CHAPTER V

THE LOGICAL LAWS OF IMITATION

STATISTICS gives us a sort of empirical law or graphical formula for the very complex causes of the particular spread of every kind of imitation. We must now consider those general laws, laws which are really worthy the name of science, which govern all imitations, and to this end we must study, one by one, the different categories of causes which we have heretofore merged together.

Our problem is to learn why, given one hundred different innovations conceived of at the same time—innovations in the forms of words, in mythological ideas, in industrial processes, etc.—ten will spread abroad, while ninety will be forgotten. In order to solve this question systematically let us first divide those influences which have favoured or hindered the diffusion of successful or non-successful innovations into physical and social causes. But in this book let us pass over the first order of causes, those, for example, which make the people of southern countries prefer new words composed of voiced to those composed of whispered vowels, and the people of northern countries, the opposite. In the same way there are in mythology, in artistic or industrial technique, or in government, many peculiarities which result from a racial conformation of ear or larynx, from cerebral predispositions, from meteoric conditions or from the nature of fauna and flora. Let us put all this to one side. I do not mean that it has no real importance in sociology. It is of interest, for example, to note the influence which may be exerted upon the entire course of a civilisation by the nature of a new and spontaneous production of its soil. Much depends upon the spot in which it springs; the conditions of labour, and, consequently, the family groups and political institutions of a fertile valley are different from those of a moor more or less rich in pasture-land. We must thank those scholars who devote themselves to researches of this character, researches which are as useful in sociology as studies upon the modification of species by the action of climate or general environment are in biology. It would be erroneous to think, however, that because we had shown the adaptation of living or social types to external phenomena we had thereby explained them. The explanation must be sought for in the laws which express the internal relations of cells or of minds in association. This is the reason why, in this discussion of pure and abstract, not of concrete and applied, sociology, I must set aside all considerations of the above nature.

Now, social causes are of two kinds, the logical and the non-logical. This distinction is of the greatest importance. Logical causes operate whenever an individual prefers a given innovation to others because he think it is more useful or more true than others, that is, more in accord than they are with the aims or principles that have already found a place in his mind (through imitation, of course). In such instances, the old or new inventions or discoveries are themselves the only question; they are isolated from any prestige or discredit which may have attached to those circulating them or to the time and place of their origin. But logical action is very rarely untrammelled in this way. In general, the extra-logical influences to which I have referred interfere in the choice of the examples to be followed, and often, as we shall see further on, the poorest innovations, from the point of view of logic, are selected because of their place, or even date or birth.

Unless these necessary distinctions are constantly borne in mind, it is impossible to understand the simplest social facts. Language is a notable example. It seems to me that its present inextricable skein might be readily unravelled by applying these ideas (if any professional philologist would pay me the compliment of adopting them). Philologists seek for those laws which should govern the formation and transformation of languages. But, hitherto, they have only been able to formulate rules which are subject to very many exceptions, in regard to both changes in sound (phonetic laws) and changes in meaning, in regard to the acquisition of new words through the combination of old roots or of new grammatical forms through the modification of old forms, etc. Why is this? Because only imitation and not invention is subject to law in the true sense of the word. Now, small, successive inventions have always had to accumulate in order to form or transform an idiom. Besides, in the service of language a large part must be conceded, at the outset, to the accidental and arbitrary.

It is because of these individual factors that, among other peculiarities, there are a certain number of roots in a language, that one root will consist of three consonants and another of a single syllable, or that one termination and not another will be adopted at the behest of a given shade of thought. After this concession has been made to invention and to influences of a climatic or physiological order, a great field is still open to the laws of language.

There is, of course, apart from both the irrational and important, not to say pregnant, motives of which I have been speaking, a host of minor linguistic inventions which were suggested to their unknown authors by way of analogy,¹ i. e., through imitation of self or others; and it is in this direction that linguistic inventions are subject to law. The first man to conceive the idea of expressing capacity for respect by adding the suffix bilis, which, according to hypothesis, was already used in the compound amabilis, to the root of veneratio, or of creating Germanicus upon the model of Italicus, was an unconscious inventor, but, to put it briefly, he imitated at the same time that he invented. Whenever terminations, or, similarly, declensions or conjugations, have been broadened and generalised in this way, imitation of self and of others has taken place, and precisely to this extent is the formation and transformation of languages subject to formulation into rules. But these rules, which should explain to us why one among many almost synonomous forms of speech which are concurrently at the service of the tribal, or civic, or national mind has alone fought its way into general usage, fall into very distinct groups.

In the first place, we see that the incessant struggle between minor linguistic inventions which always ends in the imitation of one of them, and in the abortion of the others, finally comes to transform a language in such a way as to adapt it, more or less rapidly and completely, according to the spirit of the community, to external realities and to the social purposes of language. Enlargements of vocabulary correspond to increases in the number of human beings and of their modes of life. Grammar, by means of a more flexible conjugation of verbs or a clearer or more logical arrangement of phrases, lends itself to the expression of more subtle relations in time and space. The softening and differentiation of vowels (in Sanskrit they are all sharp sounds in a or o; in Greek and Latin, e, u, ou, and i have been added to the vocal key-board) and the contraction and abbreviation of words render a language more and more pliable and expressive, and distinguished philologists like M. Régnaud¹ have raised to the dignity of a law the vowel softening and the contraction of words of the Indo-European family. In fact, in Zend, Greek, Latin, French, English, and German, the e appears “in an infinite number of cases as a weakened substitute for a,” whereas, “the opposite never, or hardly ever, takes place.” If, by the way, this rule could be accepted unreservedly, we should have here a pretty example of linguistic irreversibility.

But, on the other hand, even in the most perfect idioms, even in that Greek of which it may be said that its conjugation is a “system of applied logic,”¹ we see that many modifications effected in the course of time are far from being advances in utility or truth. Is the loss of j and υ (digamma) or, in many cases, of an initial sibilant of any advantage to Greek? Is it not rather a cause of deterioration? In France have not certain expanded forms succeeded contracted ones contrary to the law of word contraction, as portique from porche, capital from cheptal, etc.? In such cases certain influences, in regard to which the need of logic and finality had no part, preponderated. We know that in the case of the last example certain writers of renown manufactured many words like portique and capital in servile imitation of Latin, and that they succeeded by means of their own prestige in putting them into circulation.²

But I do not wish to dwell at greater length upon the science of language. I am content with having indicated in these few observations the drift of the laws which we have still to formulate. In this chapter, the logical laws will occupy our attention exclusively.

I

Invention and imitation are, as we know, the elementary social acts. But what is the social substance or force through which this act is accomplished and of which. It is merely the form? In other words, what is invented or imitated? The thing which is invented, the thing which is imitated, is always an idea or a volition, a judgment or a purpose, which embodies a certain amount of belief and desire. And here we have, in fact, the very soul of words, of religious prayers, of state administration, of the articles of a code, of moral duties, of industrial achievements or of artistic processes. Desire and belief: they are the substance and the force, they are the two psychological quantities¹ which are found at the bottom of all the sensational qualities with which they combine; and when invention and then imitation takes possession of them in order to organise and use them, they also are the real social quantities. Societies are organised according to the agreement or opposition of beliefs which reinforce or limit one another. Social institutions depend entirely upon these conditions. Societies function according to the competition or co-operation of their desires or wants. Beliefs, principally religious and moral beliefs, but juristic and political beliefs as well, and even linguistic beliefs (for how many acts of faith are implied in the lightest talk and what an irresistible although unconscious power of persuasion our mother tongue, a true mother indeed, exerts over us), are the plastic forces of societies. Economic or æsthetic wants are their functional forces.

These beliefs and desires which invention and imitation make specific and in this sense create, although they virtually exist prior to the action of the latter, originate far below the social world in the world of life. In like way, the plastic and functional forces of life that are made specific and turned to account by generation, originate beneath the animate in the physical world. In like way, the vibration-ruled molecular and motor forces of the physical world originate in turn in an inscrutable hypophysical world that some of our physicists call the world of noumena, others, Energy, and yet others, the Unknowable. Energy is the most widespread name for this mystery. By this single term a reality is designated which, as we can see, is always twofold in its manifestations; and this eternal bifurication, which is reproduced under astonishing metamorphoses in each successive stage of universal life, is not the least of the common characteristics to be noted between life’s stages. Under the different terms of matter and motion, of organs and functions, of institutions and progress, this great distinction between the static and the dynamic, in which is also included that between Space and Time, divides the whole universe in two.

It is important to state at the outset and firmly establish the relation between these two terms. There is a profound insight underlying the Spencerian formula of Evolution which states that all evolution is gain in matter with corresponding loss in motion, and that all dissolution is the inverse. Translated into a somewhat modified and less materialistic phraseology this thought means that every development in life or society is a growth in organisation offset or, rather, secured by a relative diminution in function. As an organism grows in weight or dimension, as it unfolds and differentiates its characteristic forms, it loses its vitality,¹ just because it has used it up in the process, a fact Mr. Spencer fails to mention. As a society enlarges and expands, as it perfects and differentiaties its institutions, its language, religion, law, government, industry, and art, it loses its civilising and propelling vigour; for it has been using it up in its course. In other words, if it is true that the substance of social institutions consists in the sum of faith and confidence, of truth and security, in a word, in the unanimous beliefs which they embody, and that the motor power of social progress consists in the sum of the curiosities and ambitions and of the consistent desires which it expresses, if all this is so, then as a society advances it becomes richer in beliefs than in desires. The true and final object of desire, then, is belief. The only raison d’être of the impulses of the heart is the formation of high degrees of mental certitude and assurance, and the further a society has progressed the more is it possessed, like a mature mind, of stability and tranquillity, of strong convictions and dead passions, the former having been slowly formed and crystallised by the latter.¹ Social peace, a unanimous belief in the same ideal or in the same illusion, a unanimity which presupposes a continually widening and deepening assimilation of humanity—this is the goal for which, irrespective of our wishes, all social revolutions are bound. This is progress, that is to say, social advancement along logical lines.

Now, how is progress effected? When an individual reflects upon a given subject first one idea comes to him and then another until from idea to idea, from elimination to elimination, he finally seizes upon the guiding thread to the solution of the problem and then, from that moment, passes quickly out from the twilight into the light. Does not the same thing happen in history? When a society elaborates some great conception, which the curious public pushes forward before science can correct and develop it, the mechanical explanation of the world, for example, or when it dreams in its ambition of some great achievement like the use of steam in manufacture or locomotion or navigation before it can turn its activity to exploiting it, what happens? The problem that is raised in this way at once prompts people to make and entertain all kinds of contradictory inventions and vagaries which appear first here and then there, only to disappear, until the advent of some clear formula or some suitable mechanism which throws all the others into the background and which serves thenceforward as the fixed basis for future improvements and developments. Progress, then, is a kind of collective thinking, which lacks a brain of its own, but which is made possible, thanks to imitation, by the soliditary of the brains of numerous scholars and inventors who interchange their successive discoveries. (The fixation of discoveries through writing, which makes possible their transmission over long stretches of time and space, is equivalent to the fixation of images which takes place in the individual brain and which constitutes the cellular stereotype-plate of memory.)

It follows that social like individual progress is effected in two ways, through substitution and through accumulation. Certain discoveries and inventions can only be used as substitutes, others can be accumulated. Hence we have logical combats and logical alliances. This is the general classification which we will adopt, and in it we shall have no difficulty in placing all historical events.

Moreover, in different societies discord between fresh desires and old, between a new scientific idea and existing religious dogmas, is not always immediately perceived nor perceived within the same period of time. Besides, when the discord is perceived, the desire to put an end to it is not always equally strong. The nature and intensity of the desire vary with time and place. In fact, Reason exists in societies as well as in individuals; and Reason in all cases is merely a desire like any other, a specific desire which like others is more or less developed by its own satisfactions as well as created by the very inventions or discoveries which have satisfied it; that is to say that systems, programmes, catechisms, and constitutions, in undertaking to render ideas and volitions coherent, create and stimulate the very desire for their coherence. This desire is a real force, located in individual brains. Its rise and fall and its direction and object vary according to given periods and countries. At times, it is a passing breeze; at times, a whirlwind. To-day it attacks the government of states; yesterday and the day before it attacked languages; to-morrow it may make an attack upon our industrial organisations, and another time upon our sciences; but it never pauses in its incessant labour of regeneration or revolution.

This desire, as I have said, has been aroused and recruited by a series of initiations and imitations. But this is equivalent to saying by a series of imitations, for an innovation that is not imitated is socially non-existent. Consequently all those streams and currents of belief and desire which flow side by side or contrary to one another in society, quantities whose subtractions and additions are regulated by social logic, a kind of social algebra,—all, including the very desire for this general reckoning and the belief in its possibility,—all are derived from imitation. For nothing in history is self-creative; not even its own ever-incomplete unity, the secular fruit of constant and more or less successful efforts. A drama, to be sure, a stage play, a fragment in which the whole of history is mirrored, is a logical and gradual and intricate harmony which seems to work itself out independently of anybody’s design. But we know that this appearance is misleading and that the harmony transpires as surely and rapidly as it does only because it answers to the imperious need for unity that is felt by the dramatist as well as by the public to whom he has suggested it.

Everything, even the desire to invent, has the same origin. In fact, this desire completes and is part of the logical need for unification, if it is true, as I might prove, that logic is both a problem of a maximum and a problem of equilibrium. The more a people invent and discover, the more inventive and the more eager for new discoveries they grow. It is also through imitation that this noble kind of craving takes possession of those minds that are worthy of it. Now, discoveries are gains in certitude, inventions, in confidence and security. The desire to discover and invent is, consequently, the twofold form which the tendency toward achieving a maximum of public faith takes on. This creative tendency which is peculiar to synthesising and assimilating minds often alternates, is sometimes concomitant, but in all cases always agrees with the critical tendency towards an equilibrium of beliefs through the elimination of those inventions or discoveries which are contrary to the majority of their number. The desire for unanimity of faith and the desire for purification of faith is each in turn more fully satisfied, but in general their ebullitions either coincide with, or follow closely upon each other. For just because imitation is their common source, both of them, the desire for stable as well as that for absolute faith, have a degree of intensity proportionate, other things being equal, to the degree of animation in the social life, that is, to the multiplicity of relations between individuals. Any fine combination of ideas must first shine out in the mind of the individual before it can illumine the mind of a nation; and its chance of being produced in the individual mind depends upon the frequency of the intellectual exchanges between minds. A contradiction between two institutions or two principles will not harass a society until it has been noted by some exceptionally sagacious person, some systematic thinker, who, having been checked in his conscious efforts to unify his own group of ideas, points out the aforesaid difficulty.—This explains the social importance of philosophers.—And the greater the amount of mutual intellectual stimulation and, consequently, the greater the circulation of ideas within a nation, the more readily will such a difficulty be perceived.

In the course of the nineteenth century, for example, the relations of man to man having been multiplied beyond all expectation as a result of inventions in locomotion, and the action of imitation having become very powerful, very rapid, and very far-reaching, we should not be surprised to see that the passion for social reforms, for systematic and rational social reorganisations has taken on its present proportions, just as, by virtue of its previous conquests, the passion for social, especially industrial, conquests over nature has known no bounds. Therefore it is safe to predict that a century of adjustment will follow upon the past century of discovery. (Does not the nineteenth century deserve this name?) Civilisation requires that an afflux of discovery and an effort to harmonise discoveries shall coincide with or follow one another.

On the other hand, when societies are in their uninventive phases they are also uncritical, and vice versa. They embrace the most contradictory beliefs of surrounding fashions or inherited traditions,¹ and no one notes the contradictions. And yet, at the same time, they carry within themselves, as a result of the contributions of fashion and tradition, much scattered thought and knowledge which would reveal from a certain angle a fruitful although unsuspected self-consistency. In the same way they borrow out of curiosity from their different neighbours, or cherish out of piety as a heritage from their different forefathers, the most dissimilar arts and industries, which develop in them ill-assorted needs and opposing currents of activity. Nor are these practical antinomies, any more than the aforesaid theoretical contradictions, felt or formulated by anybody, although everybody suffers from the unrest which they provoke. But at the same time neither do such primitive peoples perceive that certain of their artistic processes and mechanical tools are fitted to be of the greatest mutual service and to work powerfully together for the same end, the one serving as the efficient means of the other, just as certain perceptions serve as intermediaries in explaining certain hypotheses which they confirm.

The grindstone and the paddle-wheel were known about for a long time without the idea occurring to people that by means of a certain artifice, that is, by adding a third invention, a mill, to the other two, they might be made to cooperate to an extraordinary degree. Back in Babylon, bricks were marked with the names of their maker by means of movable characters or stamps, and books were composed; but the thought of combining these two ideas, of composing books with movable characters, was not conceived of, although it was a very simple matter and one that would have precipitated the coming of printing by some thousands of years.

The cart and the piston likewise coexisted for a long time without giving rise to the idea of using the latter (through other inventions, of course) as a means of propelling the former. On the other hand, at the close of the decadent Middle Ages, for example, how many pagan and licentious tastes for luxury, importations or revivals from Arabia or from the ancient world, crept through castle loopholes and monastery windows to ingratiate themselves within and to form bold medleys, not at all disturbing, however, to the men of those times, with the existing practices of Christian piety and the rude customs of the feudal system! Even in our own days, how many opposite and contradictory objects our industrial or national activity is engaged in achieving! And yet, as the exchange and friction of ideas and the communication and transfusion of needs becomes more rapid, the elimination of the weaker by the stronger, when opposition arises, will be more quickly accomplished and, at the same time, and for the same reason, mutually helpful and confirmatory aims and ideas will be more prompt to encounter each other in the ingenious mind. In these two ways, social life must necessarily reach a degree of logical unity and power hitherto unknown.¹

I have now pointed out how the social need for logic, through which alone a social logic is formed, arises and develops. It is at present necessary to see how it sets about to obtain satisfaction. We already know that its two tendencies are distinguishable, the one creative, the other critical, the one abounding in combinations of old accumulable inventions and discoveries, the other in struggles between alternative inventions or discoveries. We shall study each of these tendencies separately, beginning with the latter.

II The Logical¹ Duel

Suppose that a discovery, an invention, has appeared. There are straightway two facts for us to note about it: its gains in faith, as it spreads from one person to another, and the losses in faith to which it subjects the invention which had the same object or satisfied the same desire when it intervened. Such an encounter gives rise to a logical duel. For example, cuneiform writing spread for a long time undisturbed throughout Central Asia, while Phoenician writing had the same career in the Mediterranean basin. But one day these two alphabets came into conflict over the territory of the former; and cuneiform writing slowly receded, but did not disappear until about the first century of our era.

Studied in detail, then, the history of societies, like psychologial evolution, is a series or a simultaneous occurrence of logical duels (when it is not one of logical unions). What happened in the case of writing had already happened in that of language. Linguistic progress is effected first by imitation and then by rivalry between two languages or dialects which quarrel over the same country and one of which is crowded back by the other, or between two terms or idioms which correspond to the same idea. This struggle is a conflict between opposite theses implicit in every word or idiom which tends to substitute itself for another word or grammatical form. If, at the moment I think of a horse, the two words equus and caballus, borrowed from two different Latin dialects, come into my mind at the same time, it is as if the judgment “equus is a better designation than caballus” were contradicted in my thought by the judgment “caballus is better than equus.” If I have to choose between s and s to express plurality, for example, this choice is also conditioned by judgments which are intrinsically contradictory. During the formation of the Romance tongues thousands of like contradictions came into the brains of the Gallo-Romans, Spaniards, and Italians; and the need of adjusting them gave birth to the modern languages. What philologists call the gradual simplification of grammars is only the result of the work of elimination that is prompted by a vague feeling of these implicit contradictions. This is the reason, for example, that Italian always uses i and Spanish, s, whereas Latin sometimes made use of i and sometimes of s.

I have compared the logical struggle to a duel. In fact, in each of these separate combats, in each of the elementary facts of social life that pass through an edition of numberless copies, the opposing aims or judgments are always two in number. Have you ever seen a battle take place in ancient or mediæval or modern times between three of four parties? Never. There may be seven or eight, or ten or twelve, armies of different nationalities, but there can be only two hostile camps, just as in the counsel of war prior to a battle there are never more than two opinions at the same time, in relation to any plan of action, the one for it and the other made up of those united against it. And, obviously, the quarrel to be fought out upon the battlefield may always be summed up in a yes opposed to a no. Every casus belli is this, at bottom. Of course the adversary who gainsays the other (in religious wars principally) or who thwarts the plan of the other (in political wars) has his own particular thesis or plan as well; but only in as much as his thought or will is more or less directly or indirectly, implicitly or explicitly, negative or obstructive, does it render the conflict inevitable. Hence whatever political parties or fragments of parties there may be in a country, for example, there are never more than two sides in relation to any question, the government and the opposition, the fusion of heterogeneous parties united on their negative side.

This remark applies generally. At all times and places the apparent continuity of history may be decomposed into distinct and separable events, events both small and great, which consist of questions followed by solutions. Now, a question for societies, as for individuals, is a wavering between a given affirmation and a given negation, or between a given goal and a given impediment; and a solution, as we shall see later on, is only the suppression of one of the two adversaries or of their inconsistency. For the moment I shall speak of questions only. They are really logical discourses; one says yes, the other, no. One desires a yes, the other, a no. It makes no difference whether we are dealing with language or religion, with jurisprudence or government, the distinction between the affirmative and the negative side is easily found.

In the elementary linguistic duel which we were considering above, the established term or idiom affirms and the new term or idiom denies. In the religious duel, the orthodox dogma affirms, the heterodox denies, just as, later, when science tends to replace religion, the accepted theory is the affirmation that is controverted by the new theory. Juridical contests are of two kinds. The one occurs in the bosom of a parliament or cabinet whenever it deliberates upon a law or decree, the other, in the bosom of a court whenever a case is tried before it. Now, the legislator must always choose between the adoption or the rejection of the proposed law, i e, between its affirmation or its negation. As for the judge, we know that in every suit that is brought before him,—a peculiarity that has been overlooked in spite of its significance,—there is always a plaintiff who affirms something and a defendant who denies it. If the defendant puts in a counter claim, this means that a second suit is added to the first. If other parties intervene, each of them takes on the character of plaintiff or defendant and thus multiplies the number of the separate questions between the litigants of the action. In political contests a distinction should be made between foreign and intestine wars. The latter are called civil wars when they reach their highest pitch of intensity and result in armed violence. In ordinary times, they constitute the parliamentary or election contests of political factions. In a foreign war is there not always an offensive and defensive army, one in favour of a fight and the other against it? And, above all, is not the cause of war the advance of some claim, or, if it be a doctrinal war, of some dogma that is noised about and pushed forward by one of the belligerents and rejected by the other? In electoral or parliamentary wars there are as many separate combats as the number of measures or principles that are proposed or proclaimed on the one hand and condemned or contradicted on the other. This process between an official plaintiff and one or more opposing defendants is renewed under countless pretexts, from the moment that a ministry or government is first formed; it is ended by the destruction of the opposition—as, for example, in 1594, by the defeat of the Catholic League—or by the downfall of the government or ministry. As for industrial rivalries, to conclude, they consist, if we consider them closely, in many successive or simultaneous duels between inventions that have spread and been established for a shorter or longer period and one or more new inventions that are trying to spread by satisfying more fully the same need. Thus there are always in an industrially progressive society a certain number of old products which defend themselves with varying fortune against new ones. The production and consumption of the former embody a strong affirmation or conviction,—in the case of tallow candles, for example, we have the affirmation that this means of lighting is the best and most economical.—that is impugned by the production and consumption of the latter. We are surprised to find a conflict of propositions underlying the quarrel over shop-counters. The quarrels that are to-day past history between cane sugar and beet sugar, between the stage-coach and the locomotive, between the sailboat and the steamboat, etc., were once real social discussions or even argumentations. For not only two propositions, but two syllogisms, were here face to face, according to a general condition unheeded by logicians. The one said, for example, “The horse is the fastest domestic animal. Now, locomotion is possible only by means of animals; consequently the stage-coach is the best means of locomotion.” To this, the other answered: “The horse is, to be sure, the fastest animal, but it is not true that only brute forces can be utilised in the transportation of men and merchandise, consequently, your conclusion is false.” This observation should be generalised, and it would be easy for us to discover many syllogistic rebuffs of a similar kind in the above logical duels.

I may add that, in the case of industry, the contest is not merely one between two inventions meeting the same need or between the manufacturers or corporations or classes which have monopolised them separately. It is also one between two different needs. The one, some widespread and dominant desire that has been developed by a number of antecedent inventions, like the love of country, for example, among the ancient Romans, is supposed to be of superior importance; the other, aroused by some recent or recently imported inventions, like the taste for objects of art or for Asiatic effeminacy, implicitly impugns the superiority of the first, against which it contends. This kind of contest seems, of course, to be more closely connected with morality than with industry; but in a certain sense morality is only industry viewed in its high and truly political aspect. Government is only a special kind of industry that is able or is supposed to be able to satisfy the chief need and aim that the nature of long-prevailing systems of production and consumption or of long-ruling convictions has planted without a rival in the heart of a people and to which morality insists that all others be subordinated. One country clamours for glory, another for territory, a third for money; it all depends whether its people have done most of their work under arms or at the plough or in the factory. As nations or as individuals, we are ever unwittingly under the control of some guiding desire or, rather, some persistent resolution which, born itself of some past victory, has always fresh combats to wage. We are also under the control of some fixed idea or opinion which has been adopted after some hesitation and whose citadel is continually being attacked. This is called a state of mind in individuals, and a state of society in nations. Every mental or social state implies, then, while it lasts, an ideal. To the formation of the ideal which morality defends and preserves, all the military and industrial as well as all the æsthetic past of a society has contributed. And finally art itself has its own peculiar conflicts of theses and antitheses. In each of its domains there is always some prevailing school that affirms a certain type of beauty which is denied by some other school.

But here I should linger for a moment to emphasise the preceding points. We are considering social facts mainly from the logical point of view, that is, from the point of view of the corroborative or contradictory beliefs which they imply, rather than from that of the auxiliary or contrary desires which they likewise imply. It is difficult to understand how inventions and their aggregates, institutions, can either endorse or disavow one another, and this point I must make clear once for all. Invention only satisfies or provokes desire; desire expresses itself as purpose; and purpose, besides being a pseudo-judgment in its affirmative or negative form (I desire, I do not desire), includes some hope or fear, generally hope, that is, it always includes a true judgment. Hope or fear means affirmation or negation accompanied by a greater or less degree of belief that the thing desired will come to pass. Suppose that I wish to be a Deputy,—a desire which has been developed in me through the invention of universal suffrage and representation,—it means that I hope to become a Deputy by means of certain well-known methods. And if my opponents hinder me (because they believe that another will aid them more in obtaining the places which they desire, a desire which has been provoked in them by the old or new invention of the functions in question), it is because they have some quite contradictory hopes. I affirm that thanks to my good management I shall probably be elected; they deny it. If they should absolutely cease denying and lose all hope, they would no longer oppose me, and the teleological duel would end, as it always does end, in the logical duel—a proof of the capital importance of the latter.

What is social life but a continual turmoil of vague hopes and fears intermittently excited by fresh ideas which stir up fresh desires? When we dwell upon the conflict or competition of desires we get a social teleology, when upon that of hopes, a social logic. When two inventions satisfy the same desire, they clash together, as I have shown, because each implies on the part of its respective producer or consumer the hope or conviction that it is the better adapted to the end in view, and, consequently, that the other is the inferior of the two. But, even when two inventions satisfy two different desires, they may contradict each other, either because the desires are dissimilar expressions of a higher desire which each thinks itself the fitter to express, or because the satisfaction of either requires that the other shall remain unsatisfied and because each hopes that this will be the outcome.

We have an example of the first case in the invention of oil painting in the fifteenth century. This invention gainsaid the ancient invention of painting on wax in the sense that the growing passion for the former contested with the existing taste for the latter the right of considering itself the best form of the love of pictures. As an example of the second case we have the invention of gunpowder in the fourteenth century. In developing among sovereigns an evergrowing craving for conquest and centralisation, a craving which required the subjection of the feudal lords for its satisfaction, it found itself in opposition with the inventions of fortified castles and elaborate armour, inventions which had developed the need for feudal independence among the nobility; and if the latter persisted in their resistance to their king, it was because they continued to have as much confidence in their castles and cuirasses as the king in his cannon.

But in history the chief contradiction between two inventions arises from their satisfying the same desire. The Christian invention of the diaconate and the episcopacy certainly contradicted the pagan invention of the prætorship and consulship and patriciate, for both Christian and pagan thought that their desire for grandeur was satisfied by their respective dignities and denied that it could be satisfied by the dignities of the other. Consequently a social state which tolerated all of these opposite institutions at the same time contained a hidden evil; and, as a matter of fact, many contradictions of this kind contributed, after the advent of Christianity, to the break-up of the Roman Empire and to that absorption of Roman civilisation which at the Renascence forced the civilisation of Christendom to give way in its turn. In a way, too, the invention of the monastic rule of the first religious orders also gainsaid the ancient invention of the Roman phalanx, since each of these inventions, in the eyes of those who made use of it, satisfied, to the exclusion of the other, the desire for true security.

In like manner the Doric and Corinthian orders were gainsaid by the pointed style, and the hexameter and pentameter by the rhymed verse of ten syllables. The hexameter and the Corinthian order satisfied the Roman’s desire for literary and architectural beauty; they failed to do this for the twelfth-century Frenchman, whom the ten-syllabled verse, dear to the trouvères, and the style of Notre Dame de Paris alone satisfied. The irreconciliable elements in such conceptions, then, are the judgments which accompany them. This is so true that when in modern times a more liberal taste attributes grandeur to both the patriciate and the episcopacy and beauty to both the hexameter and the heroic measure, formerly antagonistic elements are reconciled, just as long before this monasticism and militarism came into perfect harmony when it was seen that in the one lay security for the life to come and in the other, for life from day to day.

It is quite certain, therefore, that all social advances by means of elimination consist, at first, of duels between antagonistic affirmatives and negatives. But it is well to note that the negative is not entirely self-sustaining, that it must depend upon some new thesis which is itself gainsaid by the thesis of the affirmative. In times of progress, then, the elimination must always be a substitution, and I have merged these two ideas into the latter one. This necessity explains the weakness of certain political oppositions which have no programmes of their own, and whose impotent criticism controverts everything and affirms nothing. For the same reason no great religious heretic or reformer ever confined himself wholly to the negative side in any effective opposition to dogma. The cutting dialectic of a Lucian did less to shatter the statue of Jupiter than the lisping by slaves of the least of the Christian dogmas. It has been justly observed, too, that an established system of philosophy resists all attack until the day when its enemies have become its rivals in the establishment of another original philosophic system.

However ridiculous a school of art may be, it continues vigorous until replaced. It took the pointed style to kill the Roman style of architecture, and the art of the Renascence to kill the Gothic. Classic tragedy would have survived its critics but for the appearance of the romantic drama, hybrid though it was. A commercial article disappears from consumption only because another article satisfying the same want takes its place, or because the want that it satisfies has been suppressed by a change of fashion or custom, and this change can be accounted for not alone by the spread of some new distaste or objection, but by that of some new taste or principle as well.¹ In the same way a new legal principle or procedure must be formulated or adopted before inconvenient or antiquated principles or procedures can disappear. In Rome archaic civil processes would have persisted indefinitely but for the ingenious invention of the Formulary system. Quiritian law gave way only to the happy fictions and liberal inspirations of Prætorian law. In our own days the French penal code, as well as many other foreign criminal codes, is clearly old-fashioned and contrary to public opinion, but it will be maintained until criminologists agree upon some new theory of penal responsibility that will be generally adopted.

Finally, if a people retain the same number of ideas to be verbally expressed (if it loses some of its ideas without acquiring at least an equal number, its civilisation is declining instead of progressing), the words and grammatical forms of its language can be eliminated only through the spread of equivalent terms or idioms. When one word dies another is born, and, consequently, or analogously, when one language perishes, it means that another has been born within it or outside of it. Latin would still be spoken, in spite of the barbarian invasions, providing certain important linguistic inventions, the derivation of articles from pronouns, for example, or the characterisation of the future tense by the infinitive followed by the verb to have (avoir) (aimer-ai), had not come to group themselves together somewhere or other to form a rallying point for the Romance languages. Here were new theses without which the antithesis, which consisted in opposition to the cases and tenses of the Latin declensions and conjugations, would never have succeeded.

Thus every logical duel is in reality twofold, consisting of two sets of diametrically opposite affirmations and negations. Still, although, at every moment of social life, one of the two hostile theses gainsays the other, yet it presents itself as pre-eminently self-affirmative; whereas the second thesis, although it likewise affirms itself, owes its prominence only to its contradiction of the first. It is essential both for the politician and the historian to distinguish in every case whether the affirmative or the negative side preponderates and to note the moment when the rôles are reversed. This moment almost always arrives. There is a certain time when a growing philosophy or religious or political sect owes all its popularity to the support which it lends to the controvertists of the accepted thesis or dogma or to the detractors of government; later, when this philosophy or sect has enlarged, we see that all the forces of the still resistant national church or orthodox philosophy or established government are called upon to serve as a protection against the objections, the doubts, and the alarms that have been aroused by the ideas and pretensions of the innovators, ideas and pretensions that have by this time become attractive in themselves. In the case of industry and fine arts, it is for the pleasure of change, of not doing the usual thing, that that part of the public which is influenced by fashion adopts a new product to the neglect of some old one; then when the novelty has become acclimated and appreciated for its own sake the older product seeks a refuge in the cherished habits of the other part of the public which is partial to custom and which wishes to show in that way that it also does not do the same thing as the rest of the world. In the struggle of a new form of speech with some old expression, the new form at first relies upon its chiefly negative charm for neologists who wish to talk out of the ordinary; and when the new form in turn becomes time-worn, the older expression finds support in its turn, but upon its negative side merely, among the lovers of archaisms who do not wish to talk like all the rest of the world. The same somersaults are turned in a duel between a new principle of justice and a traditional one.

It is now essential to distinguish between the cases in which the logical duel of theses and antitheses is individual and those in which it is social. The distinction could not be more clear-cut. The social duel commences only after the individual one has ceased. Every act of imitation is preceded by hesitation on the part of the individual, for every discovery or invention that seeks to spread abroad always finds some obstacle to overcome in some of the ideas or practices that have already been adopted by every member of the public. And then in the heart or mind of every such person some kind of a conflict sets in. It may be between two candidates, that is, between two policies which solicit his vote, or, if he be a statesman, between two perplexing lines of action. It may be between two theories which sway his scientific belief; or between religion and irreligion, or between two sects which contend for his religious adherence. It may be between two objects of art or commerce which hold his taste and his purchase price in suspense. If he be a legislator, it may be between two contrary bills¹ or principles that seem equally important; or, if he be a lawyer, between two solutions of a legal question over which he is reflecting, or between two expressions which suggest themselves at the same time to his hesitating tongue. Now, as long as a man hesitates in this way, he refrains from imitation, whereas it is only as an imitator that he is a part of society. When he finally imitates, it means that he has come to a decision.

Let us suppose, although it is an hypothesis that could never be realised, that all the members of a nation were simultaneously and indefinitely in a state of indecision like that which I have described. Then war would be at an end, for an ultimatum or a declaration of war presupposes the making of individual decisions by cabinet officers. For war to exist, the clearest type of the logical duel in society, peace must first have been established in the minds of the ministers or rulers who before that hesitated to formulate the thesis and antithesis embodied in the two opposing armies. For the same reason there would be no more election contests. There would be an end to religious quarrels and to scientific schisms and disputes, because this division of society into separate churches or theories presupposes that some single doctrine has finally prevailed in the previously divided thought or conscience of each of their respective followers. Parliamentary discussions would cease. There would be an end to litigation. A lawsuit, the presentation of a social difficulty for settlement, shows that each party has already settled in his own mind the mental difficulty that was presented to him. Industrial competition between rival establishments would cease because their rivalry depended upon each having its separate group of patrons, and now their products would no longer vie against one another in their patrons’ hearts. There would be an end to the struggles and encroachments of different kinds of law, such as those between the Custom and the Roman law of mediæval France, for such national perplexity means that individuals have chosen one or the other of the two bodies of law. There would be an end to contests for pre-eminence between distinct dialects, between the Langue d’Oc and the Langue d’Oïl, for example, for a linguistic hesitation of this kind in a nation is due to the linguistic steadfastness of the individuals who compose it.

In brief, to reiterate, social irresolution begins when individual irresolution ends. Nowhere else can be seen to greater advantage the striking similarity and dissimilarity of the logic and psychology of society to the logic and psychology of the individual. I hasten to add that although the hesitation which precedes an act of imitation is merely an individual fact, yet it is caused by social facts, that is, by other accomplished acts of imitation. The resistance which a man always puts up against the influence, whether rational or prestigeful, of another man whom he is about to copy is always the outcome of some prior influence which he has already experienced. His delay in imitating is due to the intersection in his mind of a given current of imitation with an inclination towards a different imitation. It is well to note here that even the spread of an imitation involves it in an encounter and struggle with another imitation.

At the same time it may be seen that the necessity of there being only two adversaries in social oppositions is explained by the universality of imitation, the essential fact of social life. In fact, only two theses or judgments can be in opposition wherever this elementary fact occurs: the thesis or purpose of the individual-model and the thesis or purpose of the individual-copy. If we wish to look abroad over masses of human beings, the duel may be seen to be reproduced, magnified, and socialised under thousands of forms; but the more narrow and complete the order of the phenomena of human association in question, the more clearly will it be reflected in the total group of facts. It is very clear in military affairs as armies become disciplined and centralised and as it comes about that only one great combat is waged at the same time on the same battlefield instead of the multiplied single combats of the Homeric period. It is very distinct, too, in religions, as they grow more united and more hierarchical. The duel between Catholicism and Protestantism, or between Catholicism and free thought, implies an advance in the organisation of these cults and of that of free thought as well. The duel is less clear in politics, but it becomes more clear as parties advance in organisation. It is even less clear in industry; but if industry ever comes to be organised on a socialistic basis, the case will change. In language it is very vague, for language has become less conscious of nationality than any other human product. However, I mentioned above the struggle of the Langue d’Oc and the Langue d’Oïl, and there are many other analogous examples. The duel became vague, too, in jurisprudence when the study of law ceased to be a passion, and law schools were no longer recruited by the trained and enthusiastic followers of famous professors, and ceased to witness anything comparable to the great contentions of the Sabiniani and Proculiani at Rome, of the Romanists and Feudists at the close of the Middle Ages, etc.

When social irresolution has been produced and accentuated it must be transformed in its turn into resolution. How? Through a fresh series of individual states of irresolution followed by acts of imitation. If several political programmes are splitting a nation up, one of them will spread, through means of propaganda or terror, until it has won over almost everybody one by one. The same is true of one among many rival churches or philosophies. It is useless to multiply examples. Finally, when a certain degree of the unanimity which is never absolute comes to be realised, all irresolution, whether individual or social, is very nearly over. This is the inevitable finish. Everything which we see anchored and rooted in our customs and beliefs of to-day began by being the object of ardent discussion. There is no peaceful institution which has not been mothered by discord. Grammars, codes, catechisms, written and unwritten constitutions, ruling industries, sovereign systems of versification, all these things which are in themselves the categorical basis of society, have been the slow and gradual work of social dialetic. Every grammatical rule expresses the triumph of some habit of speech which has spread at the expense of other partially contradictory habits. Every article of the French Code is a bargain or treaty made after bloody street broils, after stirring journalistic polemics, and after rhetorical parliamentary tempests. No constitutional principle has ever been accepted except in the wake of revolutions, etc.¹

The categories of the individual mind originated in the same way.¹ Our slightly developed notions of time, space, matter, and force are, according to the well-grounded conclusion of the new psychology, the result of the inhibitions, inductions, and acquisitions that take place in the individual during the first period of life. But, just as the little child in the cradle possesses at an age which defies analysis the germ of vague ideas on space and time, if not on matter and force, so every primitive society presents to us a confused body of grammatical rules, of customs, of religious ideas, and of political forces about whose formation we are absolutely ignorant.

The conclusion of society’s logical duel occurs in three different ways. (1) It quite often happens that one of the two adversaries is suppressed merely by the natural prolongation of the other’s progress. For example, the Phoenician writing had only to continue to spread to annihilate the cuneiform. The petroleum lamp had only to be known to cause the brazier of nut oil, a slight modification of the Roman lamp, to fall into disuse in the shanties of Southern France. Sometimes, however, a moment arrives when the progress of even the favoured rival is checked by some increasing difficulty in dislodging the enemy beyond a certain point. Then, (2) if the need of settling the contradiction is felt strongly enough, arms are resorted to, and victory results in the violent suppression of one of the two duellists. Here may be easily classed the case in which an authoritative, although non-military, force intervenes, as happened in the vote of the Council of Nice in favour of the Athanasian creed, or in the conversion of Constantine to Christianity, or as happens in any important decision following upon the deliberations of a dictator or assembly. In this case, the vote or decree, like the victory in the other case, is a new external condition which favours one of the two rival theses or volitions at the expense of the other and disturbs the natural play of spreading and competing imitations somewhat as a sudden climatic change resulting from a geological accident in a given locality disturbs the propagation of life by preventing the multiplication of some naturally fertile animal or vegetal species and by facilitating that of others which otherwise had been less prolific. Finally, (3) the antagonists are often seen to be reconciled, or one of them is seen to be wisely and voluntarily expelled through the intervention of some new discovery or invention.

Let us consider for a while this last and, as it seems to me, most important case, for here the intervening condition comes from within rather than from without. Besides, the successful discovery or invention plays the same part here as that played in the preceding case by the happy inspiration of the general on the battlefield whose flash of military genius ensured the victory of his side. It took the discovery, for example, of the circulation of the blood, to put an end to the interminable discussions of the anatomists of the sixteenth century. It took the astronomical discoveries due to the invention of the telescope, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, to settle the question in favour of the Pythagorean hypothesis and contrary to those of the Aristotelians whether the sun revolved around the earth or the earth around the sun, as well as many other questions which divided the astronomists into two camps. Turn to any library and see how many sometime burning questions, how many belching volcanoes of argument and abuse, are now cold and extinct! And the cooling down has almost always been started, as if by a miracle, by some scholarly, or apparently, by some even erudite or imaginary, discovery. There is not a page of the catechism which is at present unchallenged by believers but whose every line embodies the outcome of violent polemics between the founders of its dogma, between the Church Fathers or the Councils.

What was needed to end these at times bloody combats? The discovery of some more or less authentic and sacred text, or of some new theological conception—unless some supposedly infallible authority cut short the controversy by force. In the same way, how many conflicts between men’s wills and desires have been settled or singularly, calmed down by some industrial or even by some political invention! Before the invention of wind-mills or water-mills, desire for bread and aversion to the enervating labour of grinding by hand were openly antagonistic in the hearts of the master and his slaves. To wish to eat bread was to wish this atrocious fatigue for one’s self or for others, and not to wish this fatigue for one’s self, if one were a slave, was to wish that nobody should eat bread. When the water-mill was invented, it was an immense relief to slave-labour, and the aforesaid desires ceased to impede each other. Before the invention of the cart, one of the most wonderful inventions of antiquity, the need to transport heavy weights and the wish not to exhaust one’s strength by carrying them on one’s shoulder and not to prostrate beasts of burden with them fought together and blocked each other’s way in people’s feelings. In short, slavery was but a necessary evil for the accomplishment of painful and obligatory work the necessity of which was recognised by the slave as well as by his master. The master threw the burden of it upon the slave in order that, as far as he himself was concerned, at any rate, the conflict of contradictory desires might be settled; otherwise it would have been settled for nobody. This chronic antagonism of desires and interests gave way but gradually to comparative harmony through a series of capital inventions which provided for the utilisation of the inanimate forces of nature, of steam, of the winds and streams, etc., to the great and equal advantage of both master and slave.

Here each intervening invention did better than merely to suppress one of the terms of the difficulty; it suppressed their contrariety. This is what happens in the unravelling of a comedy (for an invention is a dénouement, and vice versa), when the contradiction in the wills of a father and son, for example, comes to a point that seems to be insurmountable, some unexplained disclosure shows that it is entirely fictitious and groundless.¹ Industrial inventions may be compared, then, to the unravelling of a comedy, in other words, they are pleasing and satisfactory to all the world, whereas military inventions, with their perfected armaments and cunning strategy and eagle-eyed perception at critical moments, plainly suggest the unravelling of a tragedy where the triumph of one rival is the death of the other, where so much passion and prejudice is embodied in the actors, where the contradiction between their desires and their convictions is so serious that harmony becomes impossible and the final sacrifice inevitable. Every victory is in this way the suppression, if not of the vanquished, at least of his national and resisting will, by the national will of the victor. It is this rather than a mutual agreement, in spite of the treaty which follows and which is an involuntary compact. In short, history is a tissue, an interlacing of tragedies and comedies, of horrible tragedies and cheerless comedies. If we look closely, we can easily distinguish them. This is perhaps the reason, I may say in passing, why, in our much more industrial than military age, it is not surprising to find that, on the stage, where real life is reflected, tragedy is becoming more neglected day by day and is yielding to comedy, which grows and flourishes, but which becomes sombre and gloomy at the same time.

III. The Logical Union

Now that we have discussed the inventions and discoveries which fight and replace each other, I have to deal with those which aid and add to each other. It must not be inferred from the order I have followed that progress through substitution originally preceded progress through accumulation. In reality, the latter necessarily preceded, just as it plainly follows, the former. The latter is both the alpha and the omega; the former is but a middle term. For example, the formation of languages certainly began in a successive acquisition of words, of verbal forms, which, as they expressed ideas hitherto unexpressed, found no rivals to contest their establishment; and this circumstance undoubtedly facilitated their first steps. In the beginnings of primordial religion the legends and myths with which it was enriched found in their character of answers to entirely fresh questions no prior solutions to contradict them, and it was easy for them not to contradict each other, since they gave separate answers to different questions. It was probably difficult for primitive customs to graft themselves upon the waywardness peculiar to a state of nature; but as they answered to problems of justice which had until then been unpropounded and as they regulated individual relations which had until then been unregulated, they had the good fortune to have no pre-existing customs to combat, and it was an easy matter for them not to become embroiled with one another.

Finally, primitive political organisations must have been free to develop up to a certain point without any inward disturbance or military or industrial struggle. The very first form of government was in answer to a demand for security which had until then received no satisfaction, and this circumstance was favourable to its establishment. When the art of war first arose, every new weapon or drill or tactic could be added to those already in existence, whereas, in our own day it is seldom that a new engine of war or a new military regulation does not have to battle for some time with others which its introduction has rendered useless. In the beginnings of industry, in its pastoral and agricultural forms, every newly cultivated plant and every newly domesticated animal were added to the feeble resources of field and barn, of garden and stable, and did not, like to-day, replace other domestic plants and animals of almost equal worth. At that time, likewise, every new astronomical or physical observation which lit up some hitherto obscure point in the human mind took an undisputed place side by side with anterior observations which it in no way contradicted. It was a question of scattering shadows, not of overcoming falsehoods. It was a question of exploiting unbounded and uncultivated lands, not of improving lands that had already been worked by other possessors.

But we should not overlook the fact that the kind of accumulation which precedes substitution by means of logical duels is different from that which follows it. The first kind consists of a weak aggregation of elements whose principal bond lies in not contradicting one another; the second, in a vigorous group of elements which not only do not contradict one another, but, for the most part, confirm one another. And this should be so, because of the continually growing need of strong and comprehensive belief. From what has preceded we can already see the truth of this remark; it will presently become still more apparent. I will show that along all lines there are two distinct kinds of inventions or discoveries, those that are capable of indefinite accumulation (although they may also be replaced) and those that, after a certain degree of accumulation has been reached, must, if progress is to continue, be replaced. Now, the distribution of both kinds takes place quite naturally in the course of progress. The first both precede and follow the second, but in the latter instance, after the exhaustion of the second, they present a systematic character which they previously lacked.

A language may grow without limit through the addition of new words corresponding to new ideas; but although nothing may check the increasing bulk of its vocabulary, the additions to its grammar are restricted. Outside of a small number of grammatical rules and forms which are alike in character and which meet, more or less satisfactorily, all the needs of the language, no new rule or form can arise without entering into opposition with others and without tending to recast the idiom in a different mould. If the idea of expressing case by means of a preposition followed by an article comes into a language which is already possessed of declensions, either the article and the preposition must eventually eliminate the declensions, or the declensions must repel them. Now, let me observe, after the grammar of a language has become fixed, its vocabulary does not cease to grow richer; on the contrary, it increases still more rapidly; besides, from this time on, as every new term takes on the same grammatical livery, it not only does not contradict the others, but even indirectly confirms their implicit propositions. For example, every new word which came into Latin with the termination us or a seemed in its declension to reiterate and confirm that which was said by all the other words similarly terminated and declined, namely, the following general propositions: us and a are signs of Latinity, i, u, æ, um are signs of the genitive, the dative, the accusative, etc.

Religions have also, like languages, two aspects. They have their dictionary of narrative and legend, their starting point, and their religious grammar of dogma and ritual. The former is composed of Biblical or mythological tales, of histories of gods and demi-gods, of heroes and saints, and it can develop without stop; but the latter cannot be extended in the same way. After all the main conscience-tormenting problems have been solved according to the peculiar principle of the given religion, a moment comes when no new dogma can be introduced which does not partly contradict established dogma; similarly, no new rite, in as much as it is an expression of dogma, can be freely introduced when all the dogmas have already been expressed in ritual. Now, after the creed and ritual of a religion have been defined, its martyrology, hagiography, and ecclesiastical history never fail to grow richer, and this even more rapidly than before. Moreover, the saints and martyrs and devotees of a mature religion, not only do not contradict one another in the conventionality and orthodoxy of all their acts, thoughts, and even miracles, but mutually reflect and endorse one another. In this respect they differ from the divine or heroic persons, from the gods and demigods, from the patriarchs and apostles, as well as from the legends and prodigies, that succeeded one another before the making of dogma and ritual.

Here I must open a parenthesis for quite an important observation. If a religion is primarily narrative, it is highly variable and plastic; if it is primarily dogmatic, it is essentially unchangeable. In Greco-Latin paganism there is almost no dogma, and since ritual has, therefore, almost no dogmatic significance its symbolism is of the more distinctly narrative kind. It may represent, for example, an episode in the life of Ceres or Bacchus. Understood in this way there may be no end to the accumulation of different rites. If dogma amounted to almost nothing, narrative was almost everything, in ancient polytheism. Therefore it had an incredible facility for enrichment. This is analogous to the inflation of a modern idiom, like English, which, although it is grammatically very poor, incorporates all manner of foreign words by merely making a slight change in their termination, a kind of linguistic baptism. But although this capacity for unlimited enlargement is a cause of viability in a narrative religion, this does not mean that it is particularly well fortified against the attacks of criticism. It is quite a different thing from the solid theological system or body of self-consistent or apparently self-consistent dogma and dogmatic ritual that can rise up in a mass to confront any outside controversialist that may oppose them.

But to return. What is true of religion is also true of that which seeks to replace it, of science. As long as science merely enumerates and describes facts, sense-given data, it is susceptible of indefinite extension. And science begins in this way by being a collection of non-related as well as non-contradictory phenomena. But as soon as it becomes dogmatic and law-making, in turn, as soon as it conceives of theories that are able to give to facts the air of mutual confirmation instead of merely mutual non-contradiction, as soon, indeed, as it unwittingly synthesises the data of sensation under intuitive mental forms which are implicit general propositions called time, space, matter, and force, then science becomes, perhaps, the most incapable of extension of all human achievements. Scientific theories undoubtedly become more complete, but this happens through mutual substitution and through periodically fresh starts, whereas observations and experiments go on accumulating. Certain leading hypotheses that reappear from one age to another—atomism, dynamism (modern evolutionism), monadology, idealism (Platonic or Hegelian)—are the inflexible frames of the swelling and overflowing mass of facts. Only, among these master thoughts, these hypotheses or inventions of science, there are certain ones which receive increasing confirmation from one another and from the continual accumulation of newly discovered facts which, in consequence, no longer merely restrict themselves to not contradicting one another, but reciprocally repeat and confirm one another, as if bearing witness together to the same law or to the same collective proposition. Before Newton, successive astronomical discoveries did not contradict one another; since Newton, they confirm one another. Ideally, every distinct science should be reducible, like modern astronomy, to a single formula, and these different formulas should be bound together by some higher formula. In a word, there should be no longer sciences, but Science, just as in a polytheistic religion which has become monotheistic by means of selection there are no longer gods, but God.

And so in a tribe which passes from a pastoral to an agricultural and then to a manufacturing state, adding wheat fields and rice fields to its pasture lands, enriching its orchards and gardens, elaborating its textile fabrics, interests do not fail to multiply nor corresponding laws and customs to accumulate. But the general principles of law which finally shine out from such a medley are always limited in number, and for them progress means substitution. Now, after the formation of a legal grammar, the dictionary of law, in France called the Bulletin des lois, can, of course, visibly enlarge and redouble its activity as well; but from this time on, succeeding laws are garbed in the same uniform of theory, a uniform which adapts them to codification, to a rural code, to a commercial code, to a maritime code, etc. This systematisation would have been impossible before.

Finally, from the point of view of government (I use the word in its large sense to mean the directed activity of a nation in all its forms) analogous distinctions are exhibited. We may say that the directed national activity is either militant or industrial and that the former type of activity is divisible into military and political forces, according as it consists of the short and bloody warfare of armies or of the long and stormy warfare of parties, of the oppression of a conquered and tributary foreigner or of that of a home foe who has been crushed down by taxation. Now, it is remarkable that in both these subdivisions, the administrative side is continually unfolding and improving as its functions multiply, whereas the arts of war and statesmanship are always moving in a narrow circle of strategies and constitutions which may be gathered up into a small number of different and mutually exclusive types. But it is only after civil or military functions have been taken and multiplied by some constitutional or strategic plan, that they converge, instead of merely refraining from overdiverging, and that they form a true state or army, instead of a horde or federation of barbarians.

As for the industrial division of directed national activity, the same remarks are applicable, modified by certain observations. Industry, as I have already said, can be separated only in thought from the dominant ethics and æsthetics of any given period. If we hold to this idea as we should, we shall perceive that only a certain number of new industrial ideas or inventions are, as I have so often repeated, susceptible of indefinite progress, that is to say, of an almost endless amount of accumulation. The industrial machinery of course increases; but the ends of the service to which all these means are eventually put, follow one another only through mutual elimination. At first sight and taking the means and ends of industry collectively without distinguishing between them, it would seem as if the industrial systems of different periods had wholly replaced each other. Nothing is less like the industry of Greece or Rome than the industry of Assyria; the industry of the seventeenth century is quite unlike that of the Middle Ages and modern manufacture unlike the hand labour of our forefathers. In fact, each of these great groups of human actions is held together and inspired by some great dominant desire which completely changes from one age to another. It may be the desire to prepare for the life after death or the desire to propitiate one’s gods or to honour and embellish one’s city, or the desire to give expression to religious faith or kingly pride or the desire to equalise society. The change in this highest aim of all explains the sequence of those striking works in which a whole period is epitomised, works like the Egyptian tomb, the Greek temple, the Roman circus and triumphal arch, the mediæval cathedral, the palace of the seventeenth century, the railroad stations or city structures of to-day.

But, as a matter of fact, it is the civilisation and not the industry which has disappeared forever in this way, if by civilisation we mean the sum of a period’s moral and æsthetic aims and industrial means. The junction of the former with the latter is always partially accidental. For the given ends exploited the given means because they happened to run across them, but they might have made use of others, and although the given means did serve the given ends, they stood ready to serve different ones as well. Now, the ends pass away; but the means, or what is essential in them, remain. An imperfect machine survives, by a sort of metempsychosis, in the more perfect and complex one which was in whole or in part the cause of its annihilation; and every primitive mechanism such as the rod, the lever, or the wheel reappears in our most modern implements. The long bow survives in the cross bow, the cross bow in the arquebuse and gun. The primitive cart survives in the carriage on springs and the latter in the locomotive. The stage-coach was not routed, but absorbed, by the locomotive, which added something to it, namely, steam and the capacity for a higher rate of speed. On the other hand, the Christian’s desire for mystical salvation did not absorb, but actually routed the Roman’s desire for civic glory, just as the Copernican theory banished the Ptolemaic system.

In short, the industrial inventions which have followed one another for thousands of years may be compared to the vocabulary of a language or to the facts of science. As I have said above, many tools and products are, in truth, dethroned by others, just as many inexact pieces of information have been driven out by more accurate knowledge, but, in the long run, the number of tools and products, like the sum of knowledge, has increased. Science properly called, a collection of facts that can be drawn upon to prove a given theory, is comparable to industry properly called, a store of processes and mechanisms that can serve to actualise a given system of morals or æsthetics. Industry, in this sense, is the content whose form is supplied by prevailing ideas of justice and beauty, by ideas concerning the criterion of conduct. And by industry I also mean art, in as much as it is distinct from the changing ideal which uplifts it and which lends to its manifold secrets and facilities their profound inspiration. Now, the resources of industry, including the artifices of artists and even of poets, go on multiplying both before and after the formation of well-defined moral and æsthetic systems, that is, of a hierarchy of wants consecrated by unanimous judgment, but, before this is formed, they are scattered, whereas, after it is formed, they are concentrated; and it is only then, when a single thought is implicitly affirmed in all the branches of national industry, that they present the spectacle of that mutual confirmation, of that unique orientation and of that admirable internal harmony which was known in Greece and in the twelfth century of our era and which our grandchildren may, perhaps, live to see.

For the time being, we must confess, and this remark leads us to new considerations, our modern contemporary epoch is in search of its pole. Its character has been rightly described as chiefly scientific and industrial. By that we must understand that theoretically a successful search for facts has predominated over preoccupation with philosophic ideas and that, practically, a search for the means has predominated over regard for the ends of activity. That means that our modern world has at all times and places instinctively precipitated itself in the direction of discoveries or inventions that can be accumulated without questioning whether the neglected discoveries or inventions that can be substituted for one another did not alone justify and give value to the others. But let us, at any rate, put this question to ourselves: Is it true that the sides of social thought and conduct that cannot be indefinitely extended (grammars, dogma, and theories, principles of justice, political policy and strategy, morals and æsthetics) are less worth cultivating than the sides that can be indefinitely extended (vocabularies, mythologies and descriptive sciences, customs, collections of laws, industries, systems of civil and military administration)?

Indeed, on the contrary, the side open to substitution, that which after a certain point cannot be extended, is always the essential side. Grammar is the whole of language. Theory is the whole of science, and dogma, of religion. Principles constitute justice. Strategy, war. Government is but a political idea. Morality is the sum of industry, for industry amounts to neither more nor less than its end. The ideal is surely the all of art. What are words good for but for building sentences, or facts, but for making theories? What are laws good for but to unfold or consecrate higher principles of justice? For what use are the arms, the tactics, and the different divisions of an army but to form part of the strategical plan of the general in command? Of what use are the multiple services, functions, and administrative departments of a state but to aid in the constitutional schemes of the statesman who represents the victorious political party? Of what use are the different crafts and products of a country but to co-operate in achieving the objects of its prevailing morality? Of what use are schools and works of art and literature to a society but to formulate and strengthen its characteristic ideal?

Only it is much easier to move forward in the direction of possible acquisitions and endowments than in that of necessary substitutions and sacrifices. It is much easier to pile up neologism upon neologism than to master one’s own tongue and, thereby, gradually improve its grammar; to bring together scientific observations and experiments, than to supply science with theories of a more general and demonstrated order; to multiply miracles and pious practices than to substitute rational for outworn religious dogma; to manufacture laws by the dozen than to conceive of a new principle of justice fitted to conciliate all interests; to increase the complexity of armaments and tactics, of offices and functions, and to have excellent civil or military administrators than to have eminent generals or statesmen able to conceive of the proper plan at the desired moment and to contribute by their example to remodelling and improving military art or statecraft; to multiply wants by virtue of an ever richer and more varied consumption and production than to substitute for some dominant want a superior and preferable want, one more conducive to order and peace; finally, to artistically unroll an inexhaustible series of tricks and ingenuities than to obtain the slightest insight into some fine new thing that was more worthy of exciting love and enthusiasm.

But modern Europe has been somewhat carried away by the deceptive charm of doing things easily. This is the reason of the especially striking contrast between the wealth of its legislation and the feebleness of its juridical system (compare it, in this particular, with Trajan’s Rome or even with Justinian’s Constantinople), or between its industrial exuberance and its æsthetic poverty (compare it, in this respect, to the great days of the French Middle Ages or of the Italian Renaissance). I might also bring forward to a certain extent the contrast between modern Europe’s sciences and its philosophy of science. But I hasten to recognise the fact that although the philosophic side of its knowledge is comparatively neglected, it has been the object of a much more profound and extensive cultivation than the moral side of its activity. Industry, from this point of view, is notably behind science. It has aroused, on all sides, factitious wants which it satisfies indiscriminately without bothering itself about their arrangement or harmony. In this it resembles the ill-digested science of the sixteenth century which gave birth to a crop of incoherent and pedantic guesses and vagaries each of which was fostered by a certain number of facts. Contemporary activity, contemporary civilisation must straighten out this chaos of heterogeneous wants, just as the science of the sixteenth century had to bridle the imagination of its scholars, and prune away the majority of their conceptions in order to give others a chance to be transformed into theories. What are the simple and fruitful wants which the future will develop, and what are the sterile and smothered wants that it will cast aside? This is the secret. It is hard to find out, but we must make the attempt. All these wrangling or ill-adjusted wants which flourish at every point on the industrial field, and which have their passionate devotees, constitute a sort of moral fetichism or polytheism which seeks to branch out into a comprehensive and authoritative moral monotheism, into a great new and potent system of æsthetics.

Besides, it is industry far more than civilisation that has progressed in recent times. As a proof of this I might point to my embarrassment a while ago in trying to find some characteristic monument of our modern industry. It is a strange fact and one that has been lost sight of that, at present, the grandest works of industry are not industrial products, but industrial implements, namely, great factories, prodigious machines, immense railroad stations. How trivial are the things, even the most important things, which come out of our great foundries or factories; how trivial the fine houses and theatres and city halls compared with the giant laboratories themselves! How the petty magnificence of our private or public luxury fades away before our industrial expositions, where the sole usefulness of the products is self-display! Once the opposite was true, when the miserable huts of Pharaoh’s fellahs, or the obscure stalls of mediæval artisans surrounded the gigantic pyramid or cathedral that was reared on high through the sum of their combined efforts. It seems in these days as if industry existed for the sake of industry, just as science exists for the sake of science.

Additional Considerations

We have seen that social progress is accomplished through a series of substitutions and accumulations. It is certainly necessary to distinguish between these two processes; and yet evolutionists have made the mistake, here as elsewhere, of merging them together. Perhaps the term evolution is badly chosen. We may call it social evolution, however, when an invention quietly spreads through imitation—the elementary fact in society; or even when a new invention that has already been imitated grafts itself upon a prior one which it fosters and completes. And yet why should we not use, in this second instance, the more precise term of insertion? A philosophy of universal Insertion would be a happy contribution to the correction of the theory of universal Evolution. Finally, when a new invention, an invisible microbe at first, later on a fatal disease, brings with it a germ which will eventually destroy, the old invention to which it attaches itself, how can the latter be said to evolve? Did the Roman Empire evolve when Christianity inoculated it with the virus of radical negations of its fundamental principles? No, this was counter-evolution, revolution perhaps, but certainly not evolution. At bottom, of course, in this case as in the preceding, there is nothing, elementarily, but evolution, because everything is imitation; but, since these evolutions and imitations struggle against each other, it is a great mistake to consider the sum formed by these conflicting elements as a single evolution. I thought it important to note this fact in passing.

Let us note another more important fact. Whatever method may be used to suppress conflict between beliefs or between interests and to bring about their agreement, it almost always happens (does it not always happen?) that the resulting harmony creates a new kind of antagonism. For contradictions and contrarieties of details, some massive contradiction or contrariety has been substituted, and this also seeks a solution for itself only to raise up still greater oppositions, and so on until the final solution is reached. Instead of quarrelling together over cattle or game, over utilitarian objects, a million of men will organise themselves into an army and work together for the subjection of a neighbouring people. This is the rallying point of all their avarice and activity. And, in fact, before commerce and exchange existed, militarism must have been for a long time the only logical outcome of the problem raised up by rival interests. But militarism gives birth to war, and war between two peoples is a substitute for thousands of individual struggles.

In the same way a group of some hundred men will cease from individual fights and plots and counterplots and will set to labour together in one workshop. Their acts are no longer antagonistic, but from this very fact an unexpected contrariety arises, namely, the rivalry of their workshop with others that turn out the same kind of goods. This is not all. The workmen in every factory are collectively interested in its prosperity; in any case their desires in production, thanks to the division of organised labour, converge towards the same end. The soldiers of an army have likewise a common interest in victory. But, at the same time, the struggle between so-called Capital and so-called Labour, that is, between the total number of employers and the total number of workmen,¹ as well as rivalry between different ranks in an army or between different classes in a nation, is aroused by this imperfect agreement. These teleological problems are inherent in the very progress of industrial or military organisation, just as scientific progress raises problems of logic and uncloaks soluble and insoluble antinomies of reason which an earlier state of ignorance had concealed.

The feudal system on one hand and the ecclesiastical hierarchy on the other were powerful in allaying the passions and consolidating the interests of the Middle Ages. But the great and bloody conflict between the Papacy and the Empire, between the Guelphs, the partisans of the Pope, and the Ghibellines, the partisans of the Emperor (at first a logical, later, a teleological, i. e., political, duel), arose from the chock of these two harmonious systems which could not be mutually harmonised without the downfall of one of them. The question is whether or not the displacement of such contradictions or contrarieties is advantageous and whether the harmony of interests or of minds can ever be complete without being offset by discord. In other words, whether or not a certain amount of error and falsehood, of deception and sacrifice, will not always be necessary for the maintenance of social peace?

When the displacement of contradictions or contrarieties consists in their centralisation, an advantage is certainly gained. Although the organisation of standing armies may provoke cruel wars, that is better than innumerable combats of small feudal bands or of primitive families. Although the progress of the sciences may have disclosed profound mysteries, and although great chasms may divide different schools of philosophy because of the new questions over which they contend in arguments drawn from the same scientific arsenal, we are not able to regret the times of ignorance that were free from these problems. In short, science has done more to satisfy poignant curiosity than to arouse it, civilisation has done more to satisfy needs than to engender passions. Inventions and discoveries act as cures through the method of substitution. By stilling natural wants and arousing those of luxury, inventions substitute less urgent for more urgent desires. Discoveries replace the first very anxious states of ignorance by perhaps as many, but, at any rate, by less disquieting, states of not-knowing. And, then, can we not see the goal to which this protean transformation of contradiction and contrariety leads us? Competition ends inevitably in monopoly. Free trade and laisser-aller tends towards the legal organisation of labour. War tends to the hypertrophy of states;—it will go on producing enormous agglomerations until the political unity of the civilised world is finally consummated and universal peace is assured. The more the conflict between masses that is caused by the suppression of minor conflicts increases in emphasis and scale (until a point is even reached which makes us regret the latter), the more inevitable this peaceful outcome of it all becomes. When a royal army was substituted for provincial or feudal militia, it began by containing a much smaller number of soldiers than the effective total of the former militia, and consequently the amount of disaster involved in the conflicts of royal armies was far from equalling that which would have existed in the conflicts which they precluded. But this advantage has, as we know, been decreasing in proportion to the irresistible necessity that has forced each state to enlarge its military contingent to such a point that, at present, the great nations have drafted all their able-bodied men into their armies. Therefore, all the gain of civilisation in this respect would vanish, did not the very enormity of these armies betoken the imminence of some decisive upheaval followed by some colossal unity-and-peace-bringing conquest—unless our soldiers’ weapons should become rusty from lack of service and end by dropping out of their hands.