CHAPTER VII

EXTRA-LOGICAL INFLUENCES (CONTINUED)

Custom and Fashion

THE presumption of superiority which recommends one among a thousand examples of equal logical value, attaches not only to the persons, classes, and localities from which the example emanates, but to the time of its origin as well. I intend to devote this chapter to a consideration of this last-named order of influences. It is, we see, only a consequence of the law of the imitation of the superior, looked at under a fresh aspect. Let us begin by laying down the principle that even in societies which are, like our own, the most over-run with foreign and contemporary (thus doubly accredited) literature, institutions, ideas, and turns of speech, ancestral prestige still immensely outweighs the prestige of these recent innovations. Let us compare some of the few English, German, and Russian words that have recently been popularised, with the foundations of our old French vocabulary; some of the fashionable theories on evolution or pessimism with the mass of our ancient traditional convictions; our present-day reform legislation with the bulk of our codes, whose fundamental points are as ancient as Roman law; and so on. Imitation, then, that is engaged in the currents of fashion is but a very feeble stream compared with the great torrent of custom. And this must necessarily be so.¹ But, however slender this stream may be, its work of inundation or irrigation is considerable, and it behoves us to study its periodic rises and falls in the very irregular kind of rhythm in which they occur.

In all countries a certain kind of revolution is gradually effected in people’s minds. The habit of taking on faith one’s priests and one’s ancestors is superseded by the habit of repeating the words of contemporary innovators. This is called substituting the spirit of investigation for credulity. Actually, it is merely a welcoming of foreign and persuasive ideas following upon a blind acceptance of traditional and authoritative affirmations. By persuasion is meant the apparent agreement of these foreign ideas with those that are already established in dogmatic minds, that is, with dogmatic ideas. The difference, we see, does not lie in the voluntary or non-voluntary nature of the acceptance. If traditional affirmations are accepted, I will not say more freely, but more quickly and vigorously, by the mind of the child, and are imposed upon it through authority, not through persuasion, it means that the mind of the child was a tabula rasa when the dogmas came into it, and that to be received they had neither to confirm nor contradict any idea that was already established there. They had only to arouse fresh curiosity, and to give it indifferent satisfaction. This is the whole difference. It follows that the authoritative form of impression must have necessarily preceded the persuasive form, and that the latter is an outcome of the former.

Similarly, in every country, a like revolution occurs in the case of people’s volitions. Passive obedience to ancestral orders, customs, and influence, comes to be not replaced, but neutralised in part, by submission to the pressure, advice, and suggestions of contemporaries. In acting according to these last-named motives, the modern man flatters himself that he is making a free choice of the propositions that are made to him, whereas, in reality, the one that he welcomes and follows is the one that meets his pre-existent wants and desires, wants and desires which are the outcome of his habits and customs, of his whole past of obedience.

The epochs, and societies in which the prestige of antiquity rules exclusively are those where, as in ancient Rome, antiquity means, in addition to its proper sense, some beloved object. Nihil inihi antiquius est, nothing is dearer to me, said Cicero. In China and Siberia¹ you tell the passerby, to please him, that he looks aged, and your interlocutor is deferentially addressed as elder brother. The epochs and the societies which are, on the contrary, controlled by the prestige of novelty are those where it is proverbial to say that everything new is admirable. And yet the traditional and customary element is always, I repeat, preponderant in social life, and this preponderance is forcibly revealed in the way in which the most radical and revolutionary innovations spread abroad; for their supporters can further them only through oratorical or literary talent, through superior handling of language, not of scientific, or philosophic, or technical language, all bristling with new terms, but of the old and antique language of the people, so well known to Luther and Voltaire and Rousseau. The old ground is always the vantage-point from which to tumble down old edifices and to rear up new ones. The established morality is always the basis for the introduction of new political ideas.

It seems as if I ought to cross-classify the foregoing distinctions between imitation of a native and ancient model and imitation of a new and foreign model. Is it not possible for both the ancient and the novel models to have prestige, although the former is neither native, nor the latter foreign to either family or city? This may be so, of course, but it is such a rare occurrence that it is not worth the trouble of making the distinction. Those epochs whose byword is “everything new is admirable “are essentially externalised—on the surface, at least, for we know that in reality they are more deeply penetrated than they think for by ancestral religion; and those epochs whose unique maxim is “everything antique is good,” live a life wholly from within. When we no longer venerate the past of our family or city we cease, a fortiori, to venerate every other past, and the present alone seems to inspire us with respect. Inversely, when it is only necessary to be blood-kindred or compatriots, to be considered equals, the stranger alone seems to produce as a rule that impression of respect which leads to imitation. Remoteness in space acts here like the remoteness in time in the former case. In periods when custom is in the ascendant, men are more infatuated about their country than about their time; for it is the past which is pre-eminently praised. In ages when fashion rules, men are prouder, on the contrary, of their time than of their country.

Is the revolution to which I have referred universal and necessary? It is, for the reason that independently of any contact with alien civilisation, a given people within a given territory must inevitably continue to grow in numbers, and must no less inevitably progress in consequence towards urban life. Now, this progress causes the nervous excitability which develops aptitude for imitation. Primitive rural communities can only imitate their fathers, and so they acquire the habit of ever turning towards the past, because the only period of their life in which they are open to the impressions of a model is their infancy, the age that is characterised by nervous susceptibility, and because, as children, they are under paternal rule. On the other hand, the nervous plasticity and openness to impressions of adults in cities is in general well enough preserved to permit them to continue to model themselves upon new types brought in from outside.

In contradiction to this view may be cited the example of nomadic peoples like the Tartars, Arabs, etc., who appear for many centuries past to have been irrevocably tradition-bound. But perhaps, or, rather, undoubtedly, their present state of immobility is the end of the historic cycle which they had to traverse, the equilibrium which they have reached at the close of the anterior stages in which their semi-civilisation was formed by means of successive importations. In fact, the corresponding involution of the revolution we have discussed is no less necessary. Man escapes, and then but partly, from the yoke of custom, only to fall under it again, that is, to fix and consolidate, in falling under it again, the conquests due to his temporary emancipation. If he is full of genius and vitality, he escapes again and makes new conquests, only to pause for the second time, and so on. These are the historic somersaults of the great peoples of civilisation. There is a notable proof of this in the fact that the progress of urban life is not continuous; after accesses of fever like that which is now raging through Europe, it suffers intermittent setbacks and lets rural life develop again at its expense. This development takes place in all manner of ways, not only in the numerical increase of scattered rural and village communities, but, likewise, in the increase of wealth and welfare and enlightment outside of the great centres. A mature civilisation like China, for example, or ancient Egypt, or the Peru of the Incas (?), or feudal. Europe in the twelfth century, is always essentially rural in the sense that the general level of its cities remains static, while that of its country districts continues to rise. Our own Europe, according to all probabilities, and in spite of the apparent unlikelihood of this hypothesis, is bound towards a like goal.

But this final return from the spirit of fashion to that of custom is in no sense a retrogression. In order to thoroughly understand it, it is necessary to throw some light on the analogies presented by animate nature. Let us note that each of the three great forms of universal repetition, vibration, reproduction, and imitation, is at first tied up with and subservient to the form from which it sprang, but that it soon tends to escape and, then, to subordinate the latter to itself. Among the vegetal and the lowest animal species we see that reproduction is the slave of vibration. Their vitality, in its alternating periods of torpor and revival, follows closely upon changes of season, upon solar light and heat, whose ethereal vibrations stimulate the vibrating molecules of organic substances. But as life evolves, it consents less docilely to turn like a top under the whip of the sun’s rays; and, although it can never escape from the enforced flagellation, it gradually transforms it into a regulative thing. Thanks to various processes which permit it to store up the products of solar radiation, it succeeds in holding in reserve certain internal explosives and combustibles which are always ready for the nervous system to use. Life sets them off and burns them up at its own pleasure, not at that of the seasons, in order to give itself the vibratory stimulus that is indispensable to muscular effort, to flying, to jumping, to fighting. A moment comes when life not only does not depend upon physical forces, i. e., the great currents of ethereal or molecular vibrations and the combustions which generate them, but, in large measure, controls them. Man, who even in the most extreme types of civilisation, remains a simple living being, changes night into day, winter into summer, the north into the south, with his street lights, his furnaces, and his locomotives, and renders subject to himself, one after the other, all the vibratory energies of nature, heat, electricity, and even the light of the sun.

Generation seems to me to hold analogous relations to imitation. In the beginning, it is likewise fitting that the latter should timidly attach itself to the former, like a child to its parent. And we see that in all very primitive societies the privileges of being believed in and obeyed, and of setting the example, are connected with the function of procreation. The father is imitated because he is the procreator. If an invention is to be imitated, it must be adopted by the pater familias, and the domain in which it can spread terminates with the limits of the family. The family must multiply for it to continue to spread. Because of the same principle or the same connection of ideas, the transmission of sacerdotal or monarchical power is conceived of, at a less remote period, as possible only by way of inheritance, and the vital principle regulates the course of the social principle. Then every race has its own language, its own religion, its own legislation, and its own nationality. Parenthetically, I may say that the desire in our own day to give an exorbitant historical importance to the idea of race is a sort of anachronism—a naturalistic point of view which can only be explained by the remarkable progress of the natural sciences.

But, from the very beginning, every discovery or invention feels itself cramped within the limits of the family or tribe, or even within those of the race, and seeks expansion by a less lengthy method than the procreation of children; and, from time to time, some invention will burst its bounds and cause itself to be imitated outside, thereby making a road for others. This tendency of imitation to free itself from reproduction hides, at first, under the ingenious mask of the latter, under the fiction of adoption, for example, or naturalisation of foreigners, adoption by the nation. It manifests itself more boldly in the admission of aliens to national worship (the admission of the Gentiles, for example, to the Jewish and Christian rites after the time of St. Paul), in the appearance of so-called proselyting religions, in the substitution of an elective or consecrated priesthood for an hereditary priesthood or of an elective presidency for hereditary rulership, in the power accorded to the lower classes to participate in the honours of the upper classes (the honour accorded to the plebeians, for example, of becoming prætors or consuls like the patricians), in people’s growing eagerness to learn foreign languages or to learn the ruling dialect of their own country to the neglect of the local patois, and to copy every striking peculiarity in the customs, arts, and institutions of foreigners.

Finally, the social principle becomes despotic in turn, and dominates, in its emancipation, the vital principle. At first a feeble body of inventions, an embryonic civilisation, depended upon the pleasure of the race in which it had appeared for a chance to spread. It could hope to spread only as its race spread. Later on, on the contrary, after a conquering civilisation has made the tour of the world, no race can survive or propagate itself unless it be apt, and only in the measure that it is apt, in developing that potent body of discoveries and inventions that is organised in sciences and industries. Then, too, practical Malthusianism is introduced into the habits of society. This may be taken as a negative form of the subjection of reproduction to imitation, since it consists in restraining the power of the former within the estimated limits of production, i. e., of labour, an essentially imitative thing.¹ We have the positive form not only, as I have said, in the choice of the fittest race to further the civilising idea, but also in the gradual formation of new races for this purpose, races born of age-long habits and of chance or deliberate intercrossings. The day may already be foreseen when civilised man, after having created so many vegetal and animal varieties to satisfy his own wants or whims, and after having kneaded at will the lower forms of life, as if to train himself for some higher purpose, will dare to approach the problem of directing his own development, of scientifically and deliberately transforming his own physical nature in the direction most consistent with the ultimate intent of his civilisation.

But, while we wait for this living masterpiece of human art, for this artificial and superior human race which is destined to supplant all known races, we can say that each of the national types that has been formed since the dawn of history is a fixed variety of the human type, due to the long-continued action of some particular civilisation which has unwittingly created it for its mirror. In less than two centuries we have seen the birth and establishment in the United States of an Anglo-American type. This original product serves many sides of our European civilisation as an admirable means for their propagation and progress. The same thing has always happened in the past. English, Spanish, French, Roman, Greek, Phœnician, Persian, Hindoo, Egyptian, and other living or dead products of social domestication are merely modified offshoots of the ancient Aryan or Semitic trunk.

I have purposely omitted the Chinese type, although it probably realises the most complete adaptation of a given race to a given civilisation in the fact that each has become inseparable from the other. In this case, the civilisation seems to have been moulded by the race as much as the race by the civilisation, to infer from the essentially familial character which this people has retained in spite of its prodigious expansion. The complete harmony of these two elements without any very apparent subordination of either of them to the other, is not the least peculiarity of this unique empire. It has known how to make much out of little in all things; in it the national is only the domestic on an immense scale. This is true, too, of its civilisation taken as a whole. Like its other features, it has remained rudimentary in spite of its refinement and even high attainments. Its language has grown rich and cultivated without ceasing to be monosyllabic. Its government is both patriarchal and imperialistic. In its religion animism and ancestor-worship persist under the purest form of spiritualism. Its art is as awkward and childish as it is subtle. Its agricultural system is simple and yet finished. Its industry is backward, and yet it thrives. In a word, China has been able to stop, all along the line, in the first of the three stages which I have indicated, and its example proves to us that, although the order of their succession is irreversible, a people is not obliged to pass through all of them to the end.

Now, what happens when a certain original form of civilisation has arisen and spread within a tribe for centuries through custom, and has then passed beyond and spread in neighbouring related or unrelated tribes through fashion, developing itself all the while, what happens when it ends by welding together all the tribes in which it has spread into a new human variety which is called a nation? When this physical type is once fixed, the civilisation attaches itself to it; it seems to have created it only to settle down in it. Ceasing to look beyond its own frontiers, it thinks only of its own posterity, and forgets the foreigner—as long, at least, as he does not force it to pay attention to him by some rude external shake-up. At this time everything in it takes on a national garb. It is to be observed that sooner or later every civilisation tends towards this period of drawing in upon and consolidating itself. Although our own European civilisation is following in all directions and through all varieties of races its own line of expansion, yet even it already shows plain signs of an inclination to choose out or fashion for itself some universally invading and exterminating race. Which will be this chosen and privileged race? Will it be Germanic or neo-Latin? And what part, alas! will be played by French blood in its definite formation? An anxious question for a patriotic heart! But “the future is no man’s,” says the poet. However this may be, imitation which was at first custom-imitation and then fashion-imitation, turns back again to custom, but under a form that is singularly enlarged and precisely opposite to its first form. In fact, primitive custom obeys, whereas custom in its final stage commands, generation. The one is the exploitation of a social by a living form; the other, the exploitation of a living by a social form.

This is the general formula which sums up the whole development of every civilisation, at least of all those which have been able to go the length of their course without sudden annihilation. But this formula applies even better to each of the partial developments of a society, to the little secondary waves which fringe, as it were, and constitute its full onward sweep, that is to say, to the evolution, as we shall show in the following sections of this chapter, of each of its separate elements, to language, religion, government, law, industry, art, and morality.

If the distinction between custom epochs and fashion epochs is not clearly defined in history, if it does not seem salient to historians, it is because epidemics of foreign imitation and sheeplike innovation very rarely flourish in all, or almost all, the regions of social activity at the same time. To-day they may make a revolutionary attack upon religion, to-morrow, upon politics or literature; another day, upon language, etc. Communities are like individuals; they are often revolutionary in politics and at the same time set and orthodox in religion, or innovators in politics and conservative purists and classicists in literature.

And the periods of these crises vary greatly in length in different cases. When by exception many of them do occur together, as, for example, in the Greek world in the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ, or as in Europe in the sixteenth or eighteenth centuries of our era, or as in contemporaneous Japan,¹ it is then impossible to misunderstand the eminently revolutionary character of the times or not to note their contrast to the ages which immediately preceded or followed them. But such synchronisms are rare. With the benefit of this observation, let us apply our threefold division to the different aspects of social life and examine the facts which it explains.

I. Language

Different families or clans originally speak each its own separate tongue,¹ until the day comes when they begin to form a tribe; then the advantage of speaking a common idiom is appreciated, and, during a more or less prolonged period, one of the idioms, that generally of the ruling family, suppresses all the others.

The members of ruling families who have known and who have wished to know only the language of their fathers, come to learn, as a matter of fashion or taste, that of their foreign masters. Then, when the fusion of blood is completely effected, the tongue of the tribe, the great new family, first spreads and then takes root. It is a language that, after having begun by being foreign to the greater number of those who speak it, has, in turn, become a native tongue, and one exclusively dear to all its speakers, who despise and reject all other foreign idioms. This is not all. It is well to observe that from now on the family, I mean the artificial as well as natural, patriarchal family of kinsfolk, slaves, and adopted strangers, is not the only primitive social group. By the side of it must be considered as the yeast of all ulterior progress, the inevitable reunion of the unclassed, of all the family outcasts, who are forced to organise into hordes for conquest or self-protection. The number of these outcasts increases with the increasing despotism of domestic law under patriarchal rule. If imitation is the true social life, these physiologically heterogenous elements will have no difficulty, even in the most primitive times, in merging together socially. From a linguistic point of view, this fusion will result in the creation of a composite language like the hybrid idioms of certain seaport towns. There has been, then, not only in periods of decay, but from the very beginning, a kind of philological as well as a kind of religious syncretism.

But let us continue. Later on, when tribes themselves seek to mingle together and form a confederation, the same phases are repeated on a larger scale. From the diffusion of one of the characteristic tribal languages and the suppression of the others, we pass on to the first foreign and, then, in turn, maternal, language of the city. Later on there is a new series in the same rhythm. The languages of cities and provinces which have concentrated into states vanish before the fatuous adoption¹ of one among them, and the resulting triumphant language finally becomes a national tongue which is as jealous and exclusive, as custom-bound and traditional, as those which preceded it. We ourselves are at this stage. But do we in Europe, where the need of international alliance and confederation is so manifest, do we not feel the anticipatory signs of the opening of a new period? Our mania for borrowing from the vocabularies of neighbouring peoples and our craze for teaching our children foreign languages are clear indications of this. Neologism flourishes everywhere, just as archaism once flourished. A certain language which is spreading with gigantic strides—I do not mean Volapük, I mean English—is tending to become universal. The day may come when this language, or some other, a language which will be the universal mother-tongue and which will be as familiar, as fixed, and as lasting as it is cultivated and widespread, will merge the whole human species into a single social family.

Within every separate nation, large or small, we may observe analagous effects. Tocqueville has very justly remarked that in aristocratic societies—where, as we know, everything is hereditary or customary—each class has not only its own habits, but its own tongue, a tongue which it has carved out of the common idiom for itself. It “adopts by choice certain words and certain terms which afterwards pass from generation to generation like their estates. The same idiom then comprises a language of the poor and a language of the rich, a language of the plebeian and a language of the nobility, a learned language and a vulgar one,” and, let me add, a sacred language and a secular language, the language of ceremonial and the language of everyday speech. On the contrary, when “men, being no longer restrained by ranks, meet on terms of constant intercourse,” that is to say, when fashion-imitation begins to act openly, “all the words of a language are mingled and patois disappear. There is no patois in the New World.”¹

A language can spread in two ways by means of fashion. Thanks to conquest or to its own recognised literary superiority, it may be studied voluntarily by the aristocracies of neighbouring nations; they will be the first to renounce their own barbarous tongues and, later on, to inspire the lower classes with either a vain or a utilitarian desire to renounce them also. In the second place, it may exert a very sensible influence over those nations which it has not succeeded in subjugating in this way. Although the former may preserve their own maternal idiom, yet they copy the latter in their literature, they borrow from it the construction of its phrases, the harmony of its periods, its refinements, its prosody. This second kind of external imitation, this so-called literary cultivation of a language, frequently occurs in history and often coincides with the first kind. Thus at Rome, in the time of the Scipios, the young nobles not only studied Greek, they Hellenised the style of their own tongue. In France, in the sixteenth century, the nobility first learned to speak Spanish and Italian and then adapted French to Spanish and Italian phraseology. To go farther back into the past, it is probable that the Persian Persianised in this way neighbouring tongues, that the Arab Arabianised them, etc.

Now, in the one form or other, linguistic fashion leads to custom. The foreign tongue that is studied and substituted for the maternal idiom, becomes, as I have said, the mother-tongue; the foreign culture which is introduced into a national language becomes national itself before long. In less than a century the Greek periods, the Greek metres, and the Greek constructions that were borrowed by Latin incorporated themselves in the genius of the Latin language and came to be transmitted as national products.

But throughout the above remarks I have attributed to imitation of foreigner and contemporary many changes which are due in large part to imitation of superior. It is, in fact, very difficult to distinguish between these two kinds of contagion. The former, however, does sometimes appear to be experienced by itself, notably in that badly demarcated period where, in the night, in the vast forest of the early Middle Ages, the Romance languages were born, like so many philological cryptogams, with such rapidity and in such obscurity. The linguists, like the old-time naturalists, have been in great haste to explain this apparently miraculous phenomenon on the hypothesis of true spontaneous generation. I confess that I am not satisfied by their explanation, and I think I can affirm that the supposed miracle will continue to be mysterious until we come to take another idea as our starting point, the idea, namely, that towards the ninth century of our era, the spirit of invention, having turned a little capriciously in the direction of language, perhaps because every other outlet was closed to it by circumstances, the breath of fashion, so to speak, began to blow, and for a long time drove and scattered to the four corners of Latin Europe and even beyond the new germs that had appeared somewhere or other, it matters little just where. If, as we are assured, the Romance idioms were born on the spot from the spontaneous decomposition of Latin in consequence of the breaking off of all pre-existing communication between the disintegrated populations of the Empire, it would be astonishing to find that Latin had been corrupted everywhere at the same time and in equal degree, and that nowhere, in no little isolated region, had the old Latin tongue survived with its declensions, its conjugations, and its syntax.

Such simultaneousness, such universality of corruption, in a time of such distraction and in the case of such a tenacious and such a live thing as language, may well astonish us. Moreover, if this were so, what should we think of the uniformity of structure which is to be observed between all the dialects and languages which germinated together from the rotten trunk of Latin? Certain “close and profound analogies exist “between the Langue d’Oc, the Langue d’Oil, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Walloon, and between their provincial variations, analogies which Littré justly admires, but about which he errs when he sees in them the effect of some general necessity. Was it a necessary and predetermined thing that everywhere, at all points at the same time, the article should spring up and be derived from the pronoun ille, or that the perfect indefinite should be added to the Latin preterite to form with the aid of the verb avoir placed in front of the past particle j’ai aimai, ai amat, ho amato, he amado, or that the word meus should be arbitrarily taken as a new suffix to constitute the new adverb, chère-ment, cara-men, caramente. . . .? It is clear that each of these ingenious ideas sprang up in some place or other from which it radiated everywhere. But the sweep¹ and rapidity of this radiation would be inexplicable unless we admitted the existence of some special current of fashion in relation to the facts in question.

It would be inexplicable just because of that very territorial disintegration, and of that very rupture of ancient communications which has falsely appeared to furnish an explanation of the phenomenon in question. Contrariwise, there is no better proof than this example of the reality and intensity of those special, intermittent currents which I feel compelled to hypothecate. Thus, in the sixteenth century, the teaching of Luther spread across the many bristling frontiers of those times with an unheard-of speed that was due to a similar hurricane, a religious one this time. It vent itself throughout the whole of Europe; only, as the force of its blasts diminished, it assumed in each province or region a special physiognomy, comparable to the diversity of the Romance dialects in the eleventh century, after each province had reassumed its linguistic isolation. It must not be said, then, that in the ninth and tenth centuries Latin decomposed of itself. It no more decomposed of itself than did Catholicism at the time of Luther’s sermons. In both cases the introduction of unexpected and really fresh microbes was necessary to bring about the decomposition that has been advanced as the cause itself. This decomposition followed, but did not precede, the grammatical or theological innovations which transformed the language or religion in question. To spread these seeds far and wide, a kind of an epidemic disposition to welcome foreign novelties was necessary.

Ordinarily, every community brings this hospitable opening out of itself to an end by shutting itself up into its customs. Compare the extreme slowness with which even a conquering language spreads beyond its habitual area with the above-cited linguistic conversion of the masses of the Romance populations! Or compare the usual amount of time it takes to snatch a few catechumens away from their native religion, with the extraordinary success of the Catholic apostolate throughout the Greek and Roman worlds, and throughout Germany and Ireland during the first centuries of our era, or with the amazing triumphs of Luther at the time of the Reformation!

These great revolutions cannot be credited, or can be credited only in part, to the prestige of a superior. The Romance revolution in language, like the Christian revolution in religion in its first centuries, at least, arose and spread in the bosom of the common people and of conquered nations. Nor could intrinsic superiority, in the birth of Romance speech, at any rate, account for its triumph over Latin, although the logical laws of imitation do apply here. When the embryo of Romance speech was once substituted for the Latin language, it was undoubtedly by means of logical substitution and accumulation, as I said above, that this embryo grew and matured. But the preference which led in the beginning to the adoption of this still rudimentary language had certainly nothing rational about it, and if in the innumerable logical duels which occurred at that time between the Latin and the Romance forms the latter had always the advantage, it was precisely because they had the wind of fashion behind them. And yet an attempt has been made to justify this fact by observing that because the article, the conditional, and the perfect indefinite were lacking in Latin, Romance stepped in to fill up the gap. And so the admirable instrument which served the great writers of Rome was inadequate for the barbarian colonists! Besides, if the innovation to which I refer had been favoured merely on the ground of improvements, Latin, whose genius was in no way contradicted by them, would only have been enriched by them. But, as a matter of fact, it was destroyed by them, for the same spirit which prompted them also prompted certain substitutions, substitutions which I cannot think of as progressive, that of the preposition for the case of the declension, for example. Let no one say that the delicate feeling of the inflections of the declension was necessarily lost as a result of intellectual coarsening. Nothing penetrates gross minds better than the subtleties of language. The populations of this period were far from having a dulled philological sense; it was so acute that they put themselves uselessly to the effort of invention for the mere pleasure of invention, it seems to me, and because the human imagination must take some direction or other. And let us admire the imaginative luxury of these primitive people! Littré, who accuses them of having lost the key to Latin through rusticity, does not perceive that he refutes himself in the following lines: “Every student of language will realise how much delicacy and grammatical discrimination was developed at the beginning of our language, how lacking modern French is in these particulars, and how false the opinion, as I shall not cease to reiterate, which makes grammatical barbarity our starting point.”

No philologist will have difficulty in upholding this assertion. It applies to the formation of the Aryan languages as well. The preceding considerations make a fitting introduction, I think, to certain insights into the social conditions which presided over their prehistoric appearance, into the debauch of invention and the zeal of imitation from which they proceeded. This need of irrational linguistic revolution is one of the first epidemics of fashion which rages among the adolescent, as we may see in our colleges. And it affects the adolescence of nations as well.

The effects produced in the domain of language by the alternate transition from custom to fashion, and from fashion to custom, are both many and plain. In the first place, when imitation of the foreigner is combined with that of the superior, a great progress is always to be seen, because of a gradual enlargement of the territory that belongs to the triumphant languages, and because of a reduction in the total number of the languages that are spoken. But even when fashion works alone, it is effective in the same direction; for the linguistic disintegration of feudal Europe, compared with the Roman Empire, must not be attributed to fashion. It was the fault of the custom which was forced to grow up after it; and it is very likely that if fashion had not helped to spread the budding Romance tongues, Latin, left to itself in each distinct canton, would have evolved without revolution in a thousand different directions, and given rise to a still more lamentable disentegration.

Now, in view of the fact that language is the most potent and indispensable means of human communication, it is safe to affirm that the social transformations which are brought about on a given territory in the direction of a levelling assimilation of all classes and localities by the introduction of locomotives as substitutes for wagons are as nothing compared with the same kind of social changes that are due to the overflow of one great dialect over several petty ones, of one language over several dialects. Linguistic similarity is the sine qua non of all other social similarities, and, consequently, of all those noble and glorious forms of human activity which presuppose the establishment of those similarities and which work on them as on a canvas. The transient period, in particular, in which a language spreads on the surface through fashion alone, makes possible the advent of what is called (for everything is relative) great national literature. The maximum of value, or, what amounts to the same thing, fame, to which literary works can attain, is limited to the number of those who can understand them. Consequently, in order that they may raise themselves to a far greater height of value or glory than what has ever been reached before, their language must flow out far beyond its old-time banks—irrespective of the fact that the perspective of a more brilliant prize will stimulate genius. And yet this is not enough. Although a given language might be unified if it were visibly transformed from generation to generation by a series of fashion-spread grammatical vagaries without any strict fidelity to usages or rules, yet its people would favour the blossoming of ephemeral shows, the masterpieces of a day, applauded to-day, forgotten to-morrow; they would refuse to consecrate those august and enduring reputations, whose majesty grows in the course of ages because every new generation enlarges their public. Brilliant literature, there might be, but there would be no classic literature. A classic writer is an ancient literary innovator who is imitated and admired by his contemporaries, and then by following generations, because his language has remained unchanged. Living, he owes his incomparable celebrity to the recent diffusion of his language; dead, he owes his lasting authority to the fixation of his language by custom.

Successive crises of fashion also tend, other things being equal, to make prominent those linguistic innovations which are the fittest to direct language into a certain channel which it is difficult to define, but which is characterised, notably in English, by the simplification of grammar and by the enlargement of vocabulary, and by a utilitarian advance towards clearness and regularity, which is not without injury to poetic qualities.¹ Let us bear in mind these characteristics; they will soon repeat themselves under other names.

II. Religion

Religions have often been divided into two great classes: those that proselyte and those that do not. But the truth is that at first even the most hospitable religions began by being jealously closed to the foreigner. We shall find this so, at least, if we go back to their true origins. Buddhism, to be sure, appealed from its very birth to men of every race; but Buddhism is only a detached branch of Brahminism, and Brahminism admits of no means of propagation, in principle at least, but transmission through blood.² As for Christianity, it did not spread before the time of St. Paul beyond the Jewish race. Besides, it sprang out of the Mosaism which had always repulsed the Gentiles. It is only a Jewish heresy, as a child of Israel once proudly said. Before Islamism conquered so many nations, it remained for a long time an exclusively Arabian thing, and its armed pontificate was hereditary among the descendants of Mahomet. Before the advent of Apollo, in Greece, every tribe had its own gods. The rapidly propagated cult of Apollo was the first bond of union between the Hellenic cities. Exclusive religions always precede non-exclusive religions, for the same reason that castes always precede classes, monopolies, commercial freedom, and privileges, equality before the law. In brief, this famous distinction between proselyting and non-proselyting religions merely means that the need of expansion that is common to all alike is satisfied in the one case by the transmission of useful maxims of piety to the posterity of the same race, a posterity that is always becoming more and more numerous,—this is the cause of the ardent desire of the Hebrew and Aryan of antiquity for a numerous offspring,¹—whereas in the other case, the same need seeks an easier and a quicker satisfaction in the transmission of its rites and dogmas to contemporaries of other race and blood. In the first case the propagating agent is custom; in the second, that which I call fashion. And the passage from the first to the second is only an extraordinary advance of imitation; it has passed from pedestrianism to flight.

But the most expansive and hospitable worships end early or late by reaching their natural limits, and in spite of their vain efforts to pass beyond them, and in spite, even, of the accidental breaks which they sometimes effect in them (just as Mahometanism has been proselyting again of late on an immense scale in the heart of Africa), they resign themselves to confessing that a given nationality or group of kindred nationalities is their unique and, henceforward, impassable domain. Here they draw back and implant themselves, and here they generally break up into fragments. From now on, their chief care is not to spread themselves among distant peoples by means of conquest and conversion, but to prolong and perpetuate themselves for future generations through the education of childhood. All the great religions of our own days have reached this stage of withdrawal, a stage which is at first, before the decline which follows it, not lacking in fruitfulness.

But the three periods which I have pointed out as existing in each of the great religions had already been traversed by the lower types of religion on which they were based, and so on until we come to the lowest rung of the religious ladder, where we find ancestor or fetich worship, purely familial cults.¹ In the most ancient times, then, proselytism must have been known and practised, since a common worship, the worship of the god of the city, succeeded in establishing itself and in slowly crushing out the different domestic cults of different families. But it must also have always happened that the vogue of an exotic god, of a god outside of the household, was followed by a static period, when the exotic god became established as a patriotic god, because we find that these city gods became as hostile to, and as exclusive of, one another, as the household gods of a more remote age. Thus the historic rhythm of religions is an alternating transition from proselytism to exclusivism and vice versa, indefinitely. The statement that exclusivism was the first link in the chain could not be made without some hesitation.

The opposite view could be maintained. In India, where in the depths of Hindooism the birth of some very low form of religion is actually an everyday occurrence, Lyall informs us that their starting point lies in the preaching of some exalted reformer, of some ascetic or celibate, who has completely broken with his family and caste. He gains adherents on all sides, and then, from his followers’ habits of eating and marrying among themselves, the sect becomes a caste in its turn, and ends by localising itself as a family. But we should be exaggerating the bearing of this contemporaneous fact if we saw in it a complete representation of what must have occurred at the origin of religions. It is valuable, however, as confirming the hypothesis according to which the family is not the unique source of societies. A band, or horde, or group of those who are called indifferently family exiles or emigrants, would be the first term of a social evolution differing very much from the preceding, although interwoven with it and modelled upon it. Besides, everything is a witness to the fact that all religions began in animism, that belief in deity was originally fear of spirits; and it is very probable that one of the first and principal manifestations of animism was the deification of dead ancestors, and that the souls of dead kinsmen were the first spirits that were feared. As for spirits of a different origin, the personified forces of nature in anthropomorphism, or, rather, at first, as we shall see, in spontaneous zoömorphism, was it not necessary to get the authority of the head of the family, of the chief, to have them adopted unanimously? The really primitive religion, then, could only be transmitted through blood.

In this connection let us note the strange character of ancestor apotheosis, and, especially, of its universality. For it seems very difficult to understand this worship and veneration of the dead, this obedience to the dead, in those crude times when one is accustomed to think of the adoration of power as ruling alone. I think that this phenomenon, to be understood, must be brought into relation with another equally general and primitive fact, the fact of gerontocracy. All primitive societies, however unendowed and unprogressive they may be, have veneration and fetich worship for old age. But how can this fresh fact be reconciled with the rule of brute force? How does it happen that in a young world, in the midst of perpetual conflicts, old men are not relegated to the rear? The likeliest explanation, in my opinion, is the following: In the primitive family, which is very self-centred and very hostile to even neighbouring families, the examples of the father must have a potent and irresistible influence over his children, his wives, and his slaves. In fact, the need of direction which they experience in view of their utter ignorance and lack of external stimulus, can be satisfied only through imitation of some one man, and he must be the man whom they have been in the habit of imitating from their cradles. The prestige of the example of the father, the king-priest of his small state, equals the sum of all that prestige to which our modern civilised Europe is subject, for the most part unconsciously, but whose influence is dispersed by a thousand different channels of docility and credulity, under the influence of teachers, comrades, friends, or strangers, instead of being concentrated in a single basin of paternal customs and traditions. Given this fact and the fact that the paternal magnetisation, as it were, is the more complete in the beginning the greater the age of the father, it having had more time to act in, the fact which Buckle has brought forward may be very well explained, the fact, namely, that the more prodigious the size and strength and intelligence that are attributed by primitive peoples to their superhuman giants, and heroes, and geniuses, the more remote is the past to which they tend to assign them. This is an optical effect, an orientation of admiration, which parental prestige is able to account for. The children know that their own father trembles before the shadow of his ancestor. The idol, then, of their idol must seem a superior kind of god to them.

But Buckle might also have observed that even in the most remote period of antiquity the worship of the foreigner appears alongside that of the ancestor. The distant in space is no less prestigious to barbarians and savages than the distant in time. And the wonders of the world they dream of, their Edens and Hells, in particular, and the beings they endow with supernatural power are localised by their legends on the borders of the known universe. The Aztecs thought that they were fated to be conquered by a divine race hailing from the shores of the far East. The Peruvians held an analogous belief. It is impossible not to recognise, moreover, that several of their gods were the alien reformers or conquerors who had charmed or subjugated their forefathers. The same fact may be observed in all old religions. The reason of it is that, from the most remote period of antiquity, parental prestige must have often been arrested by the sudden appearance of some external and superior prestige. From time to time some unknown chief of invincible fame rises up out of the distant horizon; all are prostrate before him, and the Penates are for the moment forgotten. A newcomer, a bringer of secret and admirable knowledge, is conceived of as an all-powerful sorcerer before whom the whole world trembles. The multiplication of such apparitions is all that is needed to turn men towards a new form of adoration, to substitute the fascination of the distant for that of the past.¹ Moreover, it is likely that the despotic authority of foreign masters and civilisers was copied from that of the pater familias, and the apotheosis of these epochs, whether filial or servile displays itself to us as the highest degree of reverential fear. It is, therefore, not astonishing that the most despotic gods are also the most revered. To-day, families which are ruled by authority show us the same state of things. The terrifying character of ancient deities and the humiliating nature of ancient cults are not due to a source for which man need blush. And we can understand the persistence of such beliefs in ancient societies from the fact of their dependence upon the social principle without which the societies themselves could not have been possible. For this reason, although atheism would certainly have been a great relief to the hearts of devout people as an emancipation from their chronic state of terror, atheism could not spread at a time when it would have been social suicide.

Nevertheless, in the beginnings of mankind, the isolation of human families that were scattered in a growling wilderness of animal life must have been great enough to have prevented them from encountering or fighting one another very often. The cause, then, to which I have referred could not have gained its full importance until later. On the other hand, another class of strange charmers must have played, it seems to me, a preponderating, although overlooked or inadequately appreciated, rôle in the formation of very ancient mythologies. These were, at first, wild beasts and venomous serpents; and then domestic animals. And I lay stress upon this side of mythologies, because here we have, in the most remote ages, the isolated action of fashion, independent of any such imitation of superiority as we had in the kind of progress which we have already discussed.

To-day we hunt wild beasts, but our first ancestors fought them. It was with wild beasts, primarily, that they were forced to be constantly at war, either for food or self-defence. “As often pursued as pursuer.” Primitive man was undoubtedly far from feeling the contempt which we feel for the hare and quail of our plains, or even for the wolves and boars of our lingering forests, for the lions, the cave bears, the rhinoceros, and the mammoths against which he fought day after day with thrilling turns of fortune. The end of the tertiary period and the beginning of the quartenary period, that is, of the age when man began to count for something, is characterised by a formidable “emission of flesh eaters.” Such a deadly and such a cunning fauna had never before appeared on the earth. Elephants, rhinoceroses, tigers twelve feet long, lions, hyenas, etc., all belonged to extinct species of which extant ones are but pale reflections, and all habitually preyed upon man. Before these terrible belligerents, much more than before the great men of prey of neighbouring tribes, he trembled with that sacred fear which is the beginning of all devotion. And afterwards, when he found himself in the presence of any great phenomenon, a tempest, the phases of the moon, the rise or setting of the sun, etc., and when he animated the phenomenon in order to understand it, his spontaneous personification of it was more animal-like than human. For him to personify was to animalise, rather than to humanise. If all primitive gods, from the Scandinavan Pantheon to the Aztec Olympia, are saturated with blood and are unmerciful in exacting a periodic tribute of human lives, a tribute which comes to be rendered to them later on in an equivalent of animal lives, until only its shadow and mere vegetable symbol survives in the Christian host, if all these archaic divinities are cannibals, is it not because man conceived of them, not precisely in his own image, but in the type of those great superhuman monsters, reptiles or carnivora, which often devoured him?

This hypothesis allows us to rate primitive man as superior to his deities, since it explains their ferocity, not on the ground of his alleged wickedness, but on that of the hard conditions of his precarious and anxious and perilous existence. Now, nothing supports the ordinary hypothesis according to which man has modelled his gods after himself. The resemblance is so slight! They are immortal and invulnerable, he so ephemeral! They are caprice incarnate, he is routine itself. They command surrounding nature as its masters; he falls prostrate before the pettiest meteor. My conjecture, on the contrary, is based, as we have seen, on serious considerations. I may add that the universality of sanguinary deities is naturally explained by the universality of ferocious beasts; and the fact that all races have the same starting point explains, in turn, the similarity of the phases traversed by religious evolution: human sacrifices, animal sacrifices, fruit offerings, spiritual symbolism.

Moreover, if our point of view is true, it follows that when, in a subsequent age, the ebb tide of animality and the rising tide of humanity enhanced the importance of war between man and man, and diminished that of the war between man and beasts, the gods of human form must have decidedly prevailed over the beast-like gods. This is just what happened; this gradual humanising of deities is one of our most substantiated facts. The Egyptian deities, with a man’s face on an animal’s body, or with an animal’s face on a man’s body, show us the most ancient transition that is known from the prehistoric zoomorphic gods to the purely anthropomorphic gods which the Greeks gradually elaborated. It was a profound transformation, whose accomplishment could not fail to revolutionise the divine idea. Originally, deity was pre-eminently destructive; whereas with us it is primarily creative. Warlike gods were necessarily triumphant, and in war to triumph was to destroy.

Incidentally, it seems to me that the habitual or ritualistic anthropophagy of primitive peoples is explained by the foregoing considerations. When man was overcome, and this frequently happened, in his combats with monsters, he was always devoured. Consequently, when he happened to overthrow them, he took it as his duty to kill and eat them, however unedible they might be, not only for food, but, following the everlasting custom of military retaliation, for the sake of reprisal as well.¹ On this supposition, what should happen when two tribes made war against each other? Such chance combats wedged themselves in between the familiar combats with the great carnivora, and bore the same relation to them as species to genus. And so it naturally came to be a rule for captives, and even for the corpses of the conquered, to be treated like animals that had been trapped or beaten; they were sacrificed and solemnly eaten at a triumphant feast. The first triumph must have been a banquet. Thus cannibalism must have arisen, originally, from imitation of the primitive chase, although it might have been maintained later on for motives of a mystical or utilitarian nature.¹

It may be seen how proper the preceding considerations are to explain a fact which greatly astonishes mythologists and which has called forth the most contradictory hypotheses from them, the fact, namely, that everywhere in the world the most ancient gods of mythology have been animals, savage and often ferocious beasts, and that if in the progress of the ages their zoömorphic, their theriomorphic character has gradually changed into anthropomorphism, it is never impossible to discern the deified beast under the humanised god.¹ The animal companion of a god has begun by being the god himself. This was true of the goose of Priapus, of the cuckoo of Hera, of the mouse of Apollo, of the owl of Pallas, as well as of the hummingbird of the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. It has been proved that, prior to the invasion of the Shepherd Kings, “whenever the gods [Egyptian] appeared on monuments they were represented by animals.” Shall we explain with Lang this universal deification of the surrounding fauna (and, at times, of the flora), as the result of totemism, of the universal custom among savages and primitive peoples of recognising some animal as their first tribal ancestor? And then shall we proceed to connect animal worship with ancestor worship? On the contrary, I think that, in this case, the effect is taken for the cause. Totemism does not explain the deification of animals; this deification can alone give a reasonable explanation of totemism.² The animal is not reputed to be an ancestor until after it has been deified. Now, why has it been deified? Because the sight of it inspired terror or admiration, or merely because it once chanced to create a lively feeling of surprise as the result, undoubtedly, of a mistaken observation on the part of some ignorant observer. The first animal, the first natural being which appealed to the savage’s curiosity, opened out a new world to him, a world outside of his family, or, rather, made a new opening for him into that world which the never-ending growling of savage creatures had never allowed him wholly to ignore. Seen through his dreams or fears, either the commonplace or the terrible animal revealed to him something outside of himself or his people that was worthy of his interest. This animal, then, this stranger, whose prestige he feels and yields to, tears him away from the exclusive prestige of his divine ancestors and despotic masters. And if the deified animal comes to take higher rank than that of the latter, it is none the less true that, far from this new cult being derived from the family cult, it must have been in opposition to it. In the beginnings of mankind, when animality dominated, the stranger after whom man must have sought to model himself, and to whose fascination he must have yielded after he had escaped from that of his forefathers, must have been, ordinarily, an animal, although, from time to time, and later on more frequently, encounters with other tribes allowed the human stranger to play a like part. It is certain that two prominent kinds of myths are to be found side by side in all old mythologies, myths about animal-gods and myths about divine or heroic civilisers. This curious juxtaposition would be most incomprehensible unless my point of view were accepted. According to it, these two classes of myths are merely varieties of one genus. Both witness from the most remote periods to the action of external and contemporaneous prestige, the source of fashion, as contrasted with paternal prestige, the source of custom.

Let us continue. I have not yet finished my enumeration of the principal sources of primordial religions. To conclude this conjectural and somewhat digressive investigation, I may say that after the deification of fierce beasts, domestic animals should have been and were deified. Thus good gods came to take a place next to bad gods, forming in this way a transitory phase that it is well to notice between theriomorphism and anthropomorphism, in addition to the transitions already referred to. Conceive, indeed, of the immense and beneficent change which was wrought when, in the midst of some small human colony, which lacked all forms of industry or agriculture and all means of supply but the bow and harpoon, some savage genius dreamed of domesticating a dog, a sheep, a reindeer, a cow, an ass, or a horse.¹ What do all our modern inventions amount to in comparison with this capital invention of domestication? This was the first decisive victory over animality. Now, of all historic events, the greatest and the most surprising is, unquestionably, the one which alone made history possible, the triumph of man over surrounding fauna. Moreover, the farther back one travels into the past, the greater the value of cattle appears to be. Cattle were the most precious part of spoil, the most coveted kind of treasure, and the first form of money. Hence, the deification of bulls, oxen, and cows in the Old World and of llamas in America. This was a great advance upon the apotheosis of carnivorous animals. Egypt is a witness to this fact in the pre-eminence which she accorded to her Apis over the tiger, lion, and cat-like deities of her more ancient mythology. Archaic Greece gave a great impetus to the development of this already civilised form of animal worship. We have the proof of this, among other facts, in the myth of the centaurs, half men, half horses, which undoubtedly expresses the gradual humanisation of a primitive horse-worship, and to correspond in this new phase of the divine idea to the human-faced tiger-gods of Egypt. In his excavations in Argolis, Schliemann discovered thousands of very ancient idols in which a similar metamorphosis from a cow-goddess to a woman-goddess² could be traced through its many phases up to the point when two almost invisible little horns was the last sign of the originally bovine nature of the divinity. This explains the little-understood Homeric epithet of boôpis. It is unnecessary to remind the reader of the cow-worship of India.

But man celebrated the wonders of domestication not merely by his worship of different kinds of cattle; he also celebrated it in the nature of the cult which he paid to gods of various origins. After he had domesticated animals and had appreciated the immense advantage of their exploitation, he must have asked himself whether he could not also domesticate some of those gods, of those great spirits which he had already conceived of as the hidden springs of the great mechanisms of nature, of sun and moon, of rain and tempest, and which he had pictured under the lineaments of men and animals. Once these conceptions had been taken and developed into an innumerable divine fauna, the domestication of divinities must have been the great preoccupation of men of ability. It was a question of having one’s own spirits attached to one’s dwelling, like sheep, or dogs, or reindeer. These were the Lares; and they were not always, as a matter of fact, the souls of ancestors. But how were these wild deities to be overcome and humanised? By methods strangely like those which had served in the subjection of tame animals, namely, by caresses and flattery, by offering them the advantage, rare in those times, of a regular and abundant nourishment which would entirely relieve them of the effort of searching for an uncertain and intermittent one. Here we have the origin of sacrifices. This view will cease to appear odd if we try to conceive of what domestication must originally have been. To us the trained horse that is docile under its bit is merely a certain muscular force under our control. But to the savage of bygone ages, just as, to a certain extent, to the Arab of to-day, the horse possessed a hidden power which could not be managed without a certain superstitious fear of, or respect for, its latent mystery. Therefore, it is less surprising for worship to have been an attempt at domestication, if domestication was really a kind of worship.

In support of these speculations, I will add another which completes them and which seems to me to be equally probable. The idea of reducing men to slavery, instead of killing and eating them, must have arisen after the idea of training animals instead of feeding on them, for the same reason that war against wild beasts must have preceded that against alien tribes. When man enslaved and domesticated his kind, he substituted the idea of human beasts of burden for that of human prey.

But the preceding speculations on the probable origin of the earliest religions is, to be frank, a digression for which I crave the reader’s indulgence. Let us return to our special subject and let us seek out, as we have already done in the case of language, the consequences which are involved in the transition, in questions of religion, from custom to fashion, and from fashion to custom, that is to say, in the development of a worship following upon its establishment in an enlarged domain. In the second place, let us ask ourselves what are the inner characteristics which the expansion of a cult presupposes and which enable it to be successful? I answer, in a word, to the first point of view, that a widespread religion is a prerequisite of every great civilisation, and that a stable religion is the no less necessary condition of every strong and original civilisation. As its cult, so its culture. To the second point of view I answer that the most spiritual and philanthropic religion has the greatest chance of expansion, and that, on the other hand, a religion which spreads beyond its source tends to become spiritualised and humanised.

This tendency of religions to become spiritualised in their onward movement is well known. The worship of Apollo, for example, which is so pure and noble a worship in comparison with the gross cults which it succeeded, Hebrew prophecy, which is spiritual, compared with the Mosaism which preceded it, Christianity, which is still more spiritual, and the particularly refined forms of Christian spirituality, Protestantism and Janseism, all these are so many successive steps in religious evolution. But now we know the reason of this progress. The idea of deity, which was at first bestial or physical in the times when the relations of men with beasts and nature were more frequent and important than their relations with their non-related fellows, becomes gradually spiritualised, or, to put it better, humanised, in the social sense of the word, as man comes into closer touch with both related and non-related man and as his direct contact with nature diminishes. And we have seen how the animal character of ancient gods came to be effaced and replaced by human traits, which have themselves ended by vanishing, transfigured, into a sublime dream of infinite Wisdom and Power. This change was wrought in the divine idea at the same time that religion, of which it is the soul, passed beyond the limits of its cradle in the family. These two transformations must have been parallel, for they emanated from the same cause: the preponderance that was acquired by the social and, consequently, by the spiritual side of human things over their natural and material side. Imitation was emancipated from heredity for the same reason that mind was disengaged from matter.¹ On the other hand, the latter progress facilitated the former. The god who is the least corporeal and the most spiritual is the one who has the most chance of subjugating foreign peoples; for men of different races differ less from one another intellectually than physically, or, at any rate, their physical differences are less rigid and unmalleable and more easily effaced through gradual assimilation than their physical differences. For the same reason the most systematic mythology is the one that is fated to win territory.

The springing up of a religion beyond its native race involves, we may suppose, another important progress. Is it because its founder has proclaimed the brotherhood of men of all races that a religion is apt to overflow, or does its founder profess this regenerating dogma to create in it this aptitude? It matters not. It is clear that the proclamation of such a truth greatly favours the propagation of the beliefs which are united to it. Christianity and Buddhism are proofs of this. When the spirit of Custom is in full sway, religious sentiment is directed towards the past or the future, man’s great preoccupation is centred about his ancestors and his posthumous life, as in China or Egypt, or about his posterity, as in Israel. In a word, the devout spirit is supported by the thought of the infinite in time. On the contrary, where the spirit of Fashion is fully triumphant, religious sentiment receives its liveliest inspirations and its most spontaneous impulses from the thought of the immensity of the earth and heavens, from the conception of a universe whose boundaries are forever receding and of a great omnipresent God, the common father of all beings scattered throughout the infinity of space. Are not the sympathy, the pity, and the love which are engendered in the hearts of the devout by this belief the very source of moral life? It follows that the most moral religions are necessarily the most contagious. And, as I fail to see how any high standard of morality can arise and spread by any other means than an all-conquering religion, I think I am justified in accepting the conclusion of history that no great civilisation could ever have existed without religious proselytism.

I may add that without a stable religious institution, one resting on its conquests, a strong and original civilisation is impossible. By this I mean a profoundly logical social state, from which, by means of a long and painful elaboration, all important contradictions have been banished, a state where the majority of elements are in agreement, and where almost everything proceeds from the same principles and converges towards the same ends. It takes a long time for a religious faith to recast in this way, in its own image, the small or large society which it has been invading.

We do not know, to be sure, how long it took the religion of Egypt, before the old empire, after the indigenous gods of Memphis, or of some other city, had spread the entire length of the Nile Valley, to give birth to Egyptian civilisation. We are also ignorant of the duration of the incubation of Babylonian civilisation by the primitive religion of Chaldea, once its gods had radiated throughout the sweep of that once thickly peopled and highly fertile valley. But we do know that the cult of the Delphic Apollo, the first religion that was common to all the Doric and Ionic branches of Greece, dates from the tenth century, B. C., and that “the climax of maturity and beauty” in the art and poetry and philosophy and statecraft of Greece was reached about the sixth century. We also know that the literature, architecture, philosophy, and governmental system of the Christian Middle Ages had just begun to flourish and grow into harmony with the law of Christ in the eleventh century of our era, four or five hundred years after the spread of Christianity through Europe. Arabian civilisation, born of Mahomet, required a shorter period of gestation, but we know how long it lasted.

It is not true, then, that the progress of civilisation results in the side-tracking of religion. It is the essence of religion to be everything or nothing. If an established religion falls behind, it is because another religion has slipped silently and unperceived into its place, and has lent itself to the setting up of a new civilisation which will end by being just as religious as the prior civilisation in its best days. If, in the beginning of societies, everything in the most trivial thoughts and acts of man, from the cradle to the tomb, is ritualistic and superstitious, mature and consummate civilisations present the same conditions. It has been said that the peculiarity of Christianity has been its aloofness from statecraft, in contrast to the intimate alliance of the cults of antiquity with the power of the state. But this feature is only apparent. In the spiritual and missionary religions of modern days, as well as in the gross and exclusive religions of antiquity, morals and dogma are inseparable; there is a higher law for conduct as well as for thought. Only, in consequence of the external expansion which results, as we know, from its internal developments, a religion ceases to be able to regulate of itself all the small details of practical thought and will. Like a ruler whose kingdom has grown more extensive, and whose administration has become more complicated, it delegates to its subalterns a part of its twofold authority of teacher and ruler, leaving a certain amount of independence to its delegates, who are pretty badly supervised by it because they are so far below it.

On one side, then, religion abandons to kings and statesmen, to whose personality it is quite indifferent, providing they are true believers, the care of commanding armies, of levying taxes, and of making laws, on the condition that they attempt nothing contrary to the general precepts of its catechism, a sort of supreme constitution. Thus religion becomes the sovereign ruler of souls and the final court of appeal for anyone who has been abused by secular power. On another side, it also allows inquisitive and enquiring minds to discover and formulate certain theories and natural laws, but it allows this, of course, on the condition of teaching nothing which openly contradicts the verses of its sacred books or the conclusions drawn from its texts.

In short, the god of the Christian or Moslem was, during the whole of the Middle Ages, at least, the sole teacher and master of Christianity or Islamism, occupying, in this particular, the same position as the divine Lars of the primitive family; and the pope or caliph, the organ of deity, taught and commanded as a sovereign. The only difference between the omnipotence of savage or barbaric religions and that of civilised religions lies in the fact that the former expresses itself through ritual, the formal equivalent of that period of morality; and the second, through morality, the spiritual equivalent of ritual. Ritual becomes more pro-found as it disguises itself. Was it not primitively the supreme statecraft of the ancients, the pre-eminent military and civil art of diplomacy? The armies of antiquity went into action only after they had been stimulated by the ceremonies of the war heralds, by sacrifices, and by the sacramental observations and experiments of the augurs. It is no exaggeration to say that the thrusts of lance and sword that followed seemed to the men of those times to continue as accessories the rites which had preceded them, a sort of sanguinary sacrament. Nor, for the same reason, did any deliberative assembly in these same epochs enter into any debate without the sacrifice of some victim or the offering up of some prayer or the performance of some rite of purification. Voting, as well as fighting, was only one way of worshipping and praying to one’s gods, of placating and glorifying them.

Later on, when different cities and peoples come into communication with one another and endeavour to impose their rites, become more simple in their expansion, upon one another, a moment arrives when a purely spiritual cult, i. e., morality as it is understood by Christians, Moslems, and Buddhists, seems to be the only cult worth the name. Then people say that morality should dominate politics and even soar over war. They also say, and with no less reason, that it should rule over art and industry. As a matter of fact, religion has always been implicitly conceived of in the bosom of every religious people, not only as a higher form of statecraft and diplomacy, but as the first of all arts and the most important of all industries. Architecture, sculpture, painting, poetry, music, metal-working, and cabinet-making, all forms of art, arise from the temple and issue from it, like a procession, to continue outside the solemnities occurring within. To the citizens of the Greek cities the great hecatombs were undoubtedly great productions of wealth and value, of security and power. This was in part imaginary, but not wholly so, for it is certain that faith is power. What was the petty labour of a slave or an artisan in comparison with those mystical works? And, besides, there was no important act in the life of a husbandman, or even of an artisan, which did not begin with the offering up of a prayer to the gods, or with a procession of the Arval Brethren, or with the sacrifice of a lamb, so that every industrial or agricultural task was merely a prolonged prayer or sacrifice. In a more advanced and spiritual civilisation the same thing is expressed, at bottom, in saying that work is a form of duty, and that the economic side of societies, like their political and artistic sides, is merely a development of their moral side.

Moreover, on the day when a scholar, like Galileo, undertakes to formulate the simplest scientific law or fact that is contrary to the shortest verse of Sacred Scripture; or on the day when a ruler publishes the pettiest decree that is contrary to the most subordinate precept of an established religion, an authorisation, for example, to sell meat during a fast or to work on Sunday, or on the day, finally, when a branch of industry or art begins to flourish in a given country, although it is deemed immoral and impious by the local religion, a profane theatre, for example, or a free-thinking journal—on this very day, a germ of dissolution has entered into the social body, and there is the most urgent need either for this germ to be expelled, notably by an inquisition, or for it to grow through philosophic or revolutionary or reform propagandism, and extend itself to the point of reconstructing the social order upon new foundations. This is the point we are at in Europe. It is a problem in social logic that is set before us by this redoubtable dilemma.¹ We do not know how it will be solved. But we may be certain that when the order of the future is once consummated, unanimous belief in an indisputable truth, in an incontestable Good and Right will become again what it once was, intense and intolerant. And science, transfigured by a vast synthesis and supplemented by a highly æsthetic morality, will be the religion of the future, before which all professors and statesmen, all minds and wills, will humbly bow.

The omnipotence and omnipresence of religion in all functions of society justify the exceptional place which religion has been accorded in this chapter. But this consideration must not prevent us at present from examining rapidly and separately the fragmentary and secondary governments that rule with the consent of religion,—although not without a threatening kind of independence,—namely, the philosophy of certain periods on the one side and, on the other, the government, in the usual sense of the word, and the legislation and custom of all periods. When an accredited philosophic system arises in a serious-minded nation, it stands in the same relation towards religious dogma as a form of government, a body of law, or the sum of people’s wants stands in any country towards its religious morality. The one is the foundation-stone of thought, the other of conduct. But this does not prevent the frequent occurrence of conflicts between the suzerain, or so-called suzerain authority, and those authorities that are vassal to it. Struggles between philosophies and theologies correspond to those between empires and priesthoods. Besides, if it is true that religion controls civilisation in its entirety and moulds it after itself, it is no less certain that the temporarily prevailing philosophy directs and develops its own science, or that the established government directs and develops its own politics and war, or that legislation and custom determine the course and character of industry. Let us see whether the transition from custom to fashion and vice versa occurs here as above, and whether it produces like effects. In any case, let us refrain, for lack of space, from touching upon the philosophic and scientific sides of societies, an undertaking that would require a separate volume. Let us pass on to the practical side.

III. Government

All the foregoing remarks amount to saying that in the beginning the family, or the pseudo-family that grew up by the side of it, was the only social group, and that every subsequent change resulted in lessening its importance in this respect by constituting new and more ample groups which were formed artificially, at the expense of the social side of families, and which reduced them to mere physiological expressions; but that, finally, such dismembered families tended to aggregate into a kind of enlarged family that was both natural and social like the original family, except that the physiological characteristics, which were transmitted through heredity, existed mainly to facilitate the transmission through imitation of the elements of civilisation, and not vice versa. In fact, we have already seen from the linguistic point of view that in very remote prehistoric times every family must have had its own language, and that later on a single language embraced thousands of families who finally, because of the greater facility for connubium between speakers of the same tongue, gave birth to one race. Thus every tongue eventually had its own race, i. e., its own great family, whereas, primitively, every family, as I have said, possessed its own tongue. We have also seen how, in the question of religion, every family had originally its own cult and was a church in itself, but who, later on, the same cult united thousands of families who, finally, through the more or less strict interdiction of marriage with infidels and the exclusive practice of connubium, combined into one race that was expressly created for its religion.

We can now see from the point of view of government an analogous series of transformations. In the beginning every family formed a distinct state; then followed a state which contained thousands of families, welded together by a purely artificial tie, and, finally, every state made its own nation, i. e., its particular race or sub-race, its own family.

On this point, I might repeat what Fustel de Coulanges and Sumner Maine have said so well about the gradual transformation of the patria potestas into the imperium of the Roman magistracy, about the primordial union and the progressive separation of the power to procreate and the power to command. But I will not bore the reader with this. I prefer to observe that it is proper to round off this point of view by admitting that from the commencement of history, or even pre-history, artificial states were formed through a general infatuation for some renowned chief or brigand, and enlarged by those who had broken loose from surrounding families. Cities of refuge, like early Rome and the free cities of the Middle Ages, can give us some idea of these primitive aggregates. They were, perhaps, or rather undoubtedly, the first cities, properly speaking. And, as a matter of fact, the urban element, which has co-existed from the earliest time with the rural element, has always been distinguished by its predominant and widespread spirit of innovation, compared with the conservative spirit of the latter. We may infer that these original collections of undisciplined people have been the most active centres for war and conquests and that, consequently, although all the scourges born of war may be imputed to them, yet theirs is the honour of having created great national agglomerations, the eventual guarantee of wealth and peace.

In addition, we may see that custom and fashion are everywhere embodied politically in two great parties whose alternating strife and triumph explain all political advances. In fact, there are never more than two opposing parties, however subdivided they may be. Their names differ in different countries and at different times, but the one may be called, without impropriety, the party of conservatism, and the other the party of innovation. Among seaboard populations, their rivalry is usually expressed through that between agricultural interests, such as Aristides, the conservative, personified at Athens, and maritime interests such as were embodied in the innovator, Themistocles. Among continental populations, the rivalry is between commerce and agriculture, between towns and country districts, between artisans and peasants. Now, it is fairly clear that the strife between conservatives and liberals, which is as ancient as history and which had already begun in the bosom of the primitive family or tribe, always leads back to that between custom and fashion. The progressive party welcomes with its whole heart the new ideas, the new rights, and the new products that are imported over land or sea and imitated as foreign models, whereas the party of tradition resists them with all the weight of the ideas and customs and industries which it has inherited from its forefathers. More specifically, the party of innovators desires to modify the political constitution of its country, in conformity with the theories which have been suggested to it by the sight of outside governments and which, in spite of, or by reason of, this very suggestion, a more or less unconscious one, seem applicable, through imitation, to all the peoples of the earth. The Tory party, on the contrary, desires people to respect and maintain unaltered the form of government which prevailed in the past.¹ We know that whenever and wherever a conflict arises between these two parties, it is because a liberal party that has been stimulated or awakened by contact with an outer and a more brilliant world has reappeared in the midst of a people who have been unwittingly traditional, and has aroused the conservative party, i. e., the immense majority, to self-consciousness. This means that at first custom held sway here alone, or almost alone, but that at this point fashion has begun to replace it.

Meanwhile fashion grows, and the party which represents it and which was at first defeated ends by getting the innovations which it extols, accepted. The result of this is that the world makes a step in advance towards international political assimilation. This assimilation goes on even when political agglomeration, which is a different thing, is static or retrogressive. Indeed, even during antiquity and the Middle Ages, the uniformity of government which accompanies or heralds governmental unity was always brought about on any given territory—the territory being at one time very small and then becoming more and more extensive—by the triumph of some innovating party. Dating from the heroic period of Greece we can find certain traces of the breath of fashion blowing from time to time across communities who were supposed to be among those most custom-bound. It is very surprising, for example, to find the Dorians, who are such a tradition-bound race at the moment when history throws her light upon them, governed by certain institutions which were imported from Crete by the foreigner Lycurgus, and subject, moreover, to non-Dorian royal families. Can these facts be otherwise explained than by presupposing some anterior age in which foreign prestige swayed this nation, a nation which subsequently succumbed again to the prestige of its forefathers?

The second fact referred to is in no sense exceptional; on the contrary, it frequently occurs. The Greek historian Curtius cites, in this connection, the government of the Molossians by the Oacidæ, of the Macedonians by the Temenidæ, of the Lyncestæ by the Bacchiadæ, of the Ionians by the Lycians, etc., just as the Swedes are governed in our own day by the successors of Bernadotte. This prestige of the foreigner, therefore, has been general at times from the most remote periods. It must have gone very deep if we admit, with the learned author whom I have cited, that belief in the divine extraction of kings is explained by their foreign origin. Since their home vanishes into a distant unknown region, “they might be accounted sons of the gods, an honour which natives could scarcely have received from their countrymen.”¹ Besides, wherever we see primitive families loyal subjects to one of their own number, or even to one of their own race, we must infer that this privileged family owes its supremacy to a more or less ephemeral infatuation by which admiration of ancestors has been momentarily eclipsed. But, although family sentiment may be broken for a time by the advent of some dynasty in this way, it is subsequently awakened and magnified under the name of civic spirit or patriotism.

If we find that in the tenth century Europe was covered with thousands of little states, called seigniories, that were all pretty much alike in their feudal constitution, whose originality was as striking as their resemblance in the midst of their diversity, we cannot doubt that the typical fief, wherever it originated, was copied by the intelligent liberals of the time and imposed by them upon recalcitrant reactionaries like the Gallo-Roman senators or others. The fief was at that time the great fruitful novelty, the model to which the royal power itself came to conform after, as we have seen already it had likewise suggested it. Before that the king had vaguely associated his authority with that of the ancient Roman emperors, the traditional type of sovereign power in the popular mind. It seemed as if the very essence of this supremacy lay in universal dominion or in the dream of it. But Hugues Capet was inspired with what might be called an idea of genius, a very simple idea withal. Instead of looking behind him in the Roman Empire for his ideal, he took it from his own neighbourhood. According to Sumner Maine, he is the prototype and the initiator of strictly feudal, non-imperial royalty. “Hugues Capet and his descendants were kings of France in an entirely new sense; they had the same relations to the soil of France as the baron held towards his fief and the vassal towards his land.” The invention, in short, consisted merely in modelling sovereignty upon suzerainty and in extending over the entire territory of a great nation the feudal relations which had hitherto been confined to the petty limits of a canton. Witness, nevertheless, its success. “All subsequent sovereignty was based on this new model. The sovereignty of the Norman kings, copied from that of the kings of France, was positively territorial. Territorial rulers were established in Spain, in Naples, and in all the Italian principalities which were founded upon the ruins of municipal liberties.”¹

In modern times the contagion of another master-thought, of one which was in contradiction to the preceding, and which was forced to dethrone it in order to propagate itself, has spread still more rapidly, namely, the idea of the state as we understand it to-day. Where was modern statecraft born? In the petty Italian republics, and, first of all, in Florence, whence the modern type of political activity spread to France and Spain and Germany and even to England. Spain and France, in particular, who disputed for such a long time over Italy, “began,” says Burckhardt, “to resemble the centralised Italian states, and, indeed, to copy them, only on a gigantic scale.”¹ Upon this fashion is grafted in the eighteenth century² a fashion which does not contradict it in any way, but which completes it. Anglomania becomes the rage. The parliamentary constitution of England began to be copied before its general diffusion in the nineteenth century, under two original forms, first by the United States, which made a simple republican translation of it, as Sumner Maine has shown in his Popular Government, and then by revolutionary France, which hastened to drive parhamentarism into Rousseau-inspired radicalism. This last transformation, whose dawn was greeted as a marvellous creation, called forth I do not know how many ephemeral republics in South America, overwhelmed the Old World and reacted even upon British soil.

One of the most remarkable traits of the liberal party and, consequently, of those times in which that party rules, is the cosmopolitan character of its aspirations. Cosmopolitanism, indeed, is not the exclusive privilege of our own time. It flourished in all those periods of antiquity and mediævalism in which fashion-imitation held sway. “Cosmopolitanism,” says Burckhardt, “is . . . a sign of an epoch in which new worlds are discovered and men feel no longer at home in the old. We see it among the Greeks after the Peloponnesian War;¹ Plato, as Niebuhr says, was not a good citizen. . . . Diogenes went so far as to proclaim homelessness a pleasure and calls himself, . . . ἄπολις² The Italians of the Renascence were cosmopolitan even before the fifteenth century, not merely because they had become habituated to their exile, but because their epoch and their country abounded in innovations of every kind and because people’s minds were turned towards foreign and contemporary things even more than towards the domestic and patriotic things of their past. The weakening of French patriotism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is notorious. Let us call to mind the monstrous foreign alliances that were made by the different parties during the religious wars and the compliments of Voltaire to the King of Prussia after Rosbach. Even Herder and Fichte, who became such ardent patriots under the heel of the conqueror, began by holding the idea of fatherland in contempt. In contemporary Germany and France it has taken the evident necessity of armed defence to restore to national sentiment some part of its old-time vigour.

But does everything terminate in the victory of fashion over routine? Not at all. This victory is itself incomplete until the conservative party, resigned to its defeat and to taking a subordinate place, transforms itself into a national party and set itself to making the sap of tradition circulate in the new graft of progress. This nationalisation of foreign elements is the completion of the historical drama which contact with different or superior neighbouring civilisations unfolds. Thus the feudal kingdoms which were founded by fashion on the model of the Capetian monarchy became national and traditional in the highest degree.

The stream of custom returns, then, to its channel—singularly enlarged, to be sure—and a new cycle begins. It spins itself out and ends like its predecessors. And this will undoubtedly continue until the political uniformity and unity of the whole human genus are achieved. The innovating party plays, then, in all of this, only a transitory, although an indispensable, part. It serves as a mediator between the spirit of comparatively narrow conservatism which precedes it and the spirit of comparatively liberal conservatism which follows it. (Consequently, traditionalism should no longer be opposed to liberalism. From our point of view the two are inseparable. Without hereditary imitation, without conservative tradition, any invention or novelty that was introduced by a liberal party would perish still-born, for the latter is related to the former like shadow to substance, or, rather, like a light to its lamp. The most radical revolutions seek to be traditionalised, so to speak, and, reciprocally, at the source of the most rigid traditions we find some revolutionary condition. The object of every historic transformation seems to be to debouch in an immense and potent and final custom, where free and vigorous imitation will finally unite the greatest possible intensiveness to the greatest possible extensiveness.

Let me continue this subject in order to remark that the pursuit of this ideal is accomplished along the line of a rhythmical repetition of the same phases upon a scale of increasing size. In the transition from the primitive government of the family to tribal government, societies must have passed through exactly the same periods as contemporary societies are painfully traversing in order to pass from their systems of national government to the continental government of the future. Meanwhile, the foundations of municipal government and, then, of the government of small states or provinces, and, last of all, of the government of nations, all required the same series of efforts. To understand how each of these successive and intermittent enlargements of the political aggregates of the past took place, we should observe the manner in which modern political aggrandisements are effected. The little American republics which were to become the United States, lived separate and independent. One day a common danger brought them together and their union was proclaimed. The war which was the occasion of this great event was merely an historic accident, like the wars for conquest or independence which, during the course of history, have occasioned, have hastened, or retarded, but in no sense caused, the really stable extensions of the state from the family-state to the nation-state. The American Union, then, was decreed; but what made it possible and lasting? What was the cause that not only necessitated this federal tie, but that still works to make it closer, day by day, a cause that will eventually bring forth unity out of union? Tocqueville will tell us. “In the English colonies of the North, more generally known as the States of New England, the two or three main ideas which now constitute the basis of the social theory of the United States were first combined. The principles of New England spread at first to the neighbouring states; they then passed successively to the more distant ones; and, at last, if I may so speak, they interpenetrated the whole confederation. They now extend their influence beyond their limits, over the whole American world. The civilisation of New England¹ has been like a beacon lit upon a hill, which, after it has diffused its warmth immediately around it, also tinges the distant horizon with its glow.”² It is certain that if each of the United States had remained faithful to the constitution of its fathers, if it had not welcomed the two or three foreign ideas which were formulated by a small group of neighbouring states, the political similarity of all these states, which alone made possible their political fusion, would never have existed. Fashion-imitation was, then, the cause of this progress. I may add that the ideas which were imported in this way into a majority of the United States were so fully acclimatised in them as to become part and parcel of their primitive customs. The final result was a collective patriotism which was not less intense or less traditional or self-assertive than their original forms of patriotism.

If the great American federation has just originated in this way, under our very eyes, we ought to believe that the origin of the little Greek federation was not very different. The innumerable municipal republics scattered through Greece and the Archipelago were almost exact copies of the two principal types, the Dorian and the Ionian. Evidently the resemblance which prompted them to unite on all occasions could not be explained by the mere fact of colonisation by common mother-cities; such a propagation through heredity must have been followed by a propagation through imitation, and it was this that inaugurated a new era of Greek civilisation. Then Sparta and Athens, like fires lit up in lofty places, as Tocqueville says, radiated abroad. Here was fashion-imitation; and when fashion became settled and imbedded, it represented to all the cities a common national custom which inspired the liveliest and most hereditary patriotic sentiment that had ever been seen. But, if we consider each of these little cities apart in its deep attachment to its original institutions, before the assimilation of which I am speaking, and question how the different tribes of which it was composed came themselves to federate and form a city, we shall find no other reason but that of their pre-existing similarity, a similarity which had been effected by the radiant brilliancy of one of their number, voluntarily or coercively copied by the others.

These periods of brilliancy towards which the eyes of the historians turn of their own accord, the age of Pericles, the age of Augustus, the age of Louis XIV, are characterised, in common, by the introduction, after an era of sudden innovations and rapid annexations and assimilations, of a new form of society and the inauguration of a new tradition. After language has been subject to change for a long time, it becomes fixed in a mould which is henceforward respected. After many changes have been produced in religion by an over-hospitable welcoming of alien ideas, it is re-established and reorganised. After great upheavals, political institutions, remodelled and reorganised, take root anew. After innumerable gropings in the dark, art, in all its branches, finds its classical direction, and henceforward maintains itself in it. After a chaos of ordinances, decrees, and laws, legislation codifies and ossifies itself, so to speak. In this respect, Pericles, although he was the head of a democratic state and of the most stirring one of ancient peoples, resembles Augustus and Louis XIV. Under him, all those elements of Athenian civilisation, which were disorganised in consequence of the great current of fashion-imitation which had preceded him, and which, more-ever, was never interrupted for long in the Greek world, given over, as it was, to an intermixture of commercial and maritime civilisations, came into logical agreement like that of the elements of Latin and of French civilisation, under the two great emulators of Periclean glory, subsequently to the troublous times which had disorganised the Roman Republic, before the advent of the one, and French society before that of the other. Then the Attic dialect began to spread everywhere, and to impose its colonial empire upon every one; and in its spread and consolidation it became fixed as the immortal language of the whole of subsequent antiquity. Then, too, sculpture and dramatic poetry attained their apogee, their exemplary perfection. And then, finally, government and finance took a truly permanent and conservative stand. For, although Pericles inclined towards intellectual novelties and welcomed foreign writers and thinkers, he was as conservative as Augustus and Louis XIV, each of whom was the patron and abettor of the intellectual and artistic life which he welcomed in order to appropriate it to himself.

Now, it is clear that if a return is made to tradition during these epochs of great men, or of great reigns, it is to an enlarged tradition, to a tradition that has been enlarged in two ways, by the extension of the territory over which it rules, and by the elaboration of the elements of which it is composed. Before Pericles, Athens was merely a greater and more illustrious city than the other Greek cities. During his time it became the capital of a fairly vast empire, whose life depended upon its life, and the intensity and complexity of this life was quite a different thing from that of the early centuries of Athens.

We have seen how the great centuries of which I am speaking may be considered under two aspects; in the first place, as the time when a new logical equilibrium is reached through what I have called the grammar in contrast to the dictionary of the elements of civilisation; in the second place, as the point of departure for a new era of traditional life. But these two aspects are bound together, for it is because innovations, introduced by the breath of fashion, have become harmonised, that they have subsequently become imbedded as customs. The proof that they have been harmonised is visible in the symmetrical and even artificial air which all the creations of such memorable epochs take on. In them, political administrations are uniform and centralised. In them, the streets and squares of cities are transformed into geometric symmetry. For example, when Pericles rebuilt Sybaris under the name of Thurii, Curtius tells us that the city “was laid out on the plan of the Piræaus,” that “four principal roads ran from end to end and three from side to side.” We can read in Babeau, La Ville sous l’ancien régime, of the transformations à la Haussmann, which were effected in all the cities of France under Louis XIV, and we can compare all of this with what Roman archæology teaches us about post-Augustan cities. Besides, although the austere and autocratic Pericles, the descendant of an illustrious family, a kind of republican Pitt, desired maritime grandeur and imperial expansion for Athens, he jealously opposed the introduction of the alien into the city as a member of the civic body. On this point, he reverted, Curtius tells us, “to antique, severe, and archaic legislation.” He governed democratically, but he suppressed all democratic principles, i. e., “rotation in office, division of authority, and even responsibility in public office.” Like Augustus, he concentrated in his own person all the functions of the Republic, and out of them he made himself a sovereign power.

However, he had nothing in common with the ancient tyrants but appearances. The tyrant was far from representing or favouring the conservatism of custom; in spite of his despotism, he favoured those currents of foreign fashion which dissolved national traditions, his great stumbling block. Pericles, on the contrary, inaugurated a return to the life of tradition, because it was to his interest.

I do not mean to say that Pericles, in imposing his authority and in stamping his seal upon the institutions of his country, created that desire of a more national and traditional life by which he profited for the time being—too short a time, unfortunately. The Persian wars, like all warlike crises, had revived the sentiment of nationality (but of an aggrandised nationality) which had, in the preceding centuries, notably in the sixth century, been weakened by the drain upon it of cosmopolitan life. “Whereas, in the time of Solon,” says Curtius (II, 476), “the facile life of the Ionians (of Asia) flourished at Athens, whose wealthy citizens took pleasure in displaying their purple and gold and perfumes, their horses, their hounds, their favourites, and their banquets, it is incontestable that with the Persian wars a more serious view of life penetrated the nation.” There was a return to the customs of the Athenian forefathers. “The victory of Marathon brought back into honour the old Attic race of the cultivators of the soil; and the more the core of the Athenian people came to consider themselves superior to the maritime populations of Ionia [a form of pride, let us note, which is always dependent upon custom-imitation], the more they desired independence in language, customs, and dress.” Dress became simpler in a return to primitive austerity. “Here was a purely objective difference between the Asiatic Ionians and the Athenians; but their customs and habits of life had already varied for a long time.” This is a proof of the priority of subjective over objective imitation.

There are many signs to show that the time immediately preceding Pericles, the beginning of the fifth century, and, especially, the sixth century, were periods in which the wind of foreign imitation blew throughout the Archipelago, in all the civilised or to-be-civilised basins of the Mediterranean. This was the epoch of Polycrates and the other Greek tyrants, all of whom were opposed to the ancient morality, all of whom were propagators of foreign customs and precursors of modern administrative government. Moreover, tyranny plainly showed by its rapid spread from island to island, at this epoch, the impressionability of the period to extraneous examples. A still better indication of this was the unheard-of spectacle that could be seen in Egypt, under the Psammetichi and under Amasis, in their imitation of the life of Greece and in their efforts to introduce it into the classical land of tradition! Amasis “was married to a woman of Cyrene; his boon companions were Greeks, and Greek princes were his friends and guests; like Cræsus [the innovator of Lydia], he honoured the gods of the Greeks.” It was in this way, in the eighteenth century of our era, that Frederick the Great attempted to Gallicise his kingdom. Darius may be considered to have shared in this movement of Hellenisation, but under more hidden and general forms. At any rate, he opened the way to the great administrative empires which followed him. Persia was “utterly transformed by him. A new spirit of administration took the place of its ancient customs.”

Hence the individualism which appeared at this time. “An entirely new sentiment of personality was awakened.” People dared to think for themselves; from this audacity philosophy was born. The Sophists were the agents of the intellectual freedom of the individual. Hence, too, the cosmopolitanism of this epoch.

Have I said enough to show the leading rôle which is played in political history by the alternation in the levels of the two great currents between which imitation unequally, divides itself? Undoubtedly not, but I will conclude this exposition by studying more closely the political consequences which result from the occurrence of this simple rhythmical change in the direction of a single force and the characteristics which must be taken on by any form of government to fit itself to expand or to implant itself in the way that I have described.

The consequences are, in brief, as we already know, the progressive enlargement and consolidation of the political agglomeration, and, then, as we shall see, a continually growing administrative and military centralisation, the increasing opportunity given to a personal government to make itself universal and later on to perpetuate itself through becoming traditional. The characteristics are a relatively rational and democratic air in the case of constitutions that are expanding and an air of relative originality and authority in the case of constitutions that have already spread and that are already established. All this will become clearer through a comparison of our antithesis with two different but kindred antitheses, upon which two eminent although unequal thinkers are agreed.

Both Tocqueville and Spencer have had a lively appreciation of the great social transformation which is the slow and irresistible movement of our age. They have both endeavoured to formulate it in terms in which they thought they saw a general law of history. Spencer was especially impressed by the industrial development of our time. In this he saw the dominant trait which explained all the other traits of our societies, notably, the emancipation of the individual, the substitution of constitutional rights for natural rights, of the régime of contract for the régime of status, of justice for privilege, and of free and voluntary association for hereditary and state-imposed corporations. In generalising this view he considered the directing of activity towards depredation or production, towards war or peace, a major fact which sufficed to characterise two ever-conflicting types of civilisation: the militant type, which is approaching extinction, and the industrial type, which is destined to an idyllic and grandiose future of peace, liberty, morality, and love.¹

Tocqueville was profoundly and religiously impressed, as he tells us, by that levelling of conditions which is precipitating the peoples of Europe and America towards the inevitable slope of democracy. In his eyes, desire for equality is the highest motor power of our times, just as desire for privilege was the highest motor power of the past, and upon the opposition of those two forces he bases the contrast between aristocratic and democratic societies which have at all times differed in everything, in language, in religion, in industry, in literature, and in art, as well as in politics. Without alarm—on the contrary, with evident sympathy, but without superfluous illusions or, at least, without any dose of optimism that could be compared with that of Spencer’s—he foresees the results of the equalisation that is to be consummated in the future of democracy, and he depicts them in a way which is at times prophetic.

On many points the antitheses of Spencer and Tocqueville agree, for it seems as if Spencer’s militant societies were precisely, in many respects, the aristocracies of Tocqueville, and as if the industrial societies of the former tended to identify themselves with the democracies of the latter. Spencer tells us, however, that militancy engenders obligatory co-operation and the oppression of the individual under administrative centralisation, and that industrialism makes for voluntary co-operation, individual independence, and decentralisation. Tocqueville, on the contrary, in pages where the most solid erudition is joined to the most thoughtful and sincere insight, is forced to conclude, at the last and against his wish, that democratic equality, born of general uniformity, leads us almost inevitably to oppressive centralisation and excessive paternalism, and that local franchises and personal guarantees were far more surely protected in times of aristocratic differentiation and inequality. This avowal must have cost him dear, and I do not see how he reconciles his passionate love for liberty, a love which far outweighs his love for equality, with his sympathy for the conventional and intolerant state, in a word, for the socialistic state, which he so clearly foresees. And yet his liberalism is not more inconsistent than that of the great English evolutionist. At any rate, which of the two is in the right? Must we agree with Tocqueville in holding that an aristocratic rule is decentralising, differentiating, and, in a sense, liberal, and that a democratic rule is centralising, levelling, and authoritative; or must we accept Spencer’s apparently inverse proposition?

I think that Tocqueville’s thesis contains a greater amount of truth, but that he was wrong in not bringing out more clearly a certain side of his thought which has remained in the shade. At bottom, he generally means by aristocratic rule the dominance of custom, and by democratic rule, the dominance of fashion, and, if he had expressed his thought in these terms, he would have been incontestably in the right. But his expression was inexact, for it is not essential to aristocracy to be bound to the spirit of tradition, and every democracy is not hospitable to novelties. Nevertheless, his merit consists in his having discriminated between the hereditary and non-hereditary origin of powers and rights, of sentiments and ideas, and of not having misconstrued the capital importance of this distinction, a distinction which is wholly neglected or barely touched upon by Spencer. Spencer does not distinguish between the hereditary and customary, i. e., feudal, form of militancy, and its voluntary, legislative, and outwardly imitative form, a form which is peculiar to our contemporaries. To him the important fact is whether the nature of ordinary activity is bellicose or industrial. But to say that obligatory co-operation is peculiar to every nation under the domination of an army, under the pretext that military organisation is essentially coercive, is to forget the fact that a great workshop is governed just as authoritatively as a barbarous horde, or as a modern fleet or regiment. Was not the Peru of the Incas a great phalanstery rather than a great barracks? At any rate, no military despotism was ever more dictatorial than this agricultural despotism. This was because obedience to custom was never more rigorously enforced, except, perhaps, in China. China is the least warlike and the most laborious country in the world; but in spite of this, co-operation there is as obligatory as it can possibly be, intolerance is absolute, and administrative centralisation is carried as far as the absence of railroads and telegraphs allows of in such an extensive stretch of territory. For there the yoke of custom and ancestral domination weighs everybody down, beginning with the Emperor.¹

Spencer attributes to the militancy of France, whose development, as he says, surpasses that of England, because of the more frequent wars of the former, the dictatorial and centralising character of the old French régime (completed, in this respect, as we know, by the Revolution). But let us observe that this character was accentuated in proportion to the encroachment of the royal power, which, in its dependence upon the communes, that is, upon the industrial classes of the nation, extended itself to the detriment of the warrior caste of feudal lords. If it did not result in preventing foreign and intermittent wars, it did, at least, prevent steady and intestine warfare, much to the advantage of labour. The King of France was essentially a peace bringer. England remained in a state of comparative decentralisation, because she continued to be an aristocratic country. Her industrial wealth, which, up to the end of the eighteenth century, was not superior to that of France, counted for nothing in this result. As for the entirely recent tendency of contemporary nations towards state socialism,—so strong an argument against the liberalising influence that is attributed by Spencer to industrial development, and such a formal refutation of his views upon the political future,—is it permissible to interpret it as an accidental and momentary effect of the exaggerated armaments which the Franco-Prussian war imposed upon Europe? And would it not be more exact to attribute to this profound and invincible and, to all appearances, lasting movement, an internal and permanent, instead of a fortuitous and external, cause, one which would closely connect the progress of the modern state with the progress of modern industry and democracy?¹

This cause lies in the habit, which is becoming daily more general, of taking examples that are near at hand, in the present, instead of those that belong exclusively to the past. It is remarkable that from the time this habit began to prevail, nations have been urged, either by war or peace, in the direction of extreme centralisation and unification, and of the broadening and deepening of democracy, just as when the opposite habit prevailed, war and peace, chateaux and guilds, contributed to the maintenance of feudal disintegration. Why is this? Because external imitation produces that great uniformity of ideas and tastes, of usages and wants, which makes possible and then necessary, not only the fusion of the assimilated peoples, but the equalising of their rights and conditions, i. e., juridical similarity between members of communities who have become alike in so many other respects. Because, in addition, this uniformity makes possible for the first time, and then necessary, both wholesale industry, machine production, and wholesale war, machine destruction. And, finally, because this same uniformity, which makes one man equal to another, necessarily leads to the treatment of men as like units, to the mechanical consideration and calculation of their desires by means of universal suffrage and of their actions by means of statistics, and to the restraining of them all under a uniform system of discipline by means of those other mechanisms that are called administrative bureaus or departments. Here the truly essential and causal thing is the multiplication of external relations among classes and peoples. This is so true that the social transformation in question set in immediately after the comparatively modern inventions in printing, in locomotion, and in communication, that it develops parallelly with the propagation of these inventions and that, in those places where it has not yet begun, the laying of railroads and the setting up of telegraph poles suffice to inaugurate it. If American democracy shows in a remarkable degree the features which M. de Tocqueville has attributed to democracies in general, and, notably, to European democracies, whose portrait he has drawn for them in advance, it is because North America has anticipated Europe in its bold and extensive use of new methods of transportation, in its steamboats and railroads, it is because nowhere else has there been so much or such rapid travelling, nor so great an interchange of letters and telegrams.

Moreover, may we not suppose that in the future, when our democracies are firmly established, they will differ in many points from the picture that Tocqueville makes of them? Is it true that a democratic rule essentially implies the empire of what I call fashion? Must its opinions and practices be in consequence unstable, as well as chaotic and domineering? Must the short-sightedness and capriciousness of its majorities equal their omnipotence? I see no reason to think this. The social being, after all, however social he may be, is a living being, born through the power of generation and born for it. He wishes to perpeutate his social body, and he knows no better way of doing this than to attach it to his physical body, and transmit it with his blood. Every civilisation which has run its course, Egypt, China, the Roman Empire, has presented the spectacle of a more or less extensive society, drawing back through the promptings of filial piety, after its conversion through a kind of beneficent epidemic to a given body of ideas and institutions, and shutting itself up in these ideas and institutions for ages at a time. I have already referred to China. In the last centuries of the Roman Empire we find a society which is not democratic, which is, on the contrary, pretty aristocratic, but which is very uniform, and at the same time very stable and mechanical, and which is ruled over by a highly centralised administration. Ancient Egypt, which was to a certain extent democratic, was no less striking in its uniformity from one end to the other of the Nile basin, in its administrative centralisation, and in its prodigious immutability as well. All these examples and arguments suggest the thought that our own contemporaneous society may be unwittingly gravitating, in spite of its transient mobility and momentary bias for individual liberty (just as the fluctuations of the sea give a free air to a vessel), towards an age of fixed custom in which the present work of rendering all things uniform will be completed. Towards the end of his work Tocqueville had a presentiment of this. Once a democratic state is established, he says, far from favouring revolutions, it is antagonistic to them; and, he adds: “I can easily discern a state of polity which, when combined with the principle of equality, would render society more stationary than it has ever been in our western part of the world.”¹

IV. Legislation

The above consideration concerning government may be applied to legislation.¹ Legislation, like political and military systems, is only a particular development of religion. And, as a matter of fact, law was originally as sacred a thing as kingship. The most ancient collection of laws, Deuteronomy, the Irish codes of the ancient Brehons, the code of Manu, are inextricably mingled with legendary lore and cosmogonic explanations. This fact shows that the prophet who dogmatises and is deified after death is one with the legislator who commands and the king who governs. In the beginnings of history the father of the family, as well as the leader of the social group, is all that in one. His essential quality is that of pontiff, and, as such, he is, in consequence, both chief and judge. He is chief, in as much as he directs the collective action of the group for the common interest of all its members. He is judge when he interposes his authority between these members to settle their differences. If his method of settling them is continuous and self-consistent, if he possesses a system of jurisprudence, as our jurists would say, he comes to prevent their occurrence. And from that time on law exists in his little society; the memory of his past decisions implies the prevision of his future judgments. Then legislation is in the beginning and always, at bottom, nothing more than accumulated, generalised and capitalised justice, just as a constitution is merely accumulated, generalized, and systematised politics. Legislation is to justice, a constitution is to politics, what the Lake of Geneva is to the Rhone.

In general, there is between common law which is passed down by tradition and statute law which is born of some current of reform opinion the same difference as between natural and rationalistic constitutions, or between exclusive and proselyting religions, or even between dialects and cultivated languages. Dialects, local cults, original systems of government, and customs, seek to transmit themselves from generation to generation; cultivated languages, open-armed religions, ready-made constitutions, and new codes, seek to spread themselves from man to man, either within the circumference of a single country or beyond it. This does not prevent the most widespread language from having been originally like any other dialect; or the most penetrating kind of religion from having germinated in some narrow sect; or the most triumphant and ambitious constitution from having been suggested by some petty, local government, like that of Lacedæmon, with which our conventions were so much taken, or, at any rate, by some traditional government, like that of England, over which our parliamentarians are still so enthusiastic; or, finally, the most contagious kinds of legislations like Roman law, or its hybrid derivative, modern French law, from having their source or sources in such humble customs as the primitive jus quiritium or the Frankish laws. Nor does this prevent the most widespread language, religion, constitution, or piece of legislation from contracting after its expansion, from becoming localised after its diffusion, and from tending to become in its turn a dialect, a local cult, a peculiar constitution or custom, but all this upon a much greater scale and with a higher degree of complexity. There are, then, I reiterate, three phases to be considered; and from the legislative point of view, just as in all other aspects, their characteristics are well marked. In the first, Law is extremely multiform and extremely stable, very different in different countries, and immutable from age to age. In the second, it is, on the contrary, very uniform and very changeable, as is the case in modern Europe. In the third, it endeavours to combine its acquired uniformity with its refound stability. A cursory glance will show us that this is the rhythm in which the whole history of Law is played.

There was a time when every family or pseudo-family possessed its own peculiar law,—then every clan and tribe,—then every city,—then every province. “In order to understand how each of these successive steps towards the prospective unity of the legislative domain was accomplished, let us study the transitions from provincial to national law. For a long time every province of France possessed its own distinct customs, but gradually a body of royal ordinances came to be superposed upon these customs. Moreover, it should be noted that every parliament and tribunal interpreted new laws in its own way, and created its own separate system of jurisprudence. This juristic habit reduced legislation to the original provinciality whence it seemed unable to escape in a time that was still dominated by hereditary imitation. But, finally, contagious imitation, the tendency to copy the legislative and juristic innovations of Paris, having definitely prevailed, the edicts of the Parisian legislators of the Revolution and of the Empire were readily obeyed throughout the France whose provinces had ceased to bow down before the authority of their own ancestors and of native jurists. What is more, the jurisprudence of every court or tribunal was modelled (by compulsion, someone may say, but why, unless the need of territorial conformity had become imperative?) upon the jurisprudence of the court of cassation at Paris. Let me add that already our national jurisprudence, established in this way by fashion, is tending to become transfixed by tradition and to carry legislation with it into its own state of immobility. The law of the Twelve Tables, which ended by being the venerable tradition and sacred custom of Rome, began by being a foreign importation that a fine outburst of fashion-imitation caused to be adopted.

While this movement is transpiring, a still more majestic change is inaugurated. The same cause which rendered necessary first the superposition and then the substitution of national law upon or in place of provincial laws, compels the different national laws to reflect one of their own number, and to prepare for the legislative unification of the future. It was in the sixteenth century, unsettled period though it was, a time of contagious innovations, that Roman Law arose from its scattered ashes and spread throughout every state, while in each one of them the progress of the royal power was making their legislation uniform. Yesterday it was the Napoleonic Code that crossed the frontiers of the French Empire. To-day, unfortunately, no prestigious authority is arising potent enough to construct a new monument of law to dazzle the eyes from afar; but everything leads us to think that if it did appear somewhere or other, it would be copied with unheard-of rapidity everywhere—witness the comparative success of the Torrens act. In the absence of really new juristic solutions, the new problems of law which occur, in connection, for example, with industrial accidents and labour legislation, are barely formulated in any corner of the world before they violently rebound to every other corner.

Well, if it is true that the disposition of the modern public towards free imitation of outside things has alone made possible the diffusion of the French Code, for example, is it not likely that in past ages, when the same provincial law came to prevail over a certain number of cities, and the same municipal law over a certain number of tribes, etc., a like disposition characterised the public of those times, and that without it none of these gradual extensions of the juristic sphere would have occurred? When in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we see in France and Germany a certain number of cities which had been previously governed by very distinct customs, presenting a comparative similarity of legislation, we know that in France this uniformity was established through the imitative spread of the first charter granted to a commune, a document which fascinated the eye of the public of the period, and we know that the idea of mutual imitation in this respect came to cities which already had multiple relations with each other by way of commerce or treaty, or through language or kinship. The customs of Lorris, for example, spread with great rapidity in the royal domain and in Champagne. The same thing happened in Germany. “Almost all the municipal laws of the Rhine towns are like those of Cologne,” writes M. Schulte, in his classical work upon the history of German law.¹ The Rhine towns lived a common life through that continuous stream of mutual imitation which was sustained and symbolised by the current of their river. “The law of Lubeck,” says the same author, “was the model for that of Holstein and Schleswig, and the majority of the cities on the Baltic Sea.” The law of Magdeburg was parallelled and developed, too, by Halle, Leipsic, Breslau, and other “sister cities,” and from Breslau it “spread to Silesia, Bohemia, Poland, and Moravia, so that it was pretty closely followed through the entire East.”² Nevertheless, after any municipal law or charter has spread in this way through fashion, after it has been somewhat modified, it soon becomes one of the most cherished of customs in the hearts of its administrators.

In letting this thought sink into our minds, we shall save ourselves from the error of differentiating between ancient and modern law, of digging a factitious abyss between them, and of supposing that the bridging-over from one to the other, in so far as it is genuine, has only been effected once in the world’s history. That eminent thinker who has penetrated so profoundly into the law of the past, Sir Henry Sumner Maine, is not free from illusion of this kind. According to him, the great, the capital revolution which has been accomplished in law is that which took place, as he supposes, when the idea of common territory was substituted for that of consanguinity as a basis for political and juridical union. There is much truth in this view, but if we endeavour to particularise it, we shall see that it ought to be expressed in other terms, and that it would gain by such a translation. It is certain that the family was for a long time the narrow domain to which moral obligations were confined, and that all the rest of the universe was field for prey. Consequently, the ancient pater familias had power over life and death in his household; he could condemn to death his wife, his children, and his slaves. But what was this hermetically sealed family life but a profession of complete disdain on the part of its members for all external examples? It is obviously difficult to maintain such exclusiveness; little by little domestic barriers are broken down and foreign influences are added to paternal traditions. It is then, when different families have begun to lend and borrow to and from one another, that relations of neighbourhood combine with those of kinship in the creation of legal ties. But as the only recognised type of solidarity was habitually the tie of blood, ties of friendship were at first fictitiously classed under this tie by adoption or otherwise. Later, in Christian countries, spiritual fatherhood, the relation of godfather to godchild, with the rights and duties which accompany it, must be classed with paternity by adoption, just as the relation of spiritual nurse, that is, of spiritual preceptor, to disciple must be classed with that of foster-father to foster-child (the fosterage of Ireland). In Ireland, for example, the preceptor had the right to succeed to the fortune of his disciple. In this same country, I am still citing Sumner Maine, the very ecclesiastical organisation, the bulk of the monasteries and bishoprics, simulated a true tribe. It is perhaps because of a like fiction that the names of father, brother, mother, and sister are given to the inmates of convents and monasteries, in spite of their obligatory celibacy.

But, little by little, as non-related individuals came to intermingle and to assimilate with one another more and more, the impossibility of extending similar fictions to their new relations insured the rejection of these fictions, and the simple fact of living together in the same country sufficed to bind men legally to one another. Why was this? Because in the great majority of cases compatriots had become very much alike through their habit of reciprocal imitation. When, as an exception, a particular group was different from the others, like the Jews in the Middle Ages, or the American negroes, or the Spanish Moors under Philip II, or like the Catholics in Protestant countries, or the Protestants in Catholic countries, during the sixteenth century, participation in the law of the land was refused, or with great difficulty conceded to them, in spite of their common territory. So true is it that the real foundation and first condition of law is the existence of a certain kind of preliminary similarity between the men that it is to unite. When blood relationship was a requisite, it was because it alone presupposed this degree of resemblance, whereas, at present, the possession of a common territory suffices to give birth to this presumption. Besides the tie of a common territory aspires to strengthen itself through the addition of the tie of kinship. In modern nations, where distinct races have had time to fuse together through their prolonged submission to the same laws, the national party are convinced that they have common ancestors, although the apparently territorial character of their law disguises their faith in their common kinship. Seeley justly places foremost among the conditions of national unification, “community of race, or, rather, belief in such community.” In the most modern as well as in the most ancient times, then, the important thing is not so much real consanguinity as fictitious or reputed consanguinity. Thus we see that the action of fashion-imitation has produced, not once, but very often, the important juridical revolution to which Sumner Maine refers. But from the expression of this author it would seem as if physiological or physical causes, generation, or climate, or soil, were the factors of this transformation, whereas an essentially sociological force, imitation, has done it all.

In the preceding remarks it is true that imitation of superiors appears to be confused with imitation of contemporaneous innovators. But there are cases in the domain of jurisprudence, as well as elsewhere, in which it is differentiated. The history of penal law furnishes us with many striking examples of this. I will merely indicate them here, as I have already spoken of them at some length in another work.¹ It is stupifying to find with what rapidity certain odious and absurd criminal procedures, like torture or certain inadequate and unintelligent ones like the jury system, have, at certain epochs, been propagated. Torture was in fashion in Europe from the time of the unearthing of Roman law at Bologna, and up to the sixteenth century it spread like an inundation of blood. In the eighteenth century people fell in love with the jury system, without understanding it, upon the word of a few anglomaniacs; so much so that in 1789 all the official instructions of the electors to the deputies at the States-General were unanimous on this, as on so many other points. And we know how far prepossession for this lame and blind kind of justice has spread in our century of equality and enlightenment. Are we not forced to surmise from these two examples that the method which preceded torture, judicial combat, was itself propagated by means of some similar infatuation?

At any rate, it is notable that these foreign fashions were not slow to plant themselves as cherished customs in the hearts of the people. At present, the jury is a national and inviolable institution in France. But in the seventeenth century torture was honoured in the same way. Several times the States-General of the sixteenth century, and even those of 1614, declared themselves in favour not only of the maintenance, but even of the extension, of this method of proof, thereby bearing witness to the far-reaching extent of its popularity.

Let me hasten to add that the fevers of fashion here, as elsewhere, rarely produce such bad effects, and that since they are in general merely auxiliary to imitation of superiority and to social logic, they ordinarily favour the progress of legislation. As much could be said of the new customs which follow upon these crises. Let us enquire, then, into the characteristics which are apt to be taken on by a legislation which seeks first to extend itself and then to implant itself upon the vaster territory, and into the consequences of both this extension and this entrenchment.

These characteristics are, in general, greater richness of content and greater simplicity of form. In expanding law, greater weight is attached to contracts, to reciprocal engagements, to equity, to humanity, and to individual reason; and in law which is being fixed and codified, in addition to these qualities, an air of learned casuistry and despotic regulation. Roman law, as it was spontaneously formed under the influence of the jus gentium and the prætorian modifications and as it was codified and transfixed during the Empire, is a remarkable example of this twofold type. Wherever it was propagated by the jurists, it was received for justice and logic incarnate, and this fact partly accounts for the annihilation under it of all the other original legislations of antiquity or the Middle Ages. Wherever it was established it became the potent instrument of despots. Let us note at this point that although we oppose equity to privilege and justice to custom, equity and privilege, justice and custom, have the same origin. Custom appears just to primitive men because, whether it favour or sacrifice the individual, it treats him in the same manner as it does the only persons to whom he is wont to compare himself, namely, his ancestors and the members of his caste. His desire to be treated like others is satisfied in this way in spite of the juridical disparities and dissimilarities which custom establishes between those who are already dissimilar in every respect. But when the individual begins to care more for this juristic likeness to his fellow-countrymen and to his contemporaries in general than for his likeness to his ancestors and kinsfolk, because his resemblance to the former has become marked in other respects, the equality of treatment to which he makes claim is what we call justice or equity. It matters little to him, then, if he is treated quite differently from his forefathers, provided he is treated like his neighbour.

To a certain extent the distinction between real and personal property, the social preponderance of which seems to alternate, is connected with that between custom-imitation and fashion-imitation. In times of custom and tradition ancestral heritages, lands, houses, offices, business houses, etc., are considered, and justly so at this time, much the most important part of a fortune. What the individual can acquire in the course of his ephemeral life through his particular little industry, through his commerce or through his spontaneous initiative or through the initiative that he has imitated from his contemporaries, does not in general add much to this hereditary fund, the fruit of accumulated savings produced by the exploitation of ancient inventions, of inventions in agriculture, in finance, in industry, in art, etc.

It is natural in these epochs to consider the patrimony as the most sacred piece of property, worthy of being safeguarded in its integrity by tutelary laws, by successoral or feudal repurchase, by substitution or by religious respect for testamentary disposition. The habit of imitating one’s forefathers first of all, of turning to the past for the choice of one’s models, leads to the habit of obeying one’s ancestors and of respecting their wishes above everything else. On the contrary, when imitation of contemporaries rages, that is to say, when the latter are remarkably inventiveand when their inventions throw ancestral ones for the time being into the shade, the facility for growing rich in exploiting contemporaneous innovations is so great, that a patrimony is likely to be considered more and more as a mere outfit, initial capital to be either promptly dispersed or increased tenfold through bold speculation or labour or enterprise. Consequently, a patrimony loses its prestige and acquired property takes on a nobler character. At such times no property seems more respectable than that which is gained through personal effort, through the intelligent use of new industrial or agricultural ideas, etc. This is where we stand to-day in France and everywhere else. Consequently, it is not astonishing that there is some little talk everywhere, mistaken talk, I think, of making an attack upon the old laws of succession, of suppressing or limiting the right of bequest and the capacity to inherit and of basing the right of holding property exclusively upon personal labour.

Obviously, here as everywhere else the influence of fashion-imitation is exerted in an individualistic sense. Parenthetically, I may observe that this opposition between real and personal property is at the bottom of the opposition between the juristic and the economic points of view. It is notable that political economy was born in Greece, in Florence, and, in the eighteenth century, in England, during their ages of fashion.

The consequences which are involved by the progress of Law, first in extension and then in stability, are of several kinds; for legislation is concerned with all the directions which individual activity can take, and these directions far outnumber those of collective activity which are controlled by the constitution of the government. All that a national party can do collectively consists of military or diplomatic action in relation to other states or of internal political reform, the production of power or glory, or of national liberty, a more highly rated occupation. Moreover, a political reform is only the manipulating by legislation of matters which bear upon the acts and interests of private life, upon individual rights and duties. But the acts which individuals may perform separately are innumerable: they relate to rural or urban occupations of every nature, to all kinds of agricultural and industrial work, to all kinds of crime, to all forms of adjusted or conflicting interests. We must distinguish here between activity that is contrary to and activity that is in accordance with the laws. Activity which is contrary to law and which must be anticipated by law in order to be suppressed, is the sum of those occurrences which lead to civil or criminal actions; since the former, no less than the latter, presuppose a violation of justice by one of the contestants, only it is a violation that is supposed to have been committed by mistake and not by bad will. Activity in accordance with law is primarily the sum of all the works of civil or criminal justice, the production of peace and security, a special kind of industry, as well as the peaceful and legal exercise of all callings, the production of multiform wealth, industry strictly speaking. Now, in matters of justice, the uniformity of legislation which follows upon a diversity of legislation results in centralising and regulating, I was about to say in making mechanical, the administration of justice and in enlarging systems of jurisprudence; and stability of legislation results in consecrating and consolidating such enlarged systems of jurisprudence. This is particularly true of civil justice, although the penal system is subject to analagous changes. To a customary and mechanical penal system, one abounding in strange and atrocious as well as in absurd forms of torture, a methodical and rational system succeeded. This was undoubtedly too slow in coming, but it has already led to a singular contrast between the penitentiaries of to-day and the jails of the past. Indeed, every revolutionary access of fashion, in any order of facts whatsoever, introduces a higher degree of rationality into our society, just as every reversion to custom introduces a higher degree of wisdom.

In relation to any industry whatsoever, the substitution of uniform legislation for legislative disintegration is a sine qua non of all production on a large scale, of all production requiring machinery or concentration of capital, in questions of railroads, of manufacturies, or of extensive farming. Thus uniform legislation is indispensable if we care to have brilliant prosperity; and stable legislation is indispensable if our prosperity is to be lasting. At any rate, as industrial development is still more directly dependent upon variations in such fundamental and implicit laws as the laws of want and habit than it is upon law technically speaking, it is proper to relegate considerations of this kind to the following section. But among industries, there is one, namely, agriculture, which is more immediately dependent upon legislation. We know, indeed, how much the progress of agriculture, which is carried on by machines and which has extensive markets at its command, can be hindered by a multiplicity of customs having the force of law, in questions of apprenticeship, of usufruct, of different kinds of ownership, of mortgages, of successions, of sales, of rent, of prescribing for title, etc. When these barriers are cast aside by the optional or obligatory, but in either case contagious, adoption of a single body of laws that has emanated from some prestigious court or capital or from some contemporaneous celebrity, the impetus is finally given to agriculture on a great scale.

V. Usages and Wants.—Political Economy

Usage is the most despotic and the most circumstantial of governments, the most rigorous and the best-obeyed kind of legislation. By usage I mean those thousand and one traditional or recently established habits which regulate private conduct, not abstractly and from a distance, like law, but close at hand and in every detail, and which include all the artificial wants, all the tastes and distastes, and all the peculiarities of morals and manners which characterise a given country or a given period. It is for the satisfaction of this group of special desires in the special forms which are determined by them and in conformity to the more or less badly formulated laws of political economy that industry exerts itself. In this sense, usage, like government and law, is connected with religion. It is an offshoot of ritual. Who would guess, for example, that our habit of writing from left to right has a sacerdotal origin? And yet this is absolutely so. The Greeks originally followed the example of the Phœnicians and wrote from right to left; but later on, following the example of their priests, who wrote down the oracles in the opposite direction because the direction towards the right was of good augury, the east lying to the right of the sacrificer who watches the sky with his face towards the north, they made an entire reform in this particular in their old habits. “Because people turned towards the right to pray,” says Curtius, “the sacrificial cup, the casque which held the lots, the harp that was to celebrate the gods, were all passed on from left to right.” In view of this explanation of the direction in which we write, it is curious to find anthropologists explaining it on physiological grounds. Moreover, even in supposedly irreligious societies, usage never fails to express the true and deep cult, the chivalric or materialistic, the aristocratic or democratic, ideal which dominates and directs them. The mere form of the seats and chests of the twelfth and eighteenth centuries is enough to reveal the mysticism of the first period and the epicurism of the second.

To-day, the same kind of comfort in food, in dwellings, and in clothing, the same kind of luxury, the same forms of politeness, bid fair to win their way through the whole of Europe, America, and the rest of the world. We no longer wonder at this uniformity, a condition which would have appeared so amazing to Herodotus. It is, nevertheless, a capital fact, and although it was itself developed through the progress of industry, without it our immense industrial wealth would be impossible. A traveller through Europe in the twelfth century would not have failed to observe that at every step, from one canton to another, communities who were possessed of the same religion and, often, of the same language and law and form of government, differed strangely from one another in their methods of nourishment, lodging, clothing, personal adornment, and amusement.¹ But had the traveller passed through the same places one hundred years later, he would not have perceived any marked difference in these same particulars between the different generations of a given canton. On the contrary, the modern continental tourist will find, particularly in large cities and among the upper classes, a persistent sameness in hotel fare and service, in household furniture, in clothes and jewelry, in theatrical notices, and in the volumes in shop windows. But let him return ten or fifteen years later and he will find many changes in all these things. New dishes will figure on the bill of fare; an entirely different style and perhaps a new kind of utility will characterise the furniture; new-fashioned costumes will have sprung from the imagination of the fashionable dressmakers, and new forms of jewelry from the phantasy of the jeweller’s brain; new comedies and operas and novels will be in vogue. This contrast, one which I have referred to before, is more striking in this case than in any other.

Does this mean that the gradual and general or regular substitution of diversity in space for diversity in time and of similarity in time for similarity in space which is due to the progress of our civilisations must be considered as an inevitable law of history, and as an entirely irreversible order of things? No. Only the normal transition from geographical diversity to geographical similarity is really irreversible; for we cannot imagine, unless as a consequence of some social cataclysm, the return of usages to a state of disintegration once their unity was established. But we can well conceive, without any mental somersault, of a chronological reversal of the transition from identity to differentiation; we can well conceive that after a period of capricious changes or rather of hasty experiments, usages might become fixed. Steadfastness in the case of habits is far from contradicting in any respect their universality; it completes it. Europe, which is still so stormy, but which was not always so, is unconsciously making for this peace-bringing port. The fever of civilisation which torments it is not an entirely new and unheard-of thing in history; and we know how it ends. We may be sure that the entire basin of the Nile or Euphrates, or the whole of the Middle Empire, or all India, was not made partially uniform in more or less remote or obscure epochs without feverish agitation, seeing that this involved the destruction of a great number of local peculiarities. These were blotted out by a current of contagion whose transitory violence is evidenced to by this very effect. But this current, having done its work, has disappeared. And behind it, upon the great Asiatic territories over which it must have flowed, we are surprised to find not only an amazing resemblance in dress, in furniture, etc., but an immutable fidelity to ancient usages as well. This is so marked that the type of dwelling, for example, and of interior arrangements that is still made use of in Oriental palaces, enables us to reconstruct the plan of the ancient palaces of Assyria in spite of the shapeless character of their ruins.

It is infinitely likely that the alternating play of the two kinds of imitation was alone able to transform the world to the point of gradually effacing all traces of the primitive checker-board of local usages. But I must anticipate an objection. Because archæologists of prehistoric times find in every cave-dwelling about the same types of flakes, of knives, of very simple utensils, they hastily conclude that their savage possessors did not differ at all from one another in their clothes or morals or methods of life, and that this resemblance was due to the spontaneous appearance of the same ideas and wants among primitive men. But this conclusion is absolutely arbitrary, and the only one that is authorised by logic is that the production or consumption of flint arms or tools, of pottery, etc., was propagated by fashion-imitation over vast regions at those remote periods during which we are often led to think that tribal imitation played an insignificant part. When I call to mind that the Incas, in spite of their high degree of civilisation, never had any notion of a wagon or wheel, nor of illumination by means of a lamp or candle, thereby utilising the oleaginous substances which were right under their hands, I cannot doubt but that the majority of savage peoples would have always been ignorant of the art of pottery if they had not been taught it from outside. Consequently, it seems a fallacy to me to see in the almost universal diffusion of this art proof of the necessity of the innateness of certain discoveries.

I realise, however, that the life of savages on the lowest rung of the human ladder is almost as much lacking in originality as in variety, and that they resemble each other in many particulars without having imitated each other the least in the world. But their similarity in this respect is in no way social. It is entirely vital, for the only wants which they know are natural wants with a very slight impression of the special characteristics of the family.¹ Let us pass on to the point when the family has become more artificial than natural and begins to be and to wish to be a society, not solely a physiological group. Then true usages, fictitious wants which overlie or swell out physical wants, begin. They arise as distinct things in the several groups, and as they become more precise and more numerous in each group they become differentiated in them. But their internal precision and richness continues without let, whereas their external differentiation is soon checked by the inmate tendency to copy the foreigner famous for invention or conquest. Now and then this tendency has free scope and, thanks to this intermittent spirit of introducing foreign wants and to its combination with the steady spirit of conserving traditional wants, every tribe, and then every city, and then every province, and then every large nation, and finally almost the whole of the civilised globe, presents the spectacle, in respect to usages, as in so many other respects, of advances in similarity joined with increasing degrees of complexity.

If one wished to explain the architectural style and fashion of a given locality merely on the ground of the exigencies of its climate, one would be greatly handicapped. In Asia Minor, for example, all the houses on the slope of the Black Sea are roofed with tiles, whereas on the slope towards Cyprus their roofs are terraced, “whatever may be,” says M. Élisée Reclus, “the difference of climate.” It is a question of fashion or custom, or, rather, of an ancient fashion that has become a custom. From one end to the other of the United States, from top to bottom, throughout all classes, even among good-looking women (and there is certainly no more striking example of the power of imitation than this) we find the repugnant habit of tobacco chewing,—a fact that explains the universal presence of the spittoon, the most indispensable piece of furniture in America.¹ Is this a habit that is made necessary by the exigencies of race and climate? Not at all; it is another case of fashion and custom.

Let me dwell a little upon this point, if only to emphasise a distinction which might have been expressly indicated in the preceding sections, but which finds a more natural place here, the distinction between production and consumption. In that beginning of society of which I have been speaking, every family or every horde began by being a workshop and a storehouse of all kinds of useful things, besides being both church and state. In other words, it produced all that it consumed and consumed all that it produced either in the matter of private and individual utilities or in that of beliefs or in that of collective utilities. This means that exchange, economic solidarity, did not exist between families any more than political or religious solidarity. Certain families did not produce wheat or rice, linen or cloth, for the consumption of other families in exchange for the different products or services, political or military services, for example, of the latter, any more than certain families taught or ruled over others, furnishing them with an intellectual or volitional direction which the latter believed in and followed, in return for the latter’s services or products. Now I must show how production became differentiated from consumption all along this line, and it is incumbent upon me to prove that the law of the alternation of the two kinds of imitation applies both to the spread of productive acts and to that of the desires of consumption.

When the family is an exclusive and self-sufficient workshop, the secrets and processes of fabrication, of domestication, and of cultivation are transmitted from father to son, and imitation functions only through heredity. At the same time the wants which this embryonic industry satisfies are transmitted in the same manner. But when the family learns of better processes in use elsewhere, and copies them, forsaking its old mistakes, then the new products, which are always a little different from the old, must be desired and called for simultaneously on the part of consumers. Consequently, new needs of consumption must have themselves been transmitted by fashion. Finally, it always happens that after an influx of industrial innovations has been freely welcomed on the part of an inheritance- and custom-bound imitation, the desire to fix them as customs on a larger scale appears. In this way corporations are born. Parallelly, corresponding desires of consumption end by taking root and becoming national habits.¹ Then this process begins anew. On the other hand, an era of free competition, that is, of free external imitation, succeeds to the close corporations of the old régime, and this new era invariably winds up with a return to the ancient monopoly on a vaster scale, under the name of great companies or professional syndicates. On the other hand, a rule of general caprice and all-pervasive fashion succeeds to the old usages of past times until the appointed hour comes for the quiescence of people’s souls in wants that are alike stable and uniform.

Here we must take note of an apparently simple fact, but one, however, which has had great consequences in history. Desires of consumption are in general much more rapidly and much more readily communicated than the desires of production which correspond to them. The first time that a primitive tribe sees any objects of war or adornment in bronze, it straightway desires to possess similar articles. But it is not until much later that it desires to make such objects for itself. Meanwhile, and the wait may be a long one, it appeals to the fabricators of some foreign tribe, and thus commerce arises. It has been noted with surprise that among the Semites, the Cushites, and the Aryans (not among the Chinese) the composition of prehistoric bronze was always the same, in spite of the possibly arbitrary proportion of its elements. M. Lenormand says this is “an important fact and one which proves that the same invention was passed on from one to another over a region whose geographical limits have been accurately determined by M. de Rougemont.” This means that at a certain prehistoric period the desire to acquire this newly discovered metal spread from people to people like a powder train, and that the majority of tribes or peoples bought it long before they knew how to make it. Otherwise, its composition would have varied very materially in different places. Many other facts confirm this point of view, notably the spread of amber, in prehistoric ages, to very great distances from the place in which it was discovered. Thus the same condition held in the past as in the present. To-day, the nations which are entering upon civilisation are the markets for the old nations of Europe, because they have caught the contagion of new wants without being as yet stung to emulation by the sight of new industry. England’s worldwide commercial conquests, so fruitful of immense consequences, result from this.¹

Although this phenomenon is or appears to be very simple, the contrary phenomenon would be, a priori, much more conceivable. Desires of production have to spread only in a small group of men in order to be realised, whereas, if desires of consumption are to be viable, they must propagate themselves through a large mass of people. It is consequently surprising to find that when a whole people are charmed into wearing certain stuffs and jewels, and into living in houses which are built on certain plans, no member of the community is inspired with a lively desire to produce these stuffs and jewels and houses. So imitative is man, in general, and so passive besides, in his manner of imitating. However this may be, the fact that we have noticed may be observed in every order of social facts. The taste for reading poetry, for looking at pictures, for listening to music or plays, comes to all peoples through the imitation of some neighbour long before the taste to versify or to paint, or to compose operas or tragedies. Hence the universal radiation and the international character of certain great literary and artistic reputations.¹ In the same way, the need to be governed by intelligent and adequate legislation comes to a people long before the desire or the capacity to elaborate a judicial system. Hence the spread of Roman law among the Visigoths and other barbarians and, after the Renascence, in almost all of feudal Europe. In this same way, too, the need of religious sentiment precedes that of religious as well as that of philosophic genius, i. e., theoretic invention. Hence the very rapid conversion of young or aged peoples to a new religion. Similarly, communities love military and patriotic glory through imitation before they possess the genius for war or statecraft which makes for a glorious army or fatherland. This circumstance favours the annexation of large territories by illustrious conquerors; it favours the formation, for example, of the Roman Empire. Finally, communities experience, through contact with foreign peoples, the desire to speak a rich and cultivated language before they are either capable or desirous of that cultivation which alone enriches and perfects an idiom. I may say the same thing of the lower classes, who in their contact with the educated classes are eager to copy the polite language of the court or drawing room before they make any pretence of reproducing fashionable life. Hence the rapid progress that is made by certain languages or dialects throughout a continent or country. The spread of Greek throughout the Eastern Empire, of the dialect of the Isle-de-France throughout France, and of English throughout North America and the world in general, are examples in point.²

This priority along all lines of the needs for consumption over those for production may be deduced as an important corollary from the course of imitation ab interioribus ad exteriora, i. e., from the thing signified to the sign. Here the sign is the productive act which actualises the idea and aim of the thing which is to be consumed. This idea and this aim are the hidden content of which the consumed product is the form. Now, in periods of change, the form, as we know, always lags behind the content. Guyau remarks very justly, for example, that “the political revolution of the first half of this century [in France] was accomplished in thought before it took shape in action: philosophic, religious, and social ideas which had been previously unknown to the poets burst forth in the beautiful setting of the tranquil alexandrines of Delille.” The change to romanticism in verse was the making of the literary product appropriate to meet the demand of the new soul of poetry. Does not this inability of innovators to find at once suitable metres and processes and symbols of art for their ideas and sentiments suggest the impossibility on the part of countries which have been but just initiated into new desires for luxury and comfort to create industries adapted to the satisfaction of these desires?

No social phenomenon has had greater consequences than the one in question. It has been a potent factor, as we have seen, in breaking down the barriers of nationalities before the torrent of civilising examples which escaped from it or which entered into it. International exchange arose in that way. Suppose that the need to reproduce, in every order of things, the new object that had been seen abroad had preceded or accompanied the need to consume this article, what would have happened? Primitive families would have copied one another without uniting together; they would have remained as much aloof from, if not as hostile to, one another after every act of borrowing as they were before it, like the monads of Liebnitz, which reflect but do not influence one another. It is true that this heterogeneity combined with this similarity, this disintegration in this uniformity, implies a kind of contradiction which cannot be indefinitely prolonged. And so the imitative passivity of mankind has had the happy result of multiplying the commercial and political and intellectual ties of human groups and of effecting or preparing their fusion. When, after it has been passive for a long time, imitation finally becomes active, when a people who have for a long time imported from abroad the books and paintings, the articles of luxury and the statesmen and legislators which it needs, undertakes to supply its own literature and art, its own luxuries, its own diplomacy, the greater part of its attempts fail. Or, if they do succeed by means of a high tariff, or by means of other methods of protection which tend to re-establish the community’s previous state of isolation, its acquired habits are too strong to be entirely broken off, and they will regain their hold some day or other, to the advantage of all concerned.

In reality, when new desires for production break forth in a people, long after the establishment of new desires for consumption, they do not consist in simply and solely copying the literature, the arts, the industries, and the strategy of the nation whose products have heretofore inundated the aforesaid people. But an original system of production appears, which in its turn endeavours, and usually with success, to open up a market for itself among the original foreign producers. Moreover, in the preceding sections I concluded that the widespread propagation of a single language, of a single religion, of a single governmental authority, or of a single body of laws, was the first and preliminary condition of a great literature or civilisation or statecraft or system of security. And now I shall have no difficulty in showing that the widespread propagation of the same number of wants and tastes, or, in a word, of the same individual usages, is the first and preliminary condition of great wealth and of a great industrial system as well as of a great art (to anticipate the following section on this latter point).

Here, as before, we must distinguish the influence which the transition from custom to fashion in matters of usages and, later on, the return from fashion to a more extensive custom, exercises upon the characteristics of industry.

It is clear that in an age when custom imposed different kinds of food and clothing and furniture and houses in different localities, in localities where they remained fixed for several generations, machine production on a large scale would be, even if it were known, without a market. The artisan of such an epoch is bent upon making only a small number of very solid and durable articles,¹ whereas, later on, in periods when the same fashion holds sway over more than one country, although it changes from year to year, the quantity and not the stability of the product is the aim of industry. A builder of American trading vessels told Tocqueville that on account of the frequent change there in naval fashions it was to his interest to construct vessels of little durability. In ages of custom, the producer seeks the narrow and long-drawn-out market of the future, in ages of fashion he seeks the vast ephemeral market of the outside world. As far as products whose essential quality is permanency are concerned, such as buildings, jewelry of gold or precious stones, furniture, bookbindings, statues, etc., the insufficiency of contemporaneous patronage in times of custom may be compensated for up to a certain point by the prospect of the future patronage to which each generation will contribute. And so, the Middle Ages, in spite of the disintegration of their² local usages, possessed its great architects and goldsmiths, its remarkable cabinetmakers and binders and sculptors. But for products destined to more or less immediate destruction, for those whose consumption is speedy, this compensation does not exist. Consequently, we must not be surprised to find that horticulture and even agriculture, that ordinary glass work and pottery and cloth-making, prospered or progressed so little during the feudal period. Inversely, if the fickleness of taste in times of fashion hinders the development of such arts and industries as architecture and statuary, things that must look to the future, a uniformity of taste over a vast territory highly favours, in spite of their instability, the progress of all manufacture which is essentially ephemeral, such as paper-making, journalism, weaving, landscape-gardening, etc. Nevertheless, if renewed stability were ever added to the acquired uniformity of usages, a third period of incomparable prosperity would open out to industry. Already such a period may be foreseen. China arrived centuries ago at this happy goal. We know how surprising her industrial wealth is in view of the slender treasury of inventions that she exploits.

Have I in any of this been exaggerating the rôle of imitation? I think not, for it is remarkable that when a great system of industry is introduced into a country it at first applies itself to objects of luxury, to tapestry, jewels, etc., and it is only later that it includes objects of secondary and then of prime necessity. Why is this? Because usages are assimilated in the upper classes, the consumers of objects of luxury, before this assimilation is accomplished among the common people. Therefore Colbert was very unjustly blamed for having encouraged the manufacturer of silks and other aristocratic industries. In his time, this was the only course open to him. And yet Roscher, in pointing out the apparently fantastic order of the successive forms of industry, does not seem to me to have perceived its reason. “In ancient times,” he says, “the greatly inferior means of transportation, the manners and customs of different countries, and, finally, lack of machinery, resulted necessarily in a much greater dispersion of industry.” Here the cause which I have pointed out as unique is not even mentioned. Those which have been substituted for it are merely, in my opinion, its consequences. Was not inadequacy of transportation, for example, as well as difference of character, of customs, and manners, the result of putting a too feeble emphasis on foreign imitations on the part of consumers? If different localities had desired to buy the same articles, the need of common routes would have been experienced and, before long, satisfied. But roads¹ which were opened out by the bridge-building friars (a religious body which was expressly created in the Middle Ages for the construction of roads and bridges, a kind of clerical administration for bridges and highways) went to ruin for lack of use. Under the Roman Empire, too, excellent roads existed; but, in spite of the impetus given to universal assimilation by the prestige of Rome,² as the particular usages of the different provinces remained pretty dissimilar, industry on a large scale was little known at this period.³

As for the lack of machinery, the same explanation applies. For, as a matter of fact, the germ of machinery that was fit to start or develop a great system of industry was latent in antiquity in all the branches of production that were scattered through Egypt and Phoenicia and Greece and Babylonia. If it had been propagated by fashion-imitation among producers, it could not have failed to suggest rapid improvements. The great lack, then, was the lack of a tendency to imitate the foreigner. Thus everything comes back to this. The first condition for the viability of paper-making on a large scale is, undoubtedly, a sufficiently general habit of writing. Besides, machinery, strictly speaking, is not indispensable to industry on a large scale. There is manufacture as well as machine-facture. In Rome, before the days of the printing press, there were great workshops of copyists who manufactured editions of Virgil and Horace and other classics. Here was an exceptionally extensive industry, because it appealed to the scholars of the whole Empire, scholars who were possessed of the same education, who spoke the same language, and who were inspired by the same literary tastes.¹

We must not overlook the following fact. The mere existence of a similarity of wants and usages is not sufficient to make industry on a large scale possible. Recognition of the similarity is also necessary. In the Middle Ages, according to Jusserand, none but kings and their suites, none but great nobles, pilgrims, fugitive criminals, a few wandering workmen, minstrels, preaching and begging friars, and hawkers of relics and indulgences, passed over the bad roads of the periods. From this enumeration it appears that the sole or principal industry of exportation that was popular at this epoch was the sale of relics and indulgences. As for the minstrels, they worked only for a few castles and for one or two royal courts. Does this mean that the people had only one desire in common, namely, that of buying relics and indulgences?¹ No, but this similarity, derived, as it was, from a common religion, was known to all, whereas the other resemblances, in general, were not. Nevertheless, pilgrims and other wanderers helped to spread, little by little, the originally vague consciousness of these resemblances. They even helped to increase the number of the already numerous points of resemblance. In this respect, they paved the way for the industry of the future. The preaching friars unconsciously contributed to the same end in assimilating people’s minds, in spreading democratic ideas under an evangelical guise, or evangelical ideas under a democratic guise. In this way they moved souls, and this is always the right road, even to material well-being. The ardent homilies of innumerable Savonarolas, the preaching of Luther and his followers, the passionate theories of our Encyclopedists, were all necessary factors in causing almost all classes and nations to consciously and openly dress and live in approximately the same way. It is this condition which permits industry to unfold its wings.

Among the usages whose similarity is essential to extensive industry there is one which it is important to consider above all, because the assimilation of all the others would amount to very little, unless it, too, were assimilated. I mean that which is concerned with the regulation of price. I freely admit that some logical rule, although not that, to be sure, of supply and demand, as applied by dogmatic economists, but one more precise and more complete, presides over the formation of price when for the first time any specific price is formed. But when a price has once been established as a result of an openly discussed calculation or contract, it spreads through fashion far beyond the places where those special conditions which rationally determine it prevail; or else, it persists in a place through custom long after the first conditions of its establishment there have disappeared. But although this persistence through custom or diffusion by fashion be or ought to be considered by classical economists as an abuse or transgression of their laws, it is certain that without this persistance or diffusion, according to the period, industry would have been hindered from its very start. Would our great commercial houses be possible if each of the towns to which they express their innumerable stores wished to pay for them according to its traditional price and refused to conform to their uniform price? And could our great factories carry on their business for long if each one of them insisted upon always paying the same customary wages to its work-people in disregard of the rise or fall of wages in the general market? Formerly, on the other hand, when every artisan worked with a view to the future, when every perspective in the narrow circumference of contemporaneous time was closed,¹ when he could not count for his livelihood or fortune upon the extension of his patronage and his returns, when he could count only upon their permanency, when rigid ties bound him for years at a stretch to his patron, and when the patrons themselves were bound together in a perpetual association, what security could there have been for either consumers or producers if future prices had not been fixed and assured in advance? Thus the customary fixation of prices in the past compensated for their local variation, just as in the present their uniformity compensates for their changeability. Some day, perhaps, they will end by being both fixed and uniform, and by furnishing a scope and steadiness of outlet to production which will increase its audacity tenfold.

In fact every new fashion endeavours to become rooted in custom; but only a few are successful for the same reason that many germs are abortive. However, the introduction of only a few foreign wants, or of novel means of satisfying them, suffices to complicate the consumption of a given country; for pre-existent wants and luxuries do not give way or disappear without prolonged resistance. In Europe the habit of eating bread was not encroached upon by the importation of Asiatic rice, any more than in Asia the habit of eating rice suffered to any serious extent from the introduction of European bread. But the dietary in both places became complicated by a new element. “The mistake was made in France,¹ at the time of the signing of the commercial treaty of 1860, of thinking that French wines were going to replace beer in the United Kingdom. We fancied that we could make our wines reach a class of consumers that was supposed to have abstained from them because of their high tariff and consequent high price. This forecast was ill-founded. If French wine has made some progress in British markets, it is only among a very limited circle of patrons, of which neither the working classes nor even the majority of the middle classes² form a part. Although our alcoholic products are better appreciated to-day, this has in no way come about at the cost of beer. The consumption of beer has always increased in very different proportions from that of foreign wines.” Thus wine has been added to beer in England, but it has in no respect replaced it.

The characteristics which the rule of fashion in the matter of usages inspires in industry are easy to guess. In order to spread through a kind of conquering epidemic, language must become more regular and more prosaic, it must take on a more logical and a less animated air, religion must become more spiritual, more rational and less original, a government must become more administrative, less prestigious, legislation must shine through the reason and equity rather than through the originality of its forms, finally, an industrial system must develop its mechanical and scientific side at the expense of its spontaneous and artistic side. In a word, the apparently singular fact is that the rule of fashion is tied to that of reason. I may add, to that of individualism and to that of naturalism. This is explained when we consider that imitation of contemporaries has to do with models individually considered, detached from any parent stock, whereas imitation of ancestors emphasises the tie of hereditary solidarity between the individual and his forebears. And we may also readily perceive that all epochs of fashion-imitation—Athens under Solon, Rome under the Scipios, Florence in the fifteenth century, Paris in the sixteenth and, later on, in the eighteenth century—are characterised by the more or less triumphant invasion of so-called natural law (as well read individual law) against civil law, of so-called natural against traditional religion, of art which I shall also call natural, that is to say, of art which is faithfully observant and reflective of individual reality, against hieratic and customary art, of natural morality, as we shall soon see, against national morality. The Italian humanists and Rabelais, Montaigne, Voltaire, personify this naturalistic and individualistic character under divers aspects. Since nothing is more natural to the individual human being than reason, since nothing is better able to satisfy individual reason than the substitution of a symmetrical and logical order for the mysterious complications of life, we must not be surprised to find rationalism, individualism, and naturalism hand in hand. The rule of fashion is distinguished in every order of things by the blossoming of certain great and free individualities. It is at such times that, in language, grammarians, like Vaugelas, have free play; even the wholesale makers of idioms, of Volapuk, for example, can hope for some success, providing, of course, their reforms have the stamp of regularity and symmetry. In religion, it is the era of great reformers, of great heretics and philosophers, who succeed, providing they simplify and rationalise religion. In statecraft, in legislation, it is the epoch of illustrious legislators and founders of empire, of men who perfect codification and administration. Economically, it is the period of the great industrial inventors who perfect machinery. Æsthetically, I may add, it is the time of glorious creators of art who carry to the highest point of mechanical perfection the tricks and devices of composition. Besides, wherever we see that great reputations have been made, we may affirm that there the contagion of fashion has raged, although each of these glories may have been the point of departure of some traditional fetichism that is as exclusive and tenacious as the preceding forms of fetich worship which it destroyed. The Molièrites, for example, with their prior attachment to the petty traditions of the théâtre français, must not make us forget that their idol, Molière, was, in his innovating century of art, the most open-minded man to innovations, the worst enemy to fetiches. These followers of Molière can make us understand the followers of Homer. We may be sure that Homer, like Molière, appeared in an age of imitative expansion, when all the Archipelago and the whole of Asia Minor were beginning to open out to the radiations of Ionia.

To sum up, the rôle played by custom and fashion in the economic sphere closely corresponds to the action exerted in the other spheres of the social world by these two always co-existent, but alternately increasing and decreasing, forms of imitation. It falls without any difficulty into the general law which I have formulated. But, in addition, the reason of this law, of this vacillating struggle between custom and fashion which lasts until the ultimate triumph of the former, is at present suggested to us. Since every invention is the centre of some particular imitation which emanates from it, the desire to imitate must always be directed, by preference, towards the side where the richest galaxy of inventions is shining, that is to say, sometimes, exclusively towards the past, if one’s ancestors were inventive or if they were more inventive than one’s contemporaries, and sometimes, and this more and more frequently, towards the contemporaneous and the foreign, if one’s contemporaries are more inventive than one’s own ancestors. Now, these two situations will inevitably alternate for a long time, for, as soon as some mine of discoveries is disclosed, all the world exploits it, and it does not take long for it to become, for the time being, exhausted, thereby swelling the legacy of the past until some new vein be found; and when the last of these mines shall have been discovered, we shall have our ancestors alone to appeal to for examples.

There is a certain reciprocity of stimulation between the rule of fashion and the progress of contemporary invention which should not make us fail to recognise the priority of the latter. Undoubtedly, as I have said already, once the current of fashion has been set free, it excites the inventive imagination along the lines that are the fittest to accelerate its overflow; but what set it free, if it was not the impetus that was given to it by contact with some neighbouring country whose fruitful novelties had been more or less spontaneously struck out? We cannot doubt that this is so in our own century in whatever has to do with industry; for certainly the first cause of that fascination which causes all European peoples to imitate one another was steam machinery, which led to production on a large scale, and of railroads, which led to the distant transportation of products—not to speak of telegraphs. It is especially in the matters of industry and science that the modern imagination has had full swing; and it is especially on its economic and scientific side that it has broken down the barriers of custom. In matters of art, on the contrary, just as the creative imagination has often been lacking in them, so the spirit of tradition has subsisted in them, taken as a whole. The details are significant. In architecture we have invented almost nothing; our epoch has slavishly copied Gothic, Roman, and Byzantine models. In this respect the nineteenth century was as much given over to tradition—at least until the advent of what might be called architecture in iron—as the twelfth century was given over to innovation.

In fact, in spite of the partly accidental character of inventions, inventors themselves are so imitative, that there is in every period a current of inventions which is in a certain general sense religious or architectural or sculptural or musical or philosophical. There are certain currents of imitation which must through force of habit precede others. For example, the mythological genius must have habitually—I will not say, with Comte, necessarily—exerted itself before the metaphysical genius. The creative genius of language was most certainly prior to either. And this was the one to be exhausted first of all; so we should not be surprised if in the most progressive societies, societies which are the most scornful of custom in other respects, the empire of custom in what has to do with language prevails more and more, day by day, through a more exaggerated respect for orthography and a growing spirit of philological conservatism. It seems to me that many apparent peculiarities in history could be explained by considerations drawn from the same source. But the reader will be able to make for himself such applications as I have not indicated here.

VI. Morality and Art

Tastes which are formulated into principles of art and morals which are formulated into principles of morality, alike variable according to time and place, direct two important parts of social activity and, consequently, form part, like usages, laws, and constitutions, of the government of societies, in the large and true meaning of the word. This is so true that the more moral or artistic a people become, the less need they have of being governed. Consummate morality would make the coming of a-n-archy possible. But in order to avoid the commonplaces which I might indulge in in this twofold subject, I wish to limit myself here to a very brief discussion. I need not prove, I think it is enough to merely point out, the religious origin of art, of which I spoke in a previous chapter,¹ or of morality, whose duties were at first understood as divine commands. Moral sentiments and artistic tastes emanate, then, from religion. Let me add, from the family. At the time when every family and tribe had its own language and worship, it had, when it was artistically well endowed, its particular art, which was piously transmitted from father to son, and when it was supplied with sympathetic instincts it had its particular morality where its own group of moral, often immoral, prejudices and of odd and difficult sacrifices had been scrupulously observed from time immemorial. How often must these walled-up arts and exclusive morals have broken down their barriers! How often, after their overflow outside, must they have shut their doors and secured themselves behind their new frontiers, only to push them forward again from time to time and from age to age! All this had to be done before it was possible to see on this earth the unheard-of sight of many vast nations feeling, at the same time and in about the same way, the beautiful and the ugly, good and evil, admiring or mocking at the same pictures, the same novels, the same dramas, the same operas, applauding the same acts of virtue or becoming indignant over the same crimes, crimes that are made public by the daily press in the four corners of the globe at the same time.

Under this new aspect the world shows us again the contrast which I have pointed out so often. Formerly, in those times when custom predominated in art and in morals as in religion and in politics, every nation and, to go back still further, every province was distinguished from neighbouring nations and provinces and cities by its original products of jewelry, chiselled weapons, ornate furniture, figurines and poetic legends as well as by its characteristic virtues, so that often, in different places, the beautiful and the good appeared quite different, but, on the other hand, from one century to another, in each country, the beautiful and the good were unchanging, and the same virtues, the same objects of art, were invariably reproduced. Nowadays, on the contrary, in our era of widespread and penetrating fashions, artistic works and virtuous acts are about the same everywhere, upon two continents at least, whereas, from decade to decade, not to say from year to year, the styles and schools of painters, musicians, and poets are transformed along with the public taste, and moral maxims are themselves worn out and changed and renewed with alarming facility. Nevertheless, we must not be over-alarmed by this extraordinary mutability, if it be true that, in connection with a corresponding universality, it is related to a whole series of rhythmical oscillations which grow bigger and bigger and whose consequences, from the point of view of morality, especially, have been most salutary, and if it be true that the experience of the past justify us in counting upon a return, in the more or less immediate future, to a reassuring fixity of ideals, joined, at last, to peace-bringing uniformity.

However simple moral duties may seem to those who have practised them for a long time, they were all in their beginnings individual and original inventions, inventions which like all others, appeared and spread one after the other.¹ They were instigated and helped to succeed, at times by the dogmas of a new religion whose practical and, usually, extremely strange consequences they were logical in scorning, at times by the new conditions of social life with which they found themselves in agreement. It is in this way that successive inventions of art owe their appearance and their fortune to changes either in ideas or in morals. Respect for old age, blood-feud, hospitality, bravery; later on, labour, honesty, respect for the cattle, or fields, or women of others; still later, patriotism, feudal loyalty, almsgiving, the emancipation of slaves, the relief of unfortunates, etc., were ushered in in the different ages of humanity, like the Egyptian tomb, or the Grecian temple, or the Gothic cathedral. It was therefore necessary for the breath of fashion, so to speak, to blow and scatter the germ of every new duty as well as that of every new thing of beauty that had duly blossomed forth somewhere or other, throughout the world, over the forbidding walls of tribes and cities shut up in their traditional art and morality. Hence the contradictions which arose so frequently between ancient customs and imported examples, and this partly explains the so frequently negative character of moral proscriptions as well as of canons of taste. Thou shalt not kill thy conquered enemy to devour him, thou shalt not sell thy children or kill thy slaves without a motive, thou shalt not kill or beat thy wives except for infidelity, thou shalt not steal thy neighbour’s ass or ox, etc.—these are the highly original and much-discussed prohibitions which, in their respective epochs, composed the major part of the moral code of every people. Their æsthetic code is, likewise, full of prohibitions instead of positive directions for the guidance of taste.

I do not mean to say in what has preceded that the sentiment of fraternity as well as of equality and liberty and justice, that is to say, the germs and soul of moral life, is a modern discovery. That which is modern is the enormous compass of the human group where this superior sentiment is supposed to rule. This sentiment has always existed as a matter of fact, but it exists in groups which become more and more narrow the further back we go in the course of history. This potent and exquisite sentiment is, in fact, the very sweetening of social life, its peculiar charm and magic, the sole counter-balance to its inconveniences, and these inconveniences are such that, if this unique advantage had ever ceased to show itself in any society, that society would have fallen straightway into dust. They who have seen nothing in primitive humanity but combats and massacres, but the cannibalism and other horrors that were commited by one tribe upon another, they who have seen nothing but the lashes of the whip upon the slave, or the sale of little children by their fathers, these people have not understood primitive societies. They have looked at them only on the outside, they have not penetrated within. The inner side, the essence, the content of these societies is the relation which existed in them between the equals which composed them, between the family heads of the same tribe or clan, between the citizens of Sparta or Athens in the agora, between the nobles of the old régime in a drawing room. . . . Always and everywhere, passing quarrels excepted, we see that union and peace and politeness prevailed in the reciprocal relations that were established between these equals, who in themselves exclusively composed the social group, to the exclusion of slaves, of minor sons, and of women, not to mention strangers. Strangers are, in comparison with the common interest of the equals, the obstacle to be overcome. Minors, women, and slaves are, in comparison with the same interest, a mere means of service. But neither the latter nor the former are associates.

Only, in the long run, contact with these peers inspires inferiors with a lively desire to be admitted into their magic circle, to force the circumference of their fraternal intimacy to widen out. This desire is realised but gradually and not without difficulty, not without revolutions. How is it realised? By the mere play of long-continued imitation.¹ When we attribute a preponderating share in this result to the preaching of philosophers or theologians, be they Stoics or Apostles, we take the effect for the cause. A moment always comes when, from having copied the superior in everything, in thought, in speech, in prayer, in dress, and in general methods of life, the inferior inspires him with the irresistible feeling that they both belong by right to the same society. Then this feeling finds expression, ordinarily in an exaggerated form, in some philosophic or theological formula which strengthens it and which favours its expansion. When Socrates, in his dialogues, raised somewhat the dignity of women and even of slaves, when Plato, going still further, dreamed, in his Republic, of the complete equality of man and woman and of the suppression of slavery, it was because, in contemporaneous Athens, women had begun to cross the thresholds of the gynecia, and because the slave was already assimilated with the free man.¹ “The common people of Athens do not differ from the slaves in dress or in general bearing or in any other particular,” says Xenophon. Besides, before his twofold Utopia could be realised, it was necessary that for many more centuries the distance between man and woman, between the citizen and the slave, should continue to diminish until it reached the point that was attained under the Antonines. Aristotle was much more consistent with the practical morality of his time when he justified slavery; and the contrary opinion of the first masters of Stoicism on this point remained practically unechoed until the day when the world was ripe for the words of Epiotetus.

Unfortunately, friendship, as well as society, is “a circle which deforms itself in stretching out too far,” and this serious objection has instigated the resistance of conservatives of all periods to the wishes of subject classes who aspired to equality. But it is necessary for this objection to fall away and for the social circle to widen itself out to the limits of humankind. We may query whether the gradual extension of the field of the sentiment of which I am speaking has not been bought at the price of its intensity, and whether there is not reason for thinking that in the past, in the remote past even, it was much more intense, where it existed, than it is at present. Has the word pietas the same force and fulness of meaning, has it the same divine unction, for us that it had for the ancients?

It has been very justly observed that just as foreign wars, the Persian Wars, for example, tend to strengthen the morality of the belligerents, so civil or quasi-civil wars, the Peloponnesian War, for example, are demoralising. Why so? The same means are used, there is always the same trickery and violence. But, in the one case, it is directed against a group of men who were strangers to one another to begin with and who, after the struggle and in consequence of the contact of war, become so much less strange to one another than they were before that they usually fall to copying one another; whereas, in the other case, they are directed against a group of men who were before that one another’s social brothers and relations, one another’s friends and compatriots. Thus, in the one case, in that of foreign war, the social field has not been curtailed, it even tends to enlarge itself, and the social tie is strengthened; in the other case, the social field is diminutised and the social tie is weakened. Here, then, everything is social loss; and that is why we properly talk of demoralisation. There is no better illustration of the eminently social character of morality.

At any rate, it is certain that from century to century the moral public, like the artistic public, has not ceased to extend itself, not by constant, but by intermittent, aggrandisement. By this I mean that the group of persons to whom the individual recognises that he owes certain duties and whose opinion influence his morality,¹ just as the circle of persons for whom the artist works and whose judgments count for something in his eyes, has gone on enlarging. This enlargement has been twofold; on the surface, by the incessant pushing forward of the urban and provincial and national frontiers across which the virtuous man of the city or of the province or of the nation saw no one to whom he felt under any obligation of pity or justice and across which the artist or the poet saw none but barbarians;² and, in depth, by the lowering of the barriers which separated classes and limited the horizon of duty and of good taste for each of them. This was a progress which was already immense of itself, but which was in addition accompanied necessarily by an internal remodelling of morals and arts. Now, how was this progress accomplished, how must it have been accomplished? We have first to answer that all the outbursts and overflowings of external imitation that had been brought about from the religious, political, industrial, legislative, or linguistic point of view, indifferently, were potent contributions to this result, through assimilating day by day an increasing number of men. If, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, popular rights forbid the sacking of captured cities, the enslavement of the conquered or the confiscation of his goods, if, from the same epoch, the right of succession to the estate of a deceased alien (droit d’aubaine) was no longer claimed, if, in a word, duties towards the stranger, at least towards the European and Christian stranger, came to be recognised, it is largely due to the fact that this innovating century gave a remarkable impetus to fashion-imitation on our continent and was pre-eminently distinguished by the wide paths which it opened out to this form of imitation. If Racine wrote for some thousands of people of good taste in France, and if Victor Hugo has written in our day for some millions of admirers in France and Europe, a great part of this extension of the literary public is due to the fresh inundation of the general current of examples, which, after the conservative seventeenth century, was brought about in the eighteenth century and which still flows under our eyes. Let us suppose that the steam machine, the loom, the locomotive, and the telegraph had not been invented, that the principal facts of modern chemistry and physics had not been discovered, Europe would unquestionably have remained broken up in an endless number of little dissimilar provinces, a state of things as incompatible with a broad system of art or morality as with an extensive system of industry. Thus all the good ideas which have civilised the world may be considered auxiliary inventions and discoveries of art and morality.

But, in matters of morality, at least, this general cause would not have sufficed to bring about the overthrow of the obstacles which were in the way of the enlargement of its domain. To the ideas which indirectly effected this progress, must be added those which had it for its direct and more or less conscious object. In this class I place in the first rank all those fictions which in those primitive times when it was necessary to be related by blood in order to be social and moral compatriots created artificial systems of consanguinity and extended to them the advantages of natural kinship. Among many barbarian peoples the custom prevails of cementing an alliance by mixing together a few drops of the blood of the different contracting parties, who thereby become in a sense consanguineous. Such a usage could only have been imagined in an epoch when men judged themselves under moral obligations only within the limits of the ties of blood; and Tylor has reason to celebrate this as “a discovery of a solemn means of extending beyond the narrow limits of the family the duties and affections of the fraternity.” Adoption with its many strange forms was another no less ingenious means that worked towards the same end. Finally, the practice of hospitality might well have been based upon some analogous idea. The fact of entering into a house, into the domestic temple, might well have been regarded as a fictitious incorporation into the family, remotely comparable to adoption or to the mingling together of drawn drops of blood. But of all such ingenuities, the most marvellous and the most fruitful is undoubtedly the word of Christ: “Every man is thy brother, ye are all the sons of God.” By virtue of this all men were included in one blood-relationship.

When, through these processes or others like them, or simply as a result of the levelling of civilisation, a more ample opportunity is given for the doing of upright acts or for the making of æsthetic things, we see peoples or classes who had before been cooped up by their own peculiar arts and morals inclined to interchange them; and from this common tendency results the triumph of a higher art or morality, which is, in turn, inevitably transformed. There is the same difference between imported morality and inbred, domestic morality, between a fashion-morality and a custom-morality, as between an art that is exotic, that is acclimating itself, and an art that is indigenous. The inspiration of the latter, in spite of its relative age and immutability, has much more freshness and force and originality. We have no cause to wonder at this; any more than at the oddly youthful energy which is inherent in the duties that are imposed by antique customs, in the duty of family vengeance, especially. But there are other points which I prefer to emphasise.

There are two points to note on the subject of art. In the first place, art, in the ages of custom, when it is born spontaneously, without any wholesale importation, springs up from handicraft, “like a flower from its stem,” under the warmth of religious inspiration. This was the case in Egypt, in Greece, in China, in Mexico and Peru, and in Florence.¹ Architecture, Gothic or otherwise, is born of the builder’s craft; the painting of the fourteenth century, of illuminating, and illuminating, of the craft of the copyists; sculpture, of mediæval cabinet-making, of the tombs of Egypt; modern music, of the ecclesiastical habit of intoning; eloquence, of the professions which involve speaking, of bench and bar; poetry and literature, of the different ways of speaking, of narration, of instigation, of persuasion. In the second place, at the same epochs, the work of art answers, not to the need of knowing something new, which is peculiar to the ages of fashion where curiosity is excited by the very stimulants which come in from outside, but to the truly loving need of seeing again, of finding again with tireless and ever keener eagerness, that which one has already known and loved, admired or adored, divine types of ancestral religion, divine legends, the history of the saints, epic tales of national history, the familiar scenes of life which conform to old customs, in a word, the traditional emotions which are summed up, for the artist and for his public, in a profound love for a remote past and in a profound hope in a long future on earth or in the posthumous future that is promised by religion. We do not demand the expression of fleeting impressions from architecture or music, impressions that are borrowed from foreign or from dead and artificially restored civilisations; we demand from them a vivid expression and reproduction of the impressions that are wrought into our life. We do not ask sculpture or painting to invent exotic or imaginary groups and scenes and landscapes, but to reproduce vividly and expressively the twelve apostles, St. Michael, St. Christopher, Christ, the Virgin, or family portraits or pictures representing the city of our birth with the dresses and celebrations and idiosyncracies which we think will last forever. We do not ask the epic or drama to interest us by keeping us in ignorance of its climax or by the novelty of its subject, we ask it to vividly reproduce the legendary lore that we have known from childhood, the death of Prometheus or Hercules, the misfortunes of Œdipus, the drama of the creation from Lucifer to Christ or Anti-Christ, the death of Roland, etc.

These are the two principal characteristics of art proper in the ages of tradition. It may be seen that they are linked together. The art of these ages is, I will not say industrial, but professional, because it is formed by a slow accumulation of æsthetic processes which are transmitted with useful directions from father to son, and the cause which has produced this effect, that is to say, the habit of having one’s heart and mind always turned towards the past, towards one’s forebears and their subjective models, also makes it necessary for art to be the living and magical mirror of a past that is itself still living, of a past, in other terms, that is full of faith in its own future existence, instead of being the factitious resurrection of some extinct past or the translation of some foreign works. In ages of fashion, on the contrary, it must naturally happen that the forms of imported art show themselves detached from their stem, since it is the flower, and not the stem, that, in this case, attracts curiosity. Then art becomes handicraft more often than handicraft becomes art. And curiosity, the characteristic of these epochs, demands a misleading and irritating kind of satisfaction, which supplies it with a continuous stream of invention, of invention to order and by formula, of novels and dramas based upon fictitious happenings, of fantastic pictures, of unheard-of-music, of eclectic movements, Curious times want only artists of imagination; loving and believing times want artists imbued with faith and love.

We see that either because of its origin, or of its subject, or of its inspiration, the art of fashion differs from the art of custom. A difference that is, in many respects, analogous, distinguishes the two corresponding kinds of morality. Their origin, in the first place, is quite distinct. The essentially religious virtues of tradition are the natural flowering of the wants of the restricted group where they blossom. Reflected virtues, namely those of a lower class that seeks to appropriate to itself the moral qualities of an aristocracy, those of a people which is taking moral or immoral lessons from another, just as at the Restoration England copied French morals, these reflected virtues are an ethical veneer, an arbitrary decoration of the everyday conduct which they overlie, but which is not in touch with them. In such cases the borrowed virtues are even unearthed from the past, but from a dead or fashion-revived past. This phenomenon of moral mimicry, by which fashion takes on a false air of custom, is not at all rare in history. But moral reforms, where we see, for example, virtues which had their raison d’être among the Hebrew patriarchs or the Christians of the primitive Church, reappearing in the midst of the sixteenth century in Europe, are, in reality, innovations which have been born in the soul of an apostle in love with a past which he fails to understand, and which have subsequently spread abroad, thanks to the general drawing of people’s hearts into the ways of free imitation. In this they absolutely resemble those literary or artistic renascences, another kind of conventional archaism, which have often been seen. The objects and the motives of the two kinds of morality which I am comparing are no less clearly distinguished. Customary duties impose upon the individual certain sacrifices in view of certain peculiar but permanent wants of his walled-in and exclusive society, of his family, tribe, city, canton, or state. Borrowed duties, conventional and so-called national duties, order the individual to sacrifice himself to more general interests, to interests that are scattered among a large number of men, but to interests which are often more transient and less lasting. The man of traditional times draws the power to accomplish the sacrifice that is demanded of him from the hereditary solidarity which makes him one with the series of generations in which he is a single link, in such a way that, in dying for his family, for his tribe, or for his city, in order to contribute to the immortality of the great collective person of which he is a part, he thinks that he is devoting himself to himself. Moreover, he usually draws this power from the promises of his inherited and ancestral religion. This double source of energy dries up partly or wholly for the man of an innovating age. In such ages imitation frees itself from heredity, and ties between kindred, between forebears and descendants, are obliterated by the connections between the unrelated individuals who are detached from their families¹ and brought together by the age. In such ages, the clash of different religions or of religion and philosophy tends to engender scepticism. But the men of these periods substitute for these losses in part an entirely new development of the highest kind of moral energy, the sentiment of honour.

I mean honour, not in the sense of family and aristocracy, but in the democratic and individual sense, in the modern sense, since we are unquestionably passing through a period of fashion-imitation, one which is pre-eminently remarkable for its breadth and permanency. This second meaning, dating from the Italian Renascence, according to Buckle, must in reality have been formed wherever the spread of public morality was rapid through the lowering of certain social barriers. Why is it, we shall be asked, that this desire for personal consideration must grow while the antique bases of morality, the family and religion, are being more and more undermined? Because the same cause which shakes the latter to their foundations is fit to consolidate and extend the former, I mean the progress of communication and of the indefinitely accelerated circulation of ideas in a domain that is being incessantly enlarged far and beyond the walls of clans, classes, creeds, or states. The substitution of fashion-imitation for custom-imitation results in breaking down pride of birth and dogmatic belief, but it also results in arousing, through the progressive assimilation of people’s minds, the irresistible power of public opinion. Now, what is honour but a passive, spontaneous, and heroic obedience to public opinion?

We are witnesses to the birth and growth of this new and potent motive, whenever a young conscript passes out from the paternal roof to his regiment. At the end of a short time, he no longer thinks of the father for whom he had had a reverential fear, or of the field which he coveted, or of the young girl whom he was courting with the idea of founding a family; he thinks still less of the catechisings of his curate. All the springs of his laborious honesty and of his relatively pure morals have dried up. But his morality has changed rather than degenerated, and what he has lost in continence or in love of work he has regained in courage and in probity, because in addition to the thought of court-martial he has had to sustain him in his life of barrack-room discipline and at his post of duty on the field of battle the idea of avoiding, even at the price of death, shame or humiliation in the eyes of his comrades. At the same time he is conscious of being useful in the accomplishment of his new duties to a mass of men who have just become his fellows, to the great country which is assimilating him and for which he formerly cared so little, absorbed as he was in his domestic preoccupations.

To this I may add that if his new morality is adapted to the care of more numerous, less personal, and more extensive interests, his old morality was fitted to watch over less momentary and more lasting interests. In any case, the effect of the sacrifices that are required by his new duties reaches much farther, proportionally, in space than in time, whereas, formerly, the sacrifices demanded of him by his duties had a utility that was narrowly hemmed in by his immediate surroundings, but that was relatively considerably prolonged into the future. All the strictly domestic and patriarchal, local and primitive virtues, female chastity, for example, are privations that are undergone for the advantage of a single family, to be sure, but for the advantage of the whole posterity of that family. Inversely, modern morality, which is very indulgent to the vices for which our grandchildren will alone have to suffer, blames severely the faults which may react harmfully upon our contemporaries, remote though these contemporaries may be. In this, it seems as if the morality of ages of fashion resembled their politics. Whatever may be the form of their government, the statesman of to-day differ from those of other days both in their enlarged horizon of watchfulness over a larger number of similar interests subject simultaneously to identical laws, and by their much shorter range of foresight. Formerly the feudal king of the Isle-de-France, shut up in his narrow domain, looked forward from the start to the development in future ages of this fine realm of France and he toiled painfully on in the pursuit of this future ideal. We have seen the kinglet of petty Prussia sacrifice the present in his calculation of a far distant, imperial future which his grandchildren, alas! have seen shine. Nowadays, would any political assembly in any country whatsoever, beginning with Germany, consent to sacrifice some actual interest in view of some benefit from which only the second or third generation to follow would profit? Far from that, it is to our descendants that we charge up the bill of our debts and follies. I need not explain, after all that has been said, how this striking contrast, this offsetting by extension of abbreviations in duration, is related to the distinction between the two forms of imitation.

But if it is true that every stream of fashion tends to betake itself to the big and tranquil lake of custom, this contrast can be but temporary. Without doubt, as long as the stream flows, the prescriptions or interdictions of morality will bear less and less upon acts that are useful or prejudicial to our children or grandchildren alone, especially upon certain facts of conjugal fidelity or infidelity, of filial piety or domestic waywardness, of cowardice or patriotic bravery, which were considered in other days cardinal virtues or capital crimes, but whose salutary or disastrous effects are experienced only in the long run. After me, the deluge, society will say. Unfortunately, society might end by perishing from the too frequent reiteration of this phrase. Besides, we have reason for thinking that after a time of progressive but transitory shortsightedness, collective forethought will begin again to apply itself to time after it has vent itself upon space, and that nations will become as widely conscious of their permanent as of their general interests. The moment will arrive when civilisation will, finally, at its culminating point, draw back upon itself, just as it has already done so many times in the course of history, in Egypt, in China, at Rome, at Constantinople. . . . The past speaks for the future. Then morality will become again, in many respects, what it has been, distinguished for grandeur and logic. Casuistry will spring up again in a more rational setting. To the duties of honour, an artificial morality which contents an age enslaved to a fickle public opinion, the duties of conscience, as our fathers knew them, will succeed. They will be as imperious, as absolute, as deeply rooted in the human heart, but they will be superior in light and reason. And at the same time, art, turning back from its brilliant vagaries, will drench itself again in the profound sources of faith and love.

There is much to be said in explanation of the historic phenomenon of renascences, the hybrid phenomenon of fashion and custom, to which I referred above. It is a subject which is a little distinct from that of the present chapter, for in connection with it we do not see a new fashion becoming in its turn a custom, but we see it taking on the aspect of some ancient custom. This additional relation of the two branches of imitation deserves to be examined. In science and industry, an entirely new idea and one that it gives itself out as new, can spread through fashion; for in its birth it brings with it experimental proofs of truth and utility. But the case is different in the fine arts, in religion, in literature, in philosophy itself up to a certain point, in statecraft, in morals, and, finally, wherever the choice of solutions is abandoned in large measure to the discretionary power of the judgment and is unable to depend upon a rigid demonstration. In this case, upon what authority, that of facts being pretty nearly lacking, could fashion depend for the triumph of its novelties over the old strongholds of custom? By what right is she entitled to array the products of enterprising reason or imagination against time-proved rules and ideas and institutions? Therefore, if she wish to succeed, she must assume the mask of the enemy and besiege existing custom by unearthing some ancient custom long since fallen into discredit and rejuvenated for the needs of her cause. And so we see all religious reforms pretending, with more or less complete sincerity, to return to the forgotten sources of the religion upon which they were grafted. This was the pretence of the protestantism of all the sects of the sixteenth century, the first century to inaugurate the grande mode of modern times. It was also the pretence of the Mussulman sect of the Ouahabites, which was born in the eighteenth century and which spread and is still spreading in Asia and Africa, where it boasts of steeping Islam again in the primitive Koran (see Revue scientifique, November 5, 1887). And this is the pretence of all the sects which swarm over the old but still fruitful trunks of Hindooism and Brahmanism and which think that they are restoring the antique religion of India to its original state. This was also the thought of Buddhism, the Protestantism of the East.

If this is so with religious reforms, it is no less so with reforms in literature or art. When fresh sap begins to circulate in the souls of artists and poets, it is under the form of a renascence of some distant past which it interprets to the outer world. Shall I cite the humanism of the Italian Renascence, the Ciceronianism of Erasmus, the neo-Hellenism or neo-Latinism of the architects and sculptors and painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the neoGothic flavour of the romanticism of 1830? From the time of Hadrian, the craze for Latin poetry, which had raged among the upper classes at Rome from the time of Augustus, and which had spread step by step to the provinces, began to subside. Why? Because a new fashion put in its appearance, that of the new Greek sophists, whose art had been born again—a true renascence, indeed,—and had aroused admiration and, later on, general imitation. This fascination lasted a long time and produced a factitious and, likewise, archaic reawakening of Greek patriotism.

The same thing is true of legislative reform. The top of fashion, in this connection, was a fashion which, in the sixteenth century, made all the codes of Europe uniform. It consisted of unearthing the Corpus Juris and of introducing under cover of the Roman name all the salutary or pernicious usurpations of lawmakers or kings or emperors. The same thing is even true of political reforms. Sometimes this is obvious. The French parliament, for example, in inaugurating an entirely new and original control of the royal power by judicial authority, invoked the antique customs of the Franks and imagined that they were resurrecting the political constitution that they saw in their dreams. At other times, although it is less obvious, it is none the less true. Even the French Revolution prided itself upon copying Athens and Sparta. Finally, the very boldest of philosophers, men who were the least respectful of precedents, our French Encyclopedists, judged that the support that logic seemed to lend to their plans of social reconstruction was insufficient; and the at times sincere desire to rediscover the forgotten attributes of the human race, to reproduce in its primal purity the supposed state of nature, combines in their writing, as well as it can, with their cult of Reason. A great deal of prehistoric archæology is mixed up with their idealogy.

Moreover, renascences, let me repeat, are more apparent than real. Burckhardt shows that the resurrection of antiquity was only one of the innovations of the fiftenth century in Italy, of the Italian Renascence, and that, in its re-birth, Greek and Latin antiquity was strongly Italianised. Besides, this innovation was only a fashion following, like any other, in the tail of certain discoveries, namely, the archæological discoveries resulting from the diggings in the sacred soil of antique Rome or in the libraries of the monasteries. Prior to these numerous finds of statues, inscriptions, manuscripts, and ruins of all kinds, antiquity may well have been taken on faith and admired, but it could not have been imitated.

The Reformation, I may say, was only a German Renascence, just as the Renascence was only an Italian Reformation. The return to life and youth which Italy exacted from the old classical antiquity that she was said to be imitating, Germany demanded from its alleged and still more imaginary imitation of primitive Christianity. (It would be a mistake, between parentheses, to see in the first of these two movements merely the prelude of the second. The Humanists were merely the chance allies of the Lutherans. As a matter of fact, each movement was a complete evolution in itself. The Renascence was not, as has been said, a superficial revolution of people’s souls; it was, for a narrow group of souls reared in the aristocracy of art and intellect, a profound dechristianisation which, underneath the Reformation, was to spread among us in the eighteenth century.) As the Renascence was connected with discoveries in arts and letters, so the Reformation proceeded, in large part, from the invention of printing. The idea of acquiring by the mere reading of sacred books the highest type of knowledge, a full solution of the most difficult problems, could only have arisen when the sudden and extraordinary diffusion and invasion of books, hitherto unknown, had developed a general epidemic of reading and of the illusion of thinking that books were the source of all truth. It was perhaps because of this, Germany being the birthplace of printing, that Protestantism was German in its origin. Otherwise, this fact would be surprising, for, prior to the Reformation, all great heresies, all attempted rebellions against the Church, started from the South of Europe, a more civilised region than the North.

Fashion and custom have still another relation of which I have not spoken, and which requires to be distinguished both from the revival of an antique custom by a recent fashion and from the consolidation of a fashion into a custom. I refer to the very frequent cases in which a new fashion creeps, in order to introduce itself, under a still living custom which it insensibly changes and appropriates to itself.

For example, it has been noted that long after the importation of bronze among communities that had previously been restricted to the chipping of flints, bronze tools and weapons were made to imitate the forms of entirely outworn tools and weapons of flint. It has also been proved that Greek architecture is explained by the reproduction in stone or marble of the peculiarities of the huts of the primitive populations of Hellas. The most ornate columns of the temples of Miletus or Athens were modelled upon ancient wooden structures. The architectural type of China is explained by the primitive tent. What does this mean but the grafting of new fashions upon the still living trunk of old customs? Does it not imply the necessity of this grafting among societies based on custom, and is it not, above all, an act of art and of morality in order to make innovations live and endure? When the fashion of iron or marble was introduced after the example of foreign peoples, the only way it could become acclimated was through adopting the uniform of national usages.

An entirely parallel phenomenon is produced when new maxims or sentiments of morality filter into a social group whose horizon tends to enlarge and, in order to make themselves acceptable, have to have themselves introduced by the very prejudices whose place they are taking. Thus in a clan where only contracts between blood relations have ever been recognised as valid, contracts are made with strangers by means of such ceremonies as the intermingling of drops of blood to counterfeit consanguinity. Thus, when the feudal disintegration of the Middle Ages began to give way to monarchical centralisation, the duty of fidelity to the king, which was soon to be substituted for the duty of the vassal towards his over-lord, began by affecting a feudal colour, and seemed to express nothing more than a more general tie of vassalage, etc.