INTRODUCTION

GABRIEL TARDE, whose most interesting and important book is here given to American readers, is Professor of Modern Philosophy in the Collège de France, and a member of the Institut. A true philosopher, but also a man of affairs, with wide intellectual sympathies, M. Tarde is a writer of great charm, and his influence among his own countrymen and abroad has steadily increased since he began, in 1880, to contribute to the Revue philosophique. American scholars, long familiar with M. Tarde's suggestive works, have felt that his thought should be made more accessible to English-speaking readers. Hitherto only a little book, Les Lois sociales, presenting a mere outline of his philosophy, has been translated.

M. Tarde was born in 1843, at Sarlat, Dordogne. After school days were over, instead of entering upon university life at Bordeaux, or Montpellier, or Paris, he took up legal studies, and presently became juge d'instruction in his native town. This office he held for nearly eighteen years, years of keen observation, but also of much solitude, of patient reflection, of the gradual unfolding of original ideas of man, of society, and of the world, which were presently to combine in a complete philosophical scheme.

A born student of human nature, M. Tarde was from the first interested in that oldest of philosophical problems, the explanation of motive. He early perceived not only that motive may be resolved into terms of belief and desire, but also that it may be measured. This discovery had, of course, been made before by Bentham, Cournot, Menger, Walras, and Jevons, but Tarde's presentation of the subject in his first contribution to the Revue philosophique, on La Croyance et le désir, possibilité de leur mesure, was independent and original.

But motives, and those impersonal forces that are not motives, work out results in an orderly fashion, by definite modes, which are the chief subject-matter of scientific study, and to the explanation of modes of activity M. Tarde was to make noteworthy contributions. Among the phenomena that early arrested his attention was imitation. From his office of magistrate he observed the large part that imitation plays in criminal conduct. Does it play a smaller part in normal conduct? Very rapidly M. Tarde's ardent mind ranged over the field of history, followed the spread of Western civilisation, and reviewed the development of language, the evolution of art, of law, and of institutions. The evidence was overwhelming that in all the affairs of men, whether of good or of evil report, imitation is an ever-present factor; and to a philosophical mind the implication was obvious, that there must be psychological or sociological laws of imitation, worthy of most thorough study.

At this time sociology was represented in France by disciples of Comte and by a few interested readers of Herbert Spencer. The thoughts of the Comtists did not range far beyond the “hierarchy of the sciences,” and the “three stages” of history. To demonstrate the place of sociology in the “hierarchy,” or to show that a social fact belonged to one or another “stage,” was very nearly the limit of Comtist sociological ambition. The Spencerians, on the other hand, seizing upon Spencer's proposition that society is an organism,—but neglecting most of the psychological and historical elements of his system,—were busy elaborating biological analogies.

With such notions Tarde had, and could have, no sympathy. He felt that if the study of society was to be erected into a science, a beginning must be made, not by demonstrating the logical and rightful place of sociology in the sisterhood of sciences, and not by exploiting the analogy of institutions to organic life, but rather by thoroughly examining the nature and combinations of some distinctively social phenomenon. The fact—the relationship or activity—if such there be, in virtue of which society is itself, a differentiated thing, and not merely a part of something else, that fact the sociologist should understand through and through, and in all its bearings, and should make it the corner-stone of his system. That elemental social fact M. Tarde believed he had discovered in the phenomenon of imitation.

Too profoundly philosophical, however, to view any fact in even partial isolation, M. Tarde perceived that imitation, as a social form, is only one mode of a universal activity, of that endless repetition, throughout nature, which in the physical realm we know as the undulations of ether, the vibrations of material bodies, the swing of the planets in their orbits, the alternations of light and darkness, and of seasons, the succession of life and death. Here, then, was not only a fundamental truth of social science, but also a first principle of cosmic philosophy.

His first tentative studies of the laws of universal repetition in physical nature and in history, and of imitation as the distinctive social fact, M. Tarde published between 1882 and 1884 in the Revue philosophique. Among articles which, in substance, afterwards reappeared as chapters of Les Lois de l'imitation, were those entitled Les Traits communs de la nature et de l'histoire, L'Archéologie et la statistique, and Qu'est-ce qu'une societé? Other articles, setting forth the same underlying principles, but having a more practical aim, and presenting views born of the author's professional experience as a magistrate, were afterwards incorporated in the volumes, La Criminalité comparée and La Philosophic pénale (1891). Of these and other writings by our author on criminology, Havelock Ellis says: “He touches on all the various problems of crime with ever-ready intelligence and acuteness, and a rare charm of literary style, illuminating with suggestive criticism everything that he touches.”¹

The first edition of Les Lois de l'imitation appeared in 1890; a second in 1895. M. Tarde had now conceived a complete philosophy of phenomenal existence, and he rapidly converted it into literary embodiment. Unlike philosophers in general, M. Tarde is compact and brief in his systematic work; discursive in his varied writings illustrative of principles or practical by application. His whole philosophical system is set forth in three volumes of moderate dimensions. Les Lois de l'imitation is an exposition of the facts and laws of universal repetition. In La Logique sociale, which appeared in 1895, we have our author's explanation of the way in which elemental phenomena, undergoing endless repetition, are combined in concrete groups, bodies, systems, especially mental and social systems. This process is a logic, a synthesis, of repetitions. It includes adaptation, invention, and organisation. The chapters on the laws of invention are brilliant examples of M. Tarde's originality and many-sided knowledge. The third volume of the system, L'Opposition universelle, was published in 1897. Here was developed the theory of a third universal form and aspect of natural phenomena—namely, conflict.

The chronological: order of these publications did not correspond exactly to their logical order, as parts of a system. The latter was presented in a series of lectures in 1897 at the Collège Libre des Sciences Sociales. The order there given was “The Repetition of Phenomena,” “The Opposition of Phenomena,” “The Adaptation of Phenomena.” These lectures were published in 1898, under the title already mentioned, Les Lois sociales.

M. Tarde's abilities, and in particular his knowledge of criminal statistics and penology, had ere this drawn attention to him as a man whom the state could not overlook, and in 1894 he was called to Paris to assume charge of the Bureau of Statistics of the Ministry of Justice. This position he held until his election as Professor of Modern Philosophy in the Collège de France in 1900. In this latter year he was elected also a member of the Institute of France.

M. Tarde's later writings present his philosophical and sociological views under many aspects. They include: Les Transformations du droit, Les Transformations du pouvoir, L'Opinion et la joule, Études pénales et sociales, Essais et Mélanges sociologiques, Études de psychologie pénale, and Psychologie économique.

It is not the purpose of these brief lines of introduction to attempt any estimate of M. Tarde's place in philosophy, or to offer any criticism of his sociological views. The object is rather to indicate the place which “The Laws of Imitation” holds among the many writings of a gifted and widely influential author, in the belief that those who read this volume will wish to look into at least some of the others.

Of the quality of Mrs. Parsons' translation the reader himself will judge. It is enough here to say that Mrs. Parsons has sought with painstaking fidelity to convey to English readers the exact meaning of the original text.

FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS
Columbia University