CHAPTER IV

ARCHÆOLOGY AND STATISTICS

WHAT is history? This is the first question which presents 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 research which have been highly honoured in recent days, the study of archæology 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 phenomena 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 archæology.

I

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 archæologist keeps the implements for himself and hands over the skulls to the anthropologist. The anthropologist studies races, the archæologist, 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 intersection, 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 the same racial character in one skull or skeleton after another. Although this very racial character has been reproduced and multiplied through heredity from some individual peculiarity, still it is impossible for the anthropologist to attempt to trace this back. The archæologist likewise ignores, 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 invention every one of the anonymous unearthed objects was but an ephemeral vehicle, a mere place for growth.

The deeper the past in which the archæologist buries himself the more he loses sight of personalities. Even manuscripts 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 archæological 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 Mesopotamia, in America! There was a time when archæology, 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 rôles are inverted. Historians are nothing more than subordinate guides, auxiliaries of those excavators who, revealing to us the things about which the former are silent, give us the details, so to speak, of the fauna and flora, of the hidden wealth of life and of the harmonious regularities of those lands that are so picturesquely described by historic landscapists. Through the archæologists we know what particular group of ideas, of professional or hieratic secrets, of peculiar desires, 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 archæologists 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 archæological point of view, therefore, is the best from which to see that violent events which are in themselves dissimilar, and whose series are as irregular as mountain 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 antiquarians, 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 obscure 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, decrees, or political revolutions, but they take no place in history unless they promote or retard other kinds of inventions which are already known and which are destined to be peacefully imitated. History would pay no more attention to the manœuvres at Marathon, at Arabela, or at Austerlitz than to so many skilful games of chess, were it 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 inventions 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 condor 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 intersection of heterogeneous imitations in one brain,—an exceptional 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 satisfaction 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-eminently 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 industries. 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 intellectual imitation), he for the most part, or more and more, imitates and adopts only those which seem to him to 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 response 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 becoming 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, inventions, as in the given example, by the establishment of a postal service and, later, of the aërial telegraph? Even physical needs cannot become social forces unless, as I have already 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 discovery of tea, or coffee, or tobacco. Here is another example among a thousand. “Clothing does not result from modesty,” M. Wiener justly observes (Le Pérou); “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 accustomed 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 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 arduous, 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 creative 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 everything 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 inventions, 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, imitate for the mere pleasure of imitating. This motive determines 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 before me is that of a feeble, wayward imagination scattered here and there in the midst of a vast passive imitativeness 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 archæological researches fully confirm this view. Sumner Maine says in his Early History 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 Imagination. Comparative jurisprudence as might be expected from the natural stability of law and custom yet more strongly suggests the same inference.”¹ 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 Ægina. 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.

Archæological 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 institutions and industries, than we have been led to suppose. It is truly surprising to find that at a certain period of antiquity 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 surprising 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 according 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 archæological period were distinguished by the preponderating prestige of some particular civilisation which illuminated and coloured all other rival or subject civilisations somewhat as every palæontological period is the reign of some great animal species, of some mollusk, reptile, or pachydermus.

Archæology can also show us that men have always been much less original than they themselves are pleased’ to believe. 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 opposite 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 individuals 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 our contemporary painters and sculptors and writers, and between 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 galleries of Dutch or Venetian or Florentine or Spanish art, containing pictures of the same school or period, or when we examine the mediæval manuscripts in our archives, or when, in a museum of historic art, we view the rifled contents of Egyptian tombs, it seems to us that we are beholding almost indistinguishable copies of a single model and 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 misleading, 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 archæological 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 originality 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 archæologists 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 explain these resemblances as fortuitous coincidences. Imitation is the postulate which serves as a guide in these questions, and which, under wise management, is never misleading. 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 resemblance, but infer kinship from them likewise. From the fact, for example, that the vases, situlæ, etc., found in the excavations at Este, in Venetia, were curiously like those found at Verona, Belluno, and elsewhere, M. Maury 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 common 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 Cisalpine 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 archæologists have been obliged to seek for the secret of past generations in the most remote and, to the lay eye, imperceptible analogies in the matter of form, style, situation, language, legend, dress, etc., thereby training themselves to discover the unexpected everywhere. Some of these unexpected things are based on fact; others, on different degrees of likelihood according to a very extensive scale of probability. In this way archæologists 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 successive Asiatic and even African contributions. There is no assignable limit to this archæological decomposition of civilisations; there is no social molecule which their chemistry has not a fair hope of resolving into its constituent 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 archæologists 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-painting, and, still much more anciently, the orders of Greek architecture, the Phoenician alphabet, etc., displayed themselves 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 recognising the atrium in the cloister, the prætorium of the Roman 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 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 unconsciously, 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 distinguished from the naturalist. In distinction to historians 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 tearing, archæologists stand out as makers of pure sociology, because, as the personality of those they unearth is impenetrable, 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 destroying 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, nevertheless, 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.

To archæologists, 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, involuntary, adoption, do not philologist and mythologist, the modern archæologist, 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 theory? If history is on the way to become a science, is it not due to this point of view?

III

Something is likewise due to the statistician. The statistician, like the archæologist, 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 committing or repressing crime, of suing for judicial separation, and even with the acts of being born, of marrying, of procreating, and of dying. All these individual acts are related 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 archæology is the collection and classification of similar products where the highest possibledegree of 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 choice of units; the more alike and equal they are, the better they are. What is the subject of Statistics unless, like that of archæology, 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 palæontology, the other the physiology, of society. While archæology tells us that specimens of Greek pottery were transported in Phœnician vessels 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 England 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 archæology, and that of imitation, to Statistics. While the former endeavours to follow out the thread between successive discoveries, the latter excels in estimating their individual expansion. The domain of archæology is the more philosophic, that of Statistics, the more scientific.

To be sure, the methods of these two sciences are precisely opposite to each other, but this is because of the difference in the external conditions of their investigations. Archæology 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 imaginary mother tongue, to Aryac, or to their elder sister, Sanskrit. Archæology laboriously travels back from imitations 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 according to given years and countries. By means of its successive 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 almost stationary for the reason implied above) to one hundred 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 fashion 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 accounts, 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 historical monograph. Taken together they form the best historical narrative that it is possible to have. Synchronous tables giving comparisons between provinces or between countries are generally much less interesting. Let us contrast, as data for philosophic reflection, a table of criminality 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 uninterrupted rate from twenty-five to thirty-three per cent., i. e., from a fourth to a third. This fact evidences the action of some definite social cause, whereas a comparison of the proportions between two neighbouring departments, between 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 Germany 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 being 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 archæology and, although it supplies the same kind of information, it is much more accurate. Its method is preeminently the sociological method, and it is only because we cannot apply it to extinct societies that we substitute the method of archæology. How many trivial medals and mosaics, how many cinerary urns and funeral inscriptions, we should be willing to exchange for the industrial, the commercial, or even the criminal statistics of the Roman Empire! But in order that Statistics may render all the services which we expect of it and may triumph against the ironical criticism to which it is exposed, it must, like archæology, 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 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 desires 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 reckoning 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 action, 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 remember that the things which are under calculation are essentially 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 unrealised ojects of desire! So-called popular wishes, the aspirations of a small town, for example, or of a single class, are 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 reserved for the privileged ones of fortune or intellect, accessible 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, archæology 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 collaborator has ramified in all directions. There is an archæology 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 multiplications by means of the remarkable uniformity of innumerable generations of men. There is in archæology of religion, comparative mythology, which deals separately with every myth and with its endless imitative editions, just as philology treats every word. There is an archæology of law, of politics, of ethnology, and, finally, of art and industry. 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 addition, to the power of reproduction by example which is peculiar to each of these things. And we have a corresponding 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 commerce and industry, and with judicial statistics, not to speak of certain hybrid statistics which straddle both the physiological 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 statistics.¹ As to religious statistics, which should give us a graphic representation of the relative annual spread of different 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 archæologist and that this point of view coincides 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 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 destinies 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 entire 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 evitable 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 simultaneous 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, becomes 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 should adopt it, not partially and unconsciously, but knowingly and unreservedly, and thus, like archæology, be spared many fruitless investigations and tribulations. I will enumerate 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 exclusive 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: (1) 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 variations, to denote the various aids and hindrances which these different imitative propagations or consolidations of 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: (1) to determine the imitative power which inheres in every invention 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 research 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 parasiticides, 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 population 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 forefathers,—a more original invention, let me say, parenthetically, 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 delicate subject.

The second of the two problems which I have just noted and which seem to me to impose themselves upon the statistician, 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 uncontrolled 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 preparation 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, belonging to a single type, and expressing, with more or less exactness, its intrinsic powers. In this connection, commercial 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 progress 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 archæology 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.

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 industry, 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. Theoretically, judicial statistics take a second place, and it must be admitted that, although in one way they are more profoundly 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, proceeding 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 corresponding satisfactions.

V

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 interpretation 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 irregular, 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 plateaux 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 number, 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 detracting 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 theoretical 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 innovation should not spread more or less rapidly through an indefinite number of supposedly like minds in communication with one another. It would spread instantaneously 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 decrees 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 passage or promulgation. This occurs because in this case there is no hindrance whatsoever. Lack of communication in social physics plays the same rôle 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 assimilation 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 obstruction. But as such checks are, at one time or another, inevitable, 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 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 interest 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 progressive 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 antagonistic 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 contradictory 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 growing 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 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 inventions 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 beginnings, represents them by horizontal lines that show scarce a deviation. In view of this, there is nothing astonishing 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 diminution in this proportion) or even in the fact that the influence 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 circumscribed 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 uniform series? Let us see; the digression will be brief. Statistics 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 explanation 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 contrary 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 sun, a radiation of light which tends towards indefinite expansion 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 rotation 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 vegetal 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 unrealisable ambitions, ambitions that reciprocally 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 inability to travel further in their strictly natural course and realise 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, religion, 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 catastrophe 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 regularly 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 increase 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 inventive 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 admired periodicity of the figures given by sociologico-physiological 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 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 certain statistical regularities which seem to be of another kind belong, at bottom, to the above-mentioned group. For example, why for the last fifty years, at least, have the convictions 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 increasing 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 influenced 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 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 subsequently 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 conceptions 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 explain 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 of these motives. The Spanish-American or Anglo-Saxon is prolific because he has America to people. If Christopher Columbus had made no discovery, what millions of men would have remained unborn! The insular Englishman 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 ancient 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 institutions 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, Ampère, Parmentier, can pass, whether celibates 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 initiatives and their contagious imitations, have accomplished everything, socially, I mean. Thousands of centuries 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 time 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 proceeded, in its turn, along its own line of development.

Now, let us take one of these purely social desires for procreation 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 counterbalanced by a fear of the greater misery which their multiplication would entail, the report is suddenly spread abroad that the discovery and conquest of a great island by a compatriot 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 desire. But the latter is not satisfied at once. It has to contend with a whole tribe of rooted habits and antique practices which have given birth to a general belief that acclimatisation 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 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 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-Reymond, was unknown to classic antiquity,—a lack which explains 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 triumphant 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 boundaries 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 private 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 inventions and which is a prime agent in civilisation, was preceded by a desire for common property (the North American 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 wellbeing, 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, before reaching its final resting place. To sum up, then, every desire or belief has first to toil through a network of contrary habits or convictions, then, after this obstacle is overcome 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 proceeding from and yet contrary to the given dogma whose victorious 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

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 analogous, 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 abridgment, 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 telegraphing, 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 acquired 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 inspite of their free development, leave off accentuating their differences. It might almost be thought that they subsequently 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 condition 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 parenthesis.

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 appear to attach so much value. Between the rounded summit 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, 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 interpreted. 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 latter 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 ignore 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 according to a definite angle, every upward deviation will reveal the insertion of some auxiliary discovery or improvement 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

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 extension 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 following upon the steps of earlier ones? When an unexpected outlet has been opened up to a local industry, to the iron industry, for example, through the suppression of internal 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 arbitrary groups of certain acts or objects in which, however, 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 the 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 remained 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 inventions 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 monopolised this new kind of work and so substituted for the continuous 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 regularity does exist, although hidden below these numerical gyrations which state intervention creates for the interpreter of statistics. How, in fact, did the law of June 11, 1842, which provided for the establishment of our first great network 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 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 mathematical 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 physiognomy 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 comparison 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 annual returns to the bureau of statistics at Paris and from this bureau, in blue books, to the mágistrates of the different tribunals—why should these silhouettes, which likewise give visible expression to masses or series of coexistent 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 retinæ without any effort on our part and lend themselves with the greatest ease to our interpretation. 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 intermittent and irregular as well as in the most dilatory fashion, whereas the latter always show us regularly and uninterruptedly 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 accomplishment 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 statistical facts, with precise and condensed knowledge of all the 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 approach 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 compared to an eye or ear. Like the eye or ear, it would save us trouble by synthesising collections of scattered homogeneous 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 educated man to keep informed of the slightest current changes in religious or political opinion than for a man whose eyesight was impaired by age to recognise a friend at a distance, 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 inconceivable 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, in its own way and from its special point of view, the statistics 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 distinctive mark, it is analogous to the difference which characterises the figures of our system of notation. How should we know the sounds of do, of ré, 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 defective 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 newspapers publish from day to day graphical curves, showing the fluctuations of the different securities of the stock-exchange, 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, before long, at any rate, at some time in the future when people 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 statements 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 bureaus of statistics just as the ear-drum is a bundle of acoustic 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 approach 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 comparison of the part taken by the senses throughout the animal world, from the lowest to the highest rung of the mental ladder, with the rôle 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 approach 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 mechanically moulded and guided by them. A sure sign of advance in civilisation upon the part of a certain class of readers, is the fact that the newspaper which appeals to them devotes a smaller portion of itself to phrases and a larger portion to facts and figures and to brief and reliable information. 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 function of statistics. And yet, although I realise its future importance, I must point out, before concluding, a certain exaggerated 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 foretell future social conditions with as much certainty as the astronomist 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 archæology 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 concerning their successive advents can be formulated. In this respect, the future is like the past. It does not fall to the archæologist 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 eventual disturbers of prognosticated curves, cannot fail to increase, 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 as if the further we progressed the more all kinds of new and unforeseen things flowed out from the class that governs, 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 invention, 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 promised gift of prophecy. But this goal is far distant. Meanwhile, all that can be said is that in as much as the direction of future inventions is chiefly determined by prior inventions, and in as much as the latter are becoming more and more preponderating because of their accumulation, predictions based upon statistics may one day be hazarded with a certain degree of probability, just as it is also quite probable that archæology 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 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 initiatives 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: (1) 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 bearing 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 accidental 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.