CHAPTER VIII

REMARKS AND COROLLARIES

AFTER having studied the principal laws of imitation we have still to make their general meaning clear, to complete them by certain observations, and to point out several important consequences which proceed from them.

The supreme law of imitation seems to be its tendency towards indefinite progression. This immanent and immense kind of ambition¹ is the soul of the universe. It expresses itself, physically, in the conquest of space by light, vitally, in the claim of even the humblest species to cover the entire globe with its kind. It seems to impel every discovery or innovation, however futile, including the most insignificant individual innovations, to scatter itself through the whole of the indefinitely broadened social field. But unless this tendency be backed up by the coming together of inventions which are logically and teleologically auxiliary, or by the help of the prestige which belongs to alleged superiorities, it is checked by the different obstacles which it has successively to overcome or to turn aside. These obstacles are the logical and teleological contradictions which are opposed to it by other inventions, or the barriers which have been raised up by a thousand causes, by racial pride and prejudice, for the most part, between different families and tribes and peoples and, within each people or tribe, between different classes. Consequently, if a good idea is introduced in one of these groups, it propagates itself without any difficulty until it finds itself stopped short by the group’s frontiers. Fortunately, this arrest is only a slowing up. It is true that, at first, in the case of class barriers, a happy innovation which has happened to originate and make its way in a lower class, does not, during periods of hereditary aristocracy and of physiological inequality, so to speak, spread further, unless the advantage of adopting it appear plain to the higher classes; but, on the other hand, innovations which have been made or accepted by the latter classes easily reach down, as I have shown already, to those lower levels which are accustomed to feel their prestige. And it happens that, as a result of this prolonged descent, the lower strata gradually mount up, step by step, to swell the highest ranks with their successive increments. Thus, through assimilating themselves with their models, the copies come to equal them, that is, they become capable of becoming models in their turn, while assuming a superiority which is no longer hereditary, which is no longer centred in the whole person, but which is individual and vicarious. The march of imitation from top to bottom still goes on, but the inequality which it implies has changed in character. Instead of an aristocratic, intrinsically organic inequality, we have a democratic inequality, of an entirely social origin, which we may call inequality if we wish, but which is really a reciprocity of invariably impersonal prestiges, alternating from individual to individual and from profession to profession. In this way, the field of imitation has been constantly growing and freeing itself from heredity.

In the second place, in regard to barriers between families, tribes, or peoples, it is equally true that while the knowledge or institutions or beliefs or industries which belong to any group while it is powerful and triumphant, spread without difficulty to neighbouring groups that have been conquered and brought low; on the other hand, the examples of the weak and vanquished, if we except the case of those whose civilisation is obviously superior, are practically nonexistent for their conquerors. Hence it follows, parenthetically, that war is much more of a civiliser for the conquered than for the conqueror, for the latter does not deign to learn from the former, whereas the former submits himself to the ascendency of victory and borrows from his enemy a number of fruitful ideas to add to his national store. The Egyptians took nothing from the books of the captive Hebrews. They made a great mistake. Whereas the Jews gained much inspiration from the hieroglyphics of their masters. But, as I have said, when a people dominates others through its brilliancy, others, who heretofore had imitated none but their forefathers, imitate it. Now, this extra-national propagation of imitation, to which I have given the name of fashion, is, at bottom, merely the application to the relations between states of the law which governs the relations between classes. Thanks to the invasion of fashion, imitation always descends from the state which is for the time being superior to those which are for the time inferior, just as it descends from the highest to the lowest rungs of the social ladder. Consequently, we shall not be surprised to see the rule of fashion producing effects in the former case similar to those produced by it in the matter. In effect, just as the radiation of the examples of the higher classes results in preparing the way for their enlargement, where imitation is facile and reciprocal, through the absorption of the lower classes by them, so the contagious prestige of preponderating states results in preparing the way for their extension, for the extension of states which were originally families, then tribes, and, later, cities and nations, and which have been constantly enlarged through the assimilation of neighbours whom they have annexed, or through the annexation of neighbours whom they have assimilated.

Another analogy. Just as the play of imitation from top to bottom leads, in its continuation, to so-called democratic equality, that is to say, to the fusion of all classes into one, in which reciprocal imitation is admirably practised through the acceptance of one another’s respective superiorities, so a prolonged process of fashion-imitation ends by putting pupil-peoples upon the same level, both in their armaments and in their arts and sciences, with their master-people. It creates a kind of federation between them like that which is called in modern times, for example, the European balance of power. By this is meant the reciprocity of every kind of service or exchange which goes on incessantly between the different great centres which divide up European civilisation. In this way, in international relations, the free and unimpeded domain of imitation has been enlarged with scarcely an interruption.

But, at the same time, Tradition and Custom, the conservative forms of imitation, have been fixing and perpetuating its new acquisitions and consolidating its increments in the heart of every class of people that has been raised up through the example of higher classes or of more civilised neighbours. At the same time, too, every germ of imitation which may have been secreted in the brain of any imitator in the form of a new belief or aspiration, of a new idea or faculty, has been steadily developing in outward signs, in words and acts which, according to the law of the march from within to without, have penetrated into his entire nervous and muscular systems.

Here then we have the laws of the preceding chapters in focus from the same point of view. Through them, the tendency of imitation, set free from generation, towards geometric progression, expresses and fulfils itself more and more. Every act of imitation, therefore, results in the preparation of conditions that will make possible and that will facilitate new acts of imitation of an increasingly free and rational and, at the same time, precise and definite character. These conditions are the gradual suppression of caste, class, and nationality barriers and, I may add, the lessening of distances through more rapid means of locomotion, as well as through greater density of population. This last condition is realised in the degree that fruitful, that is to say, widely imitated, agricultural or industrial inventions, and the equally fruitful discovery of new lands promote the world-wide circulation of the most inventive and, at the same time, the most imitative races. Let us suppose that all these conditions are combined and that they are fulfilled in the highest degree. Then, wherever a happy initiative might show itself in the whole mass of humanity, its transmission by imitation would be almost instantaneous, like the propagation of a wave in a perfectly elastic medium. We are approaching this strange ideal. Already, in certain special phases, where the most essential of the conditions which I have indicated happen to be combined, social life reveals the reality of the aforesaid tendency. We see it, for example, in the world of scholars, who, although they are widely scattered, are in constant touch with one another through multiple international communications. We see it, too, in the perpetual and universal contact of merchants. Haeckel said in an address delivered in 1882 on the success of Darwin’s theories: “The prodigious influence which the decisive victory of the evolutionary idea exercises over all the sciences, an influence which grows in geometric progression year by year, opens out to us the most consoling perspectives.” In fact, the success of Darwin and Spencer has been amazingly swift. As for the rapidity of commercial imitation as soon as it is given free scope, it has been a matter for observation in every period, not merely in our own. Read in Ranke the description of the progress of Antwerp from 1550 to 1566. During those sixteen years the commerce of that city with Spain doubled; with Portugal, Germany, and France it was more than tripled; with England, it increased twenty-fold! Unfortunately, war put an end to this prosperity. But in such intermittent flights we see the steady force which pushes on to indefinite commercial expansion.

I

It is now proper to bring to light a general observation, a special side of which I have just been indicating in pointing out the passing of unilateral into reciprocal imitation. The mere play of imitation has resulted, then, not only in extending it, but in making it two-sided as well. Now, this effect which imitation produces upon itself, it also produces upon many other connections between people. Ultimately it transforms all unilateral into mutual relations.

We ceased long ago to believe in Rousseau’s “social contract.” We know that far from having been the first tie between human wills, contract was a bond of slow formation, that it took centuries of subjection to the empire of the coercive decree, of the passively obeyed command, to suggest the idea of the reciprocal decree, as it were, of the complex bond by which two wills are linked together in alternate command and obedience. Nevertheless, many people still believe, although the error is quite similar, that exchange was the first step taken by mankind. This was not so at all. Before the idea of exchanging came that of present making or that of thieving, much simpler relations.¹ Perhaps you also believe that at the very outset men talked, discussed, and interchanged ideas with one another like the shepherds of an eclogue? Now, this exchange did not occur in primitive times any more than did that of men’s products. Discussion presupposes the concession on both sides of the right of mutual enlightenment; but before that it presupposes the possession of truth, that is to say, of an individual perception or opinion which attributes to itself the rightful power of being recognised by all normal minds. Would the idea of this kind of power be possible without the preliminary experience of such power as exercised by a father, priest, or teacher? Is it not dogma that has alone made possible the conception of truth? In the same way, if some reader of idyls were inclined to think that primitive men, even the gentlest savages, were familiar with courtesy and mutual consideration, he should be shown the proofs that urbanity in France and everywhere else, born as it was of the non-reciprocal homages and compliments paid to chiefs, over-lords, and kings, is the gradual vulgarising, as history clearly shows, of this one-sided flattery as it becomes a mutual thing in its expansion. Alas! We cannot even believe that war, if by that word we mean the exchange of blows inflicted by weapons, which are more or less alike, was the first international relation between human groups. The chase, that is to say, the destruction or expulsion of some defenceless being, of a peaceful tribe by a brigand horde, preceded anything worthy of the name of war.¹

Now, how did the human chase come to make way for human warfare? How did flattery come to make way for courtesy, credulity for free enquiry, dogmatism for mutual instruction? Docility for voluntary agreement and absolutism for self-government? Privilege for equality before the law, present-making or theft for exchange,² slavery for industrial co-operation? And, finally, primitive marriage, the one-sided appropriation of the wife by the husband, for marriage as we know it, the appropriation of the wife by the husband and of the husband by the wife? I answer: through the slow and inevitable effect of imitation, of imitation under all its forms. It will be easy to quickly prove this. I need do nothing more than indicate the transitory phases that have been traversed in the course of the above transformations.

In the beginning, one man always monopolises the power and the right to teach; no one disputes it to him. Everything that he says must be believed by all, and he alone has the right to deliver oracles. But at last the desire arises among those who have drunk in with the greatest credulity the words of their master, to be infallible like him, to resemble him in that particular as well. Hence those efforts of genius on the part of philosophers which will end one day by bringing about the recognition of every individual’s right to spread his own particular faith and to evangelise even his pristine masters. But before this they must limit themselves to more humble pretensions; and imitation of the theologians is so thoroughly the spirit of their dissimulated revolt that they feel happy if, while they submit without discussion to dogma, although to dogma which is for the first time hemmed into a particularly assigned sphere, they succeed in dogmatising in their own little domain by imposing upon scholars and scientists certain capital ideas which are laid down as incontrovertible, the theories of Aristotle or Plato, for example, in as much as they are not contrary to religious faith. On the other hand, at the same period of transition, scientists who also bow down to a certain extent under the metaphysical yoke, know how to dogmatise in their turn. It is a series of dogmatic rebounds which make evident the need of imitation from which this singular stage of thought proceeds. It is nevertheless true that the emancipation of human reason comes from the same source. In fact, there is something contradictory and artificial in the attitude of the mind which already feels its own power, but which, believing in its right to impose its convictions without discussion upon others, nevertheless believes that it is its duty to accept without examination the convictions of others. So much timidity is inconsistent with so much pride. And so the time comes when a bolder and more logical mind conceives the desire of dogmatising without restriction, of asserting and imposing its convictions both above and below. Its example is at once followed, and discussion becomes general. Free thought is nothing else but the mutual conflict and mutual restraint of many such self-asserting, contradictory individual infallibilities.

Originally, one man commands and the others obey. Authority, like instruction, is monopolised by the father or the teacher. The rest of the group has no other function but to obey. But this autocratic authority becomes an object of envy. The ambitious among those that are ruled over conceive the idea of reconciling their subjection with their craving for power. At first they dream of limiting, of circumscribing the authority exerted over them by their rulers, then of diverting it, still in a limited and definite form, to the subjects next in rank. We have here a hierarchy of limited but indisputable commanding powers. The feudal system was the realisation of this idea on the greatest scale. But, as a matter of fact, the military organisation of any period is its most obvious incarnation, and this example shows us that the conception in question, just as the preceding and analogous conception, that of the hierarchy of dogmatic systems, answers to a permanent need in societies, their need of patriotic defence or of educating their children. Later on, however, men dare more, they wish to be able to command in certain respects those whom in other respects they obey and vice versa, or to be able to command for a time those who have been or who will be obeyed at another time. This reciprocity is obtained by recruiting the men in the public service from all classes, by rotation in office, and by the right of universal suffrage. The mere fact of voting implies on the part of the voter a pledge to submit to whomsoever may be elected and in this way imparts to the decrees of the latter a character of tacit contract. Can the popular sovereignty which is formed in this way be said to be anything else but kingly sovereignty multiplied into millions of examples? Without the example of the latter, as it is notably embodied in Louis XIV, would the former have ever been conceived?

All social changes or advances which have been effected by the substitution of the reciprocal for the unilateral relation, and which I deem consequences of the action of imitation, are attributed by Spencer to the replacement of “militancy “by “industrialism.” But the development of industry itself is subject to the law in question. In fact, the first germ of industry is unpaid slave labour or the labour of woman, the born slave of primitive man. The Arab, for example, is waited on, nourished, dressed, and even lodged by his numerous wives, just as the Roman was by his slaves. For this reason polygny is as necessary to him as our numerous tradesmen to us. The relations between producer and consumer begin, then, like those between father and son or between husband and wife, by being abusive. But by dint of working gratis for others, the slave aspires to make someone work gratis for himself, and, thanks to a gradual restriction in the power of his masters in no longer controlling all his acts or all his time, he ends by accumulating savings which first enable him to buy his freedom and then to purchase one or more slaves, his victims in turn. Had he dreamed only of freedom, he would have hastened to enjoy it in isolation, providing for his own wants himself. But, as a matter of fact, he copies the wants of his ancient masters; in the satisfaction of these wants, he wishes to be served, like them, by others; and as this condition becomes more and more general, the times comes when all these ancient emancipated slaves, all of whom pretend to have slaves, alternately or mutually serve one another. Hence division of labour and industrial co-operation.¹ Of course, let it be said once for all, the desire of imitation would not have succeeded in effecting either the aforesaid transformations or those I am about to mention had not certain inventions or discoveries made them possible. The invention of the water-mill, for example, in lightening slave labour to a considerable degree, prepared the way for the slave’s emancipation; and, in general, if a sufficient number of machines had not been successively invented, we might still have slaves in our midst. Scientific discoveries, notably astronomical ones, have alone given the opportunity to individual reason to fight advantageously against dogmatic authority. Juristic discoveries or inventions, the dictation of new legal formulas by writers or publicists, have alone permitted national sovereignty to manifold and thereby replace the sovereignty of royalty. But it is nevertheless true that the desire to imitate the superior, to be, like him, believed in, obeyed, and waited upon, was an immense, although latent, force which urged on the transformations I have mentioned; and it needed only the necessary accident of these inventions or discoveries to be developed.

Let us continue. The chase of man is, as I have said, the first international relation. A tribe, a folk, thanks to the discovery of some new weapon or of some new improvement of which it has the secret, exterminates or subjugates all its neighbours. Such undoubtedly were the rapid conquests of the ancient metal-possessing Aryans over the smooth- or rough-stone peoples; such were the American “settlements” of Europeans among the ill-fated Indians, a people without horses or game-supplying guns. Now, how was true warfare, a two-sided chase, according to the usage of civilised nations, substituted for this one-sided warfare, so to speak? Through the imitative spread among all these peoples of the weapons and tactics which had led to the triumph of one of their number. But they dream of imitating this conqueror still further, they seek to obtain a military monopoly like him, to discover some overpowering weapon which will make them invincible and will again reduce war to a chase. Fortunately, this dream has never been fulfilled except in a slight degree, although the Prussians with their needle-rifles did in fact treat the Austrians at Sadowa as a sportsman does a rabbit. As an intermediate stage between these two terms of evolution, I may mention certain barbarous epochs in which a people which has been completely overthrown and made tributary consoles itself for its defeat by crushing without a motive one of its more feeble neighbours and making it in turn pay tribute. In Gaul, in Cæsar’s time, certain peoples were clients of others, an international arrangement which could be defined as the feudal system applied to inter-state relations.

I have kept to the last an example which, although it is the least important, is the best fitted to illustrate the truth of my ideas. In a democratic society, a society which has always been preceded by aristocratic, monarchical, or theocratic rule, we may see the people in the street bow to one another, address one another with mutual politeness, and shake hands with one another. Whence come these usages? I leave to Spencer the task of pointing out in a masterly way, the royal or religious source of all this and of showing how the prostration of the whole body became slowly transformed into a slight inclination of the figure or uncovering of the head. Let me add that if removing the hat is but the much modified survival of the primitive obeisance, it is also the mutualised form of the latter. I may say as much of the homage or flattery of the court whose crude incense, burned on the altar of the mighty, suffocates us when a puff of it reaches us over the distance of a century or two in the dedication of some old book. The compliments which well-bred people pay each other to-day are far from being so exaggerated, but they have the advantage of being reciprocal. So, too, are those visits which were formerly, in their character of homage, unilateral. Politeness is merely reciprocity of flattery. Moreover, we know beyond a doubt that the desire of the petty potentate for ambassadors, of the marquis for pages, of the courtier for a court, that the general need of being flattered, waited on, and saluted like a nobleman, was the secret factor which little by little, in France and elsewhere, made every man polite. It began with the court, then reached the city, then the chateaux, and then all classes to the very lowest. The urbanity which characterised the ancient régime from the time of Louis XIV was the intermediate state, analogous to the transitory phases that were referred to above. Each of the innumerable ranks into which the society of that period was broken up forced the rank below it to pay it gratuitious courtesies, visits and obeisances, which it did not return.¹ It was a hierarchy of impertinences, as La Bruyère observes somewhere. But as we near the close of this vanished world, we perceive that courtesies are becoming mutual and that “equality” is approaching. In fact, of all the levelling methods that have been invented in the course of civilisation perhaps none is as powerful and as inconspicuous as that of politeness in manners and customs. What Cicero said of friendship, amicitia pares aut facit aut invenit, applies perfectly to urbanity and especially to the life of polite society. The drawing room admits equals only or equalises those whom it admits. Through this latter feature, it constantly tends to diminish, even outside of itself, those social inequalities which within it are immediately effaced. When hierarchical functionaries of very unequal rank meet very frequently in society, their relations show the effects of it even during the interval between their social meetings. Polite manners are even superior to railroads in overcoming distances, not only between civil or military functionaries, but also between classes which eventually draw nearer to one another by virtue of bowing to or shaking hands with one another. In our changing society thousands of people are daily flattered by hearing themselves addressed as sir or madam. In this, as in so many other respects, in its countenance of the rules of fashion, in its devotion to the philosophic ideas of the eighteenth century, the nobility of the old régime helped to undermine its own foundations and “buried itself in its triumph.”

II

The preceding considerations upon the transition of the unilateral to the reciprocal lead us quite naturally to treat of a question of greater interest and of one which should have been handled by sociologists, I mean the problem of what is reversible and what irreversible in history.¹ Everybody feels that in certain respects a society can pass in a precisely opposite direction through certain phases that it has already traversed, but that in other respects it is cut off from any such regression. We have seen above that after having passed from custom to fashion, communities can go back from fashion to custom—to custom that has broadened, out, to be sure, never to that which has been narrowed in;—but can they, after they have substituted reciprocal for unilateral relations, retrograde from the former to the latter? They cannot, and for a reason that I have already implied. “Monopolies,” Cournot very justly remarks, “great trading or fighting corporations, the slave trade, negro slavery, and all the colonial institutions which go with it, are things for which the world has no further wish, which have disappeared or which are about to disappear, without our being able to think that they will ever return any more than the slavery or the forum of antiquity or than mediæval feudalism.” This is true, but upon what is this conviction based? The reason should be stated, and yet Cournot does not state it. We have learned that this necessary and irreversible transition from monopoly to commercial freedom, from slavery to exchange of services, etc., is a corollary of the laws of imitation. Now, these laws may cease to act, either in part or in whole, and, in this case, a society perishes partially or completely; but the laws cannot be reversed.

Again, is it conceivable for a great empire, like the Roman Empire of Marcus Aurelius, to turn about and become first an Italian republic Hellenised by a Scipio, then an uncultivated and fanatical republic governed by a Cato, then a little barbarous village organised by a Numa? Or can it even be conceived that after having passed from a violent to an astute and voluptuous state of criminality, as is always the case, and from crimes to vices, a society ceases to be vicious to again become austere and sanguinary? We could as well conceive of an adult organism retrograding from maturity to youth, from youth to infancy, and ending by returning to the ovum from which it issued, or of a burnt-out star, like the moon, setting itself to retraversing the exhausted series of its ancient geological periods or of its vanished faunas and floras. Dissolution is never, in spite of Spencer’s opinion to the contrary, the symmetrical pendant of evolution. Does that mean that the world has really one direction and one goal, or, rather, that all reality, in its constant discontent with its destiny and in its preference for the unknown or even for annihilation as against its own past, refuses primarily to relive its life, to retrace its path?

I hasten to add that, on one of its important sides, historical reversibility or irreversibility cannot be explained by the laws of imitation alone. Successive inventions and discoveries, which imitation lays hold of in order to spread them abroad, do not follow one another accidentally. A rational tie which we do not need to dwell upon here, but which has been clearly pointed out by Auguste Comte in his conception of the development of the sciences and which has been definitely traced out by Cournot, in his masterly treatise upon L’Enchaînement des idées fondamentales, binds them to one another; and we cannot but admit that to a large extent their order, the order, for example, of mathematical discoveries from Pythagoras to us, might have been inverted. Here, irreversibility is based upon the laws of inventive logic, and not upon those of imitation.

Let us stop for a moment to justify, in passing, the distinction that I have just drawn. The order of successive inventions is distinct from the order of successive imitations, although imitation does mean imitation of invention. The laws, in fact, which govern the first of these two series should not be confused with those, even the logical ones, which govern the second. It is not necessary for all imitations of inventions to pass through the terms of the irreversible series which inventions, whether they be imitated or not, must necessarily traverse one by one. We could, if put to it, conceive of a succession of inventions, which were logically antecedent to the final consummate one, unfolding in one and the same master mind; and, as a matter of fact, it is seldom that an inventor does not climb up several obscure rungs in such a ladder before reaching the illustrious step. The laws of invention belong essentially to individual logic; the laws of imitation belong in part to social logic. Moreover, just as imitation does not fall exclusively within social logic, but depends upon extra-logical influence as well, is it not obvious that invention itself is produced mentally, through conditions which are not alone the apparition of premises in the mind of which it is the logical conclusion, but which are also other associations of ideas, called inspiration, intuition, genius?

Meanwhile, let us not forget that every invention and every discovery consists in the interference in somebody’s mind of certain old pieces of information that have generally been handed down by others. What did Darwin’s thesis about natural selection amount to? To having proclaimed the fact of competition among living things? No, but in having for the first time combined this idea with the ideas of variability and heredity.¹ The former idea, as it was proclaimed by Aristotle, remained sterile until it was associated with the two latter ideas. From that as a starting point, we may say that the generic term, of which invention is but a species, is the fruitful interference of repetitions. If this be true, I may perhaps be allowed to set forth, without emphasis, an hypothesis which occurs to me at this point. However numerous may be the different kinds of things which are repeated, if we suppose that the centres of these repetitive radiations, otherwise known as inventions or the biological or physical analogues of inventions, be regularly placed, their interferences may be foreseen; and these interferences or new centres will themselves present as much regularity in their disposition as did the primary centres. In such a universe, everything, however complex it might be, would be regular; nothing would either be or seem accidental. If, on the contrary, we assume that the primitive centres are irregular in position, the position of the secondary centres will also be unordered and their irregularity will equal that of the primary centres. Thus, there will never be in the world anything but the same quantity of irregularity, so to speak, only it will appear under the most changing forms. Let me add that, in spite of all, these changing forms must have a certain indefinable likeness. The original irregularity is reflected in its enlarged copies, the derived irregularities. From this I conclude that, although the idea of Repetition dominates the whole universe, it does not constitute it. For the bottom of it, I think, is a certain sum of innate, eternal, and indestructible diversity without which the world would be as monotonous as it is vast. Stuart Mill was led by his reflections to a similar postulate.

Whatever may be said of the conjecture which I have just hazarded, I am sure that there must be a combination of the two kinds of laws which I have pointed out to entirely explain the irreversible character of even the simplest social transformations. Let us take, for example, the changes in dress in France during the last three centuries and let us suppose them to have occurred in an inverse order. The hypothesis seems acceptable, a priori; at least it seems to involve no greater contradiction than the idea of playing a melody backwards, beginning with the last note and ending with the first. Parenthetically, it is a strange thing that in this way an entirely new melody is produced which, without having anything in common with the original one, is sometimes satisfactory to one’s ear. But imagine the courtiers of Louis XIV dressed in the black coat and waistcoat, in the trousers and silk hat of our present fashions. Imagine the trousers gradually replaced by knickerbockers, the short hair by wigs, the coats by embroidered, gilded, and many-coloured suits with side-swords, and our democratic contemporaries decked out like the followers of the Sun-King! It would be grotesque. There would be such an inconsistency between a man’s exterior and his ideas, between the succession of costumes and that of events, opinions, and customs, that it is useless to dwell upon the impossibility of the thing. It is impossible, because the events, the opinions and the customs of which the clothes should be, up to a certain point, the expression, are linked together from the time of Louis XIV by a certain logic whose laws, as well as the laws of imitation, are opposed to the reversing of their melody, so to speak. This is so true that our hypothetical inversion would be infinitely less absurd if it were a question of women’s clothes. We could, at a pinch, without making any other change in modern history, imagine the court ladies of the seventeenth century wearing the dresses and even the hats of the fashionable ladies of the nineteenth century. We could imagine that they were followed by the crinoline and then by the high Greek bodice of Mme. Récamier and Mme. Tallien, and that these metamorphoses led our contemporaries to dress like Mme. de Maintenon or to arrange their hair like Mile. de Fontange. It would be a little strange, but it would not be out of the question. And yet how is it that the current of women’s fashions can be conceived of as turned back, without its being necessary to think of the current of customs and ideas as reversed also, whereas this is not true of men’s fashions? This can undoubtedly be explained because of women’s infinitely smaller participation in political and intellectual work; because of their dominant interest at all times and places in being physically pleasing, and because of the fundamental immutability of their nature which, in spite of their love of change, rebels against the wear of civilisation.

But let us note the fact that for women, as for men, it is impossible to conceive of a reversion from extreme complexity to primitive simplicity in that succession of inventions relating to weaving which has brought us goods of a more and more varied and intricate character. The laws of logic forbid it. In the same way they forbid us to suppose that the series of weapons which has reached us from the Middle Ages might have been reversed and that we might have passed from the needle-rifle to the flint-gun, to arque-buses, to cross-bows and long-bows, or from Krupp gun to culverin or balista. Besides, the laws of imitation show us the impossibility of admitting that after either men’s or women’s clothes had been, according to hypothesis, more or less alike in cut and material for all classes and provinces in France under Louis XIV, just as they are in our day, they could gradually become differentiated in different classes and in different parishes as of yore. This is inadmissible,¹ even were we to suppose at the same time that all our telegraphs and railroads had been destroyed after having existed under Louis XIV, and had carried away with them the intense desires for affiliation and assimilation to which they had given birth. For such a violent death on the part of our civilisation would reduce all its imitative functions to inertia, but it would not make them retroactive. A chronicle² tells us how Louis XIII was filled with admiration, upon his entrance into Marseilles, for the soldiers of the militia, and was especially pleased to see that “some of them were dressed in savage style, as Americans, Indians, Turks, and Moors.” It was only under Louis XV, in fact, that a uniform became general. Imagine the effect produced by a return in our day, if one could be made, to such an antique medley of military garments! Such diversity of costume would not be tolerated, that is, it would not seem natural or normal, unless it spread abroad as a fashion; and, in this case, the very multiformity would be a kind of uniform, a similitude which consisted of copying the variety of others.

Let us turn our attention to the kind of historical irreversibility which is adequately accounted for by the laws of imitation, just as the laws of reproduction and of vibration are able to explain some, but not all, kinds of irreversibility in nature. A great national language cannot return to the little local dialect from which it has sprung. Not that it cannot be broken up by some political catastrophe into fragments which will become dialects. But, in this case, the differentiation of dialects will be due to the compulsory imprisonment in each province of the linguistic innovations that have sprung up in the place and that formerly would have radiated to the remotest part of the land. Moreover, each dialect that is made in this way will not resemble the primitive dialect in the least, nor will it incline to reproduce the latter. It will tend to spread over to its neighbours and to its own good to re-establish unity of language over a vast area. What I say of language applies also to religion. But let us cast a glance over the social life in its entirety.

It has often been remarked that civilisation has the effect of raising the level of the masses from an intellectual and moral, from an æsthetic and economic point of view, rather than of rearing still higher in these different respects the higher peaks of society. But this vague, indefinite formula has been not unjustly the subject of refutation because of failure to point out the cause of the phenomenon in view. This cause we know. Since every invention which has once been launched clear of the mass of those that are already established in the social environment, must spread out and establish itself in turn by winning a place for itself in one class after another until it reaches the very lowest, it follows that the final result to which the indefinite continuation of all these outspreadings from centres which appear at distant points and in high places, must be a general and uniform illumination. It is in this way, by virtue of the law of vibratory radiation, that the sources of heat as they appear one after another tend to produce, according to a famous deduction of physicists, a great universal equilibrium of temperature which is higher than the actual temperature of interstellar space, but lower than that of suns. It is in this way, too, that the dissemination of species according to the law of their geometric progression, or, in other terms, of their prolific radiation, tends to cover the entire earth, which is still very unequally peopled, with a uniform stratum of living beings which will be denser throughout its whole extent than the average density of its present population. Obviously, the terms of our comparisons correspond exactly. The surface of the earth is the domain that is open to the radiation of light, just as space is the domain that is open to that of heat and light and as the human species, inasmuch as it is a living species, is the domain that is open to the spread of inventive genius. After this statement, we can understand how cosmopolitan and democratic assimilation is an inevitable tendency of history for the same reason that the complete and uniform peopling of the globe and the complete and uniform calorification of space are the objects of the vital and of the physical universe. It is so of necessity, for of the two chief forces, invention and imitation, which help us to interpret the whole of history, the former, the source of privileges, monopolies, and aristocratic inequalities, is intermittent, rare, and eruptive only at certain infrequent periods, whereas the latter, which is so democratic and levelling, is continuous and incessant like the stream deposition of the Nile or Euphrates. But we can understand also that it may well happen that at periods when works of genius crowd upon and stimulate one another, in feverish and inventive ages like ours, the progress of civilisation is accompanied by a momentary increase of every kind of inequality, or, if the imaginative fever has centred in one place, of a special kind. In our day, when the creative spirit has turned primarily towards the sciences, the distance between our most distinguished scholars and the most uncultivated dregs of our population is much greater from the point of view of the sum and substance of learning than it was in the Middle Ages or antiquity. In the innovating periods of which I speak the whole question consists of knowing whether the precipitate eruption of inventions has been faster than their current of example. Now, this is a question of fact which statistics alone can solve.

Believing that the transition from an aristocratic to a democratic order is irreversible, Tocqueville refuses to think that any aristocracy can be formed in a democratic environment. But I must be clear on this point.¹ If, in consequence of the cause of which we know, societies hasten towards an increasing assimilation and an incessant accumulation of similarities, it does not follow that they are also progressing towards a greater and greater development of democracy. For imitative assimilation is only the stuff out of which societies are made; this stuff is cut out and put into use by social logic, which tends to the most solid kind of unification through the specialisation and co-operation of aptitudes, and through the specialisation and mutual confirmation of minds. It is therefore quite possible and even probable that a very strong hierarchy may be the destined goal of any civilisation,¹ although every consummate civilisation which has reached its ultimate fruition is marked by the diffusion of the same wants and ideas, if not by the same powers and wealth, throughout the mass of its citizens. This much, however, may be granted to Tocqueville—after an aristocracy which is based upon the hereditary prestige of birth has been destroyed in a country, it can never come to life again. We know, in fact, that the social form of Repetition, imitation, tends to free itself more and more from its vital form, from heredity.

We are also justified in affirming that national agglomerations will enlarge to a greater and greater degree, and that they will consequently become less dense and that the contrary will never be realised unless a catastrophe occur. This is a result (as pointed out by M. Gide in his little work upon the colonies²) of universal assimilation, especially in the matter of armaments. In fact “it is clear that the day when we shall all be formed in the same mould, the day when one man will be worth another, the power of every people will be mathematically proportioned to the number of its population “and, consequently, a struggle between a small state and a big one will be impossible or disastrous for the former. This is an additional argument for the numerous reasons which we have for foreseeing a colossal empire in the future. In every period prior to our own, larger states extended themselves as far or farther than the then means of communication made practicable. But at present it is plain that the great inventions of our times will make possible and enduring much more extensive agglomerations than those which now exist. This is an historic anomaly, unexampled in the past, and we must believe that it is fated to disappear. The world is more ready at present for a concentration of the whole of Europe, northern Africa, and half of Asia into a single state than it ever was for the Roman or Mahometan conquest, or for the empire of Charles V. Does this mean that we must expect to see a single empire extending over the entire globe? It does not; from the law which I developed above on the alternation of fashion and custom, on the final and inevitable return to a protective tariff of custom after a more or less lengthy period of free trade in examples, it follows that the natural, I do not refer to the factitious, aggrandisement of a state could never pass beyond certain limits. Consequently, we are not justified in conceiving the hope that a single state will rule over the whole earth or that the possibility of war will be suppressed. On the other hand, as the unification or at least the federation of civilised nations becomes more desirable and more longed for, the obstacles in the way of its realisation, patriotic pride and prejudice, national antagonisms, misunderstood or narrowly interpreted collective interests, accumulated historical memories, all these things will not cease to grow. The checking of this growing aspiration by this growing difficulty might be considered the infernal torment to which man is condemned by civilisation. It seems as if the mirage of perpetual and universal peace loomed up before our eyes with more and more brilliancy but at a greater and greater distance.

In a limited and relative sense, however, we may believe that this ideal will be temporarily realised through the future conquests of a people, whose name we do not know, who is destined to play this glorious part. But then, after this Empire has been established, after it has bestowed upon a great part of the world a security comparable to the majesty of a Roman peace increased tenfold in depth and extent,¹ it may happen that an entirely new social phenomenon, one neither conforming nor contrary to the principles that I have propounded, may appear to our descendants. We may wonder, to be sure, whether universal similarity under all its present or future forms, in regard to dress, to the alphabet, perhaps to language, to sciences, to law, etc., we may wonder whether it is the consummate fruit of civilisation or whether its sole raison d’être and its final consequence are not the unfolding of individual differences that will be more valid, more intense, more radical, and, at the same time, more subtle, than the differences that were annihilated. It is certain that after a cosmopolitan inundation has left a thick deposit of ideas and customs over all humanity, the demolished nationalities will never be reconstructed; men will never return to their Chinese ancestor-worship nor to their contempt for foreign usages; they will never prefer to accentuate their fixed idiosyncrasies rather than to hasten general changes shared in by all alike. But it is perfectly possible that civilisation may pause some day to draw back and give birth to new offspring, that the flood of imitation may be banked in,¹ and that through the very effect of its excessive development, the need of sociability may diminish or, rather, may become altered and transformed into a sort of general misanthropy. While this would be quite compatible with a diminution of commercial intercourse and with the reduction of economic exchange to what was strictly necessary, it would be well fitted to strengthen in each of us the distinctive traits of our individuality. Then the finest flower of our social life, the æsthetic life, would blossom forth, and as it became full-blown all men would come to have a share in it,—a rare and imperfect condition at present. And then the social life, with its complicated apparatus of confining functions and monotonous rehearsals, would finally appear, like the organic life which it follows and complements, in its true colours. It would appear as a long, obscure, and tortuous transition from a state of elementary diversity to one marked by the possession of personal physiognomy. It would appear as a mysterious alembic of numberless spiral curves where one thing is sublimated in another, where out of an infinite number of elements that have been bent and crushed and despoiled of their distinct characteristics is mental and fleeting attributes of personality, its idiosynextracted an essential and volatile principle, the funda-crasies, its ways of thinking and feeling, here to-day, vanished to-morrow.