suppose, a par- allelism of certain pregnant ideas,1 of ideas which may be yery simple or, at times, quite complicated, which have ap- peared independently and which are equivalent to, if not identical with, one another.2 But, in the first place, in as much as men have been forced by the uniformity of their organic wants to follow the same trend of ideas, we have a fact that belongs to the biological, and not to the social, order of resemblances. Consequently the biological and not the social principle of repetition is applicable. Paral- lelly when conditions of light and sound, identical to all intents and purposes, force animals belonging to different families to develop organs of sight and hearing which are not without some points of resemblance, the likeness, in this respect, is physical, not biological; it depends upon vibration, and therefore comes under the principle of physical repeti- tion. Finally, how and why did human genius come to run its course at all, unless by virtue of certain initial causes which, in arousing it from its original torpor, also stirred up, one by one, the deep potential wants of the human soul ? And were not these causes certain primordial and capital inventions and discoveries which began to spread through imitation and which inspired their imitators with a taste for invention and discovery? The first crude conceptions of the rudiments of language and religion on 1 They are all the more apt to be simple ideas, ideas exacting, but a slight effort of the imagination. This is true of some of the strangest freaks of custom. For example, in reading the work of M. Jametel upon China, I was surprised to see an account of the custom of eructation practised as an act of courtesy at the close of a meal. Now, according to M. Gamier and M. Hugonnet (La Grece nouvelle, 1889), the same ceremony is observed by modern Greeks. In both countries, evidently, the desire to give ample proof of repletion had suggested this ridiculous, although natural, custom. 2 The same needs, for example, both in the Old World and in the New, prompted the ideas of domesticating the ox and taming the chamois in the former, and in the latter, of taming the bison, the buffalo, and the llama. (See Bourdeau, Conquete du monde animal, p. 212.) Social Resemblances and Imitation 43 the part of some ape-man (I will speculate later on upon how this was done) carried man over the threshold from the animal to the social world. This difficult step must have been an unique event ; without it, our richly developed world would have been chained to the limbo of unrealised possibilities. Without this spark, the flame of progress would never have been kindled in the primaeval forests of savagery. This original act of imagination and its spread through imitation was the true cause, the sine qua non of progress. The immediate acts of imitation which it prompted were not its sole results. It suggested other acts of imagination which in turn suggested new acts and so on without end. Thus everything is related to it. Every social resem- blance precedes from that initial act of imitation of which it was the subject. I think I may compare it to that no less extraordinary event which occurred on the globe, many thousands of centuries in advance, when, for the first time, a tiny mass of protoplasm originated in some unknown way and began to multiply by fission. Every resemblance be- tween existing forms of life is the outcome of this first repetition in heredity. For it would be futile to conjecture, purely gratuitously, that protoplasm, or language, or myth- ology originated at more than one centre of creation. As a matter of fact, granted the hypothesis of polygenism, we could not deny that, after a more or less prolonged struggle and competition, the best and most prolific of the different spontaneous specimens must have triumphed alone in the extermination or assimilation of its rivals. There are two facts which we should not overlook : first, that the desire to invent and discover grows, like any other desire, with its satisfaction; second, that every invention resolves itself into the timely intersection in one mind of a current of imitation with another current which re- enforces it, or with an intense perception of some objective fact which throws new light on some old idea, or with the lively experience of a need that finds unhoped-for resources in some familiar practice. But if we analyse the feelings. 44 Laws of Imitation and perceptions in question, we shall find that they them- selves may be resolved almost entirely, and more and more completely as civilisation advances, into psychological ele- ments formed under the influence of example. Every natural phenomenon is seen through the prisms and coloured glasses of a mother tongue, or national religion, or ruling prejudice, or scientific theory, from which the most unbiassed and unimpassioned observation cannot emancipate itself without self-destruction. Moreover, every organic want is experienced in the characteristic form which has been sanc- tioned by surrounding example. The social environment, in defining and actualising this form, has, in truth, appro- priated it. Even desires for nutrition and reproduction have been transformed, so to speak, into national products. Sexual desire is changed into a desire to be married accord- ing to the different religious rites of different localities. Desire for food is expressed in one place as a desire for a certain kind of bread or meat, in another, for a certain kind of grain or vegetable. This is all the more true of the nat- ural desire for amusement. It expresses itself as desire for circus sports, for bull-fights, for classical tragedies, for nat- uralistic novels, for chess, for piquet, for whist. From this point of view several lines of imitation intersected one another in the brilliant eighteenth-century idea of ap- plying the steam-engine, which had already been em- ployed in factories, to the satisfaction of the desire for ocean travel — a desire which had originated through the spread of many antecedent naval inventions. The subsequent ad- aptation of the screw to the steamboat, both of which had been known of separately for a long time, was a similar idea. When Harvey had optical proof of the valves of the veins, and when this combined in his mind with his exist- ing anatomical knowledge, he discovered the circulation of the blood. This discovery was hardly anything more, on the whole, than the encounter of traditional truths with others (namely, with the methods and practices which Harvey had long followed docilely as a disciple, and which alone enabled him to finally advance his master proposi- Social Resemblances and Imitation 45 tion). The development of a new theorem in the mind of a geometrician through the combination of two old theorems is pretty nearly analogous. Since, then, all inventions and discoveries are composed of prior imitations; excepting certain extraneous accretions, of themselves unfruitful, and since these composites are themselves imitated and are destined to become, in turn, elements of still more complex combinations, it follows that there is a genealogical tree of such successful initiatives and that they appear in an irreversible, although other- wise indeterminate, sequence, suggestive of the pange- netic theory of the old philosophers. Every successful in- vention actualises one of the thousand possible, or rather, given certain conditions, necessary, inventions, which are carried in the womb of its parent invention, and by its ap- pearance it annihilates the majority of those possibilities and makes possible a host of heretofore impossible inven- tions. These latter inventions will or will not come into existence according to the extent and direction* of the radia- tion of its imitation through communities which are already illuminated by other lights. To be sure, only the most useful, if you please, of the future inventions — and by most useful I mean those which best answer the problems of the time — will survive, for every invention, like every dis- covery, is an answer to a problem. But aside from the fact that these problems,1 inasmuch as they are themselves the vague expressions of certain indefinite wants, are capable of manifold solutions; the point of interest is to know how, why, and by whom they have been raised ; why one date was chosen rather than another, and, finally, why one solution was chosen in one place, and another in another place.2 1 In politics they are called questions: the Eastern question, the social question, etc. 2 Sometimes the same solution is adopted almost everywhere, although the problem may have lent itself to other solutions. That is, you may say, because the choice in question is the most natural one. True, but is not this the very reason, perhaps, why, although it was disclosed only in one place, and not everywhere at the same time, it ended by spreading in all directions? For example, almost all primitive peoples think of the future abode of the wicked as subterranean and of that of the good 46 Laws of Imitation All this depends upon individual initiatives, upon the nature of the scholars and inventors of the past. From the earliest of these, the greatest, perhaps, our avalanche of progress has rolled down out of the zenith of history. It is difficult for us to imagine how necessary genius and exceptional circumstances were for the development of the simplest ideas. To tame and make use of harmless in- digenous animals, instead of merely hunting them, would seem at first to be the most natural, as well as the most fruitful, of initiatives, an inevitable initiative, in fact. Yet we know that, although the horse originally be- longed to the American fauna, it had disappeared from America when that continent was discovered, and, according to Bourdeau, its disappearance is generally explained (Con- quete du, monde animal) on the ground that " in many places (in the Old World as well) it had been annihilated by the hunter for food, before the herdsman had conceived the idea of domesticating it." And so we see that this idea was far from being an inevitable one. The domestication of the horse depended upon some individual accident. It had to occur in some one place whence it could spread through imi- tation. But what is true of this quadruped is undoubtedly true of all domestic animals and of all cultivated plants. Now, can we imagine humanity without these prime in- ventions ! In general, if we do not wish to explain resemblances be- tween communities which are separated by more or less in- surmountable obstacles (although these may not have existed in the past), through the common possession of some entirely forgotten primitive model, only one other ex- planation, as a rule, remains. Each community must have exhausted all the inventions which were possible in a given line save the one adopted, and eliminated all its other as celestial. The similarity of such conceptions is often minute. Ac- cording to Tylor, the Salish Indians of Oregon believe that the bad dwell after death in a place of eternal snow, where they " are tantalised by the sight of game which they cannot kill, and water which they cannot drink" [Primitive Culture, II, 84, Edward B. Tylor, London, 1871.— Tr.] Social Resemblances and Imitation 47 useless or less useful ideas. But the comparative barren- ness of imagination which characterises primitive people is opposed to this hypothesis. We should then accept the former hypothesis and refuse to renounce it without good reason. Is it certain, for example, that the idea of building lake dwellings came to the ancient inhabitants of both Switzerland and New Guinea without any suggestion of imitation ? The same question arises in relation to the cut- ting and polishing of flints, to the use of tendons and fish- bones for sewing, or to the rubbing together of two pieces of wood for fire. Before we deny the possibility of a diffu- sion of these ideas through a world-wide process of gradual and prolonged imitation, the immense duration of prehis- toric times must be brought to mind, and we must not overlook the evidence of the existence of relations be- tween very distant peoples not only in the age of bronze, when tin was sometimes brought from a great distance, but also in the smooth stone and perhaps even in the rough stone age. The great invasions which have raged at all periods of history must have aided and often universalised the spread of civilising ideas. Even in prehistoric "times this was true. Indeed it must have been especially true in those times, for the ease with which great conquests are effected depends upon the primitive and disintegrated nature of the people to be conquered. The irruption of the Mongols in the thirteenth century is a good instance of these periodic deluges, and we know that it broke down, in the full tide of medievalism, the closest of race barriers and put China and Hindustan into communication with each other and with Europe.1 1 In a very interesting article in the Revue des Deux Mondes of May i, 1890, M. Goblet d'Alviella aptly comments upon the rapidity and facility of the circulation of religious symbols by means of travellers, of slavery, and of currency, the latter of which is a veritable system of moving bas-reliefs. This is true also of political symbols. The two-headed eagle, for example, on the arms of both the Emperor of Austria and the Czar of Russia has come down to them from the ancient Germanic empire. It was brought there through the Eastern expedition of Frederick the Second in the thirteenth century, when he borrowed it from the Turks. Furthermore, M. Goblet d'Alviella says 48 Laws of Imitation Even in default of such violent events, a world-wide in- terchange of examples could not have failed to take place eventually. At this point, let me make the following general remark: The majority of historians are not inclined to admit the influence of one civilisation upon another unless they can prove the existence of some intercommercial or military relations. They think, implicitly, that the action of one nation upon another at a distance, of Egypt upon Mesopotamia, for example, or of China upon the Roman Empire, presupposes the transportation of troops or the sending of ships or caravans from one to the other. They would not admit, for example, that currents of Babylonian and Egyptian civilisation may have intermingled before the conquest of Mesopotamia by Egypt in the sixteenth century before our era. Oppositely, in virtue of the same point of view, as soon as a similarity of works of art, of monuments, of tombs, of mortuary relics, proves to them the action of one civilisation upon another, they at once conclude that wars or regular transactions of some kind must have occurred between them. In view of the relations which I have established between the three forms of universal repetition, the above precon- ception suggests the error of the old-time physicists, who saw in every physical action between two distant bodies, like the imparting of heat or light, the proof of a transmission of matter. Did not Newton himself think that the diffu- sion of solar light was produced by the emission of particles projected by the sun through boundless space? There is as much difference between my point of view and the ordi- nary one as there is in optics between the vibratory theory and the theory of emission. Of course I do not deny that that there are reasons for thinking that the astonishing likeness between this two-headed eagle and the eagle which is also two-headed and which figures upon the most ancient bas-reliefs of Mesopotamia, is due to a series of imitations. Note in this same article the reference to the widespread imitation of the Gamma cross as a luck piece. It is prob- able, on the other hand, that the idea of using the cross to symbolise the god of the air or the compass-card arose spontaneously and not through imitation in Mesopotamia and in the Aztec empire. Social Resemblances and Imitation 49 social action is effected, or rather aroused, by the movements of armies or merchant vessels; but I challenge the view that such movements are the sole or even the principal mode through which the contagion of civilisation takes place. Men of different civilisations come into mutual contact on their respective frontiers, where, independently of war or trade, they are naturally inclined to imitate one another. And so, without its being necessary for them to displace one another in the sense of checking the spread of one another's examples, they continually and over unlimited distances react upon one another, just as the molecules of the sea drive forward its waves without displacing one another in their direction. Consequently, long before the arrival of Pharaoh's army in Babylon, sundry external observances and industrial secrets had passed from hand to hand, in some way or other, from Egypt to Babylon. Here we have the first principle of history. Let us note closely the continuity, the power and the irresistibility of its action. Given the necessary time, it will inevitably reach out to the ends of the earth. Now, in view of the fact that man's past is to be reckoned in hundreds of thousands of years, there is ample reason to think that it must have spread through the entire universe before the nearby his- toric ages which we call antiquity, began. Moreover, it is not necessary that the thing which is propagated should be beautiful or useful or rational. In the Middle Ages, for example, a grotesque custom existed in many different places of parading, seated backwards upon an ass, husbands who had been beaten by their wives. Obviously such an absurd idea could not have arisen spon- taneously at the same time in different brains. Was it not due to imitation? And yet M. Baudrillart is led by current prejudice to believe that popular festivals originated of themselves without any conscious or deliberate individual initiative. " The festivals of Tarasque at Tarascon, of Graouilli at Metz, of Loup vert at Jumieges, of Gargouille at Rouen, and many others, he says, were never established, in all probability, by a formal decree [I admit this] or 50 Laws of Imitation by premeditated desire [the error is here] ; they were made periodic by unanimous and spontaneous agreement. . . ." Imagine thousands of people simultaneously conceiving and spontaneously carrying out such extraordinary things ! To sum up, everything which is social and non-vital or non-physical in the phenomena of societies is caused by im- itation. This is true of both social similarities and dissimi- larities. And so, the epithet natural is generally and not im- properly bestowed upon the spontaneous and non-suggested resemblances which arise between different societies in every order of social facts. If we like to look at societies on the side of their spontaneous resemblances, we have the right to call this aspect of their laws, cults, governments, customs and crimes, natural law, natural religion, natural governments, natural industry, natural art (I do not mean naturalistic art), natural crime. Now, such sponta- neous resemblances have, of course, some significance. But, unfortunately, we waste our time in trying to get at their exact meaning, and because of their irremediable vagueness and arbitrariness of character, they must end by repelling the positive and scientifically trained mind. I may be reminded of the fact that although imitation is a social thing, the tendency to imitate in order to avoid the trouble of inventing, a tendency which is born of in- stinctive indolence, is an absolutely natural thing. But al- though this tendency may, of necessity, precede the first social act, the act whereby it is satisfied, yet its own strength and direction varies very much according to the nature of existing habits of imitation. It may still be argued that this tendency is only one form of a desire which I myself hold to be innate and deep-seated and from which I deduce, later on, all the laws of social reason, namely, desire for a maximum of strong and stable belief. If these laws exist, the resemblances which they produce in people's ideas and institutions have, in as much as there can be nothing social in their origin, a natural and non-social cause. For example, the savages of America, Africa, and Asia all ex- plain sickness on the ground of diabolical possession, the Social Resemblances and Imitation 51 entrance of evil spirits into the body of the diseased — this, in itself, is quite a singular coincidence; then when they have once adopted this explanation they all conceive of the idea of curing through exorcism as a logical outcome. In reply, I say that although it cannot be denied that there is a certain logical orientation on the part of the presocial man, the desire for logical co-ordination has been enhanced and directed by the influences of the social environment, where it is subject to the widest and strangest fluctuations} and where, like every other desire, it waxes strong and defi- nite according to the measure of satisfaction which it re- ceives. We shall see the proof of this at another time. 2. This leads me to examine another leading objec- tion which may be raised against me. As a matter of fact, I have gained little in proving that all civilisations, even the most divergent, are rays from a single primordial centre, if there are reasons for thinking that, after a certain point, the distance between them begins to diminish rather than increase, and that, whatever may have been the point of departure, the evolution of languages, myths, crafts, laws, sciences, and arts has been drawing nearer and nearer to a beaten track, so that their goal must always have been the same, predetermined and inevitable. It is for us to ascertain if this hypothesis be true. It is not true. Let me first point out the extravagant conse- quence that it involves. It implies that, given sufficient time, the scientific spirit must lead, no matter what its path of speculation may be, to the infinitesimal calculus in mathe- matics, to the law of gravitation in astronomy, to the union of forces in physics, to atomism in chemistry, and in bi- ology to natural selection or to some other ulterior form of evolution. Moreover, since the industrial and the mili- tary and the artistic imagination must have depended upon this would-be unique and inevitable science in their search for the means of satisfying virtually innate wants, it follows that the invention of the locomotive and the electric tele- graph, for example, of torpedoes and Krupp guns, of Wagnerian opera and naturalistic novels, was a necessary 52 Laws of Imitation thing, more necessary, perhaps, than the simplest expres- sion of the art of pottery. Now, unless I am much mis- taken, one might as well say that from its very beginnings and throughout all its metamorphoses, life tended to give birth to certain predetermined forms of existence and that the duck-bill, for example, or the lizard or ophrys or cactus or man himself was a necessary occurrence. Would it not be more plausible to admit that the ever fresh problem of life was of itself undertermined and susceptible of multiple solutions ? The illusion which I am opposing owes its verisimili- tude to a kind of quid pro quo. The progress of civilisation is unquestionably manifest in the gradual equalisation that is being established throughout an ever vaster territory. This process is so thorough that some day, perhaps, a single stable and definite social type will cover the entire surface of a globe1 that was formerly divided up among a thousand different unrelated or rival types. But does the work of universal equalisation in which we are taking part reveal the slightest common movement on the part of differ- ent societies towards the same pole ? Not in the least, since the equalisation is plainly due to the submersion of the greater number of our original civilisations by the over- flow of one whose waters are advancing in continually enlarging circles of imitation. To see how far independent civilisations are from tending to merge together spon- taneously, let us compare in their stages of final develop- ment the Byzantine Empire of the Middle Ages, for example, with the Chinese Empire of the same epoch. Both civilisations had long since put forth all their fruit and reached their extreme limits of growth. The question at issue is whether in this final state of consummation they resembled each other more than they did at any previous 1 In the long run, however, as we shall see later on, the exclusive imitation of custom will have to prevail over the proselyting imitation of fashion. As a result of this law, the disintegration of mankind into distinct states and civilisations may very possibly be the final stage of society. Only, these civilisations will be less in number and greater in scale than those of past or present times. Social Resemblances and Imitation 53 time. It seems to me that the very opposite is much more true. Compare Saint Sophia with its mosaics to a pagoda with its porcelains, the mystic miniatures of Byzantine manuscripts to the flat paintings of Chinese vases, the life of a mandarin occupied with literary frivolities and setting but an intermittent example of labour to that of a Byzantine bishop, devoted to the mingled ruses and subtleties of di- plomacy and theology, etc. The contrast is complete be- tween the ideal of exquisite landscape gardening, of swarm- ing families, and of lowered morality that is dear to one of these peoples, and the ideal of Christian salvation, of mon- astic celibacy and of ascetic perfection which fascinates the other. It is difficult to class under the same term of religion the ancestor-worship which is the basis of the one, and the worship of divine personages or of saints which is the soul of the other. But if I go back to the most ancient ages of those Greeks and Romans whose twofold culture was amalgamated and completed in the Lower Empire, I shall find a family organisation which would seem to be pat- terned after that of China. In fact, in the ancient Aryan, and, I may add, Semitic, family, we find, as in the Chinese family, not only the worship of ancestors and of household gods, we also find the same contrivances for honouring the dead, namely, food offerings and the singing of hymns ac- companied by genuflexion. We find, too, the same fictions, particularly the fiction of adoption whose purpose is to ac- complish, in spite of the occasional barrenness of wives, the chief end in view, the perpetuation with the family of the family-cult. We shall have the counterproof of this truth, if, instead of comparing two original peoples at two successive phases of their history, we compare two classes or two social levels in each of them. The traveller, to be sure, will observe that there is greater dissimilarity in many European coun- tries, even in the most backward, between the common peo- ple who have remained faithful to their ancient customs than between persons belonging to the upper classes. But it is because the latter have been the first to be touched by 54 Laws of Imitation the rays of invading fashion; here the resemblance is ob- viously the child of imitation. On the other hand, when two nations have remained hermetically shut off from each other, there are certainly greater differences between the ideas, the tastes, and the habits of their nobles or clergy than between those of their farmers or mechanics. The reason of this is that the more civilised a nation or class becomes, the more it escapes from the narrow banks in whose thraldom the same universal corporeal wants have hemmed its development. It flows out into the freedom of the aesthetic life, where its ship of art is wafted at the pleasure of the breezes with which its own past fills its sails. If civilisa- tion were only the full expansion of organic life by means of the social environment, this would not be so; but it seems as if life, in expanding in this way, sought above all to free itself from itself, to break through its own circle; as if it bloomed only to wither away, as if nothing were more es- sential to it (this is the case with all reality, perhaps), 'than to rid itself of its very essence. Accordingly, the super- fluity, the luxury, the thing of beauty, I mean the special thing of beauty which every nation and every age makes its own, is, in every society, the pre-eminently social thing; it is the raison d'etre of all the rest, of all that which is use- ful and necessary. Now we shall see that the exclusively imitative origin of resemblances becomes more and more indisputable as one passes from things of use to things of beauty. Artistic habits of eye, born of ancient individual caprice in art, become super-organic wants which the artist is obliged to satisfy, and which singularly limit the field of his fancy. But this imitation, which has nothing vital in it, varies as much as possible with time and place. Thus the eye of the Greek, beginning with a certain epoch, needed to see his columns in keeping with the Ionic or Co- rinthian order, whereas the eye of the Egyptian, under the Old Empire, exacted a square pier, and, under the Middle Empire, a column with lotos-bulb capital. Here, in this sphere of pure art, or rather of almost pure art, for archi- tecture will always be an industrial art, my formula relating Social Resemblances and Imitation 55 to imitation as the unique cause of true social resemblances, applies to the very letter. It would apply still more exactly in sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. In fact, the aesthetic ideas and judg- ments to which art corresponds, do not exist before it. They have nothing in them that is fixed and uniform. They differ from the bodily wants and sense-perceptions which in a certain measure predetermine works of in- dustry and force them to repeat themselves vaguely among different peoples. When a product belongs both to in- dustry and to art, we must expect it to be like other products from foreign and independent sources in its in- dustrial characteristics and to differ from them on its aesthetic side. In general, this differential element seems of slight importance to the practical man. Are not the monuments, the vases, the furniture, and the hymns and epics of different civilisations differentiated from each merely in detail? But detail, the characteristic shade, the turn of the sentence, the peculiar colouring, all this is style and manner; to the artist it is more important than any- thing else. The pointed arch of one place, the semi-circular of another, the pediment of still another, is both the most visible and most significant character of its respective society. It is the master-form which controls, instead of being controlled by, utilities, and, in this respect, it may well be likened to those morphological characteristics which rule over functions and by which living types are recog- nised. This is the reason why we can deny from the aesthetic, that is, from the most purely social, point of view, that any real likeness exists between works which differ from each other only in detail. We can assert, for ex- ample, that the graceful little Egyptian temple at Elephante is, in spite of its appearance, unlike a peripteral Greek temple. Consequently, we can set aside the question of ascertaining if this resemblance is not a proof that, as Champollion thought, Greece copied Egypt. After all, this amounts to saying that the formula applies the more exactly, the more it is a question of like products satisfying wants which are more artificial than natural, that is, which belong to a social 56 Laws of Imitation rather than vital order of things. From this we may infer that if certain products ever intersected each other, products that were inspired by exclusively social motives, and that were absolutely disconnected from any vital functions, this principle would be verified with the utmost exactness. There has been much talk among artists of an alleged law of development which would subject the fine arts to turn forever in the same circle and repeat themselves indefinitely. Unfortunately no one has ever been able to formulate it with any precision without running foul of the facts. This ob- servation may be likewise applied, although in a lesser de- gree, as we should expect from what has preceded, to the development of religions, languages, governments, laws, morals, and sciences. Although M. Perrot shares in the aforesaid current prejudice, yet in his Histoire de I' art he is forced to admit that the evolution of architectural orders did not pass through analagous phases in Egypt and Greece. When the most ancient stone columns of both places came to take the place of wooden piers, they un- doubtedly began by more or less faithfully imitating them and they retained for a long time this counterfeit character; and in both countries the native plants, the acanthus in Greece, the lotos or palm in Egypt, were reproduced in the ornamentation of the capitals. Again, without doubt, the Greek or Egyptian column, massive and undivided as it was in the beginning, came to be subdivided into three parts, the capital, the shaft, and the base. Finally, the decoration of the capital in Greece and of the entire column in Egypt undoubtedly went on, becoming more and more complicated and surcharged with fresh ornamentation. But of these three analogies, the first is only another witness to our first principle, the instinctive imitativeness of social man, and the third sets off for us a necessary corol- lary of this principle, the gradual accumulation of non-con- tradictory inventions, thanks to the conservation and dif- fusion of each of them through the imitation of which each is the centre of radiation. As for the second, it is one of those functional analogies of which I spoke above. In fact, as soon as the need of shelter came to require dwellings of Social Resemblances and Imitation 57 a certain elevation for its satisfaction, this tripartite divi- sion of the column was pretty much necessitated by the nature of the materials used and by the law of gravity. If we wish to get at the truth of the pseudo-law of re- ligious or political or other kinds of development which I have just been criticising in passing, we shall see that it may be resolved into resemblances which fall within the three preceding categories. If any fails to fall within them, it is because imitation has intervened. For example, the point of similarity between Christianity and Buddhism, but es- pecially between Christianity and the worship of Krishna, are so multiple, that they have seemed sufficient to some of the most learned authorities, notably to Weber, to justify the affirmation that an historical relationship exists between the aforesaid religions. The conjecture is the less astonish- ing because it is about proselyting religions. Besides, — and here the significant divergences will stand out, — among the Greeks the proportion of the supports were always modified in the same direction, " a higher and higher fraction expressed the ratio between the height of the shaft and its diameter. The Doric of the Parthenon is more slender than that of the old temple of Corinth; it is less so than the Roman Doric. This was not the case in Egypt, its forms did not tend to grow more tapering with the lapse of the centuries. The proportions of the polyg- onal or of the fascicular column of Beni-Hassan are not more thickset than those of the columns of much earlier monuments." We even find the contrary of this, the exact inverse of Hellenic evolution. " There are thus," con- cludes the author I cite from, " capricious oscillations in the course of Egyptian art. It is less regular than that of classic art; it does not seem to be governed by an equally severe internal logic." 2 I prefer to say that it follows from this that art is un- willing to be shut up in a formula, since, at times, this formula, if formula there be, seems to apply, whereas at 1 [Histoirc de I'art, I, 574, Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, Paris, 1882.— TV.] 2 [Ibid., II, 57S-— TV.] 58 Laws of Imitation other times it is plain that it does not apply at all, and pre- cisely in that which to the eyes of those who know con- cerns the most important, the most expressive, and the most profound characteristics. When it is a question of look- ing at the column from the utilitarian point of view, ex- ternal conditions narrowly circumscribe the field of archi- tectural invention and impose certain fundamental ideas upon it like themes for variation. But when once the strait was crossed along which all schools had to follow in almost parallel courses, the schools turned in different direc- tions and drifted apart; and yet they were not more free, only each obeyed merely the inspirations of its own peculiar genius. From now on, there is an end to coincidences, and dissimilarities are deepened.1 The individual influence of great masters, either living or dead, becomes sovereign and preponderant in the transformations of their arts. In this way the " capricious oscillations " of Egyptian architec- ture may be explained; and, if the development of Greek architecture appears to be more rectilinear, is this not an il- lusion? If we do not limit ourselves to the consideration of two or three remarkable centuries of Greek development, if we include the entire unfolding of Greek art from its scarcely known beginnings to its final Byzantine transformations, shall we not see that that increasing need of more slender proportions which M. Perrot points out, begins, at a certain epoch, to diminish? The birth and growth of this optical need was due to a series of elegant and graceful artists, just as generations of solid builders made the need of massive solidity a general and permanent thing on the banks of the Nile. And yet contributions of a different style were not lacking when an architect of originality, one less inclined to conform to the national genius than to reform it, made his appearance on the scene. But how much these considera- tions would gain by being illustrated by examples taken from the higher arts, from painting and poetry and music ! 1 Do we find anything analogous to the obelisk outside of Egypt? It is because obelisks do not answer to a need that is for the most part natural, like doors or windows or like columns in so far as they are supports, but to a need that is almost entirely social. CHAPTER III WHAT IS A SOCIETY? THE meaning which I attach to society can be clearly enough inferred from what has preceded, but it is proper to express this fundamental notion still more precisely. I What is a society ? The general answer is as follows : It is a group of distinct individuals who render one another mutual services. But this definition is as false as it is clear. It has been the source of all those confusions which have so often been made between so-called animal societies, or the majority of them, and the only true societies, which do in- clude, in a certain connection, a small number of animals.1 For this wholly economic notion, a notion which bases the social group upon mutual helpfulness, it might be an ad- vantage to substitute a purely juristic conception of society. In this case, an individual would not be associated with those to whom he was useful or who were useful to him, but with those, and only with those, who had established over him recognised rights of law, custom, and conven- tionality, or over whom he had analogous rights, with or without reciprocity. But we shall see that although this is a preferable point of view, yet it unduly restricts the so- cial group, just as the economic point of view unduly en- larges it. Finally, we might think of the social tie as en- tirely political or religious in character. Belief in the same religion or collaboration for the same patriotic purpose, a purpose common to all the associates and one absolutely distinct from their different individual wants, for whose 1 I should be sorry to have the reader find any implicit criticism in these lines of the work of M. Espinas upon " Animal Societies." That work is redeemed by too many true and profound insights to be ar« raigned for the confusion referred to in the text. 60 Laws of Imitation satisfaction it matters little whether they aid each other or not, would constitute a true social relationship. Such moral and mental unanimity is undoubtedly characteristic of ma- ture societies; but it is also true that social ties may begin without it. They exist, for example, among Europeans of different nationalities. Consequently, this definition is too narrow. Moreover, the conformity of aims and beliefs of which we are speaking, this mental likeness, which may characterise tens and hundreds of millions of men at the same time, is not born all of a sudden. It is produced little by little, and extends from one man to another by means of imitation. This, then, is always the point to which we must return. If the relation of one social unit to another consisted es- sentially of an exchange of services, we should not only have to recognise the right of animal groups to be called societies, we should have to admit that they were the socie- ties par excellence. The mutual services of shepherd and husbandman, of hunter and fisherman, of baker and butcher, are far less than those which the different sexes of white ants render one another. Among animals themselves, the most typical societies would not be formed by the highest, by bees, ants, horses, and beavers, but by the lowest, by the siphonophorse, for example, where division of labour is so complete that eating and digesting are carried on separately by different individuals. There can be no more signal interchange of services than this. Applying this view to mankind it might be saidj without irony, that the strength of the social tie between men was in proportion to the degree of their reciprocal usefulness. The master who shelters and nourishes his slave and the noble who defends and protects his serf, in return for their subordinate ser- vices, are examples of mutual service. The reciprocity is gained, to be sure, by force; but that fact is insignificant if the economic point of view is the primary one and if we think that it is bound to encroach more and more upon the juristic point of view. . . Consequently, the social tie be- tween the Spartan and the helot, or between a noble and his What is a Society ? 6 1 serf, or between a Hindoo warrior and a Hindoo merchant, is stronger than that between free Spartan citizens, or that between the feudal nobles of a single country, or that be- tween the helots or serfs who live in the same village, in spite of the fact that the members of all these classes may possess the same customs and language and religion ! We have erred in thinking that societies in becoming civilised have favoured economic at the expense of juristic relations. In doing this, we forget that all labour and ser- vice and exchange is based upon a true system of contract, a system which is guaranteed by more and more formal and complex legislation; and we forget that to this accumula- tion of legal rules are added commercial and other kinds of usages which have the force of law, besides a host of all kinds of procedures, from the simple but general formalities of polite manners to electoral and parliamentary practices.1 Society is far more a system of mutually determined engage- ments and agreements, of rights and duties, than a system of mutual services. This is the reason why it is established between beings who are alike or who differ little from each other. Economic production exacts a specialisation of apt- itudes. If this specialisation were fully developed in ac- cordance with the logically inevitable although unexpressed wish of economists, we should have as many distinct hu- man species as there are miners, farmers, weavers, lawyers, physicians, etc. But, fortunately, the assured and undeni- able preponderance of juridical relations prevents any exces- sive differentiation of workers. In fact, it is continually diminishing such distinctions. Here Law, it is true, is only one form or outcome of man's inclination towards imi- tation. Is it from the standpoint of utilitarianism that the peasant is given an education and instructed in his rights when as the result of this kind of education the rural popu- lation may desert its plough and spade and the double mammal of husbandry and herding may dry up? The 1 It is a mistake to think that the rule of ceremony, of ceremonial government, to use Spencer's term, is on the decline. At the side of outgrown conventions or dying-out ceremonial, vigorous ceremonies arise and multiply under the name of conventions. 62 Laws of Imitation cult of equality has outweighed any fear of this latter contingency. We have wished to promote in the social scale certain classes which formerly, in spite of a constant exchange of services, did not come in for so much con- sideration and, consequently, we have appreciated that it was necessary to assimilate them through the contagion of imitation with the members of a higher grade of society. To put it better, it was necessary to bring into their mental and social life ideas, desires, and needs, in a word, individ- ual elements like those which constituted the mind and character of the members of that society. Beings which differ greatly in kind, the shark, for ex- ample, and the little fish which he uses as a mouth scavenger, or man and the domestic animals, can be of much service to each other, and at times, like the huntsman and his dog or like men and women very different as they often are from each other, work together in a common undertaking. But the recognition and assumption by two beings of mutual rights and obligations involves one indispensable condition, the possession of a common foundation of ideas and tradi- tions, of a common language or interpreter. These close points of likeness are formed by education, which is one of the forms by which imitation spreads. For this reason the recognition of mutual responsibilities never arose between the Spanish or English conquerors of America and the con- quered natives. In this case; racial dissimilarity either played a much smaller role than difference of language, custom, or religion; or it served merely as an added cause of incompatibility.1 This is the reason, on the other hand, that a close chain of reciprocal rights and obligations united all members of the feudal tree from its topmost branch to its nethermost root in an eminently juridical in- stitution. Here, in fact, Christian propagandism had 1 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when military and civil populations were radically unlike, the standards of the time justified the perpetration of every kind of outrage, of rape, pillage, massacre, etc., by campaigning troops upon either friendly or hostile civilians. But among themselves soldiers were more sparing of one another. What is a Society ? 63 produced in the twelfth century the most profound mental assimilation from the emperor to the serf that has ever been seen. And it was essentially because of this network of rights, that feudal Europe formed from one end of it to the other a true society, the society of Christendom, which was as widespread as Romanism (Romanitas) in the best days of the Roman Empire. If we require any counter- proof of this, we may find it in the fact that a real social tie is never established between the Chinese and Hindoo emi- grants to the Antilles and their white masters by their reciprocity of services, or even by their bilateral contracts, for they never become assimilated to one another. Here two or three distinct civilisations, two or three distinct groups of inventions which have spread out through imita- tion in their own particular spheres, come into mutual con- tact and mutual service, but there is no society in the true sense of the word. The Hindoo caste system was based mainly on an eco- nomic conception of society. Castes were distinct races which were of vast assistance to one another. We see, then, that the tendency to subordinate moral considerations of rights to utilitarian considerations of service and occupa- tion does not denote an advanced state of civilisation. This tendency diminishes, in fact, as mankind improves and as industry itself progresses.1 In reality, the civilised man of to-day is inclined to do without the assistance of his fellow. He appeals less and less to the professional 1 In his remarkable work on Cinematics, Reuleaux, the German director of the Industrial Academy of Berlin, observes that industrial progress demonstrates more clearly every day that economists err in attaching undue importance to the division of labour. It is the co- ordination which results from it that deserves the chief praise. This is true also of " the division of organic labour " ; without an admirable organic harmony, it would not be in the slightest degree a step in vital progress. " The principle of machine work," M. Reuleaux remarks in particular, " contradicts, in part, at any rate, the principle of division of labour. ... In the most improved modern factories, the men who tend the different machines are shifted from one place to another in order to break the monotony of their work." An increasing special- isation in the work of the machine produces the opposite result in the work of the mechanic. Otherwise, as Reuleaux observes, the workman would become more mechanical as the machine became a better workman. 64 Laws of Imitation specialist who is fundamentally unlike himself and more and more to the forces of subjugated nature. Is not the social ideal of the future the enlarged reproduction of the city of antiquity, where slaves would be replaced by ma- chines,— an idea that has been tediously reiterated, — and where a small homogeneous group of citizens in constant imitation and assimilation of one another, hut inde- pendent and self-sufficient in other respects, in times of peace at least, would constitute the sum total of civilised men? Economic solidarity establishes a vital rather than a social tie between workers and no organisation of labour will ever be comparable, in this respect, to the most im- perfect organism. Juridical solidarity has, on the other hand, a purely social character, because it presupposes the kind of similarity that is due to imitation. Given this simi- larity, and we have, notwithstanding a lack of recognised rights, a beginning of society. Louis XIV did not recog- nise the fact that his subjects had any claims whatsoever upon him, and his subjects shared his delusion; nevertheless, he was socially related to them, because both he and they were products of the same classical and Christian educa- tion, because everyone from the Court at Paris to the heart of Brittany and Provence looked up to him as a model, and because he himself was unconsciously reacted upon by the influence of his courtiers, a kind of diffused imitation experienced by him in return for that radiating from him. Social relations, I repeat, are much closer between indi- viduals who resemble each other in occupation and edu- cation, even if they are competitors, than between those who stand most in need of each other. Lawyers, journal- ists, magistrates, all professional men, are cases in point. So society has been properly denned by common speech as a group of people who, although they may disagree in ideas and sentiments, yet, having had the same kind of bringing up, have a common meeting ground and see and influence one another for pleasure. As for the employees of the same shop or factory who meet together for mutual assistance or collaboration, they constitute a commercial or What is a Society ? 65 industrial society, not a society pure and simple, not a society in the unqualified sense of the word.1 A nation, which is a kind of super-organic organism made up of co-operative castes and classes and professions, is quite different from a society. This distinction is ob- vious in the denationalisation and socialisation which is taking place to-day among hundreds of millions of men. It does not seem to me that the multiple uniformities to which we are hastening in language, education, instruction, etc., have as yet proved to be the fittest ways to assure the accomplishment of the innumerable tasks which nations and associations of individuals have heretofore divided up among themselves. It may well be that the scholar-peasant is not a better farmer for his learning, nor the sol- dier a better disciplined or, who knows, a braver fighter. But when we bring the steadfast partisans of progress face to face with these threatening possibilities, it is because we do not have the point of view which they, perhaps un- consciously, hold. They wish for the most intense kind of socialisation, not for the highest and strongest kind of social organisation, quite a different thing. They would be satis- fied, if need be, by an exuberance of social life in a weakened social organisation. We have still to learn how desirable this end may be. Let us hold this question in reserve. The fret and instability of modern societies must seem inexplicable to economists and, in general, to those sociolo- gists who base society upon reciprocal utility. As a matter of fact, reciprocity of services between different classes and different nations does plainly exist, and it increases day by day, thanks to the co-operation of law and custom, with the utmost rapidity. But we forget that the in- 1 Both lawyers and physicians vie with fellow professionals for public patronage, but, in the legal profession, community of work tempers the heat and bitterness of competition and selfish resentment and neces- sarily develops certain fraternal relations. Among physicians, on the contrary, nothing takes the edge off their struggle and rivalry ; for as a rule they do not work together. Consequently, paroxysms of pro- fessional hatred and animosity characterise the medical fraternity, and, I may add, all bodies of men, such as notaries, pharmacists, or merchants, who work independently of one another. 66 Laws of Imitation dividuals who compose these classes and nations are be- coming even more rapidly and thoroughly assimilated, although this process of imitation is still hindered by irri- tating obstacles, by customs, and even by laws which are, perhaps, the more irritating the less discouraging they ap- pear to be. Contemporary civilisation in England, America, France, in all modern countries, tends to diminish the intellectual difference, which was becoming more and more deep and far-reaching, between men and women by opening up most of men's occupations to women and by letting the latter share in almost all the advantages of training and education of the former. In this respect, civilisation treats the weaker sex just as it treated the peasant or free agri- cultural labourer when it took him out of the distinct caste into which it had gradually come to put him and replaced him in the big social group. Now, is social utility the end in view in either case? Were these transformations brought about to enable either class to be more successful in performing its special function, in cultivating the soil, or in nourishing and caring for children? On the contrary, many pessimists like myself foresee the time when, in con- sequence of these changes, we shall be without agricultural labourers, without nurses, and even without mothers who can or will nourish the continually decreasing number of their children. But because the enlargement of the social cir- cle was the end in view and because the assimilation of ^vomen with men, of peasants with townsmen, was an indis- pensable condition of this socialisation, assimilation had to occur. As early as the eighteenth century, in a more restricted social circle, in the brilliant social life of the common meet- ing ground of the salon, both sexes were brought closer together in tastes and ideas than they were in the Middle Ages; and we know that this social advantage was bought at the price of family fruitfulness and even at that of family honour. And yet people were happy under these circumstances, because a higher necessity impels the social What is a Society ? 67 circle, be it what it may, to continually widen its circum- ference. Am I socially related to other men who may belong to the same physical type and possess the same organs and the same senses that I do? Am I socially related to an educated deaf mute who may closely resemble me in face and figure? No, I am not. Inversely, the animals of La Fontaine's fables, the fox, the cricket, the cat, and the dog, live together in so- ciety, in spite of the difference in species which separates them, because they all speak the same language.1 We eat, drink, digest, walk, or cry without being taught. These acts are purely vital. But talking requires the hearing of con- versation, as we know from the case of deaf mutes who are dumb because they are deaf. Consequently, I begin to feel a social kinship with everyone who talks, even if it be in a 1 Romanes devotes one very interesting chapter in his Mental Evolu- tion in Animals to the influence of imitation upon the origin and devel- opment of instincts. This influence is much greater and more far- spread than we suppose. It is not only the related and even the un- related individuals of the same species who copy one another, — many song birds learn to sing only through the teaching of their mothers or companio'ns. — individuals of different species as well borrow both the useful and the unmeaning peculiarities of one another. Here we see the deep-seated desire to imitate for the sake of imitation, the desire which is the original source of all our arts. A mocking-bird can imitate a cock's crow so accurately that the very hens are deceived. Darwin thought that some hive-bees that he had observed had borrowed from the humble-bees their ingenious method of sucking the nectar of certain flowers by boring their under sides. Certain birds and insects and ani- mals are creatures of genius, and genius even in the animal world can count upon some measure of success. Only, these social attempts prove abortive for lack of language. Not man only, but every animal, reaches out according to his degree of mentality to a social life as the sine qua non of mental development. Why is this? Because the cerebral func- tion, the mind, is distinguished from other functions in not being a simple adaptation of definite means to definite ends, but in being an adaptation to many indeterminate ends which depend more or less upon chance to be made definite through the same far-reaching means by which they are in the first instance pursued, namely, through imitation of outside things. This infinite outside, this outer world which is pictured, represented, imitated, by sensation and intelligence, is pri- marily universal nature in its continual and irresistible action by sug- gestion upon the animal's brain and muscular system; later on, how- ever, it is pre-eminently the social environment. 68 Laws of Imitation strange tongue, providing our two idioms appear to me to have some common source. This social tie may be weak and inadequate, but it gains in strength as other common traits, all originating in imitation, are added to it. Society may therefore be defined as a group of beings who are apt to imitate one another, or who, without actual imitation, are alike in their possession of common traits which are ancient copies of the same model. II We must not confuse the social type of a given place or period, as it is more or less incompletely reproduced in every member of the social group, with the social group itself. What constitutes this type? A certain number of wants and ideas which have been created by thousands of time- accumulated inventions and discoveries. These wants harmonise to a certain extent, that is, they contribute to the supremacy of some dominant desire which is the soul of a given epoch or people. The ideas or beliefs also harmonise more or less ; that is, they are logically related to one another or, at least, they do not in general mutually contradict one another. This twofold, always incomplete, and, in certain notes, discordant accord, which is gradually established be- tween things which have been fortuitously produced and brought together, may be perfectly well compared to what is called in a living body organic adaptation. But it has the advantage of being free from the mystery which is inherent in this latter kind of harmony; it points out in extremely clear terms the relations of means to an end or of conse- quences to a principle, two relations which amount, after all, to one, the latter one of the two. What is the meaning of the incompatibility or discord that may exist between two organs, or conformations, or characteristics taken from two differ- ent species? We do not know, but we do know that when two ideas are incompatible it means that one of them implies a negative to the affirmative of the other and that for the same reason the consistency of two ideas means the lack, or What is a Society ? 69 the apparent lack, of all such implications. Finally, we know that when two ideas more or less agree, it is because the one implies in a more or less considerable number of its aspects the affirmation of a more or less considerable number of the points which the other affirms. There is nothing less obscure, nothing more enlightening, than these psychical acts of af- firmation and negation. In them the whole life of the mind is wrapped up. Nor is there anything more intelligible than their opposition. In it is expressed the opposition between desire and repulsion, between velle and nolle. Thus we see that a social type or what is called a particular civilisation is a veritable system, a more or less coherent theory, whose inner contradictions eventually strengthen themselves or eventually break out and force its disruption. Under such con- ditions it is easy to understand why there are certain pure and strong types of civilisation and certain mixed and feeble types, and why the purest types change and decay upon the addition of new inventions which stimulate new desires and beliefs and disturb the balance of old desires and faiths; why, in other words, all inventions cannot be added to others, and why many can merely be substituted for others, those, namely, that stimulate desires and beliefs which are implicitly or explicitly contradictory in all the logical ex- actness of the word. Therefore, in the oscillations of his- tory there is nothing but endless additions and subtractions of quantities of faith or desire which are brought forward by discoveries and which reinforce or neutralise one an- other, like intersecting vibrations. This is the national type which, as I have said, is re- peated in every member of the nation. It is like a great seal, which makes an imperfect mark upon the bits of wax which it stamps, but which could not be completely recast without comparing all its impressions. Ill What I defined above was really not so much society, in the common sense of the word, as sociality. A society is always in different degrees an association, and association 70 Laws of Imitation is to sociality, to imitativeness, so to speak, what organisa- tion is to vitality, or what molecular structure is to the elasticity of the ether. Here are some new analogies in addition to those which seemed to me to be presented in such abundance by the three great forms of Universal Repetition. But, perhaps, in order to fully understand sociality in its relative form, the only one in which in va- rious degrees it actually occurs, it may be well to conceive of it, hypothetically, as perfect and absolute. In its hypo- thetical form it would consist of such an intense concentra- tion of urban life that as soon as a good idea arose in one mind it would be instantaneously transmitted to all minds throughout the city. This hypothesis is analogous to that of physicists who state that if the elasticity of the ether were perfect, luminious excitations, etc., would be trans- mitted without lapse of time. Would it not be useful for biologists to conceive, on their part, of an absolute irrita- bility incarnated in a kind of ideal protoplasm, a conception which would help them to understand the varying vitality of real protoplasm? With this for our starting point, if we wish to carry our analogy straight through, life would be. merely the organi- sation of protoplasmic irritability, matter, the organisation of ethereal elasticity, and society, the organisation of imi- tativeness. Now, it is almost superfluous to remark that the hypothesis which was conceived of by Thompson and adopted by Wurtz on the origin of atoms and molecules, the vortex theory, extremely plausible and probable as it is, to say the least, as well as the universally accepted protoplasmic theory of life, fully answers one of the de- mands of our point of view. Given a mass of children who have been brought up together and given the same educa- tion in the same environment and who have not yet sepa- rated into classes and professions, and we have the ground- matter of society. It kneads this mass, and then, through an artificial and inevitable differentiation of functions, develops it into a nation. Given a mass of protoplasm, i. e., of ho- mogeneous molecules, which can be, but have not been, What is a Society? 71 organised, and which have all been assimilated by virtue of the obscure mode of reproduction from which they originated, and we have the ground-matter of life. From it, cells, tissues, individuals, and species are formed. Finally, given a mass of homogeneous ether whose elements are thrilled by the same rapidly exchanging vibrations, according to our theoretical chemists, and we have the ground-matter of matter. From this the corpus- cles of all bodies, however heterogeneous they may be, are made. For a body is merely an accord of differentiated and subordinated vibrations which have been separately pro- duced in distinct and interwoven series, just as an organism is only an accord of different elementary and harmonious inward reproductions, of distinct and interwoven kinds of histological elements, or just as a nation is only an accord of traditions, customs, teachings, tendencies, and ideas which have spread in different ways through imitation, but which are subordinate to one another in a fraternal and mutually helpful hierarchy. The law of differentiation, then, comes into play here. But it is not superfluous to note that the homogeneity upon which it acts under three superimposed forms is a super- ficial, although real, homogeneity, and that, if we continue the analogy, our sociological point of view would lead us to admit that in protoplasm there are some elements which have highly individualistic features under their mask of apparent uniformity, and that in ether itself the atoms are individually as characteristic as the children of the best dis- ciplined school may be. Heterogeneity, not homogeneity, is at the heart of things. Could anything be more im- probable or more absurd than the co-existence of an endless number of elements created to be co-eternally alike ? Things are not born alike, they become alike. And, besides, is not the inborn diversity of the elements the sole possible justification of their variability? I might be willing to go still further and say that without this initial and fundamental heterogeneity, the homogene- ity which screens and disguises it never would or could have 72 Laws of Imitation occurred. In fact, all homogeneity is a likeness of parts and all likeness is the outcome of an assimilation which has been produced by the voluntary or non-voluntary repetition of what was in the beginning an individual innovation. But there is something more to be said. When the homo- geneity in question, when ether or protoplasm, when a mass of people who have been levelled down and put upon a foot- ing of equality, becomes differentiated in order to become organised, do we not find, judging from what passes in our own societies at least, that the change in its character is another effect of the very same cause? After proselytism has assimilated a people, despotism steps in to rule over them and impose a hierarchy upon them; but despot and apostle are alike refractory individuals upon whom the democratic or aristocratic yoke of others has been a burden. For every individual conflict or outbreak which succeeds in this way there are, of course, hundreds of millions which are suppressed, but which are, nevertheless, the nursery of the great innovations of the future. This wealth of varia- tions, this exuberance of picturesque fancies and erratic designs which Nature unrolls so magnificently under her austere garb of time-honoured laws, repetitions, and rhythms can have but one source; the tumultuous originality of elements that have been but partly brought under these yokes of nature, the radical and innate diversity that bursts out through all these uniformities of law to be transfigured upon the fair surface of things. I will not follow up these last considerations, for they would lead us away from our subject. I only wished to point out that our search for law, i. e., for like facts either in nature or history, must not make us forget their hidden agents, agents which are both original and individ- ual. Passing on. then, we may draw a useful lesson from what preceded, namely, that the assimilation together with the equalisation of the members of a society is not, as we are led to think, the final term of a prior social progres- sion; it is, on the contrary, the point of departure for a new social advance. Every new form of civilisation be- What is a Society ? 73 gins in this way. In the homogeneous and democratic communities of the early Christians, the bishop was merely one of the faithful and the pope was not to be distinguished from the bishop. In the Prankish army, booty was dis- tributed in equal portions between the king and his compan- ions-in-arms. The first caliphs to succeed Mahomet argued in court like simple Mahometans ; the equality of all the sons of the Prophet before the Koran had not yet become the mere fiction which the equality of Frenchmen or Europeans before the law is eventually bound to become. Then, by degrees, a radical inequality, the condition of solid organi- sation, came to be hollowed out in the Arab world, some- what as the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Catholicism or the feudal pryamid of the Middle Ages was formed. The past speaks for the future. Equality is only a transition between two hierarchies, just as liberty is only a passage between two disciplines. But this does not mean that the confidence and power, the knowledge and security, of every citizen do not go on increasing from age to age. Now let us take up another aspect of our foregoing thought. Homogeneous and democratic communities pre- cede churches and states, for the same reason, I say, that tissues precede organs. Moreover, once tissues and com- munities have been formed, they become organic and hier- archical for the same reason which caused their formation in the first place. The growth of still undifferentiated and unutilised tissue is evidence of the peculiar ambition and eagerness of the germ which propagates itself in this way, just as the creation of a club or circle or fraternity of kindred spirits is evidence of the ambition of the enter- prising man who originated it in order to spread some plan or idea of his own. Now, the community becomes con- solidated into a hierarchical corporation, and tissue be- comes organic, for the sake of self -propagation and self- defence against existing or anticipated enemies. For the living or for the social being, to act and function is a necessary condition for the conservation and extension of its essential nature, for the early development of which it was 74 Laws of Imitation at first enough for it to multiply uniform copies of itself. But self-propagation and not self-organisation is the prime demand of the social as well as of the vital thing. Organi- sation is but the means of which propagation, of which generative or imitative repetition, is the end. To sum up, to the question which I began by asking: What is society? I have answered: Society is imitation. We have still to ask: What is imitation? Here the soci- ologist should yield to the psychologist. IV i. Taine sums up the thought of the most eminent physiologists when he happily remarks that the brain is a repeating organ for the senses and is itself made up of elements which repeat one another. In fact, the sight of such a congery of like cells and fibres makes any other idea impossible. Moreover, direct proof is at hand in the nu- merous observations and experiments which show that the cutting away of one hemisphere of the brain, and even the removal of much of the substance of the other, affects only the intensity, without at all changing the integrity, of the intellectual functions. The part that was removed, there- fore, did not. collaborate with the part that remained; both parts could only copy and reinforce each other. Their relation was not economic and utilitarian, but imitative and social in the sense that I use that term. Whatever may be the cellular function which calls forth thought (a highly complex vibration, perhaps? ), there is no doubt that it is reproduced and multiplied in the interior of the brain every moment of our mental life and that to every distinct per- ception a distinct cellular function corresponds. The in- definite and inexhaustible continuation of these intricate and richly intersecting radiations constitutes memory and habit. When the multiplying repetition in question is confined to the nervous system, we have memory; when it spreads out into the muscular system, we have habit. Memory, What is a Society ? 75 so to speak, is a purely nervous habit; habit is both a nervous and a muscular memory. Thus every act of perception, in as much as it involves an act of memory, which it always does, implies a kind of habit, an unconscious imitation of self by self. There is, evidently, nothing social in this. When the nervous sys- tem is sufficiently excited to set in motion a certain set of muscles, habit, properly speaking, appears. It is another case of non-social, or, as I might better say, of presocial or subsocial self-imitation. This does not mean that, as alleged, an idea is an abortive act. Action is only the fol- lowing up of an idea, the acquisition of a steadfast faith. Muscle works only for the enrichment of nerves and brain. But if the remembered idea or image was originally lodged in the mind through conversation or reading, if the habitual act originated in the view or knowledge of a similar act on the part of others, these acts of memory and habit are social as well as psychological facts, and they show us the kind of imitation of which I have already spoken at such length.1 Here we have memory and habit which are not in- dividual, but collective. Just as a man does not see, listen, walk, stand, write, play the flute, or, what is more, invent or imagine, except by means of many co-ordinated muscular memories, so a society could not exist or change or advance a single step unless it possessed an untold store of blind rou- tine and slavish imitation which was constantly being added to by successive generations. 2. What is the -essential nature of the suggestion which passes from one cerebral cell to another and which consti- 1 While correcting the proofs of my second edition, I read in the Revue de inetaphysique a brief review of an article of Mr. Baldwin's which appeared in 1894 in Mind under the title of Imitation; A Chapter in the Natural History of Consciousness. " Mr. Baldwin." writes his rfeviewer, " wishes to define and generalise the theories of Tarde. Bio- logical imitation, or imitation which is primarily subcortical, is a cir- cular reaction of the nerves, that is, it reproduces its own stimulus. Psychological or cortical imitation is habit (expressed in the principle of identity) and accommodation (expressed in the principle of sufficient reason). It is, in short, sociological, plastic, and only secondarily sub- cortical." 76 Laws of Imitation tutes mental life? We do not know.1 Do we know any- thing more about the essence of the suggestion which passes from one person to another and which constitutes social life? We do not; for if we take this phenomenon in itself, in its higher state of purity and intensity, we find it re- lated to one of the most mysterious of facts, a fact which is being studied with intense curiosity by the baffled philo- sophic alienists of the day, i. e., somnambulism.2 If you re-read contemporaneous works on this subject, especially those of Richet, Binet and Fere, Beaunis, Bernheim, Del- bceuf, I shall not seem fanciful in thinking of the social man as a veritable somnambulist. I think, on the contrary, that I am conforming to the most rigorous scientific method in endeavouring to explain the complex by the simple, the com- pound by the element, and to throw light upon the mixed and complicated social tie, as we know it, by means of a social tie which is very pure, which is reduced to its simplest expression, and which is so happily realised for the edification of the sociologist in a state of somnambulism. Let us take the hypothetical case of a man who has been re- moved from every extra-social influence, from the direct view of natural objects, and from the instinctive obses- sions of his different senses, and who has communication only with those like himself or, more especially, to simplify the question, with one person like himself. Is not such an ideal subject the proper one through which to study by ex- periment and observation the really essential characteristics of social relations, set free in this way from all com- plicating influences of a natural or physical order? But 1 At the time when the foregoing and the following considerations first appeared in print, in November, 1884, in the Revue philosophique, hypnotic suggestion was but barely spoken of and the idea of univer- sal social suggestion, an idea which has since been so strongly em- phasised by Bernheim and others, was cast up against me as an un- tenable paradox. Nothing could be commoner than this view at present. 2 This old-fashioned term shows that at the time of the first publica- tion of this passage the word hypnotism had not as yet been altogether substituted for somnambulism. What is a Society ? 77 are not hypnotism and somnambulism the exact realisation of this hypothesis? Then I shall not excite surprise if I briefly review the principal phenomena of these singular states and if I find both magnified and diminutised, both overt and covert, forms of them in social phenomena. Through such a comparison, we may perhaps come to a better understand- ing of the fact that is called abnormal by showing to what extent it is general, and of the fact that is general by per- ceiving its distinctive traits in high relief in the apparent anomaly. The social like the hypnotic state is only a form of dream, a dream of command and a dream of action. Both the som- nambulist and the social man are possessed by the illusion that their ideas, all of which have been suggested to them, are spontaneous. To appreciate the truth of this sociolog- ical point of view, we must not take ourselves into con- sideration, for should we admit this truth about ourselves, we would then be escaping from the blindness which it af- firms; and in this way a counter argument might be made out. Let us call to mind some ancient people whose civili- sation differs widely from our own, the Egyptians, or Spar- tans, or Hebrews. Did not that people think, like us, that they were autonomous, although, in reality, they were but the unconscious puppets whose strings were pulled by their ancestors or political leaders or prophets, when they were not being pulled by their own contemporaries? What distinguishes us modern Europeans from these alien and primitive societies is the fact that the magnetisation has be- come mutual, so to speak, at least to a certain extent; and because we, in our democratic pride, a little exaggerate this reciprocity, because, moreover, forgetting that in be- coming mutual, this magnetisation, the source of all faith and obedience, has become general, we err in flattering ourselves that we have become less credulous and docile, less imitative, in short, than our ancestors. This is a fal- lacy, and we shall have to rid ourselves of it. But even if the aforesaid notion were true, it would nevertheless be clear that before the relations of model and copyist, of mas- 78 Laws of Imitation ter and subject, of apostle and neophyte, had become re- ciprocal or alternative, as we ordinarily see them in our democratic society, they must of necessity have begun by being one-sided and irreversible. Hence castes. Even in the most democratic societies, the one-sidedness and irreversi- bility in question always exist at the basis of social imita- tions, i. e., in the family. For the father is and always will be his son's first master, priest, and model. Every society, even at present, begins in this way. Therefore, in the beginning of every old society, there must have been, a fortiori, a great display of authority ex- ercised by certain supremely imperious and positive indi- viduals. Did they rule through terror and imposture, as alleged? This explanation is obviously inadequate. They ruled through their prestige. The example of the magneti- ser alone can make us realise the profound meaning of this word. The magnetiser does not need to lie or terrorise to secure the blind belief and the passive obedience of his mag- netised subject. He has prestige — that tells the story. That means, I think, that there is in the magnetised subject a certain potential force of belief and desire which is an- chored in all kinds of sleeping but unforgotten memories, and that this force seeks expression just as the water of a lake seeks an outlet. The magnetiser alone is able through a chain of singular circumstances to open the necessary outlet to this force. All forms of prestige are alike; they differ only in degree. We have prestige in the eyes of anyone in so far as we answer his need of affirming or of will- ing some given thing. Nor is it necessary for the mag- netiser to speak in order to be believed and obeyed. He need only act; an almost imperceptible gesture is suffi- cient. This movement, together with the thought and feeling which it expresses, is immediately reproduced. Maudsley says that he is not sure that the somnambulist is not enabled to read unconsciously what is in the mind through " an unconscious imitation of the attitude and expression of the person whose exact muscular contradictions are instinctively What is a Society ? 79 copied."1 Let us observe that the magnetised subjects imi- tates the magnetiser, but that the latter does not imitate the former. Mutual imitation, mutual prestige or sympathy, in the meaning of Adam Smith, is produced only in our so- called waking life and among people who seem to exercise no magnetic influence over one another. If, then, I have put prestige, and not sympathy, at the foundation and origin of society, it is because, as I have said before, the unilateral must have preceded the reciprocal.2 Without an age of au- thority, however surprising this fact may be, an age of com- parative fraternity would never have existed. But, to return, why should we really marvel at the one-sided, passive imi- tation of the somnambulist? Any act of any one of our fellows inspires us who are lookers-on with the more or less irrational idea of imitation. If we at times resist this tend- ency, it is because it is neutralised by some antagonistic suggestions of memory or perception. Since the somnam- bulist is for the time being deprived of this power of resist- ance, he can illustrate for us the imitative quiescence of the social being in so far as he is social, i. e., in so far as he has relations exclusively with his fellows and, especially, with one of his fellows. If the social man were not at the same time a natural be- ing, open and sensitive to the impressions of external na- ture and of alien societies, he would never be capable of change. Like associates would remain forever incapable of changing spontaneously the type of traditional ideas and desires which had been impressed upon them by the conven- tional teaching of their parents, priests, or leaders. Cer- tain peoples have been known to approach singularly close to this condition. Nascent communities, like young chil- dren, are, in general, indifferent and insensible to all which 1 The Pathology of Mind [p. 69. Henry Maudsley, M. D., New York, 1890. The italics are the author's. — TV.]. 8 On this point I need correction. Sympathy is certainly the primary source of sociability and the hidden or overt soul of every kind of imitation, even of imitation which is envious and calculating, even of imitation of an enemy. Only, it is certain that sympathy itself begins by being one-sided instead of mutual. 8o Laws of Imitation does not concern man or the kind of man whom they re- semble, the man of their own race or tribe.1 " The som- nambulist sees and hears," says A. Maury, " only what enters into the preoccupations of his dream," In other words, all his power of belief and desire is concentrated on a single point. Is not this the exact effect of obedience and imita- tion through fascination? Is not fascination a genuine neurosis, a kind of unconscious polarisation of love and faith? Now many great men from Rameses to Alexander, from Alexander to Mahomet, from Mahomet to Napoleon, have thus polarised the soul of their people! How often has a prolonged gaze upon the brilliant point of one man's glory or genius thrown a whole people into a state of catalepsy ! The torpor that appears in somnambulism is, as we know, only superficial; it masks an intense excitement. This is the reason why the somnambulist does not hesitate to per- form great feats of strength and skill. A similar phenome- non occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century when military France fell into a passive and, at the same time, feverish state of mingled torpor and excitement and performed prodigies in obedience to the gesture of its im- perial fascinator. There is nothing better fitted than this ata- vistic phenomenon to plunge us into the remote past, to make us realise the influence which must have been exerted upon their contemporaries by those great semi-mythical persons to whom all civilisations trace their origin and to whom their legends attribute the revelation of all their knowledge, laws, and industries. Cannes in Babylon, Quetz-alcoatl in Mexico, the divine pre-Menes dynasties in Egypt, etc., are cases in point.2 Under close observation, all these king- 1 Science, then, is the source of every social revolution. It is this extra-social research which opens for us the windows of the social phalanstery in which we live and lets in the light of the universe. How many phantoms are scattered by this light ! But then, too, how many perfectly preserved mummies it crumbles into dust ! 2 In his profound Asiatic studies of the religious and social customs of the Far East, Sir Alfred Lyall (who seems to have studied on the spot the actual formation of tribes and clans in certain parts of India) What is a Society ? 8 1 gods who figure in mythologies and dynasties are seen to be inventors or importers of foreign inventions. They are, in a word, initiators. Thanks to the deep and intense stupor caused by their first miracles, each of their assertions and commands opened out an immense vent to the vast, vague, and impotent aspirations, to the blind and futile desires for faith and activity, which they had called into being. At present, when we speak of obedience, we mean a con- scious and voluntary act. But primitive obedience was far different. When the subject weeps at the bidding of the hypnotist, it is not the ego only, but the whole organism, that obeys. The obedience of crowds and armies to their demagogues and captains is, at times, almost equally strange. And so is their credulity. " It is a curious sight," says M. Charles Richet, "to see a somnambulist make gestures of distaste and nausea and experience real suf- focation when an empty bottle is put under his nose and he is told that it contains ammonia, or, on the other hand, to see him inhale ammonia without showing the least discom- fort when he is told that it is pure water." We have a strange analogy in the artificial, absurd, and extravagant, but none the less deep, active, and obstinate, beliefs of an- cient peoples, of those, indeed, who were the freest and the most cultivated of all the ancients; and this, too, long after attributes a preponderating influence in primitive societies to the indi- vidual action of men of note. " To borrow Carlyle's words," he says, "the perplexed jungle of primitive society springs out of many roots, but the hero is the tap-root from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown. In Europe, where the landmarks of nation- alities are fixed, and the fabric of civilisation firmly entrenched, people are often inclined to treat as legendary the enormous part in the foundation of their race or institutions attributed by primitive races to their heroic ancestor. Yet it may be difficult to overrate the impres- sion which must have been produced by daring and successful exploits upon the primitive world, where the free impulsive play of a great man's forces is little controlled by artificial barriers. ... In such times, whether a group which is formed upon the open surface of society shall spread out into a clan or tribe, or break up prematurely, seems to depend very much upon the strength and energy of its founder " [Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social, p. 168 ; Sir Alfred C. Lyall, K. C. B., C. I. E., second edition, London, 1884. — TV.]. 82 Laws of Imitation their first phase of autocratic theocracy had passed away. Were not the most abominable monstrosities, Greek love, for example, deemed worthy of the songs of Anacreon and Theocritus and of the philosophy of Plato? Were not ser- pents, cats, bulls, and cows worshipped by prostrate popula- tions ? Were not mysteries, metempsychoses, dogmas in ab- solute contradiction to the direct evidence of the senses, not to speak of such absurdities as the arts of augury, astrology, and sorcery, unanimously believed in? On the other hand, were not the most natural sentiments repressed with horror, paternal love, for example, in communities where the uncle took precedence over the father, or sexual jealousy among tribes whose wives were owned in common? Has not the most impressive beauty of nature or art been overlooked or condemned, and this even in modern times, because it vio- lated the taste of the period ? The attitude of the Romans to- wards the picturesqueness of the Alps or Pyrenees, or that of our own seventeenth and eighteenth centuries towards the masterpieces of Shakespeare or the art of Holland, is an example. In short, are not the clearest experiences and observations controverted and the most palpable truths ar- raigned, whenever they come into opposition with the tra- ditional ideas that are the antique offspring of prestige and faith? Civilised peoples flatter themselves with thinking that they have escaped from this dogmatic slumber. Their error can be explained. The oftener a person has been magnetised, the easier and quicker is it for him to be re- magnetised. This fact shows us how it is that societies come to imitate one another with increasing ease and ra- pidity. As they become civilised and, consequently, more and more imitative, they also become less and less aware that they are imitating. In this particular, mankind is like the individual man. A child is, unquestionably, a true som- nambulist; the older it grows, the more complex its dream becomes, until it thinks that, because of this very complex- ity, it has been awakened. But the child errs. When a ten- or twelve-year-old boy leaves his family for school, he What is a Society? 83 seems to himself to have become demagnetised, to have been aroused from his dream of parental respect and admiration. Whereas, in reality, he becomes still more prone to ad- miration and imitation in his submission to the ascendency of one of his masters or, better still, of some prestigeful classmate. The alleged awakening is only a change or piling up of slumbers. In the substitution of fashion-mag- netisation for custom-magnetisation, the usual symptom of incipient social revolution, we have an analogous, although magnified, phenomenon. We should also observe, however, that as the suggestions of example become more numerous and diversified around an individual, each of them loses in intensity, and the in- dividual becomes freer to determine his choice according to the preference of his own character, on the one hand, and on the other, according to certain logical laws which I will discuss elsewhere. Thus it is certain that the progress of civilisation renders subjection to imitation at once more personal and more rational. We are just as much enslaved as our ancestors by the examples of our environment, but we make a better use of them through our more logical and more individual choice, one adapted to our own ends and to our particular nature. And yet, as we shall see, this does not keep extra-logical and prestigeful influences from al- ways playing a very considerable part. This part is remarkably potent and interesting in the case of an individual who suddenly passes from an impoverished environment to one rich in all kinds of suggestions. Then there is no need of such a brilliant and striking object as personal glqry or genius to bewitch him and to put him to sleep. The college freshman, the Japanese traveller in Eu- rope, the countryman in Paris, are as stupefied as if they were in a state of catalepsy. Their attention is so bent upon everything they see and hear, especially upon the actions of the human beings around them, that it is absolutely with- drawn from everything they have previously seen and heard, or even thought of or done. It is not that their memory is destroyed, for it has never been as alert or as quick to re- 84 Laws of Imitation spond to the slightest word which recalls to them, with a wealth of hallucinating detail, their distant country, their home, or their previous existence. But memory becomes absolutely paralysed; all its own spontaneity is lost. In this singular condition of intensely concentrated attention, of passive and vivid imagination, these stupefied and fevered beings inevitably yield themselves to the magical charm of their new environment. They believe everything that they see, and they continue in this state for a long time. It is always more fatiguing to think for one's self than to think through the minds of others. Besides, whenever a man lives in an animated environment, in a highly strung and diversified society which is continually supplying him with fresh sights, with new books and music and with constantly renewed conversation, he gradually refrains from all in- tellectual effort; his mind, growing more and more stulti- fied and, at the same time, more and more excited, be- comes, as I have said, somnambulistic. Such a state of mind is characteristic of many city dwellers. The noise and movement of the streets, the display of shop-windows, and the wild and unbridled rush of existence affect them like magnetic passes. Now, is not city life a concentrated and exaggerated type of social life? If these persons end by becoming examples themselves, this also is due to imitation. Suppose a somnambulist should imitate his medium to the point of becoming a me- dium himself and magnetising a third person, who, in turn, would imitate him, and so on, indefinitely. Is not social life this very thing? Terraces of consecutive and con- nected magnetisations are the rule; the mutual magnetisa- tion of which I spoke above is exceptional. In general, a naturally prestigeful man will stimulate thousands of people to copy him in every particular, even in that of his prestige, thereby enabling them to influence, in turn, millions of in- ferior men. It is only at rare moments, after the movement down the scale is spent, that an inverse movement takes place and that, in a period of democracy, millions of men collectively fascinate and tyrannise over their quondam What is a Society ? 85 mediums. If every society stands forth as a hierarchy, it is because every society reveals the terracing of which I have just spoken and to which, in order to be stable, its hierarchy must correspond. Besides, social somnambulism, as I have said already, is not brought about through fear or the power of conquest, but through admiration and a sense of brilliant and irksome superiority. And so it sometimes happens that the con- queror is magnetised by the conquered. Just as a savage chief or a social upstart is all eyes and ears, is charmed or intimidated in spite of his pride, in the midst of a great city, or in a fashionable drawing room. But he sees and hears only what astonishes him and holds him captive; for a sin- gular mixture of anaesthesia and hvperses.thesia of the senses, is the dominant characteristic of somnambulists. Conse- quently, they copy all the usages, the language, the accent, etc., of their new environment. The Germans did this in the Roman world. They forgot German and spoke Latin. They composed hexameters. They bathed in marble baths. They dubbed themselves patricians. The Romans them- selves did this in the Athens which they had conquered. The Hyksos conquerors of Egypt were subjugated by its civilisation. But is there any need to ransack history for examples? Let us look nearer home. The kind of momentary paral- ysis of mind, tongue, and arm, the profound agitation of the whole being and the lack of self-possession which is called intimidation, deserves special study. The intimidated man loses, under the gaze of another person, his self-posses- sion and is wont to become manageable and malleable by others. He feels this and struggles against it, but his only success lies in bringing himself to an awkward standstill; he is still strong enough to neutralise any external impetus, but not strong enough to regain the mastery of his own power of motion. It will be admitted, perhaps, that this singular state, a state that we have all more or less passed through at a certain age, has a great many points in common with som- nambulism. But when timidity is routed, when one is put 86 Laws of Imitation at his ease, as they say, has demagnetisation set in? Far from that, to be put at one's ease in a given society is to adopt its manners and fashions, to speak its dialect, to copy its gestures, in short, to finally abandon one's self unresist- ingly to the many surrounding currents of subtle influences against which one first struggled in vain, and to abandon one's self so completely that all consciousness of this self-abandonment is lost. Timidity is a conscious and, con- sequently, an incomplete magnetisation. It may be com- pared to that drowsy state which precedes the profound slumber in which the somnambulist moves and speaks. It is a nascent social state which accompanies every transi- tion from one society to another, or from the limits of the family to a wider social life. It is for this reason, perhaps, that so-called rough dia- monds, people who strongly rebel against assimilation and who are really unsociable, remain timid during their whole life. They are but partially subject to somnambulism. On the other hand, are not people who never feel awkward and embarrassed, who never experience any real timidity upon entering a drawing room or a lecture hall, or any cor- responding stupor in taking up a science or art for the first time (for the trouble produced by entrance into a new call- ing whose difficulties frighten one and whose prescribed methods do violence to one's old habits, may be perfectly well compared to intimidation), are not such people sociable in the highest degree? Are they not excellent copyists, i. e., devoid of any particular avocation or any controlling ideas, and do they not possess the eminently Chinese or Japanese faculty of speedily adapting themselves to their environment? In their readiness to fall asleep, are they not somnambulists of the first order? Intimidation plays an immense part in society under the name of Respect. Everyone will acknowledge this, and, although the part is sometimes misinterpreted, it is never in the least exagger- ated. Respect is neither unmixed fear nor unmixed love, nor is it merely the combination of the two, although it is a fear which is beloved by him who entertains it. Respect is, What is a Society ? 87 primarily, the impression of an example by one person upon another who is psychologically polarised. Of course we must distinguish the respect of which we are conscious from that which we dissemble to ourselves under an as- sumed contempt. But taking this distinction into account, it is evident that whomsoever we imitate we respect, and that whomsoever we respect we imitate or tend to imitate. There is no surer sign of a displacement of social authority than deviations in the current of these examples. The man or the woman of the world who reflects the slang or undress of the labourer or the intonation of the actress, has more respect and deference for the person copied than he or she is himself or herself aware. Now what society would last for a single day without the general and continuous circu- lation of both the above forms of respect? But I must not dwell any longer upon the above compari- son. At any rate, I hope that I have at least made my reader feel that to thoroughly understand the essential social fact, as I perceive it, knowledge of the infinitely subtle facts of mind is necessary, and that the roots of even what seems to be the simplest and most superficial kind of sociology strike far down into the depths of the most inward and hidden parts of psychology and physiology. Society is imitation and imitation is a kind of somnambulism. This is the epitome of this chapter. As for the second part of the prop- osition, I beg the reader's indulgence for any exaggeration I may have been guilty of. I must also remove a possible objection. It may be urged that submission to some as- cendency does not always mean following the example of the person whom we trust and obey. But does not belief in anyone always mean belief in that which he believes or seems to believe? Does not obedience to someone mean that we will that which he wills or seems to will ? Inven- tions are not made to order, nor are discoveries under- taken as a result of persuasive suggestion. Consequently, to be credulous and docile, and to be so as pre-eminently as the somnambulist and the social man, is to be, primarily, imitative. To innovate, to discover, to awake for an instant 88 Laws of Imitation from his dream of home and country, the individual must escape, for the time being, from his social surroundings. Such unusual audacity makes him super-social rather than social. One word more. We have just seen that memory as well as habit, or muscular memory, as I have already called it, is very keen in the case of somnambulists or quasi-som- nambulists, while their credulity and docility are extreme. In other words their imitation of self (memory and habit are, in fact, nothing more than this) is as remarkable as their imitation of others. Is there no connection between these two facts? " It cannot be too clearly apprehended," Maudsley says emphatically, " that there is a sort of innate tendency to mimicry in the nervous system." * If this tendency is inherent in the final nerve elements, we may be permitted to conjecture that the relations between the cells within the same brain have some analogy to the singu- lar relation between two brains, one of which fascinates the other, and that this relation consists of a special polarisa- tion in the latter of the belief and desire which are stored up in each of its elements. In this way, perhaps, certain curious facts might be explained, the fact, for example, that in dreams there is a spontaneous arrangement of images which combine together according to some inward logic, and which are evidently under the control of one of them which imposes itself upon the others, and gives them their tone through the superiority, undoubtedly, of the nervous element in which it was contained and from which it issued.2 1 [Mental Pathology, p. 68.— TV.] 2 This view agrees with the master thought developed by M. Paul- ban in his profoundly thoughtful work upon mental activity. (Alcan, 1889.) CHAPTER IV ARCHAEOLOGY AND STATISTICS WHAT is history? This is the first question which pre- sents itself to us. The most natural way for us to answer it and, at the same time, formulate the laws of imitation, is by turning our attention to two very distinct lines of re- search which have been highly honoured in recent days, the study of archaeology and the study of statistics. I will show that as these studies have grown in value and fruitfulness, a point of view similar to mine in the matter of social phe- nomena has been unconsciously adopted in them and that, in this respect, the general conclusions and salient points of these two sciences, or, rather, of these two very dissimilar methods, are seen to be remarkably similar. Let us first consider the subject of archaeology. When human skulls and implements of various kinds happen to be found in some Gallo-Roman tomb, or in some cave belonging to the stone age, the archaeologist keeps the implements for himself and hands over the skulls to the an- thropologist. The anthropologist studies races, the archae- ologist, civilisations. It is useless for them to lock arms with each other; they are, nevertheless, radically unlike, as much as a horizontal line is unlike, even at the point of in- tersection, the vertical line which may be erected upon it. The anthropologist utterly ignores the biography of the Cro- Magnon or Neanderthal man whom he is examining. He cares nothing at all for this; his one aim is to distinguish 89 90 Laws of Imitation the same racial character in one skull or skeleton after an- other. Although this very racial character has been re- produced and multiplied through heredity from some indi- vidual peculiarity, still it is impossible for the anthropologist to attempt to trace this back. The archaeologist likewise ig- nores, three-quarters of the time, the names of the dead whose ashes remain to be deciphered like an enigma and looks for and sees in them only the artistic or industrial process, or the characteristic desires and beliefs, or the rites, dogmas, words, and grammatical forms that are revealed by the contents of their tombs. And yet all these things were transmitted and propagated by imitation from some single and almost always unknown inventor for whose radiant in- vention every one of the anonymous unearthed objects was but an ephemeral vehicle, a mere place for growth. The deeper the past in which the archaeologist buries him- self the more he loses sight of personalities. Even manu- scripts begin to be scarce prior to the twelfth century. Besides, manuscripts, which are, for the most part, nothing but official records, interest him primarily because of their impersonal character. Then, nothing but buildings or their ruins and, finally, nothing but a few remains of pottery and bronze, of flint weapons and implements, survive for archae- ological guess-work. And what a wonderful treasure of facts and inferences, of invaluable information, has been extracted in this humble shape from the earth's entrails wherever the picks of modern excavators have penetrated, in Italy, in Greece, in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Mesopota- mia, in America ! There was a time when archaeology, like numismatics, was only the servant of pragmatic history, when the only merit that would have been recognised in the present work of the Egyptologists was its confirmation of the fragments of Manetho. At present, however, the roles are inverted. Historians are nothing more than subordi- nate guides, auxiliaries of those excavators who, revealing to us the things about which the former are silent, give us the de- tails, so to speak, of the fauna and flora, of the hidden wealth of life and of the harmonious regularities of those lands Archeology and Statistics 91 that are so picturesquely described by historic landscapists. Through the archaeologists we know what particular group of ideas, of professional or hieratic secrets, of peculiar de- sires, constituted the individual whom the annalists call a Roman or an Egyptian or a Persian. Below the surface, in some way, of the violent and so-called culminating events that are spoken of as conquests, invasions, or revolutions, the archaeologists show us the daily and indefinite drift and piling up of the sediments of true history, the stratifications of successive and contagion-spread discoveries. The archaeological point of view, therefore, is the best from which to see that violent events which are in them- selves dissimilar, and whose series are as irregular as moun- tain ridges, have merely served to aid or hinder, to restrict or enlarge, the quiet and even spread of various given ideas of genius in certain more or less badly defined territories. And just as Thucydides, Herodotus, and Livy become mere cicerones, faithful or false as it happens, to the anti- quarians, so the heroes of the historians, their generals, statesmen, and legislators, may pass for the unconscious and, at times, refractory servants of the numberless and ob- scure inventors of bronze, of the art of weaving or writing, of oar and sail and plough, whose very date and birthplace cost the antiquarians even more effort to discover and locate than their names. Of course there is no doubt but that great warriors and statesmen have themselves had new and brilliant ideas, true inventions in the big sense of the word, but their inventions were bound not to be imitated.1 They may be military plans or parliamentary measures, laws, de- crees, or political revolutions, but they take no place in history unless they promote or retard other kinds of inven- tions which are already known and which are destined to be peacefully imitated. History would pay no more at- tention to the manoeuvres at Marathon, at Arabela, or at Austerlitz than to so many skilful games of chess, were it 1 If they are imitated, it is against the wish of their authors, as was the case, for example, with the turning movement of Ulm which the Germans copied so skilfully against the nephew of Napoleon. 92 Laws of Imitation not for the well-known influence which these victories had respectively over the development of the arts of Greece in Asia, and of French institutions in Europe. History, as it is commonly understood, is, in short, only the co-operation or opposition of certain non-imitable inven- tions of merely temporary usefulness with or to a number of useful and imitable inventions. As for the direct causation of the latter by the former, it would be as impossible as the creation of a lizard or" the development of the wing of a con- dor through an upheaval of the Andes or Pyrenees. It is true that the indirect action of the former is considerable, for, as an invention is, after all, merely the singular inter- section of heterogeneous imitations in one brain, — an excep- tional brain, to be sure. — everything that opens fresh outlets to the radiations of different imitations tends to multiply the chances of such intersections.1 Here I shall open a parenthesis in order to anticipate an objection. It may be urged that I am exaggerating the social importance both of the sheepish tendency to imitate and of the inventive imagination of mankind. Man does not invent for the pleasure of inventing, but for the satis- faction of some want that he experiences. Genius takes its own time to unfold. Consequently, it is the series of wants, not the series of inventions, which is the pre-em- inently notable thing; and civilisation consists as much in the gradual multiplication and replacing of wants as in the gradual accumulation and substitution of arts and indus- tries. On the other hand, man does not always imitate for the pleasure of imitating either his ancestors or his foreign contemporaries. Out of all those inventions, discoveries, or theories which solicit his imitation or adhesion (his in- tellectual imitation), he for the most part, or more and more, imitates and adopts only those which seem to him to 1 As an example of the indirect influence of imitation upon invention, we know that as a result of the growing fashion in France of taking water-cures, the advantage (?) of discovering new mineral springs was realised, and between the years 1838 and 1863 the waters of two hun- dred and thirty-four new springs were discovered or collected. Archaeology and Statistics 93 be useful and true. It is, then, a search for utility and truth, not a tendency towards imitation, which characterises the social man, and it were much better to define civilisation as the growing utilisation or verification of. arts or ideas than as the growing assimilation of muscular and cerebral activities. I answer by suggesting in the first place that, since the desire for cannot precede the notion of an object, no social desire can be prior to the invention by which the conception of the commodity, or article, or service able to satisfy it, was made possible. It is true that the invention was the re- sponse to a vague desire, that, for example, the idea of the electric telegraph solved the long-standing problem of a more rapid epistolary form of communication. But it is in becom- ing specific in this way that such a desire is spread and strengthened, that it is born into the social world. Besides, was it not developed itself by some past, or series of past, in- ventions, as in the given example, by the establishment of a postal service and, later, of the aerial telegraph ? Even phys- ical needs cannot become social forces unless, as I have al- ready had occasion to observe, they are made specific in an analogous way. It is only too clear that the desire to smoke, to drink tea or coffee, etc., did not appear until after the dis- covery of tea, or coffee, or tobacco. Here is another ex- ample among a thousand. " Clothing does not result from modesty," M. Wiener justly observes (Le Perou); "on the contrary, modesty appears as a result of clothing, that is to say, the clothing which conceals any part of the human body makes the nakedness of the part which we are accus- tomed to see covered, appear indecent." In other words, the desire to be clothed, in so far as it is a social desire, is due to the discovery of clothing, of certain kinds of clothes. Inventions are far from being, then, the simple effects of social necessities; they are their causes. Nor do I think that I have over-emphasised them. Inventors may, at given times, direct their imagination in line with the vague desires of the public, but we must not forget, I repeat, that these popular desires have themselves been aroused by previous 94 Laws of Imitation inventors who were in turn indirectly influenced by still older inventors. This goes on until we finally find, on the one hand, as the primordial and necessary basis of every society and civilisation, certain simple, although very ar- duous, inspirations which are due, undoubtedly, to a very small number of innate and purely vital wants; and, on the other hand, certain still more important chance discoveries which were made for the mere pleasure of discovery, and which were nothing more than the play of a naturally crea- tive imagination. How many languages, religions, and poems, how many industries even, have begun in this way ! So much for invention. The same answer may be made in regard to imitation. It is true that we do not do every- thing that we do through routine or fashion and that we do not believe everything that we believe through prejudice or on authority — although popular credulity, docility, and passivity are immensely greater than is usually admitted. But even when imitation is voluntary and deliberate, even when we do and believe that which appears to be the most useful and the most believable thing, our acts and thoughts are predetermined. Our acts are what they are because they are the fittest to satisfy and develop the wants which previous imitation of other inventions had first seeded in us; our thoughts, because they were the most consistent with the knowledge acquired by us of other thoughts which were themselves acquired because they were confirmed by other preliminary ideas or by visual, tactile, and other kinds of impressions which we got by renewing for ourselves certain scientific experiences or observations, after the example of those who first undertook them.1 Thus imitations, like in- 1 The character of our pre-existing wants and purposes does not alone influence or determine us in choosing the thoughts and acts, the creeds and careers, which we are always copying from others. The laws of respective countries, the prohibition of a certain industry, for ex- ample, or free trade, or obligatory instruction in a given branch of knowledge, are also factors. But laws act upon imitation in the same way, at bottom, as wants and purposes. They both rule over us, and the only difference in their rule is that the one is an outward master and the other an inward tyrant. Moreover, laws are only the expres- Archaeology and Statistics 95 ventions, are seen to be linked together one after the other, in mutual if not in self dependence. If we follow back this second chain as we did the first, we come, logically, at last, to self-originating imitation, so to speak, to the mental state of primitive savages who, like children, imi- tate for the mere pleasure of imitating. This motive de- termines most of their acts, all of the acts, in fact, which belong to their social life. And so I have not overrated the importance of imitation, either. II In brief, the picture of primitive society which rises be- fore me is that of a feeble, wayward imagination scattered here and there in the midst of a vast passive wiitativeness which receives and perpetuates all its vagaries as the water of a lake circles out under the stroke of a bird's wing on its surface. It seems to me that archaeological researches fully confirm this view. Sumner Maine says in his Early His- tory of Institutions: " Mr. Taylor has justly observed the true lesson of the new science of Comparative Mythology is the barrenness in primitive times of the mental faculty which we most associate with mental fertility, the Imagina- tion. Comparative jurisprudence as might be expected from the natural stability of law and custom yet more strongly suggests the same inference." This observation has only to be generalised. What is simpler, for example, than to represent Fortune with a horn of plenty, or Venus holding an apple in her hand? Yet Pausanias takes the trouble to tell us that the former emblem was originally conceived of by Bupalus, one of the oldest sculptors of Greece, and the latter, by Canachus, a sculptor of y£gina. sion of the ruling wants and purposes of the governing class at a given time, and these wants and purposes may be always explained in the way that I have already indicated. 1 [Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, p. 225, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, K. C. S. I., LL. D., F. R. S., New York, 1875.— TV.] 96 Laws of Imitation From these insignificant ideas in the minds of these two men are derived, then, the innumerable statues of Fortune and Venus which are characterised by these emblems. Archaeological studies point to another fact which is just as important although it has been less observed. They show that in ancient times man was much less hermetically bound up in his local traditions and customs and was much more imitative of the outside world and open to foreign fashions in the matter of trinkets, weapons, and even of in- stitutions and industries, than we have been led to suppose. It is truly surprising to find that at a certain period of antiq- uity such a useless thing as amber was imported from its original place of deposit on the Baltic to the extremes of southern Europe. The similarity in the decorations of the contemporary tombs of widely separated races is also a sur- prising fact. " At the same very remote period," writes M. Maury, on the subject of Euganean antiquities (Journal des savants, 1882), "the same art, whose productions we are now beginning to recognise, was spread through the littoral provinces of Asia Minor, through the Archipelago, and through Greece. The Etruscans seem to have held a place in this school. Every nation modified its principles ac- cording to its own genius." Finally, it is marvellous to find that, even in the most primitive of prehistoric ages, the types of flakes, of drawings, and of bone implements are the same almost all over the globe.1 It seems as if every well-defined archaeological period were distinguished by the preponderat- ing prestige of some particular civilisation which illu- 1 At first sight the striking similarity of the axes and arrowheads, and the other flint tools and weapons, which were discovered on both the old and the new continent, might seem to be the result of a mere coinci- dence, which the identity of human wants in war, hunting, clothing, etc., would sufficiently explain. But we already know the objections which could be raised against this explanation. Moreover, we must note the fact that polished axes, arrowheads, and even idols of jade and jadeite, stones that were absolutely unknown throughout the American conti- nent, have been found in Mexico. Is not this a proof that during the stone age the germs of civilisation were carried over from the Old World to the New? The event of such an importation in later periods is doubtful (see M. de Nadaillac, Amerique prehistorique, p. 542)- Archaeology and Statistics 97 urinated and coloured all other rival or subject civilisations somewhat as every palseontological period is the reign of some great animal species, of some mollusk, reptile, or pachydermus. Archaeology can also show us that men have always been much less original than they themselves are pleased' to be- lieve. We come to overlook what we no longer look for, and we no longer look for what we have always under our eyes. For this reason, the faces of our fellow countrymen always impress us by the dissimilarity of their distinctive traits. Although they belong to the same race, we ignore their common racial traits. On the other hand, the people we see in our travels, Chinese, Arabians, negroes, all look alike. One might say that the truth lay between these op- posite impressions. But in this instance, as in most, the method of averaging is erroneous. For the cause of the illusion which partly blinds the man settled down among his fellow citizens, the film of habit, does not dull the eye of the traveller among strangers. Therefore, the impressions of the latter are likely to be much more exact than those of the former, and they testify to the fact that among indi- viduals of the same race inherited traits of similarity always outnumber traits of dissimilarity. Well, for a like reason, in turning from the vital to the social world, we are always exclusively impressed, not by the analogies, but by the differences which are, in general, apparent between the pictures and statues and writings of ourcontemporary painters and sculptors and writers, and be- tween the manners and gestures and witticisms of the friends and acquaintances in our drawing rooms. When, however, we glance over the works of Etruscan art in the Campana Museum, or when we pass for the first time through gal- leries of Dutch or Venetian or Florentine or Spanish art, containing pictures of the same school or period, or when we examine the mediaeval manuscripts in our archives, or when, in a museum of historic art, we view the rifled con- tents of Egyptian tombs, it seems to us that we are behold- ing almost indistinguishable copies of a single model and 98 Laws of Imitation that formerly, in the same country and at the same time, every style of writing, painting, sculpturing, building, every form of social life, in fact, was so much like every other as to be taken for it. This impression cannot be mislead- ing, and it, too, should make us realise, by analogy, that we ourselves are infinitely more imitative than inventive. This is no mean lesson to draw from archaeological studies. It is certain that within a century almost all the novelists and artists and, above all, the poets, — most of whom are the apes or rather the lemurs of Victor Hugo, — of whose origi- nality we so naively boast, will justly pass for the servile copyists of one another. In a preceding chapter I tried to prove that all or almost all social resemblances were due to imitation just as all or almost all vital resemblances were caused by heredity. This simple principle has been implicitly and unanimously accepted by modern archaeologists as the guiding thread in the very obscure labyrinths of their immense subterraneous excavations, and, from the services which it has already rendered, we may predict those which it will still be called upon to give. Suppose that an ancient Etruscan tomb is discovered? How is its age to be determined? What is the subject of its frescoes? We can solve these problems by noting the slight and sometimes elusive resemblances between its paintings and others of a Greek origin ; and in this way we may at once infer that Greece was already imitated by Etruria at the time when the tomb was constructed. It does not occur to us to ex- plain these resemblances as fortuitous coincidences. Imita- tion is the postulate which serves as a guide in these ques- tions, and which, under wise management, is never mis- leading. Scholars are, to be sure, too often carried away by the naturalistic prejudices of their times; they do not limit themselves to deducing imitation from facts of re- semblance, but infer kinship from them likewise. From the fact, for example, that the vases, situlce, etc., found in the excavations at Este, in Venetia, were curiously like those found at Verona, Belluno, and elsewhere, M. Maury Archaeology and Statistics 99 inclines to think that the builders of these different tombs belonged to the same people. Nothing seems to justify this conjecture. To be sure, M. Maury takes the trouble to add that, " at any rate, they belonged to populations who observed the same funeral rites and who possessed a com- mon industry " — a somewhat different matter. At any rate, it seems pretty certain that even if the so-called Etruscans of the North, of Venetia, had Etruscan blood in their veins, they mixed it very freely with Celtic blood. On this point, M. Maury remarks elsewhere upon the influence which a civilised nation has always exerted, even without conquest, over its barbarous neighbours. " Etruscan works of art were clearly imitated," he says, " by the Gauls of Cis- alpine Gaul." And so likeness between artistic products is no proof at all of consanguinity, it points only to a contagion of imitation. In order to connect the unknown with the known archae- ologists have been obliged to seek for the secret of past generations in the most remote and, to the lay eye, imper- ceptible analogies in the matter of form, style, situation, lan- guage, legend, dress, etc., thereby training themselves to discover the unexpected everywhere. Some of these unex- pected things are based on fact; others, on different de- grees of likelihood according to a very extensive scale of probability. In this way archaeologists have contributed in a wonderful degree to deepening and widening the domain of human imitativeness and to almost entirely reducing the civilisation of every people, even that which at first may seem to be the most original, into a combination of imitations of other peoples. They know that Arabian art, in spite of its distinctive features, is merely the fusion of Persian with Greek art, that Greek art borrowed certain processes from Egyptian and perhaps from other sources, and that Egyptian art was formed from or amplified by many suc- cessive Asiatic and even African contributions. There is no assignable limit to this archaeological decomposition of civilisations; there is no social molecule which their chem- istry has not a fair hope of resolving into its constituent loo Laws of Imitation atoms. Meanwhile, their labours have reduced the number of still indecomposable centres of civilisation to three or four, in the Old World, and to one or two in the New. In the latter, strange to say, they are all situated on plateaux (•Mexico and Peru), and in the former, at the mouth or on the banks of great rivers (the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges, and the rivers of China), although great water courses, as M. de Candolle justly remarks, are neither more uncommon nor more unhealthy in America than in Europe and Asia, and although habitable plateaux are not lacking in these latter parts of the world. The arbitrary factor which influences the choice of the first makers or importers of civilisation in the pitching of their tents shows itself here. And, perhaps, the civilisations that come from them will bear to the end of time the ineffaceable mark of their primordial caprice! Thanks to the archaeologists we learn where and when a new discovery first appeared, how far and how long it has spread, and by what roads it has travelled from the place of its origin to its adopted country. Although they may not take us back to the first furnace which turned out bronze or iron, they do take us back to the first country and century in which the pointed arch, printing, and oil-paint- ing, and, still much more anciently, the orders of Greek architecture, the Phoenician alphabet, etc., displayed them- selves to a justly marvelling world. They devote all their curiosity1 and activity to following up a given invention through its manifold disguises and modifications, to recog- nising the atrium in the cloister, the praetorium of the Ro- man magistrate in the Roman church, the Etruscan bench in the curule-chair, or to tracing out the boundaries of the region to which an invention has spread through gradual 1 1 know that the curiosity of the antiquarian is often vain and puerile. Even the greatest among them, men like Schliemann, seem more bent upon discovering something relating to a celebrated individ- ual, to a Hector or Priam or Agamemnon, than upon following out the course of the principal inventions of the past. But the personal aim and motive of the workers is one thing, the net gain and specific fruit of their work, another. Archaeology and Statistics 101 self-propagation and beyond which, for yet to be discovered reasons (in my opinion they are always the competition of rival inventions), it has been unable to pass, or to studying the results of the intersection of different inventions which have spread so widely that they have finally come together in one imaginative brain. In short, these scholars are forced, perhaps uncon- sciously, into surveying the social life of the past from a point of view which is continually approximating that which I claim should be adopted knowingly and willingly by the sociologist. I refer here to the pure sociologist, who, through a necessary although artificial abstraction, is dis- tinguished from the naturalist. In distinction to histo- rians who see nothing else in history than the conflicts and competitions of individuals, that is, of the arms and legs as well as of the minds of individuals, and who, in regard to the latter, do not differentiate between ideas and desires of the most diverse origins, confusing those few that are new and personal with a mass of those that are merely copies; in distinction to those poor carvers-up of reality who have been unable to perceive the true dividing line between vital and social facts, the point where they separate without tear- ing, archaeologists stand out as makers of pure sociology, be- cause, as the personality of those they unearth is impene- trable, and only the work of the dead, the vestiges of their archaic wants and ideas, are open to their scrutiny, they hear, in a certain way, like the Wagnerian ideal, the music without seeing the orchestra of the past. In their own eyes, I know, this is a cruel deprivation; but time, in de- stroying the corpses and blotting out the memories of the painters and writers and modellers whose inscriptions and palimpsests they decipher and whose frescoes and torsos and potsherds they so laboriously interpret, has, neverthe- less, rendered them the service of setting free everything that is properly social in human events by eliminating everything that is vital and by casting aside as an impurity the carnal and fragile contents of the glorious form which is truly worthy of resurrection. IO2 Laws of Imitation To archaeologists, then, history becomes both simplified and transfigured. In their eyes it consists merely of the advent and development, of the competitions and conflicts, of original wants and ideas, or, to use a single term, of inventions. Inventions thus become great historic figures and the real agents of human progress. The proof that this idealistic point of view is the just one, lies in its fruitfulness. Through its happy, although, I repeat, in- voluntary, adoption, do not philologist and mythologist, the modern archaeologist, under different names, cut all the Gordian knots and shed light upon all the obscurities of history and, without taking away any of its grace and picturesqueness, bestow upon it the charm of the- ory? If history is on the way to become a science, is it not due to this point of view ? Ill Something is likewise due to the statistician. The stat- istician, like the archaeologist, considers human affairs from an entirely abstract and impersonal standpoint. He pays no attention to individuals, to Peter or Paul; he concerns himself only with their works, or, rather, with those acts of theirs which reveal their wants and ideas, with the act of buying or selling, of manufacturing, of voting, of commit- ting or repressing crime, of suing for judicial separation, and even with the acts of being born, of marrying, of pro- creating, and of dying. All these individual acts are re- lated on some of their sides to social life, in as much as the spread of certain examples or prejudices seems to aid in raising or lowering the rates of birth and marriage, and to affect the prolificness of marriages and the mortality of infants. If archaeology is the collection and classification of similar products where the highest possibledegreeof similarity is the most important thing, Statistics is an enumeration of acts which are as much alike as possible. Here the art is in the Archaeology and Statistics 103 choice of units; the more alike and equal they are, the better they are. What is the subject of Statistics unless, like that of archaeology, it is inventions and the imitative editions of inventions? Only, the latter study treats of inventions which are for the most part dead, worn out by their very activity, whereas the former treats of living inventions which are often modern or contemporaneous and which are in actual process of growth and expansion, of arrest or of decay. The one is the palaeontology, the other the physi- ology, of society. While archaeology tells us that speci- mens of Greek pottery were transported in Phoenician ves- sels at a certain rate of speed to certain places on the shores of the Mediterranean and far beyond, Statistics tells us what islands of Oceanica, how near the North or the South Pole, the English vessels of to-day carry the cotton goods of Eng- land and what number of yards they annually export to foreign markets. We must admit, however, that the field of invention seems to belong more especially to archaeology, and that of imitation, to Statistics. While jthe former en- deavours to follow out the thread between successive dis- coveries, the latter excels in estimating their individual ex- pansion. The domain of archaeology is the more philo- sophic, that of Statistics, the more scientific. To be sure, the methods of these two sciences are pre- cisely opposite to each other, but this is because of the dif- ference in the external conditions of their investigations. Archaeology studies the scattered examples of the same art a long time before it is able to hazard a conjecture about the origin or date of the primary process from which it has developed. For example, all the Indo-European languages must be known before they can be related to a perhaps im- aginary mother tongue, to Aryac, or to their elder sister, Sanskrit. Archaeology laboriously travels back from imita- tions to their source. The science of statistics, on the other hand, almost always knows the source of the expansions which it is measuring; it goes from causes to effects, from discoveries to their more or less successful development ac- cording to given years and countries. By means of its sue- IO4 Laws of Imitation cessive records, it will tell you that, from the time that the invention of steam engines began to gradually spread and strengthen the need for coal throughout France, the output of French coal increased at a perfectly regular rate and that from 1759 to 1869 it multiplied sixty-two and one-half times. In the same way you may also learn that after the discovery of beet sugar, or, rather, after the utility of the discovery was no longer doubted, the manufacture of this commodity was increased at an equally regular rate from seven millions of kilograms in 1828 (until then it was al- most stationary for the reason implied above) to one hun- dred and fifty millions of kilograms thirty years later (Maurice Block). I have taken the less interesting examples, but do we not witness by means of even these dry figures the birth and gradual establishment and progress of a new want or fash- ion in the community? In general, there is nothing more instructive than the chronological tables of statisticians, in which they show us the increasing rise or fall, year by year, of some special kind of consumption or production, of some particular political opinion as it is expressed in the returns of the ballot box, or of some specific desire for security that is embodied in fire-insurance premiums, in savings-bank ac- counts, etc. These are all, at bottom, representations in the life of some desire or belief that has been imported and copied. Every one of these tables, or, rather, every one of the graphical curves which represent them, is, in a way, an his- torical monograph. Taken together they form the best his- torical narrative that it is possible to have. Synchronous tables giving comparisons between provinces or between countries are generally much less interesting. Let us con- trast, as data for philosophic reflection, a table of crimi- nality in the departments of France with a curve showing the increase of recidivists during the last fifty years; or, let us compare the proportion of the urban to the rural population with that of the urban population year by year. We shall see in the latter case, for example, that the proportion increased from 1851 to 1882 at a regular and Archaeology and Statistics 105 uninterrupted rate from twenty-five to thirty-three per cent., i. e., from a fourth to a third. This fact evidences the ac- tion of some definite social cause, whereas a comparison of the proportions between two neighbouring departments, be- tween twenty-eight per cent., for example, in the one, and twenty-six per cent, in the other, is not at all instructive. Similarly, a table giving the civil burials which had occurred in Paris or in the provinces for the last ten years would be significant; just as a comparison of the number of civil burials in France, England, and Germany at any given time would be relatively valueless. I do not mean that it would be useless to state that in 1870 the number of private telegraphic despatches amounted in France to fourteen millions, in Ger- many to eleven millions, and in England to twenty-four millions. But it is much more instructive to know that in France, especially, there had been an increase from nine thousand despatches in 1851 to four millions in 1859, to ten millions in 1869, and, finally, to fourteen millions in 1879. We cannot follow this varying rate of increase without be- ing reminded of the growth of living things. Why is there this difference between curves and tables? Because, as a rule, although there are many exceptions, curves alone deal with the spread of imitation. Statistics evidently follows a much more natural course than archaeology and, although it supplies the same kind of information, it is much more accurate. Its method is pre- eminently the sociological method, and it is only because we cannot apply it to extinct societies that we substitute the method of archeeology. How many trivial medals and mo- saics, how many cinerary urns and funeral inscriptions, we should be willing to exchange for the industrial, the com- mercial, or even the criminal statistics of the Roman Em- pire! But in order that Statistics may render all the ser- vices which we expect of it and may triumph against the ironical criticism to which it is exposed, it must, like archae- ology, be conscious both of its true usefulness and of its actual limitations; it must know where it is going and where it should go, nor must it underrate the dangers of 106 Laws of Imitation the road which will take it to its goal. In itself it is merely a substitute. Psychological statistics which would take note of the individual gains and losses of special beliefs and de- sires called forth originally by some innovator, would alone, if the thing were practically possible, give the underlying explanation of the figures of ordinary statistics.1 Ordinarily Statistics does not weigh; it only counts, and in its reck- oning it includes nothing but acts, acts of manufacture and consumption, purchases, sales, crimes, prosecutions, etc. But it is only after it has reached a certain degree of intensity that growing desire becomes ac- tion, or that decreasing desire suddenly unmasks itself and gives way to some contrary and hitherto restrained desire. This is also true of belief. In looking over the work of statisticians, it is most important to re- member that the things which are under calculation are es- sentially subjective qualities, desires and beliefs, and that very often the acts which they enumerate, although equal in number, give expression to very different weights among these things. At certain times during the last century, church attendance remained numerically the same, whereas religious faith was on the decline. . When the prestige of a government has been injured, the devotion of its adherents may be half destroyed although their number may hardly have diminished. This fact is shown by the vote on the very eve of a sudden political downfall. It is a source of delusion to those who are unduly reassured or discouraged by electoral statistics. Successful imitations are numerous indeed, but how few they are in comparision with those which are still unreal- ised ojects of desire! So-called popular wishes, the aspira- tions of a small town, for example, or of a single class, are 1 According to the statistics of railroads, omnibuses, excursion steamers, etc., their receipts diminish regularly every Friday. This points to the very widespread, although much weakened, prejudice about the danger of undertaking anything at all on that day of the week. If we followed the variations in this periodic diminution from year to year, the gradual decline of the absurd belief in question might be easily calculated. Archeology and Statistics 107 composed exclusively, at a given moment, of tendencies, which, unfortunately, cannot at the time be realised, to ape in all particulars some richer town or some superior class. This body of simian proclivities constitutes the potential energy of a society. It takes only a commercial treaty, or a new discovery, or a political revolution, events which make certain luxuries and powers, which had before been re- served for the privileged ones of fortune or intellect, ac- cessible to those possessing thinner purses or fewer abilities, to convert it into actual energy. This potential energy, then, is of great importance, and it would be well to bear its fluctuations in mind. And yet ordinary statistics seem to pay no attention to this force. The labour of making an approximate estimate of it would seem ridiculous, although it might be done by many indirect methods and might at times be of advantage to Statistics. In this respect, archae- ology is superior in the information which it gives us about buried societies; for although it may teach us less about their activities in point of detail and precision, it pictures their aspirations more faithfully. A Pompeiian fresco reveals the psychological condition of a provincial town under the Roman Empire much more clearly than all the statistical volumes of one of the principal places of a French department can tell us about the actual wishes of its inhabitants. Let me add, that Statistics is of such recent origin that it it has not yet shot out all its branches, whereas its older col- laborator has ramified in all directions. There is an archaeology of language, comparative philology, which draws up separate monographs for us of the life of every root from its accidental origin in the mouth of some ancient speaker through its endless reproductions and multiplica- tions by means of the remarkable uniformity of innumer- able generations of men. There is in archaeology of reli- gion, comparative mythology, which deals separately with every myth and with its endless imitative editions, just as philology treats every word. There is an archaeology of law, of politics, of ethnology, and, finally, of art and indus- io8 Laws of Imitation try. They likewise devote a separate treatise to every legal idea or fiction, to every custom or institution, to every type or creation of art, to every industrial process, and, in addi- tion, to the power of reproduction by example which is peculiar to each of these things. And we have a corre- sponding number of distinct and flourishing sciences. But, hitherto, in the matter of truly and exclusively sociological statistics, we have had to be content with statistics of com- merce and industry, and with judicial statistics, not to speak of certain hybrid statistics which straddle both the physio- logical and the social worlds, statistics of population, of births, marriages, deaths, medical statistics, etc. In tables of election figures we have merely the germ of political statis- tics.1 As to religious statistics, which should give us a graphic representation of the relative annual spread of dif- ferent sects and of the thermometric variations, so to speak, in the faith of their adherents; as to linguistic statistics, which should figure for us not only upon the comparative expansion of different idioms, but upon the vogue or decline, in each one of them, of every vocable, of every form of speech, I fear that, if I should say anything more about these hypothetical sciences, I might bring a smile to the lips of my readers. However, I have amply justified the assertion that the statistician looks at human affairs from the same point of view as the archaeologist and that this point of view coin- cides with mine. At the risk of distorting it, let me simplify it in a brief summary before we continue. In the midst of an incoherent mass of historic facts, a puzzling dream or nightmare, reason vainly seeks for an order which it does 1 It may be that universal suffrage is of no value except on one of its sides, a side hitherto overlooked. It has decided value as an intermit- tent study in political statistics, through which a nation is made con- scious of the changes in its desires and opinions in vital matters. To work under the conditions which are required for the calculation of probabilities, this study must be based upon very large numbers. Hence the necessity for extending the franchise as much as possible, and, especially, of absolutely universalising sr>-called universal suffrage. (On this subject, see an article published in my Etudes penales et sociales). Archaeology and Statistics 109 not find because it refuses to look in the right direction. Sometimes it imagines that this order has been found and, in its conception of history as the fragment of a poem which is unintelligible except in its entirety, it refers us for the solution of the enigma to the moment when the final des- tinies of humanity shall have been fulfilled and its most hidden origins absolutely revealed. We may as well repeat the famous phrase: Ignorabimus. But if we look beneath the names and dates of history, beneath its battles and revolutions, what do we see? We see specific desires that have been excited or sharpened by certain inventions or practical initiatives, each of which appears at a certain point from which, like a luminous body, it shoots out incessant radiations which harmoniously intersect with thousands of analogous vibrations in whose multiplicity there is an en- tire lack of confusion. We also see specific beliefs that have been produced by certain discoveries or hypotheses that also radiate at a variable rate and within variable limits. The order in which these inventions or discoveries appear and are developed is, in a large measure, merely capricious and accidental; but, at length, through an evi- table elimination of those which are contrary to one; another (i. e., of those which more or less contradict one another through some of their implicit propositions), the simulta- neous group which they form becomes harmonious and coherent. Viewed thus as an expansion of waves issuing from distinct centres and as a logical arrangement of these centres and of their circles of vibration, a nation, a city, the most humble episode in the so-called poem of history, be- comes a living and individual whole, a fine spectacle for the contemplation of the philosopher. IV If this point of view is correct, if it is really the fittest from which to elucidate social events on their regular, numerable, and measurable sides, it follows that Statistics no Laws of Imitation should adopt it, not partially and unconsciously, but know- ingly and unreservedly, and thus, like archaeology, be spared many fruitless investigations and tribulations. 1 will enu- merate the principal consequences that would result from this. In the first place, sociological Statistics, having acquired a touchstone for the knowledge of what did and what did not belong to it, and having become convinced that the immense field of human imitation, and only that field, was its exclu- sive possession, would leave to naturalists the care of tabulating statistics so purely anthropological in their results as, for example, the statistics of exemption from military service in the different departments of France, or the task of constructing tables of mortality (I do not include tables of birth rates, for, in this case, example is a powerful factor in restraining or stimulating racial fecundity). This is pure biology, just as much as the use of M. Marey's graphical method, or as the observation of disease through the myograph and sphgymograph and pneumograph, mechanical statisticians, so to speak, of contractions and pulsations and respiratory movements. In the second place, the sociological statistician would never forget that his proper task was the measurement of specific beliefs and desires and the use of the most direct methods to grasp these elusive quantities, and that an enumeration of acts which resembled each other as much as possible (a condition which is badly fulfilled by criminal statistics among others), and, failing this, an enumeration of like products, of articles of commerce, for example, should always relate to the following, or, rather, to the two following ends: (i) through the tabulation of acts or products to trace out the curve of the successive increases, standstills, or decreases in every new or old want and in every new or old idea, as it spreads out and consolidates itself or as it is crushed back and uprooted; (2) through a skilful comparision between series that have been obtained in this way, and through emphasising their concomitant va- riations, to denote the various aids and hindrances which these different imitative propagations or consolidations of Archaeology and Statistics 1 1 1 wants and ideas lend or oppose to one another (according to the varying degrees in which the more or less numerous and implicit propositions of which they always consist, more or less endorse or contradict one another). Nor should the sociological statistician neglect the influence, in these matters, of sex, age, temperament, climate, and seasons, natural causes whose force is measured, at any rate when it exists, by physical or biological statistics. In other words, sociological statistics have: (i) to de- termine the imitative power which inheres in every inven- tion at any given time and place; (2) to demonstrate the beneficial or harmful effects which result from the imitation of given inventions and, consequently, to influence those who are acquainted with such numerical results, in their tendencies towards following or disregarding the examples in question. In brief, the entire object of this kind of re- search is the knowledge and control of imitations. Medical statistics may be cited to show how the latter aim has been reached. Medical statistics, as a matter of fact, are related to social science in as much as they compare the proportion, in the case of every disease, of sufferers who are cured by the use of the different methods and remedies of ancient or recent discovery. In this way it has contributed to the spread of vaccination, of the treatment of the itch by para- siticides, etc. Statistics which show that crime, suicide, and mental derangements are greatly increased through residence in cities would tend to moderate, very feebly to be sure, the great current of imitation which carries the country popula- tion to the cities. M. Bertillon assures us that even statistics of marriage would encourage us to make an even greater use than we do of that very ancient invention of our fore- fathers,— a more original invention, let me say, parenthet- ically, than it may seem, — in showing us the diminished mortality of married men in comparision with bachelors of a corresponding age. But I must not linger on this deli- cate subject. The second of the two problems which I have just noted and which seem to me to impose themselves upon the statis- H2 Laws of Imitation tician, cannot be solved before the first. It is perhaps well to note this fact. Are we not putting the cart before the horse when we try to calculate, as we often do, the influence of certain punishments, for example, or religious beliefs or of a certain kind of education upon criminal tendencies before we have measured the force of these tendencies in free play, in the days of mob rule, when the populations are uncon- trolled by police or priest or teacher, and turn to arson, murder, and pillage, deeds which are at once imitated from one end of a country to the other ? The preliminary operation, then, would be the prepara- tion of a table of our principal innate or gradually acquired desires, beginning with the social desire to marry or have children, and of our principal old or new beliefs; or, which is one and the same thing, of certain families of acts, be- longing to a single type, and expressing, with more or less exactness, its intrinsic powers. In this connection, com- mercial and industrial statistics, statistics that become so interesting from the above standpoint, are of especial value. Does not every article which is made or sold, correspond, in fact, to some special desire or idea ? Does not the prog- ress of its sale and manufacture at a given time and place express its motor power, i. e., its rate of propagation, as well as its mass, as it were, i. e., its importance? Statistics of commerce and industry are, then, the main foundation of all other statistics. Better still, if the thing were practicable, would be the application, on a larger scale, to the living, of the method of investigation which arch- aeology uses in relation to the dead. I mean a precise and complete house-to-house inventory of all the furniture in a given country and the annual numerical variations in all of its different kinds of furniture. This would give us an excellent photograph of our social condition; it would be somewhat analogous to the admirable pictures of extinct civilisations which the delvers into the past have made in their careful inventories of the contents of the tombs, the houses of the dead, of Egypt, Italy, Asia Minor, and America. Archeology and Statistics 113 But in the absence of such an inquisitorial census as I have in mind and of the glass houses which it presupposes, complete and systematic statistics of commerce and indus- try, and, particularly, statistics of publications showing us the relative changes in the annual publication of different kinds of books, suffice to give us the needed data. Theoret- ically, judicial statistics take a second place, and it must be admitted that, although in one way they are more pro- foundly interesting, in another, they are inferior. Their units lack similarity. If I am told that during the current year a certain furnace has turned out one million steel rails or that a given manufactory is in receipt of ten thousand bales of cotton, I have to deal with like units representing like wants. But it would be idle to divide thefts, for example, or distraints into classes and sub-classes; we should never succeed in keeping distinct acts which are quite dissimilar, inspired as they are by different wants and ideas, proceed- ing from different origins and belonging, in this way, to many different classes of activity. The most one could do would be to make a separate column for the assassinations of women by mutilation or poisonings by strychnine or other offences of recent contrivance which really fall into one group and constitute certain characteristic criminal fashions. Felonies and misdemeanours should properly be classified according to their methods of execution. Then the empire of imitation in such matters could be seen. It would be necessary to descend to details. If crimes could be classified according to the nature of the prize at stake, or of the hardship eliminated, we should have a different and yet a natural kind of classification which would reproduce under a new form a classification of the industrial articles or services whose purchase procures for honest people corre- sponding satisfactions. ii4 Laws of Imitation When the field of sociological statistics has been clearly defined, when the curves relating to the propagation, that is to say, to the consolidation as well, of every special want and opinion, for a certain number of years and over a certain stretch of country, have been plainly traced, the interpreta- tion of these hieroglyphic curves, curves that are at times as strange and picturesque as mountain profiles, more often as sinuous and graceful as living forms, has still to be made. I am very much mistaken if our point of view will not prove very helpful here. The lines in question are always ascending or horizontal or descending, or, if they are ir- regular, they can always be decomposed in the same way into three kinds of linear elements, into inclines, plateaux, and declines. According to Quetelet and his school, the pla- teaux would belong pre-eminently to the statistician; their discovery should be his finest triumph and the constant object of his ambition. According to this view, the most fitting foundation for a social physics would be the uniform reproduction, during a considerable period, of the same num- ber, not only of births and marriages, but also of crimes and litigations. Hence the error (it no longer exists, to be sure, thanks, especially, to recent official statistics concerning the progressive criminality of the last half-century), of thinking that the latter figures have, in reality, been uniformly reproduced. But if the reader has taken the trouble to follow me, he will realise that, without detract- ing at all from the importance of the horizontal lines, the ascending lines, indicating as they do the regular spread of some kind of imitation, have a far higher theoret- ical value. The reason is this: The fact that a new taste or idea has taken root in a mind which is constituted in a certain fashion carries with it no reason why this inno- vation should not spread more or less rapidly through an indefinite number of supposedly like minds in communi- Archaeology and Statistics 115 cation with one another. It would spread instantane- ously through all these minds if they were absolutely alike and if their intercommunication were perfect. It is this ideal, an ideal that is happily beyond realisation, that we are fast approaching. The rapid diffusion of telephones in America from the moment of their first appearance there is one proof in point. This ideal is almost reached already in the matter of legislative innovations. Laws or de- crees which were once slowly and laboriously administered in one province after another are to-day executed from one end to the other of a state the very day of their pas- sage or promulgation. This occurs because in this case there is no hindrance whatsoever. Lack of communication in social physics plays the same role as lack of elasticity in physics. The one hinders imitation as much as the other, vibration. But the imitative spread of certain well-known inventions (railroads, telegraphs, etc.), tends to diminish, to the benefit of every other invention, this insufficiency of mental contact. As for mental dissimilarity, it likewise tends to be effaced by the spread of wants and ideas which have arisen from past inventions and whose work of as- similation in this way facilitates the propagation of future inventions. I mean of future non-contradictory inventions. When wants or ideas are once started, they always tend to continue to spread of themselves in a true geometric progression.1 This is the ideal scheme to which their curve would conform if they could spread without mutual obstruc- tion. But as such checks are, at one time or another, inevita- ble, and as they continue to increase, every one of these social forces must eventually run up against a wall which for the time being is insurmoutable and must through accident, not at all through natural necessity, fall temporarily into that static condition whose meaning statisticians in general 1 At the same time, they tend to entrench themselves, and their prog- ress extensively hastens their progress intensively. Let us note, incidentally, that there is no past or present enthusiasm or fanaticism of historic importance that cannot be explained through this interaction of the imitation of self with the imitation of others. 1 1 6 Laws of Imitation appear to so little understand. In this case, as in all others, a static condition means equilibrium, a joint standstill of concurrent forces. I am far from denying the theoretic in- terest of this state, because these equilibria are equivalent to equations. If, for example, I see that the consumption of coffee or chocolate has ceased to increase in a certain country at a certain date, I know that the strength of the desire there for coffee or chocolate is exactly equal to that of certain rival desires which would have to remain unsatisfied, considering the average fortune, by a more ample satisfaction of the former. The price of every article is determined in this way. But does not every one of the annual figures in pro- gressive series or slopes also express an equation between the strength, at a certain date, of the desire in question and the strength of competing desires which hindered its further development at the same date? Moreover, if progression ceased at one point rather than at another, if the plateau is neither higher nor lower than it is, is it not because of a mere accident of history, that is to say, because of the fact that the opposing invention, from which arose the antago- nistic wants that barred the progress in question, appeared at one time and place rather than at another, or because of the fact that it actually did appear instead of not appearing at all? Plateaux, let me add, are always unstable equilibria. After an approximately horizontal position has been sustained for a more or less prolonged time, the curve begins to rise or fall, the series begins to grow or diminish with the appearance of new auxiliary and confirmatory or antagonistic and contra- dictory inventions. As for diminishing series, they are merely, as we see, the result of successful growths which have suppressed some declining public taste or opinion which was once in vogue; they do not deserve the attention of the theorist except as the other side of the picture of the grow- ing series which they presuppose. Let me also state that whenever the statistician is able to lay hold of the origin of an invention and to trace out year by year its numerical career, he shows us curves which, for a Archeology and Statitiscs 117 certain time, at least, are constantly rising, and rising, too, although for a much shorter period, with great regularity. If this perfect regularity fail to continue, it is for reasons which I will shortly indicate. But when very ancient in- ventions like monogamy or Christian marriage are under consideration, inventions which have had time to pass through their progressive period and which have rounded out, so to speak, their whole sphere of imitation, we ought not to be surprised if Statistics, in its ignorance of their be- ginnings, represents them by horizontal lines that show scarce a deviation. In view of this, there is nothing aston- ishing in the fact that the proportion of the annual number of marriages to the total population remains about constant (except in France, I may say, where there is a gradual dim- inution in this proportion) or even in the fact that the in- fluence of marriage upon crime or suicide is expressed each year by pretty much the same figures. Here we are dealing with ancient institutions which have passed into the blood of a people just like the natural factors of climate, seasons, temperament, sex, and age, which influence the mass of human acts with such striking uniformity (which has been greatly exaggerated, however, as it is much more circum- scribed than is generally supposed) and with a regularity that is also remarkable, in quite a different way, again, in connection with vital phenomena like death and disease. And yet, what do we find at the bottom of even these uni- form series? Let us see; the digression will be brief. Statis- tics have shown, for example, that the death rate from one to five years of age is always three times greater in the littoral departments of the Mediterranean than in the rest of France, or, at any rate, than in more favoured departments. The ex- planation of this fact is found, it seems, in the extreme heat of the Provencal climate during summer. This season is as harmful to early infancy (another statistical revelation con- trary to current opinion) as winter is to old age. At any rate, climate intervenes in this instance, as a constant and fixed cause. But what is climate but a nominal entity by which a certain group of realities is expressed, to wit : the 1 1 8 Laws of Imitation sun, a radiation of light which tends towards indefinite ex- pansion in unbounded space and which the earth-obstacle opposes and checks; the winds, i. e., fragments of more or less well demarcated cyclones which are continually striving to swell themselves out and reach over the entire globe and which are held in check only by mountain chains or counter whirlwinds; altitude, the effect of up-pushing subterranean forces which hoped for an endless expansion of the happily resistant crust of the earth; latitude, the effect of the rota- tion of the still fluid terrestial globe in its vain efforts at further contraction; the nature of the earth, that is, of molecules whose but partially satisfied affinities are engaged in fruitless activity and whose power of attraction, venting itself over any distance, strives for impossible contacts; finally, to a certain extent, the earth's flora, its various veg- etal species or varieties, each of which, from discontent with its own habitat, would cover the entire surface of the globe except for the restraint imposed upon its avidity by the rivalry of all the others. I might just as well say of age, sex, and other influences of nature what I have said of climate. In short, all external realities, whether physical or vital, display the same infinite unrealised and unreali sable ambitions, ambitions that re- ciprocally stimulate and paralyse one another. The thing in them that we call the fixity or immutability of the laws of nature, the supreme reality, is, at bottom, only their inabil- ity to travel further in their strictly natural course and real- ise themselves more fully. Well, this is also true of the fixed (the momentarily fixed) influences which Statistics discovers or pretends to discover in the social order; for social realities, ideas and desires, are not less ambitious than others, and it is into them that analysis resolves those social entities which are called customs, institutions, language, legislation, reli- gion, science, industry, and art. The oldest of these things, those past adolescence, have ceased to grow; but the younger are still developing. One proof of this, among others, is seen in the incessant swelling of our budgets. They have enlarged, and will continue to enlarge until some final catas- Archaeology and Statistics . 119 trophe occur which will be, in turn, the point of departure for a renewed increase which will end in the same way, and so on indefinitely. Without going back of 1819, from that date to 1869 the amount of indirect taxes has arisen very reg- ularly from 544 to 1323 millions of francs. When thirty- three or thirty-seven millions of men, — thirty-three in 1819, thirty-seven in 1869, — have increasing wants because they are copying one another more and more, they must produce and consume more and more in order to satisfy their wants, and it is inevitable that their public expenditures should in- crease in proportion to their private expenditures.1 If our European civilisation had long ago put forth, like Chinese civilisation, all that it was able to in the matters of invention and discovery, if, while living upon its old capital, it was exclusively composed of old wants and ideas, without the slightest new addition whatsoever, Quetelet's wish would probably, in accordance with what has preceded, be fulfilled. If statistics were applied to every aspect of our social life, they would lead in all cases to certain uniform series, which would unroll horizontally and which would be quite analogous to the famous " laws of nature." It is perhaps because Nature is much older than we, and because she has had the requisite time in which to bring to this state of in- ventive exhaustion all her own civilisations — I mean her living types (true cellular societies, as we know) — that we ascribe to her the fixity and permanence that we praise so highly. This is the reason for that fine and so much ad- mired periodicity of the figures given by sociologico-physio>- logical Statistics, so to speak, which obstinately insists upon emphasising the constantly uniform influences of age or sex upon criminality or nuptiality. We could be certain in advance of such regularity, just as we could be sure, if 1 This increase is not peculiar to the nineteenth century. M. Dela- hante says (Une famille de finances an XVI I Ie siecle) that under the ancient regime " the ferme generate brought in to the government a steadily increasing revenue of from one hundred to one hundred and sixty millions. [I, 195, Paris, 1880. — Tr.] 1 20 Laws of Imitation we classified criminals as nervous, bilious, lymphatic, or sanguine, or, who knows, even as blondes or brunettes, that the annual participation of each of these groups in the annual perpetration of crime would be seen to be always the same. Perhaps I had better draw attention to the fact that cer- tain statistical regularities which seem to be of another kind belong, at bottom, to the above-mentioned group. For ex- ample, why for the last fifty years, at least, have the convic- tions of police courts been appealed nearly at the rate of forty-five per thousand, whereas, during the same period, the public prosecutor has been steadily cutting down the number of his appeals to one-half? This decrease in the government's appeals is the direct effect of increas- ing imitation in the legal profession. But how can the numerical standstill in the matter of prisoners' appeals be explained? Let us observe that when the man who has been sentenced is considering whether or not he should carry his case to a higher court he is not usually in- fluenced by what other men like himself are doing or would do under similar circumstances. He is generally ignorant about such examples. He pays even less attention to the statistics that would prove to him that courts of appeal are becoming more and more inclined to confirm the decisions of the lower courts. But, other things being equal (that is, reasons for hope or fear, based upon the circumstances of the case, having on an average the same annual weight), it is the degree of boldness in the man's nature which influences him either to fear failure or hope for success, thereby making him act in one way or the other. Here, again, as an additional weight in the balance is the definite quantity of daring and self-confidence which goes to make up the usual temperament of delinquents and which necessarily finds expression as such in the uniform proportion of their appeals. The error made by Quetelet may be explained historically. The first attempts of Statistics were concerned, to be sure, with population, that is, with the birth, death, and marriage rates that prevailed among both sexes at different ages and Archaeology and Statistics 121 in different places, and, as these effects of climatic and physiological or of very ancient social causes naturally gave rise to regular repetitions of almost constant figures, the mistake was made of generalising observations that subse- quently proved false. And thus it was possible for statistics, whose regularity only expresses, at bottom, the imitative bondage of the masses to the individual fancies or concep- tions of superior individuals, to be called upon to confirm the current prejudice that the general facts of social life are determined, not by human minds and wills, but by certain myths that are called natural laws ! And yet statistics of population should have opened our eyes by this time. The total of population never remains stationary in any country; it increases or decreases at a rate which is singularly variable among different peoples and in different centuries. How can this fact be explained on the hypothesis of social physics? How can we ourselves ex- plain it ? Here we have a need which is certainly very old, the need of paternity, the extent of whose rise or fall finds an eloquent expression in the annual birth rate. Now, statistics show that, old as it is, it is subject to enormous oscillations, and if we consult history, the history of France, for example, it reveals to us a succession, in the past, of gradual and alternating depopulations and repopulations of territory. The fact is that this attribute of age is purely fictitious. The natural and instinctive desire for fatherhood is one thing and the social, imitative, and rational desire, another. The former may be constant; but the latter, which is grafted upon the former at every great change of customs, laws, or religions, is subject to periodic fluctuation and renewal. Economists err in confounding the two, or, rather, in considering the former only, whereas, it is the latter which is alone important to the sociologist. Now, there are as many new and distinct desires of the latter kind for paternity as there are distinct and successive motives because of which the social man desires to have children. And we always find certain practical discoveries or theoretic conceptions in explanation of the origin of each 122 Laws of Imitation of these motives. The Spanish-American or Anglo-Saxon is prolific because he has America to people. If Christo- pher Columbus had made no discovery, what millions of men would have remained unborn! The insular English- man is prolific because he has a third of the globe to colonise, a direct consequence of the series of fortunate explorations, of the traits of maritime and warlike genius, and, above all, of the personal initiatives, not to speak of other causes, that won for him his colonies. In Ireland the introduction of the potato raised the population from three millions in 1766, to eight million three hundred thousand in 1845. The an- cient Aryan desired descendants in order that his altar-flame might never be extinguished, nor the altar ever fail to receive its sacred libation; for he was persuaded by his religion that its extinction would bring misfortune to his soul. The zealous Christian dreams of being the head of a numerous family in docile obedience to the multiplicamini of his Bible. To the early Roman to have children meant to give warriors to the Republic, a republic which would never have existed but for that group of inventions, of military and political in- stitutions of Etruscan, Sabine, and Latin origin, which Rome exploited. To develop mines, railroads, and cotton mills is to give new hands to the industries that are born of modern inventions. Christopher Columbus, Watt, Fulton, Stephenson, Ampere, Parmentier, can pass, whether celi- bates or not, for the greatest of all the multipliers of the human species that have ever existed. Let me stop here; I have said enough to make myself clear. It is possible that fathers will always regard their actual children from the same point of view, but they will certainly consider their potential children quite differently according to whether, like the ancient pater familias, they look upon them as domestic slaves without any ultimate rights, or whether, like Europeans of to-day, they think of them as the perhaps exacting masters and creditors to whom they themselves may some day be enslaved. This is a result of the difference in customs and laws which wants and ideas have made. We see that here, as elsewhere, individual Archaeology and Statistics 123 initiatives and their contagious imitations, have accom- plished everything, socially, I mean. Thousands of centu- ries ago the human species might have been reduced to a negligible number of individuals and, like bear or bison,have ceased to progress, had not some man of genius arrived from tim.e to time, in the course of history, to stimulate its reproductive power, either by opening new outlets to human activity through industry or colonisation or, as a religious reformer, like Luther, by reviving or, rather, by rejuvenating in an entirely new form the religious zeal of the community and its general belief in Providence as the protector of all the birds of the air. Every stimulus of this kind may be said to have aroused a fresh desire, in the social sense, for paternity, and this desire was added to, or substituted for, preceding desires, the former more often than the latter, and then pro- ceeded, in its turn, along its own line of development. Now, let us take one of these purely social desires for pro- creation in its inception and let us follow its course. Such an example will serve as well as another to develop the general law which I am about to formulate. Suppose that in the midst of a population which has been stationary for a long time because the desire for children has been exactly coun- terbalanced by a fear of the greater misery which their mul- tiplication would entail, the report is suddenly spread abroad that the discovery and conquest of a great island by a com- patriot has secured to people a new means of enlarging their families without impoverishing themselves, with an increase of wealth, in fact, to themselves. As this news travels and is confirmed, the desire for paternity redoubles, that is, the pre-existent desire is redoubled by the addition of a new de- sire. But the latter is not satisfied at once. It has to con- tend with a whole tribe of rooted habits and antique practices which have given birth to a general belief that ac- climatisation in such a distant land is impossible and death from famine, or fever, or homesickness, a certainty. Many years must elapse before this pervasive opposition can be generally overcome. Then a current of emigration sets in, and the colonists, set free from prejudice, begin to indulge 124 Laws of Imitation in extreme fecundity. At this time the tendency towards a geometric progression which governs not merely the desire to procreate, but all other desires as well, is actualised and, to a certain extent, satisfied. But this period does not last. The increase in the birth rate soon falls off because of the very development of prosperity which accompanies it. Needs of luxury, of leisure, and of a fancied independence which it has itself created encroach upon it day by day. When they reach a certain point the ultra-civilised man is placed in the dilemma of choosing between the joys offered by them and the joys of a numerous family. If he choose the former, he renounces the latter. Hence an inevitable arrest of the progression in question. Then, if an extreme kind of civilisation continue, a depopulation sets in like that which occurred in the Roman Empire, and like that which modern Europe and even America are bound some day to experience. But a depopulation like this never has gone and never will go very far, because of the fact that if it were to pass beyond a certain limit, it would bring about a setback to civilisation and a diminution in the desire for luxury which would again raise the level of population. Therefore, if nothing new occur, the establishment, after some oscillations, of a static condition will necessarily be maintained until some new order of chance or genius takes place. We need not fear to generalise this observation. Since it applies to such an apparently primitive desire as that for paternity, how much more readily would it apply to the so- called needs of luxury, all of which are plainly the result of discovery, to the desire, for example, for locomotion by steam. Although this desire was at first restrained by fear of accidents and by the habit of sedentary life, its successful development was not delayed until it came into contact, in our own day, with the more redoubtable adversaries that it had itself, in part, created and encouraged. I mean the need for the thousand various satisfactions of civilised life but for the satisfaction of which the pleasure of travel could not fail to increase indefinitely. The same remark applies as Archaeology and Statistics 125 truly, although less obviously, to desires of a higher order, to the desire for equality, or for political liberty, or, let me add, for truth. These desires, the third included, are of fairly recent origin. The first arose from the humanistic and rationalistic philosophy of the eighteenth century; the second, from English parliamentarism. The sources and leaders of the first movement we know, and, without going back very far, it would not be difficult to name the successive inventors and promotors of the second. As for the desire for truth, this torment, if we are to believe M. Dubois-Rey- mond, was unknown to classic antiquity, — a lack which ex- plains the strange inferiority in science and industry of that brilliant and otherwise eminently gifted period; it was the peculiar fruit of Christianity, of that spiritual religion which, in exacting faith even more than deeds, and faith in accredited historic facts, teaches man the high value of truth. Thus Christianity gave birth to its great rival, to science, the modern check upon its heretofore trium- phant propagation. Science dates barely from the sixteenth century, when the love of truth, great as it was, was confined to a small band of devotees. It has been widening its bound- aries ever since then. But already there are clear signs that the twentieth century will not be as absorbed in disinterested curiosity as the three centuries which preceded it. And it may be safely predicted that the day is not far distant when the need for well-being, which industry, the child of science, is developing without limitation, will suppress scientific zeal and will lead coming generations to a utilitarian sacrifice of their free and individualistic worship of hopeless truth to the social need for some common and, perhaps, state-imposed consoling and comforting illusion. And it is certain that neither our already much diminished thirst for political liberty nor our present passion for equality will escape a similar fate. Perhaps the same thing should be said of desire for pri- vate property. Without adopting all the ideas of M. de Laveleye on this subject we must recognise the facts that this desire, one which arose from a group of agricultural inven- 126 Laws of Imitation tions and which is a prime agent in civilisation, was pre- ceded by a desire for common property (the North Ameri- can pueblos, the Hindoo village-community, the Russian mir, etc. ) ; that, as a matter of fact, it has not ceased to grow up to the present day at the expense of the latter desire, as is proved by the gradual division of undivided property, of our common lands, for example; that it is no longer growing, however, and that when it once enters into competition with desire for superior subsistence and for more general well- being, it will withdraw before the rival to which it itself gave birth. Every new belief as well as every social desire passes, as it spreads, through the three phases that I have described, be- fore reaching its final resting place. To sum up, then, every desire or belief has first to toil through a network of con- trary habits or convictions, then, after this obstacle is over- come and victory won, it has to expand until new enemies are raised up by its triumph to hinder its progress and finally to oppose an insurmountable frontier to its further spread. In the case of a desire, these new enemies will consist mainly of habits which it has directly or indirectly established. In the case of a belief, which we know is always partly erroneous, they will consist of somewhat conflicting ideas which have been derived from it or whose discovery has been prompted by it, of heresies or of sciences proceed- ing from and yet contrary to the given dogma whose vic- torious and world-wide course is thereby arrested, and of scientific theories or of industrial inventions which have been suggested by antecedent theories whose application is limited and whose truth or success is hemmed in by them.1 1 When a befief or desire has ceased to spread, it can nevertheless continue to send down roots into its circumscribed field. Take, for example, a religion, or a revolutionary doctrine, after its period of con- quest. Besides, a gradual taking-root of this kind presents, like the gradual expansion which it follows or accompanies, certain well-defined and analogous phases. In the beginning, when belief is still contested, it is conscious judgment; just as nascent desire is, for the same reason, purpose or volition. Subsequently, thanks to an unanimity which grows and which strengthens the convictions and volitions of each individual, Archasology and Statistics 127 A slow advance in the beginning, followed by rapid and uniformly accelerated progress, followed again by progress that continues to slacken until it finally stops : these, then, are the three ages of those real social beings which I call inventions or discoveries. None of them is exempt from this experience any more than a living being from an an- alogous, or, rather, identical, necessity. A slight incline, a relatively sharp rise, and then a fresh modification of the slope until the plateau is reached : This is also, in abridg- ment, the profile of every hill, its characteristic curve. This is the law which, if taken as a guide by the statistician and, in general, by the sociologist, would save them from many illusions. They would no longer think, for example, that the populations of Russia, Germany, the United States, Brazil, will continue to grow at their present rates of increase. They would no longer fearfully compute the hundreds of millions of Russians or Germans that France will have to fight one hundred years hence. Nor, would they continue to think that the need of railroad travel, of letter-writing and tele- graphing, of newspaper reading, and of political activity, will develop in France in the future as rapidly as they have done in the past. These errors may be costly. All these needs will cease, just as, without comparing them in any other way, the need of tattooing, cannibalism, and tent life, which appear in remote times to have been very quick-spreading fashions, came to an end. In more recent periods, the passion for ascetic or monastic life is an example. A moment arrives, to be sure, when an ac- quired desire comes, by reason of its growth, to vie with even innate desires, some of which are always stronger than it. It is because of this fact that, as I have said before, the most original civilisations, at a certain point, and in judgment passes over into principle or dogma or almost unconscious quasi-perception, and purpose, into pure passion or desire. Finally, dog- matic quasi-perception, finding itself more and more jostled by the direct perceptions of opposing and stronger senses, ceases to gain in strength, and acquired desire, coming into greater and greater opposition with certain innate and more energetic desires, is arrested, in its turn, in its downward movement into the depths of the heart. 128 Laws of Imitation spite of their free development, leave off accentuating their differences. It might almost be thought that they subse- quently tended to narrow them down; but this illusion is easily explained by their frequent intercourse and by the preponderating influence of one civilisation over the other. A slow and inevitable assimilation through imitation and an apparent return to nature results, because the shock of two contending civilisations weakens in each of them the factitious needs in which they differ and conflict and strengthens the primordial needs in which they resemble each other. Does it follow that, in the last analysis, organic needs ultimately control the course of artistic and industrial progress just as external reality ends by controlling the course of thought? It does not, for let us observe that no nation has ever been able to push its civilisation far ahead and to reach its limit of divergence except on the condi- tion of being eminently conservative and, like Egypt, China, or Greece, attached to the particular traditions in which the divergence is best expressed. But let us close this paren- thesis. Now, of the three phases of development which I have indicated, it is the second that is of the greatest theoretical importance; it is not the final static condition which is merely the limit of the third and to which statisticians ap- pear to attach so much value. Between the rounded sum- mit of a mountain and the gentle slope of its base there is a certain direction which marks better than any other the exact energy of the forces which raised it up before the denudation of its peak or the heaping up of its base. Thus the intermediate phase in question is the one best fitted to show the energy of the upheaval which the corresponding innovation has stamped on the human heart. This phase would be the only one, it would absorb the other two, if rational and voluntary imitation could be substituted in everything and everywhere for unreflecting and mechanical imitation. It is evident, moreover, that it requires less time for a new article of manufacture to find a market and that it also requires less time for its circulation to be cut off, Archaeology and Statistics 129 according to the measure in which this substitution is effected. It remains to be shown how through the application of the preceding law the most complex and, at first sight, the most puzzling curves can be readily deciphered and inter- preted. There are few curves, to be sure, which plainly conform to the ideal type which I have outlined; for there are few inventions which, as they spread and encounter others, do not bestow upon or receive from one of the lat- ter some success-accelerating improvement or which are not undermined by other inventions or checked by some physical or physiological accident like a dearth or epidemic, not to speak of political accidents. But, then, if our norm is not seen in the whole it is, at least, in the details. Let us ig- nore the disturbing influence of the natural accidents of war or revolution. Let us overlook any rise in the curve of thefts that may be due to the high price of wheat or any deflection in the curve of drunkenness that may be due to the phylloxera. After we have easily discounted the part played by these extraneous movements, we may be sure, upon inspecting a given curve, particularly if it has been plotted according to the rules that were given some pages back, that as soon as the first obstacles are overcome and it has assumed a well-marked upward movement ac- cording to a definite angle, every upward deviation will reveal the insertion of some auxiliary discovery or improve- ment at the corresponding date, and every drop towards the horizontal will reveal, on the other hand, according to our foregoing law, the shock of some hostile invention.1 1 Or else the drop is only apparent. Under the ancient regime, the consumption of tobacco was continually increasing, just as it is at present. This fact was proved by the steady increase of the taxes col- lected under the fermes generates. From thirteen millions in 1730 there was a rise to twenty-six millions in 1758, when there was a sudden drop in the receipts. It seemed at first to point to a restriction of the consumption, but it was then shown that the revenue was simply the victim of a fraud that had been organised on an immense scale. See on this subject M. Dehhante's book, Une famille de finance au XVIIIe fiecle, II. 312. and the following To return to the advance in the consumption of tobacco, it increased from thirteen millions in 1730 130 Laws of Imitation And if we study by itself the effect produced by each successive improvement, we shall see that it, too, has taken, according to the law in question, a certain time in which to make itself acceptable, that it has then spread very quickly, then less quickly, and that it finally has ceased to spread at all. Is it necessary to recall the gradual but prodigious ex- tension that every improvement in the loom, in the electric telegraph, or in the manufacture of steel has given, after a certain period of probation, to textile industries, to telegraphic activity, to the production of steel ? And is not each of these improvements due to some new inventor fol- lowing upon the steps of earlier ones? When an unex- pected outlet has been opened up to a local industry, to the iron industry, for example, through the suppression of in- ternal taxation or through an international treaty which has doubled or tripled the sale of its products, again what do we see but the felicitous intersection of two great currents of imitation, the one starting from Adam Smith and the other, according to mythology, from Tubal Cain or from him, whoever he may have been, who was the forerunner of our metallurgists? If, at a certain date, we see that the curve of arson or of judicial separations is suddenly rising, we shall find, if we investigate, that the rise in the former is explained by the introduction, at the corresponding date, of the invention of insurance companies, and that the rise in the latter is explained by some immediately preceding legislative invention which permits poor people to litigate free of charge. When, for example, an irregular statistical curve resists the preceding analysis and cannot be resolved into normal, or into segments of normal, curves, it means that it is in itself insignificant, that it is based on curious, but absolutely non-instructive, enumerations of unlike units and of arbi- trary groups of certain acts or objects in which, however, to seventy-four millions in 1835, and then to one hundred and fifty-three millions in 1855, and to two-hundred and ninety millions in 1875. And yet this rate tends to slacken. It is remarkable that the American Indians, who taught us the use of tobacco, have recently altogether lost the habits of tobacco and snuff. Archaeology and Statistics 131 order would suddenly appear if the presence of a definite underlying desire or belief were revealed. Let us consider the table of the annual expenditure on public works by the French government from 1833 to tne present time. This series of figures is exceptionally irregular, although if it be taken as a whole it presents, in spite of its discontinuity, a remarkable progression. I will merely draw attention to the fact that in 1843 the figures took a sudden rise and re- mained at the high level of about one hundred and twenty millions until 1849, when they suddenly fell at a very rapid rate. This sharp rise was due, as we know, to the building of railroads at this period. This is equivalent to saying that at this time the imitative spread of railroad invention in France ran counter to that of the much more ancient inven- tions which make up the sum of other public works, such as highroads, bridges, canals, etc. Unfortunately for the regularity of the series, the state intervened and monopo- lised this new kind of work and so substituted for the con- tinuous progression which unmolested private initiative could not have failed to produce, the discontinuity which characterises those intermittent explosions of the collective will called laws. But, after all, a real and incontestable reg- ularity does exist, although hidden below these numerical gyrations which state intervention creates for the interpre- ter of statistics. How, in fact, did the law of June u, 1842, which provided for the establishment of our first great net- work of railroads, come to be passed, unless it was because of the fact that before this date the idea of railroads had circulated abroad and that confidence, which was at first so feeble and unsettled in the utility of the new discovery, and desire for its realisation, which was at first a mere matter of curiosity, had been silently growing? Here we have the constant and regular progression which the preceding table disguises, but by which it can alone be explained. For is it not because of the uninterrupted course of this twofold advance in confidence and desire, following its normal curve, that the Chamber has adopted the Freycinet plan in recent years, and that expenditure for 132 Laws of Imitation public works has again risen to alarming proportions? Now is it not evident that had we undertaken to make an approximate numerical measurement of this progress of public opinion the idea of the above table would undoubtedly have been the most inappropriate of means for this end ? Of course an estimate of the annual increase in the number of voyages and voyagers and in the transportation of freight by rail would be more valuable. VI Having given an account of the subject, the aim, and the resources of sociological Statistics as an applied study of the laws of imitation, I have now to discuss its probable future. The special appetite which it has whetted rather than satisfied, this thirst for social knowledge of mathemat- ical precision and impersonal impartiality, is only incipient; its development lies in the future. It is only in its first phase and before reaching its predestined goal, it can, like every other need, look forward with perfect propriety to immense conquests. Let us take any graphical curve, that, for example, of criminal recidivists for the last fifty years. If its physiog- nomy is unlike that of the human face, is it not, at least, like the silhouette of hills and vales, or, since it is a question of movement, — for in statistics we speak quite properly of the movement of criminality, of birth or marriage rates, — like the sinuous lines, the sharp rises and sudden falls, in the flight of a swallow? Let me stop a moment at this com- parison and consider if it is specious? Why should the statistical diagrams that are gradually traced out on this paper from accumulations of successive crimes and misdemeanours — whose records are transmitted in official reports to the government, from the government in an- nual returns to the bureau of statistics at Paris and from this bureau, in blue books, to the magistrates of the different tribunals — why should these silhouettes, which Archaeology and Statistics 133 likewise give visible expression to masses or series of co- existent or successive facts, be the only ones to be taken as symbolical, whereas the line traced on my retina by the flight of a swallow is deemed an inherent reality in the being which it expresses and which essentially consists, it seems to me, of moving figures, of movements in an imaginary space? Is there really less symbolism in one case than in the other ? Is not my retinal image, the curve traced on my retina by the flight of this swallow, merely the expression of a mass of facts (the different states of the bird) which we have not the slightest reason in the world to consider as analogous to our visual impression? If this is so, and philosophers will readily grant that it is, let us continue our discussion. The most appreciable difference, then, between statistical curves and visual images consists in the fact that the former are laborious to trace or even interpret, whereas the latter record themselves on our retinae without any effort on our part and lend themselves with the greatest ease to our in- terpretation. The former, moreover, are traced long after the causation and appearance of the changes and events which they represent, and represent, too, in the most inter- mittent and irregular as well as in the most dilatory fashion, whereas the latter always show us regularly and uninter- ruptedly what has just occurred or what is actually occurring. But if each of these differences is taken by itself, they will all be seen to be more apparent than real and to be reducible to differences of degree. If Statistics continues to progress as it has done for several years, if the information which it gives us continues to gain in accuracy, in despatch, in bulk, and in regularity, a time may come when upon the accom- plishment of every social event a figure will at once issue forth automatically, so to speak, to take its place on the statistical registers that will be continuously communicated to the public and spread abroad pictorially by the daily press. Then, at every step, at every glance cast upon poster or newspaper, we shall be assailed, as it were, with statis- tical facts, with precise and condensed knowledge of all the 134 Laws of Imitation peculiarities of actual social conditions, of commercial gains or losses, of the rise or falling off of certain political parties, of the progress or decay of a certain doctrine, etc., in exactly the same way as we are assailed when we open our eyes by the vibrations of the ether which tell us of the ap- proach or withdrawal of such and such a so-called body and of many other things of a similar nature. This information is interesting from the point of view of the conservation and development of our organs, just as the former news is interesting from the point of view of the conservation and development of our social being, of our reputation and wealth, of our power, and of our honour. Consequently, granted that statistics be extended and completed to this extent, a statistical bureau might be com- pared to an eye or ear. Like the eye or ear, it would save us trouble by synthesising collections of scattered homogene- ous units for us, and it would give us the clear, precise, and smooth result of this elaboration. And, certainly, under such conditions, it would be no more difficult for an edu- cated man to keep informed of the slightest current changes in religious or political opinion than for a man whose eye- sight was impaired by age to recognise a friend at a dis- tance, or to distinguish the approach of an obstacle in time to avoid it. Let us hope that the day will come when the representative or legislator who is called upon to reform the justiciary or the penal code and yet who is, hypothetically, ignorant of juridical statistics, will be as rare and inconceiv- able a being as a blind omnibus driver or a deaf orchestral leader would be to-day.1 I might freely say, then, that each of our senses gives us, 1 According to Burckhardt, Florence and Venice must have been the cradle of statistics. " Fleets, armies, power and political influence, fall under the debit and credit of a trader's ledger" [The Civilization of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy, I, 97, Jacob Burckhardt. English translation by S. G. C. Middlemore, London, 1878. — TV.]. We find detailed statistics in Milan dating from 1288. In reality, embryonic statistics must have always existed in even the most ignorant and negligent states, just as there are rudimentary senses in the very lowest animals. Archaeology and Statistics 135 in its own way and from its special point of view, the statis- tics of the external world. Their characteristic sensations are in a certain way their special graphical tables. Every sensation — colour, sound, taste, etc., — is only a number, a collection of innumerable like units of vibrations that are represented collectively by this single figure. The affective character of these different sensations is merely their dis- tinctive mark, it is analogous to the difference which char- acterises the figures of our system of notation. How should we know the sounds of do, of re, of mi, except for the fact that there is in the air about us, during a certain consecutive period of time, a certain proportionate number per second of so-called sonorous vibrations? What does the colour red, blue, yellow, or green mean except that the ether is agitated, during a certain consecutive period of time, by a certain proportionate number of so-called luminous vibrations ? Touch, as a sense of temperature, is nothing more than the statistics of the heat vibrations of the ether; as a sense of resistance and weight, it is merely the statistics of our muscular contractions. But the impressions of touch, unlike those of sight and hearing, follow one another without definite proportions; there is no tactile gamut. Hence the inferiority of this sense. Statisticians are lacking in the same way when they fail to give us the relative proportions of their crudely tabulated figures. As for the senses of smell and taste, if they are justly ranked as altogether inferior senses, is it not because, poor statisticians as they are, they do not conform to our elementary rules, but are satisfied with de- fective figures, with the expressions of faulty additions in which the most heterogeneous units, all sorts of nervous vibrations and chemical actions, have been thrown together in the same kind of disorder that we see in a badly made budget ? The reader may have noticed that some of our news- papers publish from day to day graphical curves, showing the fluctuations of the different securities of the stock-ex- 136 Laws of Imitation change, as well as other changes about which it is useful to know. These curves are now relegated to the last page, but they tend to encroach upon the others, and, perhaps, be- fore long, at any rate, at some time in the future when peo- ple have been satiated with declamation and polemic, just as very well read minds begin to be with literature, and when they will read the papers merely for their multifarious state- ments of exact and ungarnished fact, they will usurp the place of honour. The public journals, then, will become socially what our sense organs are vitally. Every printing office will become a mere central station for different bu- reaus of statistics just as the ear-drum is a bundle of acous- tic nerves, or as the retina is a bundle of special nerves each of which registers its characteristic impression on the brain. At present Statistics is a kind of embryonic eye, like that of the lower animals which see just enough to recognise the ap- proach of foe or prey. But this already is a great benefit to have bestowed upon us, and through it we may be kept from running serious dangers. The analogy is plain. It is strengthened by a compar- ison of the part taken by the senses throughout the animal world, from the lowest to the highest rung of the mental ladder, with the role that has been played by newspapers during the course of civilisation. In the case of mollusk, insect, and even of quadruped, the senses are more than the mere scouts of the intelligence — the more imperfect they are, the more important they become. But their functions diminish as they become localised, and the nearer the ap- proach to man, the more subordinate the position which they hold. Similarly, in growing and inferior civilisations like our own (for our descendants will look down upon us just as we do upon our lower brethren), newspapers do more than furnish their reader with thought-stimulating information; they think and decide for him and he is me- chanically moulded and guided by them. A sure sign of ad- vance in civilisation upon the part of a certain class of read- ers, is the fact that the newspaper which appeals to them devotes a smaller portion of itself to phrases and a larger Archasology and Statistics 137 portion to facts and figures and to brief and reliable infor- mation. The ideal newspaper of this kind would be one without political articles and full of graphical curves and succinct editorials. It is obvious that I am not inclined to minimise the func- tion of statistics. And yet, although I realise its future im- portance, I must point out, before concluding, a certain ex- aggerated expectation which is sometimes entertained in relation to it. When we see that these numerical results become more and more constant and regular as they come to refer to larger and larger numbers, we are at times inclined to think that if the tide of population continues to advance and great states to enlarge, a movement will come when in the distant future all social phenomena will be reducible to mathematical formulas. Hence the mistaken inference is drawn that the statistician will some day be able to fore- tell future social conditions with as much certainty as the as- tronomist of to-day predicts the next eclipse of Venus. In this event Statistics would be fated to plunge further and further ahead into the future as archaeology has gone back into the past. But from all that which has gone before we know that Statistics is hemmed within the field of imitation and that the field of invention is forbidden ground. The future will be made by as yet unknown inventors and no real law con- cerning their successive advents can be formulated. In this respect, the future is like the past. It does not fall to the archaeologist to tell precisely what processes of ancient art or industry preceded those which had been substituted for them in the use of a given people at a certain period of its history. Why should the statisician be more fortunate in the opposite direction ? The empire of great men, the even- tual disturbers of prognosticated curves, cannot fail to in- crease, rather than diminish. The progress of population will only extend their imitative following. The progress of civilisation will but hasten and facilitate the imitation of their examples, while, at the same time, it will multiply for a certain period the number of inventive geniuses. It seems 138 Laws of Imitation as if the further we progressed the more all kinds of new and unforeseen things flowed out from the class that gov- erns, from the discoveries, and that among the class that is governed, the copyists, the things that are foreseen (which start, however, from the unforeseen) spread themselves out more and more uniformly and monotonously. And yet, on closer view, progress would seem to have spurred on the ingenuity of invention-aping imitation rather than to have fertilised the inventive genius. True inven- tion, invention which is worthy of the name, becomes more difficult day by day; so that, some time in the near future, it cannot fail to become more rare. And, finally, it must become exhausted; for the mind of any given race is not capable of indefinite development. It follows that, sooner or later, every civilisation, Asiatic or European, is fated to beat itself against its banks and begin its endless cycle over again. Then Statistics will undoubtedly possess the prom- ised gift of prophecy. But this goal is far distant. Mean- while, all that can be said is that in as much as the direction of future inventions is chiefly determined by prior inven- tions, and in as much as the latter are becoming more and more preponderating because of their accumulation, pre- dictions based upon statistics may one day be hazarded with a certain degree of probability, just as it is also quite prob- able that archaeology may come to throw light upon the origins of history. VII It is not superfluous to note, in conclusion, that as the preceding chapter was an answer to the difficult question "What is Society?" so this chapter is an answer to the question " What is History ? " We have searched much and in vain for the distinctive marks of historic facts, for the signs by which we should recognise the natural or human events that were worthy the notice of the historian. According to the learned, history is a collection of Archaeology and Statistics 139 those things that have had the greatest celebrity. I prefer to consider it a collection of those things that have been the most successful, that is, of those ini- tiatives that have been the most imitated. An immensely successful thing may have had no celebrity at all A new word, for example, may slip into a language and become entrenched in it without arousing any attention; a new idea or religious rite may make its way, obscure and unnoticed, into a community; an industrial process may spread anonymously throughout the world. There is no truly historic fact outside of those that can be classed in one of the three following categories : ( i ) The progress or decay of some kind of imitation. (2) The appearance of one of those combinations of different imitations which I call inventions, and which come in time to be imitated. (3) The actions either of human beings, or of animal, vegetal, or physical forces, which result in the imposition of new conditions upon the spread of certain imitations whose bear- ing and direction are thereby modified. From this latter point of view, a volcanic eruption, the submerging of an island or continent, even an eclipse, when it occasions the defeat of a superstitious army, and, still more, the acciden- tal illness or death of an important personage, can have the • same kind and degree of historic importance as a battle or a treaty of peace or an international alliance. The issue of a war in which the fate of a civilisation was at stake, has often depended upon inclement weather. The severe winter of 1811 affected the destinies of France and Russia as seriously as did the Napoleonic plan of campaign. From this point of view pragmatic and even anecdotal history regains the place which philosophers have so often refused to grant it. Nevertheless, the career of imitations is, on the whole, the only thing which is of interest to history. Therein lies its true definition. CHAPTER V.- THE LOGICAL LAWS OF IMITATION STATISTICS gives us a sort of empirical law or graphical formula for the very complex causes of the particular spread of every kind of imitation. We must now consider those general laws, laws which are really worthy the name of sci- ence, which govern all imitations, and to this end we must study, one by one, the different categories of causes which we have heretofore merged together. Our problem is to learn why, given one hundred differ- ent innovations conceived of at the same time — innova- tions in the forms of words, in mythological ideas, in in- dustrial processes, etc. — ten will spread abroad, while ninety will be forgotten. In order to solve this question systematically let us first divide those influences which have favoured or hindered the diffusion of successful or non- successful innovations into physical and social causes. But in this book let us pass over the first order of causes, those, for example, which make the people of southern coun- tries prefer new words composed of voiced to those com- posed of whispered vowels, and the people of northern countries, the Opposite. In the same way there are in my- thology, in artistic or industrial technique, or in govern- ment, many peculiarities which result from a racial confor- mation of ear or larynx, from cerebral predispositions, from meteoric conditions or from the nature of fauna and flora. Let us put all this to one side. I do not mean that it has no real importance in sociology. It is of interest, for example, to note the influence which may be exerted upon the entire course of a civilisation by the na- ture of a new and spontaneous production of its soil. Much 140 The Logical Laws of Imitation 141 depends upon the spot in which it springs; the conditions of labour, and, consequently, the family groups and political institutions of a fertile valley are different from those of a moor more or less rich in pasture-land. We must thank those scholars who devote themselves to researches of this character, researches which are as useful in sociology as studies upon the modification of species by the action of climate or general environment are in biology. It would be erroneous to think, however, that because we had shown the adaptation of living or social types to external phenomena we had thereby explained them. The expla- nation must be sought for in the laws which express the internal relations of cells or of minds in association. This is the reason why, in this discussion of pure and abstract, not of concrete and applied, sociology, I must set aside all considerations of the above nature. Now, social causes are of two kinds, the logical and the non-logical. This distinction is of the greatest importance. Logical causes operate whenever an individual "prefers a given innovation to others because he thirif$ .ft^is more tiSeful or more true than others, that is, mdre in accord than they are with the aims or principles that have already found a place in his mind (through imitation, of course). In such instances, the old or new inventions or discoveries are themselves the only question; they are isolated from any prestige or discredit which may have attached to those circulating them or to the time and place of their origin. But logical action is very rarely untrammelled in this way. In general, the extra-logical influences to which I have referred interfere in the choice of the examples to be fol- lowed, and often, as we shall see further on, the poorest innovations, from the point of view of logic, are selected because of their place, or even date or birth. Unless these necessary distinctions are constantly borne in mind, it is impossible to understand the simplest social facts. Language is a notable example. It seems to me that its present inextricable skein might be readily un- ravelled by applying these ideas (if any professional philolo- 142 Laws of Imitation gist would pay me the compliment of adopting them). Philologists seek for those laws which should govern the for- mation and transformation of languages. But, hitherto, they have only been able to formulate rules which are sub- ject to very many exceptions, in regard to both changes in sound (phonetic laws) and changes in meaning, in re- gard to the acquisition of new words through the combina- tion of old roots or of new grammatical forms through the modification of old forms, etc. Why is this? Because only imitation and not invention is subject to law in the true sense of the word. Now, small, successive inventions have always had to accumulate in order to form or transform an idiom. Besides, in the service of language a large part must be conceded, at the outset, to the accidental and arbitrary. It is because of these individual factors that, among other peculiarities, there are a certain number of roots in a language, that one root will consist of three con- sonants and another of a single syllable, or that one termi- nation and not another will be adopted at the behest of a given shade of thought. After this concession has been made to invention and to influences of a climatic or phy- siological order, a great field is still open to the laws of language. There is, of course, apart from both the irrational and important, not to say pregnant, motives of which I have been speaking, a host of minor linguistic inven- tions which were suggested to their unknown authors by way of analogy,1 i. c., through imitation of self or others; and it is in this direction that linguistic inven- tions are subject to law. The first man to conceive the idea of expressing capacity for respect by adding the suffix bills, which, according to hypothesis, was al- ready used in the compound amabilis, to the root of veneratio, or of creating Germanicus upon the model of Italicus, was an unconscious inventor, but, to put it briefly, 1 Philologists all recognise the immense role played by analogy in their science. See Sayce in particular on this point. The Logical Laws of Imitation 143 he imitated at the same time that he invented. Whenever terminations, or, similarly, declensions or conjugations, have been broadened and generalised in this way, imitation of self and of others has taken place, and precisely to this extent is the formation and transformation of languages subject to formulation into rules. But these rules, which should explain to us why one among many almost synono- mous forms of speech which are concurrently at the service of the tribal, or civic, or national mind has alone fought its way into general usage, fall into very distinct groups. In the first place, we see that the incessant struggle be- tween minor linguistic inventions which always ends in the imitation of one of them, and in the abortion of the others, finally comes to transform a language in such a way as to adapt it, more or less rapidly and completely, according to the spirit of the community, to external realities and to the social purposes of language. Enlargements of vo- cabulary correspond to increases in the number of human beings and of their modes of life. Grammar, by means of a more flexible conjugation of verbs or a clearer or more logical arrangement of phrases, lends itself to the expres- sion of more subtle relations in time and space. The softening and differentiation of vowels (in Sanskrit they are all sharp sounds in a or o; in Greek and Latin, e, u, ou, and i have been added to the vocal key-board) and the contraction and abbreviation of words render a lan- guage more and more pliable and expressive, and dis- tinguished philologists like M. Regnaud 1 have raised to the dignity of a law the vowel softening and the contraction of words of the Indo-European family. In fact, in Zend, Greek, Latin, French, English, and German, the e appears " in an infinite number of cases as a weakened substitute for a," whereas, " the opposite never, or hardly ever, takes place." If, by the way, this rule could be accepted un- reservedly, we should have here a pretty example of lin- guistic irreversibility. 1 See his Essais de linguistique evolutionniste, previously cited. 144 Laws of Imitation But, on the other hand, even in the most perfect idioms, even in that Greek of which it may be said that its con- jugation is a " system of applied logic," * we see that many modifications effected in the course of time are far from being advances in utility or truth. Is the loss of / and v (digamma) or, in many cases, of an initial sibilant of any advantage to Greek? Is it not rather a cause of de- terioration? In France have not certain expanded forms succeeded contracted ones contrary to the law of word con- traction, as portique from porche, capital from cheptal, etc. ? In such cases certain influences, in regard to which the need of logic and finality had no part, preponderated. We know that in the case of the last example certain writers of renown manufactured many words like portique and capital in servile imitation of Latin, and that they succeeded by means of their own prestige in putting them into circula- tion.2 But I do not wish to dwell at greater length upon the science of language. I am content with having indicated in these few observations the drift of the laws which we have still to formulate. In this chapter, the logical laws will occupy our attention exclusively. Invention and imitation are, as we know, the elementary social acts. But what is the social substance or force 1 Curtius, the historian, has borrowed this expression from his brother, the philologist. See his History of Greece [I, 24, English translation by A. W. Ward, M. A., London, 1868.— TV.]. 2 We also know that when one of many rival dialects like those, for example, of Greece or of mediaeval France, succeeds in supplanting its competitors and in crushing them back into the rank of patois, this privilege is not always and never altogether due to its intrinsic merits. It owes it primarily to political triumphs, and to the real or fancied superiority of the province in which it was first spoken. It was thanks to the prestige of Paris that the speech of the Isle of France became the French language. We may note, in passing, that the laws of imita- tion serve to explain both the inward transformations of a language and its outward diffusion. The Logical Laws of Imitation 145 through which this act is accomplished and of which it is merely the form? In other words, what is invented or imitated? The thing which is invented, the thing which is imitated, is always an idea or a volition, a judg- ment or a purpose, which embodies a certain amount of belief and desire. And here we have, in fact, the very soul of words, of religious prayers, of state administration, of the articles of a code, of moral duties, of industrial achieve- ments or of artistic processes. Desire and belief : they are the substance and the force, they are the two psychological quantities1 which are found at the bottom of all the sensa- 1 1 take the liberty of referring the reader, if he be a psychologist, to two articles which I published in August and September, 1880, in the Revue philosophique upon belief and desire and the possibility of measuring them. These articles were republished unrevised in my Essais et melanges sociologiques. Since then my ideas on this subject have been somewhat modified. But let me state in what respects. At present I realise that I may have somewhat exaggerated the role of belief and desire in individual psychology, and I no longer affirm that these two aspects of the ego are the only things in us which are susceptible of addition and diminution. On the other hand, I now attribute to them a greater importance in social psychology. We may admit that there are other quantities in the soul; we may concede to the psycho-physicists, for example, in spite of M. Bergson's remarkable study on the Donnees immedlates de la conscience — which conforms so well in other respects to my own point of view on this subject — that the intensity of sensa- tions, considered apart from their relation to reason, and apart from the amount of attention which is bestowed upon them, changes in degree without changing In nature, and that it therefore lends itself to experi- mental measurement. But it is nevertheless true that, from the social standpoint, belief and desire bear a unique character that is well adapted to distinguish them from simple sensation. This character consists in the fact that the contagion of mutual example re-enforces beliefs and desires that are alike, and weakens or strengthens, according to circum- stances, beliefs and desires that are unlike, among all those individuals who experience them at the same time and who are conscious of so experiencing them. Whereas, although a visual or auditory sensation may be felt in a theatre, for example, in the' midst of a crowd attentive to the same concert or spectacle, it is in no way modified by the simul- taneity of the analogous impressions' experienced by the surrounding public. From certain astounding historical occurrences we may infer how intense a man's belief or desire may become, when it is also experi- enced by everybody else around him. For example, even in the depraved but still credulous Italy of the Renaissance, epidemics of repentance burst out from time to time, which, as Burckhardt says1, touched even the most hardened consciences. These epidemics, of which the one at Florence of 1494-98, under Savonarola, is only one among hundreds, — 146 Laws of Imitation tional qualities with which they combine; and when inven- tion and then imitation takes possession of them in order to organise and use them, they also are the real social quanti- ties. Societies are organised according to the agreement or opposition of beliefs which reinforce or limit one an- other. Social institutions depend entirely upon these con- ditions. Societies function according to the competition or co-operation of their desires or wants. Beliefs, princi- pally religious and moral beliefs, but juristic and political beliefs as well, and even linguistic beliefs (for how many acts of faith are implied in the lightest talk and what an ir- resistible although unconscious power of persuasion our mother tongue, a true mother indeed, exerts over us), are the plastic forces of societies. Economic or aesthetic wants are their functional forces. These beliefs and desires which invention and imitation make specific and in this sense create, although they virtu- ally exist prior to the action of the latter, originate far be- low the social world in the world of life. In like way, the plastic and functional forces of life that are made specific and turned to account by generation, originate beneath the animate in the physical world. In like way, the vibration- ruled molecular and motor forces of the physical world originate in turn in an inscrutable hypophysical world that some of our physicists call the world of noumena, others, Energy, and yet others, the Unknowable. Energy is the most widespread name for this mystery. By this single term a reality is designated which, as we can see, is always twofold in its manifestations; and this eternal bifurcation, which is reproduced under astonishing metamorphoses in each successive stage of universal life, is not the least of the for one occurred after every plague or disaster, — revealed the deep and steady activity of the Christian faith. Wherever souls are possessed of the same faith or ideal, intermittent outbursts of similar contagions are the result. We ourselves no longer have epidemics of penitence, unless they are in the form of contagious pilgrimages — those unique manifesta- tions of the power of suggestion, — but we do have epidemics of luxury. of gambling, of lotteries, of stock-sneculation, of gigantic railroad undertakings, as well as epidemics of Hegelianism, Darwinism, etc. The Logical Laws of Imitation 147 common characteristics to be noted between life's stages. Under the different terms of matter and motion, of organs and functions, of institutions and progress, this great dis- tinction between the static and the dynamic, in which is also- included that between Space and Time, divides the whole universe in two. It is important to state at the outset and firmly establish the relation between these two terms. There is a profound insight underlying the Spencerian formula of Evolution which states that all evolution is gain in matter with cor- responding loss in motion, and that all dissolution is the in- verse. Translated into a somewhat modified and less ma- terialistic phraseology this thought means that every de- velopment in life or society is a growth in organisation off- set or, rather, secured by a relative diminution in function. As an organism grows in weight or dimension, as it unfolds and differentiates its characteristic forms, it loses its vital- ity,1 just because it has used it up in the process, a fact Mr. Spencer fails to mention. As a society enlarges and ex- pands, as it perfects and differentiaties its institutions, its language, religion, law, government, industry, and art, it loses its civilising and propelling vigour; for it has been using it up in its course. In other words, if it is true that the substance of social institutions consists in the sum of faith and confidence, of truth and security, in a word, in the unanimous beliefs which they embody, and that the motor power of social progress consists in the sum of the curiosities and ambitions and of the consistent desires which it expresses, if all this is so, then as a society ad- vances it becomes richer in beliefs than in desires. The true and final object of desire, then, is belief. The only raiscm d'etre of the impulses of the heart is the formation of high degrees of mental certitude and assurance, and the further a society has progressed the more is it possessed, like a mature mind, of stability and tranquillity, of strong 1 The body of a child contains more vital activity, in proportion to its siee, than that of a mature man. The relative vitality of the adult has diminished. 148 Laws of Imitation convictions and dead passions, the former having- been slowly formed and crystallised by the latter.1 Social peace, a unanimous belief in the same ideal or in the same illusion, a unanimity which presupposes a continually widening and deepening assimilation of humanity — this is the goal for which, irrespective of our wishes, all social revolutions are bound. This is progress, that is to say, social advancement along logical lines. Now, how is progress effected? When an individual reflects upon a given subject first one idea comes to him and then another until from idea to idea, from elimination to eli- mination, he finally seizes upon the guiding thread to the solution of the problem and then, from that moment, passes quickly out from the twilight into the light. Does not the same thing happen in history? When a society elaborates some great conception, which the curious public pushes for- ward before science can correct and develop it, the me- chanical explanation of the world, for example, or when it dreams in its ambition of some great achievement like the use of steam in manufacture or locomotion or navigation be- fore it can turn its activity to exploiting it, what happens? The problem that is raised in this way at once prompts people to make and entertain all kinds of contradictory in- ventions and vagaries which appear first here and then there, only to disappear, until the advent of some clear formula or some suitable mechanism which throws all the others into the background and which serves thencefor- ward as the fixed basis for future improvements and de- velopments. Progress, then, is a kind of collective think- ing, which lacks a brain of its own, but which is made possible, thanks to imitation, by the soliditary of the brains 1 Let us fully understand each other on this point too. In the course of civilisation desires increase in number, but decrease in strength, whereas truth and security are both multiplied and strengthened at an even more rapid rate. The contrast is a more striking one, if the condi- tion of barbarity, and not that of savagery, be taken as the starting point of the evolution of civilisation. The latter state, according to our present means of observation, is the final term of a social evolution complete in itself, not the first term of a higher evolution. The Logical Laws of Imitation 149 of numerous scholars and inventors who interchange their successive discoveries. (The fixation of discoveries through writing, which makes possible their transmission over long stretches of time and space, is equivalent to the fixation of images which takes place in the individual brain and which constitutes the cellular stereotype-plate of memory. ) It follows that social like individual progress is effected in two ways, through substitution and through accumula- tion. Certain discoveries and inventions can only be used as substitutes, others can be accumulated. Hence we have logical combats and logical alliances. This is the general classification which we will adopt, and in it we shall have no difficulty in placing all historical events. Moreover, in different societies discord between fresh de- sires and old, between a new scientific idea and existing religious dogmas, is not always immediately perceived nor perceived within the same period of time. Besides, when the discord is perceived, the desire to put an end to it is not al- ways equally strong. The nature and intensity of the desire vary with time and place. In fact, Reason exists in societies as well as in individuals; and Reason in all cases is merely a desire like any other, a specific desire which like others is more or less developed by its own satisfactions as well as created by the very inventions or discoveries which have satisfied it; that is to say that systems, programmes, catechisms, and constitu- tions, in undertaking to render ideas and volitions co- herent, create and stimulate the very desire for their co- herence. This desire is a real force, located in individual brains. Its rise and fall and its direction and object vary according to given periods and countries. At times, it is a passing breeze; at times, a whirlwind. To-day it at- tacks the government of states; yesterday and the day be- fore it attacked languages; to-morrow it may make an attack upon our industrial organisations, and another time upon our sciences; but it never pauses in its incessant labour of regeneration or revolution. 150 Laws of Imitation This desire, as I have said, has been aroused and re- cruited by a series of initiations and imitations. But this is equivalent to saying by a series of imitations, for an inno- vation that is not imitated is socially non-existent. Con- sequently all those streams and currents of belief and de- sire which flow side by side or contrary to one another in so- ciety, quantities whose subtractions and additions are regu- lated by social logic, a kind of social algebra, — all, including the very desire for this general reckoning and the belief in its possibility, — all are derived from imitation. For nothing in history is self-creative; not even its own ever-incomplete unity, the secular fruit of constant and more or less suc- cessful efforts. A drama, to be sure, a stage play, a frag- ment in which the whole of history is mirrored, is a logical and gradual and intricate harmony which seems to work it- self out independently of anybody's design. But we know that this appearance is misleading and that the harmony transpires as surely and rapidly as it does only because it an- swers to the imperious need for unity that is felt by the dramatist as well as by the public to whom he has sug- gested it. Everything, even the desire to invent, has the same origin. In fact, this desire completes and is part of the logical need for unification, if it is true, as I might prove, that logic is both a problem of a maximum and a problem of equilibrium. The more a people invent and discover, the more inventive and the more eager for new discoveries they grow. It is also through imitation that this noble kind of craving takes possession of those minds that are worthy of it. Now, discoveries are gains in certitude, inventions, in confidence and security. The desire to discover and invent is, consequently, the twofold form which the tendency to- ward achieving a maximum of public faith takes on. This creative tendency which is peculiar to synthesising and as- similating minds often alternates, is sometimes concomi- tant, but in all cases always agrees with the critical tend- ency towards an equilibrium of beliefs through the elimi- nation of those inventions or discoveries which are contrary The Logical Laws of Imitation 151 to the majority of their number. The desire for unanim- ity of faith and the desire for purification of faith is each in turn more fully satisfied, but in general their ebullitions either coincide with, or follow closely upon each other. For just because imitation is their common source, both of them, the desire for stable as well as that for absolute faith, have a degree of intensity proportionate, other things being equal, to the degree of animation in the social life, that is, to the multiplicity of relations between individuals. Any fine combination of ideas must first shine out in the mind of the individual before it can illumine the mind of a nation; and its chance of being produced in the individual mind depends upon the frequency of the intellectual ex- changes between minds. A contradiction between two in- stitutions or two principles will not harass a society until it has been noted by some exceptionally sagacious person, some systematic thinker, who, having been checked in his conscious efforts to unify his own group of ideas, points out the aforesaid difficulty. — This explains the social impor- tance of philosophers. — And the greater the amount of mutual intellectual stimulation and, consequently, the greater the circulation of ideas within a nation, the more readily will such a difficulty be perceived. In the course of the nineteenth century, for example, the relations of man to man having been multiplied beyond all expectation as a result of inventions in locomotion, and the action of imitation having become very powerful, very rapid, and very far-reaching, we should not be surprised to see that the passion for social reforms, for systematic and rational social reorganisations has taken on its present pro- portions, just as, by virtue of its previous conquests, the passion for social, especially industrial, conquests over nature has known no bounds. Therefore it is safe to predict that a century of adjustment will follow upon the past century of discovery. (Does not the nineteenth cen- tury deserve this name?) Civilisation requires that an afflux of discovery and an effort to harmonise discoveries shall coincide with or follow one another. 1 52 Laws of Imitation On the other hand, when societies are in their uninvent- ive phases they are also uncritical, and vice versa. They embrace the most contradictory beliefs of surrounding fash- ions or inherited traditions; 1 and no one notes the contra- dictions. And yet, at the same time, they carry within themselves, as a result of the contributions of fashion and tradition, much scattered thought and knowledge which would reveal from a certain angle a fruitful although un- suspected self -consistency. In the same way they borrow out of curiosity from their different neighbours, or cherish out of piety as a heritage from their different forefathers, the most dissimilar arts and industries, which develop in them ill-assorted needs and opposing currents of activity. Nor are these practical antinomies, any more than the aforesaid theoretical contradictions, felt or formulated by anybody, although everybody suffers from the unrest which they provoke. But at the same time neither do such primi- tive peoples perceive that certain of their artistic processes and mechanical tools are fitted to be of the greatest mutual service and to work powerfully together for the same end, the one serving as the efficient means of the other, just as certain perceptions serve as intermediaries in explaining certain hypotheses which they confirm. The grindstone and the paddle-wheel were known about for a long time without the idea occurring to people that by means of a certain artifice, that is, by adding a third inven- tion, a mill, to the other two, they might be made to co- 1 M. Earth, for example, says that " Buddhism carried in itself the denial, not of the regime of castes in general, but of the caste of the Brahmans, and this without respect to any doctrine of equality, and without, for its part, having any thought of revolt. Thus it is quite possible that the opposition which existed remained for long an uncon- scious one on both sides " [The Religions of India, pp. 125-26, A. Barth, English translation by Rev J. Wood, London, 1882. — TV.]. Finally, it became flagrant, but, for all that, and here was another unconscious contradiction, " the name brahman remained a title of honour among the Buddhists, and in Ceylon it was given to kings " [Ibid., p. 127. — TV.] . somewhat as the titles of count and marauis are valued in our own democratic society, in spite of its stand against the principles of feudalism. The Logical Laws of Imitation 153 operate to an extraordinary degree. Back in Babylon, bricks were marked with the names of their maker by means of movable characters or stamps, and books were com- posed; but the thought of combining these two ideas, of composing books with movable characters, was not con- ceived of, although it was a very simple matter and one that would have precipitated the coming of printing by some thousands of years. The cart and the piston likewise coexisted for a long time without giving rise to the idea of using the latter (through other inventions, of course) as a means of pro- pelling the former. On the other hand, at the close of the decadent Middle Ages, for example, how many pagan and licentious tastes for luxury, importations or revivals from Arabia or from the ancient world, crept through castle loopholes and monastery windows to ingratiate themselves within and to form bold medleys, not at all disturbing, however, to the men of those times, with the existing practices of Christian piety and the rude customs of the feudal system! Even in our own days, how many op- posite and contradictory objects our industrial or national activity is engaged in achieving ! And yet, as the exchange and friction of ideas and the communication and trans- fusion of needs becomes more rapid, the elimination of the weaker by the stronger, when opposition arises, will be more quickly accomplished and, at the same time, and for the same reason, mutually helpful and confirmatory aims and ideas will be more prompt to encounter each other in the ingenious mind. In these two ways, social life must necessarily reach a degree of logical unity and power hitherto unknown.1 1 Now we can see why the process of unifying the national faith by the expulsion of religious or political heretics (the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, every kind of religious persecution) is always far from accomplishing its object. It keeps a population, to be sure, igno- rant of those contradictions which might undermine their beliefs, but, although it may maintain the latter, it also precludes additions to their number. For the ignorance of contradictions which dulls the critical sense also sterilises the imagination and dims the consciousness of mu- 1 54 Laws of Imitation I have now pointed out how the social need for logic, through which alone a social logic is formed, arises and develops. It is at present necessary to see how it sets about to obtain satisfaction. We already know that its two tend- encies are distinguishable, the one creative, the other criti- cal, the one abounding in combinations of old accumulable inventions and discoveries, the other in struggles between alternative inventions or discoveries. We shall study each of these tendencies separately, beginning with the latter. II. The Logical1 Duel Suppose that a discovery, an invention, has appeared. There are straightway two facts for us to note about it; its gains in faith, as it spreads from one person to another, and the losses in faith to which it subjects the invention which had the same object or satisfied the same desire when it intervened. Such an encounter gives rise to a logical duel. For example, cuneiform writing spread for a long time undisturbed throughout Central Asia, while Phoeni- cian writing had the same career in the Mediterranean basin. But one day these two alphabets came into conflict over the territory of the former; and cuneiform writing slowly receded, but did not disappear until about the first century of our era. Studied in detail, then, the history of societies, like psychologial evolution, is a series or a simultaneous occur- rence of logical duels (when it is not one of logical unions). What happened in the case of writing had already happened in that of language. Linguistic progress is effected first by imitation and then by rivalry between two languages or tual confirmations. Moreover, a time comes when, as Colins says, enquiry can no longer be repressed. 1 1 might just as well have said Ideological as logical, just as, later on, the term logical union means teleological union as well. But it seemed well to identify the two points of view in this chapter at least. The Logical Law of Imitation 155 dialects which quarrel over the same country and one of which is crowded back by the other, or between two terms or idioms which correspond to the same idea. This struggle is a conflict between opposite theses implicit in every word or idiom which tends to substitute itself for another word or grammatical form. If, at the moment I think of a horse, the two words equus and caballus, borrowed from two dif- ferent Latin dialects, come into my mind at the same time, it is as if the judgment " equus is a better designation than caballus " were contradicted in my thought by the judg- ment " caballus is better than equus." If I have to choose between i and .$• to express plurality, for example, this choice is also conditioned by judgments which are intrinsi- cally contradictory. During the formation of the Romance tongues thousands of like contradictions came into the brains of the Gallo-Romans, Spaniards, and Italians; and the need of adjusting them gave birth to the modern lan- guages. What philologists call the gradual simplification of grammars is only the result of the work of elimination that is prompted by a vague feeling of these implicit con- tradictions. This is the reason, for example, that Italian always uses i and Spanish, s, whereas Latin sometimes made use of i and sometimes of s. I have compared the logical struggle to a duel. In fact, in each of these separate combats, in each of the elementary facts of social life that pass through an edition of number- less copies, the opposing aims or judgments are always two in number. Have you ever seen a battle take place in an- cient or mediaeval or modern times between three of four parties? Never. There may be seven or eight, or ten or twelve, armies of different nationalities, but there can be only two hostile camps, just as in the counsel of war prior to a battle there are never more than two opinions at the same time, in relation to any plan of action, the one for it and the other made up of those united against it. And, obviously, the quarrel to be fought out upon the battlefield may always be summed up in a yes opposed to a no. Every casus belli is this, at bottom. Of course the adversary who 156 Laws of Imitation gainsays the other (in religious wars principally) or who thwarts the plan of the other (in political wars) has his own particular thesis or plan as well; but only in as much as his thought or will is more or less directly or indirectly, im- plicitly or explicitly, negative or obstructive, does it render the conflict inevitable. Hence whatever political parties or fragments of parties there may be in a country, for example, there are never more than two sides In relation to any ques- tion, the government and the opposition, the fusion of heterogeneous parties united on their negative side. This remark applies generally. At all times and places the apparent continuity of history may be decom- posed into distinct and separable events, events both small and great, which consist of questions followed by solutions. Now, a question for societies, as for individuals, is a waver- ing between a given affirmation and a given negation, or between a given goal and a given impediment; and a solu- tion, as we shall see later on, is only the suppression of one of the two adversaries or of their inconsistency. For the moment I shall speak of questions only. They are really logical discourses; one says yes, the other, no. One desires a yes, the other, a no. It makes no difference whether we are dealing with language or religion, with jurisprudence or government, the distinction between the affirmative and the negative side is easily found. In the elementary linguistic duel which we were consider- ing above, the established term or idiom affirms and the new term or idiom denies. In the religious duel, the ortho- dox dogma affirms, the heterodox denies, just as, later, when science tends to replace religion, the accepted theory is the affirmation that is controverted by the new theory. Juridical contests are of two kinds. The one occurs in the bosom of a parliament or cabinet whenever it deliberates upon a law or decree, the other, in the bosom of a court whenever a case is tried before it. Now, the legislator must always choose between the adoption or the rejection of the proposed law, I. e., between its affirmation or its negation. As for the judge, we know that in every suit that is brought The Logical Laws of Imitation 157 before him, — a peculiarity that has been overlooked in spite of its significance, — there is always a plaintiff who affirms something and a defendant who denies it. If the defendant puts in a counter claim, this means that a second suit is added to the first. If other parties intervene, each of them takes on the character of plaintiff or defendant and thus multiplies the number of the separate questions between the litigants of the action. In political contests a distinction should be made between foreign and intestine wars. The latter are called civil wars when they reach their highest pitch of intensity and result in armed violence. In ordinary times, they constitute the parliamentary or election contests of political factions. In a foreign war is there not always an offensive and defensive army, one in favour of a fight and the other against it? And, above all, is not the cause of war the advance of some claim, or, if it be a doctrinal war, of some dogma that is noised about and pushed for- ward by one of the belligerents and rejected by the other? In electoral or parliamentary wars there are as many sepa- rate combats as the number of measures or principles that are proposed or proclaimed on the one hand and condemned or contradicted on the other. This process between an official plaintiff and one or more opposing defendants is renewed under countless pretexts, from the moment that a ministry or government is first formed; it is ended by the destruc- tion of the opposition — as, for example, in 1594, by the de- feat of the Catholic League — or by the downfall of the gov- ernment or ministry. As for industrial rivalries, to conclude, they consist, if we consider them closely, in many successive or simultaneous duels between inventions that have spread and been established for a shorter or longer period and one or more new inventions that are trying to spread by satisfy- ing more fully the same need. Thus there are always in an in- dustrially progressive society a certain number of old prod- ucts which defend themselves with varying fortune against new ones. The production and consumption of the former embody a strong affirmation or conviction, — in the case of tallow candles, for example, we have the affirmation that 158 Laws of Imitation this means of lighting is the best and most economical, — that is impugned by the production and consumption of the latter. We are surprised to find a conflict of propositions underlying the quarrel over shop-counters. The quarrels that are to-day past history between cane sugar and beet sugar, between the stage-coach and the locomotive, between the sailboat and the steamboat, etc., were once real social discussions or even argumentations.' For not only two propositions, but two syllogisms, were here face to face, according to a general condition unheeded by logicians. The one said, for example, " The horse is the fastest domestic ani- mal. Now, locomotion is possible only by means of animals; consequently the stage-coach is the best means of locomo- tion." To this, the other answered : " The horse is, to be sure, the fastest animal, but it is not true that only brute forces can be utilised in the transportation of men and merchandise, consequently, your conclusion is false." This observation should be generalised, and it would be easy for us to discover many syllogistic rebuffs of a similar kind in the above logical duels. I may add that, in the case of industry, the contest is not merely one between two inventions meeting the same need or between the manufacturers or corporations or classes which have monopolised them separately. It is also one between two different needs. The one, some widespread and domi- nant desire that has been developed by a number of antece- dent inventions, like the love of country, for example, amon