CHAPTER VI

EXTRA-LOGICAL INFLUENCES

WE have now to study the non-logical causes of preference or aversion which are back of different kinds of rival imitations and which determine their victory or defeat.

Before entering upon these considerations, however, let me say a few words about certain modes which an imitation may assume. The modes, namely, of exactness or inexactness, of consciousness or unconsciousness.

1. In the first place, imitation may be either vague or precise. Let us enquire whether, as the acts or ideas to be imitated increase in number and complexity in the course of civilisation, imitation becomes more exact or more confused. We might think that every forward step in complexity brought with it additional inaccuracy. Just the opposite, however, may be observed. Imitation is to such an extent the primal soul of social life, that among civilised men skill and facility in imitating increases even faster than the number and complexity of inventions. Besides, it establishes resemblances that become more and more complete. In doing this, it bears out its analogy to reproduction and vibration. Vibrations of light are much more numerous and delicate than vibrations of sound, and yet the light of the stars is transmitted to us with a marvellous accuracy that is never reached by the latter. The equally numerous and complex vibrations of electricity are transmitted with incomparable and what would be incredible fidelity, but for the striking proofs given to us by the telegraph and telephone and phonograph. A noise is a series of unlike waves, whereas a sound is a series of waves that are very much alike; nevertheless the latter with their linked harmonies are more complex than the former. Is it true that when heredity has to reproduce highly differentiated organisms it produces less exact resemblances than when it has to reproduce beings of a lower order? On the contrary, the type of a cat or orchid is at least as well conserved as that of a zoophyte or mushroom. The faintest varieties in human races can, if they have the time in which to become fixed, be perpetuated with the utmost perfection by heredity.

From any point of view social life is bound to lead, in its prolongation, to the formation of etiquette, that is, to the complete triumph of conventionality over individual fancy. Language, religion, politics, war, law, architecture, music, painting, poetry, polite manners, etc., give rise to a conventionality that is the more complete, to an etiquette that is the more exacting and tyrannical, the longer it has lasted and the more undisturbed it has been in its development. Orthography or linguistic purism, the etiquette of language, and ritual, the etiquette of religion, possess about an equal degree of arbitrary precision, when their respective language and religion are alike very old and very original.¹ Although Christianity has grown more complex, from century to century, it has shown itself from its very beginning more and more exacting in point of regularity, uniformity, and orthodoxy. Although savage languages are very meagre, they are, according to Sayce and Whitney, as variable and as carelessly transmitted as civilised languages, in spite of their richness, are uniform and persistent. Procedure, the etiquette of justice, is also very formal when the law is very old, however complicated it may have become. Ceremonial, the etiquette of worldly relations, is less strict among nations whose polite society is of later origin than their law or religion. The contrary is true in Chinese society for the opposite reason. Prosody, the etiquette of poetry, becomes more and more despotic as versification increases and, strange to say, as the poetic imagination expands. Red tape and administrative routine, the etiquette of government, increase day by day with differentiation in government. Architecture requires its followers to become more and more servile in the repetition of the consecrated types that are for the time being in favour. This is true also of music. Painting also requires its servants to reproduce with more and more photographic exactness the models of nature or tradition. Under the ancient régime, the military uniform was less general and less respected than it is to-day, and the farther back we go the greater individual variety do we find in the dress of military ranks. According to Burckhardt, at Florence, in the Middle Ages, everyone dressed to suit his fancy as if at a mask-ball. How we should be scandalised to-day by such license!

This need for conventionality is so natural to social man that after it has reached a certain degree of strength it becomes conscious of itself and adopts violent and expeditious means for its satisfaction. All old civilisations have had their masters of ceremony, high functionaries who are charged with the perpetuation of traditional rites.¹ We find these chamberlains under different names not only in monarchical states, in Egypt, China, in the Roman Empire, in the Lower Empire, in the Escurial of Philip II and his successor, in the Versailles of Louis XIV, but in republics as well, in Rome, where the censor kept a strict oversight over old usages, and even in Athens, where religious life was subject to the most absolute formalism. We ridicule all of this, overlooking the fact that our smart tailors and dressmakers, our big manufacturers, and even our journalists, bear exactly the same relation to fashion-imitation as these masters of civil or religious ceremony bore to custom-imitation and that they are likely to take on the same comic importance that the latter did. The former cut out our clothes, our conversations, our information, our tastes, and our various wants according to one uniform pattern from which it is improper to depart. Its sameness from one end of the continent to the other passes for the most obvious sign of civilisation, just as the perpetuation for century upon century of certain legends, traditions, and customs was once taken, and much more wisely, for the foundation of a people’s grandeur.²

2. In the second place, imitation may be conscious or unconscious, deliberate or spontaneous, voluntary or involuntary. But I do not attach great importance to this classification. Is it true that as a people becomes civilised its manner of imitating becomes more and more voluntary, conscious, and deliberate? I think the opposite is true. Just as with the individual unconscious habits were originally conscious and self-determined acts, so in the nation everything that is done or said by tradition or custom began by being a difficult and much-questioned importation. I should add, to be sure, that many imitations are from the very beginning unconscious and involuntary. This is so of the imitation of the accents, manners, and more often of the ideals and sentiments peculiar to the environment in which we live. It is also plain that imitation of the will of others—I know no other way of defining spontaneous obedience—is necessarily involuntary. But let us observe that the involuntary and unconscious forms of imitation never become voluntary and conscious, whereas the voluntary and conscious forms are likely to take on the opposite characteristics. Let us distinguish, moreover, between the consciousness of imitating or the will to imitate someone in thinking or doing a certain thing and the consciousness of conceiving the thought or the will to perform the act. Consciousness or volition, in this latter sense, is the constant and universal fact which the progress of civilisation neither augments nor diminishes. In the former sense, there is nothing more variable, and civilisation does not seem to encourage consciousness or will understood in this way. Certainly the savage in whose eyes the ancient custom or religion of his tribe is justice or truth incarnate is no less conscious of imitating his ancestors and is no less desirous of imitating them in practising his juridical or religious rites, than is the modern labourer or even the modern bourgeois of imitating his neighbor, or employer, or editor, in repeating what he has read in his newspaper or in buying the piece of furniture which he has seen in the parlour of his employer or neighbour. But, in fact, in both cases, man is wrong in thinking that he imitates because he wishes to. For this very will to imitate has been handed down through imitation. Before imitating the act of another we begin by feeling the need from which this act proceeds, and we feel it precisely as we do only because it has been suggested to us.

After these remarks on the intrinsic characteristics of imitations, let us turn our attention to the inequalities that they present in their career by reason of their content (according as the content is the sign or the thing signified, an inward or an outward model), or by reason of the alleged superiority or inferiority of the persons or classes or even places from which they issue or of the past or present epochs in which they originate. In this chapter I propose to show that, the logical or teleological values being by hypothesis equal, (1) the subjective model will be imitated before the objective,¹ and (2) the example of persons or classes as well as of localities that are thought superior will prevail over the example of inferior persons or classes or localities. In the following chapters I shall show that a like presumption of superiority attaches (3) at times to the present, at times to the past, and is a potent factor and one of considerable historic significance in favour either of the examples of our fathers, or of those of our contemporaries.

I. Imitation from Within to Without

This would be the moment, if I did not shrink from so difficult a task, to exploit an entirely unexplored field and compare the different functions of organic or psychological life from the point of view of their more or less pronounced tendencies, in the average case, to transmit themselves through imitation. This relative transmissibility varies greatly from one period or nation to another. It will be impossible to measure it with any precision until the day when Statistics shall have redeemed all its promises. A few words, then, on this subject must suffice.

Is not thirst more contagious through imitation than hunger? I think it is. This may explain the rapid strides of alcoholism. Although gourmandism has also increased, as we may infer from the more varied and abundant diet of the middle classes, of the labourer, and of the peasant, its advance has certainly been slower. The same drinks may be in vogue over a great stretch of country (tea in one place, wine in another, beer here, mate there, etc.), whereas the greatest diversity may still prevail in local viands. Is thirst more or less contagious than sexual desires? I think less so. Debauchery is the first vice to develop, even before alcoholism, in large gatherings of men and women or in newly populated cities. Movements of the leg, and especially movements of the upper part of the body, are still more easily communicated. The impetus of marching together is one of the great military forces. The soldier’s tendency to keep step and march with his fellows is innate before it is obligatory. It has been proved through careful tests that everybody in the same village walks on an average at the same rate of speed. As for characteristic manners and gestures, they are much more readily transmitted than peculiarities of gait among people who are accustomed to live together. This is partly the reason why in modern hospitals hysterical convulsions readily take on the character of an epidemic, like the diabolical possessions in the convents of the past. The vocal function, like all functions of intercourse, is eminently imitative, particularly on its intellectual side, in diction and pronuncation, not in the timbre of the voice.¹ Accent is also transmitted. But this happens gradually and during youth. Every city retains a characteristic accent long after its food and dress have become like those of other cities. Yawning, I mean the yawn of boredom, whch has a mental cause, is much more contagious than sneezing or coughing.

The functions of the higher senses are more transmissible through imitation than those of the lower. We are much more likely to copy someone who is looking at or listening to something than someone who is smelling a flower or tasting a dish. This is the reason why in large cities a gathering is so soon formed around a lounging-place. We plunge into the waiting line behind the doors of a theatre much more eagerly than into the restaurant behind whose window panes we see its patrons enjoying their dinner.

All passions and needs for luxury are more contagious than simple appetites and primitive needs. But shall we say, as to passions, that admiration, confidence, love, and resignation are superior in this respect to contempt, distrust, hatred, and envy? In general, yes, otherwise society would not endure.¹ For the same reason, and in spite of frequent epidemics of panic, hope is certainly more catching than terror. Indolence is likewise more so than ambition and avarice, the spirit of saving than avidity. And this is very fortunate for the peace of society. Is courage more catching than cowardice? I am much less certain of this. Here curiosity deserves a special, if not the chief, place of honour. All those throngs of people which end in bringing on revolutions in religion, government, art, and industry begin to collect under the sway of this sentiment. When a person is seen to be curious about what once may have appeared to be the merest trifle, we immediately desire to know about it. This movement spreads very quickly, and the intensity of everybody’s desire increases in proportion to its spread, through the effect of mutual reaction. Whenever any novelty whatsoever, a sermon, a political platform, a philosophic idea, a commercial article, a poem, a novel, a drama, or an opera, appears in some notable place, i. e., in a capital city, it is only necessary for the attention of ten persons to become ostensibly fixed upon this thing in order that one hundred, one thousand, or ten thousand persons may quickly take an interest in it and enthuse about it. At times, this phenomenon takes on the character of hysteria. In the fifteenth century when Böhm, the German piper, began to preach his evangel of fraternal equality and community of goods, an epidemical exodus set in. “The journeymen hastened from their workshops, the farm maids ran with their sickles in their hands,” reports a chronicler, cited by Jansenn, and in a few hours more than thirty thousand men had assembled in a foodless desert. Once general curiosity has been excited, the mob is irresistibly predisposed to be carried away by all the different kinds of ideas and desires which the preacher, the orator, the dramatist, and the novelist of the hour may seek to popularise.

M. Ribot has pointed out that the memory of sentiments is much more persistent than that of ideas. I should say the like of the imitation of sentiments compared with the imitation (i. e., the spread) of ideas. Certainly morals and religious and moral sentiments which consist of reciprocal impregnations of affective states have a greater tenacity than opinions or even principles.

But now I have sufficiently glanced over a group of ideas that I do not wish to analyse more closely. Let us turn to a truth of more general import.

All imitations in which logic has no place fall into two great categories, namely, credulity and docility, imitation of belief and imitation of desires. It may see strange to call passive adherence to the idea of another, imitation; but if, as I have said, it matters little whether the reflection of one brain upon another be active or passive in character, the extension which I give to the usual meaning of this word is highly legitimate. If we say that the scholar imitates his master when he repeats his spoken words, why should we not say that the former has already imitated the latter as soon as he has adopted in thought the idea which he afterwards expresses in speech? It may also surprise the reader to find that I consider obedience a kind of imitation; but this assimilation, which can, at any rate, be easily justified, is necessary, and it alone permits the full significance of the phenomenon of imitation to be recognised. When one person copies another, when one class begins to pattern its dress, its furniture, and its amusements after those of another, it means that it has already borrowed from the latter the wants and sentiments of which these methods of life are the outward manifestations. Consequently it can and must have borrowed the latter’s volitions, that is, have willed in accordance with its will.¹

Is it possible to deny that volition, together with emotion and conviction, is the most contagious of psychological states? An energetic and authoritive man wields an irresistible power over feeble natures. He gives them the direction which they lack. Obedience to him is not a duty, but a need. That is the way every social tie begins. Obedience, in short, is the sister of faith. People obey for the same reason that they believe; and just as their faith is the radiation of that of some apostle, so their activity is merely the outgoing of some master will. Whatever the master wills or has willed, they will; whatever the apostle believes or has believed, they believe. And it is because of this that whatever the master or apostle subsequently does or says, they, in turn, do or say or are inclined to do or say. Those persons and classes, in fact, whom one is most inclined to imitate, are those whom one is most docile in obeying. The common people have always been inclined to copy kings and courts and upper classes according to the measure in which they have submitted to their rule. During the years preceding the French Revolution, Paris no longer copied court fashions, and no longer applauded the plays in favour at Versailles, because the spirit of insubordination had already made rapid strides. In all periods, the ruling classes have been or have begun by being the model classes. In the cradle of society, in the family, this close correlation between imitation, strictly speaking, and obedience and credulity is clearly shown. The father is, especially at first, the infallible oracle and sovereign ruler of his child; and for this reason he is his child’s highest model.¹

Imitation, then, contrary to what we might infer from certain appearances, proceeds from the inner to the outer man. It seems at first sight as if a people or a class began to imitate another by copying its luxury and its fine arts before it became possessed of its tastes and literature, of its aims and ideas, in a word, of its spirit. Precisely the contrary, however, occurs. In the sixteenth century fashions in dress came into France from Spain.² This was because Spanish literature had already been imposed upon us at the time of Spain’s pre-eminence. In the seventeenth century, when the preponderance of France was established, French literature ruled over Europe, and subsequently French arts and French fashions made the tour of the world. When Italy, overcome and downtrodden as she was, invaded us in the fifteenth century, with her arts and fashions, but, first of all, with her marvellous poetry, it was because the prestige of her higher civilisation and of the Roman Empire that she had unearthed and transfigured had subjugated her conquerors. Besides, the consciences of Frenchmen were Italianised long before their houses or dress or furniture through their habit of submission to the transalpine Papacy.

Did these very Italians who fell to aping their own Greco-Roman restorations begin by reflecting the externals of the ancient world, its statues, its frescoes, its Ciceronian periods, in order to become gradually filled by its spirit? On the contrary, it was to their hearts that their transplendent model made its first appeal. This neo-paganism was the conversion of a whole community, first its scholars and then its artists (this order is irreversible), to a dead religion; and whenever a new religion, it matters not whether it be living or dead, that is made fascinating by some compelling apostle, takes hold of a man, it is first believed in and then practised. It does not begin with mummeries. Mummeries do not lead to virtues and convictions. Far from that, it is the neophyte, above all, who is impressed by the soul of a religion independent of its external form, and formalism of worship does not become empty and meaningless until much later, when religion has lost its place in people’s hearts although it may still survive in their usages. Thus the neophyte of the early Renaissance continues in his feudal or Christian habits of life, but in faith he is already pagan, as his excess of sensuality and his overruling passion for glory go to prove. It is only at a later period that he becomes a pagan in morals and manners, first in morals and then in manners. The same thing happened, if we go farther back, in the case of the barbarians of the fifth or sixth century, in the case of a Clovis for example, or a Chilperic. They forced themselves to bow down to the customs of Rome and decorated themselves with the consular insignia. But before becoming Latinised in that clumsy, superficial sense they had experienced a much more profound Latinisation in being converted to Christianity, for at that date the Roman civilisation which fascinated them survived only in Christianity.

Let us suppose that two peoples of different religions come into contact, pagans with Christians, Christians with Moslems, Buddhists with Confucians, etc. Each borrows from the other certain new rites to illustrate its own peculiar dogmas, and, at the same time, while each continues to practise its ancient rites it receives new dogmas which are more or less contradictory to the old. Now do rites spread more or less quickly than dogmas? The persistence of old rites in new religions shows that they spread less quickly. In the same way two peoples may borrow both each other’s ideas and forms of speech, but they will borrow the former before the latter. If they borrow each other’s legal procedure and ceremonial together with each other’s principles of justice, the exchange of the latter will be much more rapid than that of the former. And so we have at Rome, in England, in France, etc., the persistence of legal form long after legal reform.

In this way imitation passes on from one people to another, as well as from one class to another within the same people. Do we ever see one class which is in contact with, but which has never, hypothetically, been subject to the control of, another determine to copy its accent, its dress, its furniture, and its buildings, and end by embracing its principles and beliefs? This would invert the universal and necessary order of things. The strongest proof, indeed, that imitation spreads from within to without is to be found in the fact that in the relations between different classes, envy never precedes obedience and trust, but is always, on the contrary, the sign and the result of a previous state of obedience and trust. Blind and docile devotion to the Roman patricians, to the Athenian eupatrides, or to the French nobility of the old régime preceded the envy, i. e., the desire to imitate them externally, which they came to inspire. Envy is the symptom of a social transformation which, in bringing classes together and in lessening the inequality of their resources, renders possible not only the transmission, as before, of their thoughts and aims, not only patriotic or religious communion and participation in the same worship, but the radiation of their luxury and well-being as well. Obedience, the cause, engenders envy, the effect. Consequently, when, for example, the ancient plebeians or the middle class Guelphs in the Italian cities of the Middle Ages, came into power, their manner of using it was an evidence and a continuation of their preceding bondage, since the oppressive laws which they enacted against the sometime reigning aristocracies were suggested by the need which they felt to copy their ancient masters.

It will be observed that obedience and trust, the subjective imitation of a recognised superior, is prompted by a devotion and, so to speak, loving admiration, just as the objective imitation of a questioned or disowned superior results from envious disparagement; and it is clear that communities pass from love to covert envy or from admiration to open contempt in respect to their old masters, but that they never pass back, as far as the latter are concerned, at any rate, from envy to love or from contempt to admiration. To satisfy their persistent need of loving and admiring, they must continue to raise up new idols for themselves, from time to time, only to shatter them later on.¹

It is a great mistake to say that populations are controlled by fear alone. On the contrary, everything points to the fact that in the beginnings of all great civilisations or, rather, of all religious or political institutions whatsoever, modern ones included, there have been unheard-of expenditures of love and of unsatisfied love at that. This fact explains everything; without it, nothing is explained. If the king-god whom Spencer has so strongly portrayed had not been loved as well as feared, he would have been straightway killed. And, to go back to the cradle of societies, are we to believe that the patriarch of antiquity, the first of the king-gods, owed his absolute authority over his children and his slaves exclusively to their terror? His children, if not his slaves, certainly loved him. They probably loved him much more than he himself loved them; for here, as elsewhere, the unilateral seems to have preceded the reciprocal tie. Ancient documents lead us to think that there was far less paternal tenderness on the part of the fathers of antiquity than on the part of those of the present day. I am not speaking of mothers, for the causes of their affection are vital much more than social, and it is to this fact that it owes its relative depth and steadfastness. Filial love itself, then, must have begun as an almost one-sided unsatisfied affection. We may picture the head of the primitive family as king, judge, priest, and teacher all in one. Like a little Louis XIV, he failed to recognise that his subjects had any claims upon him and in perfect egotism offered himself to their adoration. In view of his own glorification he acknowledged, to be sure, the duty of protecting them. And they were as grateful to him, in return, as if he had bestowed a favour upon them. Hence his apotheosis. It was necessary for the family-cult and for the perpetuation of the family, the basis of city and civilisation.

The Bible and all ancient legislation testify to the extent to which the patriarch was believed in and obeyed. His thought was divined and his will willed almost without a word, and it was because of this that his children had so keen an inclination to follow his example in all things, to reproduce his accent, his language, his gestures, and his manners. They would never have been led to believe in and obey him by futilely mimicking the outside man had they not first understood him by means of their faith and docility. The formation of a social tie by the first method was impossible. But let us go back still further, to that prehistoric dawn when the art of speech was unknown. At that time how was the secret content of the mind, its desires and ideas, transfused from one brain to another? That it was, in fact, effected we may infer from what happens in the societies of animals who seem to understand one another almost without signs, as if through a kind of psychological electrisation by suggestion. It must be admitted that in that age inter-cerebral action at a distance may have taken place with perhaps remarkable intensity, with an intensity which has diminished from that time on. Hypnotic suggestion can give us some vague idea of this in so far as a morbid phenomenon can resemble a normal one. This action is the elementary and fundamental problem which sociological psychology (which begins where physiological psychology leaves off) should undertake to solve.

The invention of language wonderfully facilitated, but did not originate, the inoculation of ideas and desires of one mind by another and consequently the progress of imitation ab interioribus ad exteriora. For had not this progress already existed, the birth of language would be inconceivable. It is not difficult to understand how the first inventor of speech set to associating in his own mind a given thought and a given sound (perfected by gesture), but it is difficult to understand how he was able to suggest this relation to another by merely making him hear the given sound. If the listener merely repeated this sound like a parrot, without attaching to it the required meaning, it is impossible to see how this superficial and mechanical re-echoing could have led him to understand the meaning of the strange speaker or carried him over from the sound to the word. It must then be admitted that the sense was transmitted with the sound, that it reflected the sound. And whoever is acquainted with the feats of hypnotism, with the miracles of suggestion, that have been popularised to so great an extent of late, should certainly not be reluctant to admit this postulate.

Moreover, observation of two- or three-year-old children who are beginning to talk adds great weight to this hypothesis. It is easily seen that they understand what is said to them long before they are themselves able to say the same things. How could this be possible unless they had already imitated older persons ab interioribus ad exteriora? Now, this point admitted, the establishment of language, marvellous as it seems, presents no further difficulties. Speech was not, in the beginning of history, what it has since become, namely, an interchange of knowledge and opinion. In accordance with the law which I have frequently formulated that the unilateral precedes the reciprocal in and for everything, speech must have been at first a purely one-sided lesson or command of a father to his children, a prayer to an unresponsive deity, i. e., a kind of sacerdotal and monarchical function, eminently authoritative and accompanied by some suggested hallucination or action, a sacrament, an august monopoly. The ruler, like the modern schoolmaster, alone had the right to speak aloud in his domain. Besides, only a chosen few, objects of admiration and, then, of envy, knew how to speak.

Later the right of writing was also monopolised by the upper classes, and this fact explains the prestige that writing, according to Sacred Scripture, still held, in the past, in the eyes of the unlettered. If speech has wholly lost this same prestige, it is undoubtedly because it is much more ancient. That it once possessed it is proved by the virtue that attached to so-called sacramental expressions in old legal procedures, as well as by the magical power attributed to Prayer in its apotheosis in the Vedas of the Aryans and to the Word, the Logos, by the Byzantines and Christians. In another chapter I will show that the needs of consumption have in every order of facts preceded the needs of production and that this important phenomenon is related to the progress of imitation from within to without. If this is so, the need of listening must have preceded that of speaking.

When the action at a distance of a dominant mind over one that is dominated has once been facilitated and regulated by the habit of verbal communication it acquires an irresistible force. We can get some idea of what language was originally as an instrument of government from the power that it exerts to-day in its most recent form, the daily press, in spite of the fact that the latter has lost part of its power through its expansion and self-combativeness. It is due to speech that imitation in the human world has accentuated its leading characteristic of first attaching itself to the most intrinsic thing in its living model and of reproducing with incredible precision the hidden side, the thoughts and aims, before it seizes upon and reflects with less exactness the outward gestures, attitudes, and movements of its model. The opposite occurs among animals, where imitation is effected in a pretty inexact manner, and only in the reproduction of songs and cries and muscular acts and where the transmission of nervous phenomena, of ideas and desires, is always vague. Because of this animal societies stand still; for although some ingenious idea might gleam through the brain of a crow or bison, it would, according to hypothesis, die with him and be necessarily lost to the community. With animals, it is primarily and pre-eminently muscle which imitates muscle; with us, it is primarily and pre-eminently nerve which imitates nerve and brain which imitates brain. This is the chief contrast through which we may explain the superiority of human societies. In them no good idea is lost, and every exceptional thinker lives on in the posterity which he raises up to his own level. Good ideas may have been for a long time only the visions of a madman or the caprices of a despot. It matters not, for in passing from the leader to the multitude they at least produce the immense and fundamental benefit of that religious or political unanimity which alone makes collective discipline and military action possible, just as, in the future, when true ideas and useful applications shall have come to light, general participation in the same science and in the same morality will be an indispensable factor in any great florescence of art or industry.

Let us note in relation to the arts that their evolution does not proceed, as Spencer contends, from the more objective to the more subjective, from architecture through sculpture and drawing to music and poetry. On the contrary, it always opens with some great book or epic or poetical work of very remarkable relative perfection. The Iliad, the Bible, Dante, etc., are the high sources from which all the fine arts are fated to flow.

This progress from within to without, if we try to express it more precisely, means two things: (1) That imitation of ideas precedes the imitation of their expression. (2) That imitation of ends precedes imitation of means. Ends or ideas are the inner things, means or expressions, the outer. Of course, we are led to copy from others everything which seems to us a new means for attaining our old ends, or satisfying our old wants, or a new expression for our old ideas; and we do this at the same time that we begin to adopt innovations which awaken new ideas and new ends in us. Only these new ends, these needs for novel kinds of consumption, take hold of us and propagate themselves in us much more readily and rapidly than the aforesaid means or expressions.¹

A nation which is becoming civilised and whose wants are multiplying consumes much more than it is able or than it desires to produce. That amounts to saying, in the language of æsthetics, that the diffusion of sentiments anticipates that of talents. Sentiments are habits of judgment and desire which have become very alert and almost unconscious through repetition. Talents are habits of activity which have also gained a mechanical facility by repetition. Both sentiments and talents, then, are habits; the only difference between them is that the former are subjective, and the latter, objective facts. Now, is it not true that æsthetic sentiments form and spread long before the talents which are fitted to satisfy them? And have we not a proof of this in the commonplace observation that the virtuosity of periods of decadence survives the exhaustion of their inspiration?

No art makes its own religion; style does not create the thought back of it; but a religion or an idea ultimately makes the art or style which expresses and illustrates it. Can we imagine the painting of Cimabue or Giotto being prior to the spread of Christianity? Our law explains why the fusion of beliefs is always and everywhere accomplished long before that of arts or that of morals and why, consequently, even in the periods of small and hostile neighbouring states, a common religion can spread over a vast territory. We know that the Greek games and oracles, particularly the Delphic Oracle and the Olympic games, at first created and then continued to strengthen the sentiment of Hellenic nationality in spite of the small states into which Greece was broken up. But long before the games became a common centre, long before they gave people an opportunity to see and imitate each other from the point of view of the outward things of life, the authority of the oracles was recognised by all. Their origin is lost in a fabulous antiquity. And so in the Middle Ages, also, a common faith dominated Europe long before the great monarchies with their brilliant courts and their exchanges of contagious luxury began to assimilate the outsides of their respective peoples. There is not a single example of the contrary.

We know that if juridical or legislative changes are viable, they never precede, but follow at some distance the intellectual or economic changes to which they correspond. Our thesis requires this. It also requires, as a corollary, that laws, which are the outer framework of society, should survive for some time their inner reason for existence, the wants and ideas which they embody. Coming later or proceeding less quickly, they must or may persist afterwards. This is also true of certain customs, as observation shows us, and this general phenomenon is alone able to explain the particular case to which I have referred. The survivals of custom, to use Lubbock’s excellent term, have had so much light thrown upon them, that it is useless to cite many examples. Nevertheless, let us call to mind that after the matriarchal system was abolished and even forgotten, a simulation of it was perpetuated in the couvade, the attribution of a fictitious maternity to the father, and that after marriage by capture had fallen into disuse, marriage ceremonies preserved the fiction of it. Up to the marriage of Louis XVI, the custom of paying down thirteen deniers upon the conclusion of a marriage prevailed in France, in certain provinces at least, as a relic from the time of wife-purchase. Sects who rejected the dogma of the Eucharist have simulated the communion service and free-thinkers who opposed infant baptism have celebrated a civic quasi-baptism of their children. Moreover, what living religion has not borrowed its external observances, its rites and processions, from some dead religion? Is not the conservation of a linguistic root whose meaning has changed a survival of the same kind that is complicated, as in the preceding case, by the introduction of a new meaning which adapts an old organ to a fresh function? I have just spoken of juridical survivals. Our codes are full of them. Although feudal law has been dead for centuries, I defy a jurist to do without it in explaining the famous distinction between a possessory and a petitory action, the nightmare of our justices of the peace. Finally, in the sphere of art and poetry, there is nothing more usual than to see the cloak of a certain school whose soul is extinct pass on to some new genius.

What does this prove? In the first place it proves the tenacity, the energy, of the inclination which leads man to imitate the past. But, besides these æsthetic or ritualistic or purely mechanical simulations of vanished wants and beliefs, we also see the survival of the outward parts of imitation after the inward parts—a natural fact, if the latter are older or have evolved more rapidly than the former.

The survivals in question give us the counter-proof of our law. The following observation will remove any remaining doubt. As they spread abroad, honorary titles (sieur instead of seigneur), salutations (a slight inclination of the head instead of the bent knee of feudal times), compliments, and manners become abbreviated, diluted, and simplified. Spencer has shown this in a masterly way. This fact demands that others of a like kind be brought into relation with it. Words are contracted from being constantly used and vulgarised. They lose their edge and wear themselves out like a rolling stone. Religious beliefs lose their intensity, arts degenerate, etc. These facts seem to prove that imitation is the necessary weakening of that which is imitated and that new inventions or entirely fresh sources for imitation are therefore necessary for the timely reanimation of expiring social energy. And there is much truth in this, as we shall see later on. But is it always so? No; these resemblances occur only between the final periods of those different evolutions which we have been comparing. Before a word contracts, it must be formed and fostered and magnified by a series of ascendent and not yet decadent imitations. Before an etiquette is shaken, it must have established itself through the reinforcement of every imitation of which it has been the object. Before a dogma or a rite declines, it must have asserted and spread itself throughout the youth of its religion.

Whence comes this contrast? Does it not result from the fact that in the first period imitation was essentially from within and had to do with the spread of beliefs or desires, of beliefs and desires whose outward forms were merely their expression, were merely secondary objects, of beliefs and desires which gradually flared up by virtue of their own law through their very propagation and mutual reflection; whereas, in the second period, the outward forms continued to spread in spite of the gradual drying up of their inward source and had, consequently, to lose in strength? And so the phenomenon is explained on the ground that imitation passes from within to without, from the thing signified to its sign. Now, why does a moment come when it is not the inward side of the model, the faith or desire implicit in the act or speech in question, but the outward side which is reproduced? It is because another faith or desire which is entirely or partly irreconcilable with the former appears on the very scene where the other has already spread itself. Then, although the model continues to live on the surface, it is stricken to the heart. It goes on living in a state of self-mutilation and suicide until the moment when some new spirit succeeds it.¹ We know from the writings of Tertullian and the discoveries of archæology that in spite of the religious fervour and inward sincerity of the early Christians they continued, both men and women, to live externally, to dress, to coiffe, and even to amuse themselves like pagans, without regard to the anti-Christian indecency of the garments and amusements in question.

I cannot conclude this discussion of imitation ab interioribus ad exteriora without briefly calling attention to the analogy which imitation presents in this relation as well as in so many others to the other forms of Repetition.

It is obvious, from the very obscurity that is inherent in the study of life, that all the developments of life, from fecundation to death, proceed from some wholly internal and absolutely hidden action, from some vital faith or inspiration, so to speak, which is breathed into the germ by its progenitors and which is anterior to its manifestations. The evolution of the individual is the drawing out of this germ. At the moment of conception the parents repeat themselves in the child in their most essential vital characteristics before they repeat themselves, thanks to the former transmission, in their more visible and external traits; for in the fecundated germ the whole future growth is potential. Similarly, at the moment when a catechumen is converted, some apostle is repeating himself on his deepest social side, the side which is soon to be the source of the religious prayers and observances of the catechumen, where the apostle’s own prayers and observances will be no less faithfully reproduced. The analogy to physical phenomena of a like order is more conjectural. And yet we know the fruitlessness of efforts to explain, for example, the transmission or repetition of movements, either through contact or at a distance, without presupposing the existence of some preliminary communication of a hidden force or attraction; and the attempts to explain chemical changes and combinations as combinations of atoms without parts or dimensions have been equally unsuccessful. Let us conclude that in nature, as in society, Repetition, i. e., Action, proceeds, I cannot repeat it too often, ab interioribus ad exteriora.

Will the reader perchance argue, among other objections which could be raised against this thesis, that women are much more prompt to adopt foreign fashions in clothes than foreign ideas? But in this instance the intrinsic thing, the thing signified, is either a woman’s vain affirmation of self,—when in order to raise herself a peg she imitates the dress of a higher class whose pride and vices and pretensions have already taken hold of her,—or the sexual desire to please,—when she imitates her fellows or equals because she has first been persuaded, so often mistakenly, that she will be beautified by the adoption of some new style of dress or headgear. Moreover, the example of womankind is an illustration not only of the law of the spread of imitation from above to below, which I am about to discuss, but likewise of the law which we are considering at present. Every woman we know imitates the man whom she loves or admires or to whose ascendency she submits. But we may also notice that the man’s sentiments and ideas are communicated to her long before she has copied his mannerisms or literary knack, or adopted his forms of speech or accent. When a woman passes into a family or community which she considers superior to her own, she becomes at once impregnated with the ideas, the passions, the prejudices, the vices or the virtues which prevail in her new society, and she becomes saturated with them much sooner than a man under similar circumstances. If, at the beginning, woman is, in many respects, notably in matters of religious belief, unimpressionable to outside examples, it is because the principle of imitation from within to without is absolutely applicable in her case. As a corollary of this principle, the external manifestations of an ancient belief persist in the speech, gestures, habits, and manners of woman, much more than in the case of man, long after it has itself disappeared and been secretly replaced by another. The new cult must have won a stronghold in the soul of a woman long before she decides to adopt its outward garb. This has always been so, and it is still so. In the sixteenth century Marguerite de Valois and her feminine following were at heart converted to Calvinism,—in fact it was through them that the doctrine of Calvin, in spite of its being a doctrine so little suited to please them, began to spread through France,—but they continued to practice the Catholic religion, in part, undoubtedly, from fear of being butchered, but, primarily, because of the logical necessity which rules that the things signified should precede their signs.

II. Imitation of the Superior by the Inferior

The profoundly subjective character that is taken on from the earliest times by human imitation, the privilege which it has of binding souls together from their very centres, involves, as may be seen from what has preceded, the growth of human inequality and the formation of a social hierarchy. This was inevitable, since the relation of model to copy developed into that of apostle to neophyte, of master to subject. Consequently, from the very fact that imitation proceeded from the inside to the outside of the model, it had to consist in a descent of example, in a descent from the superior to the inferior. This is a second law that is partly implied in the first, but it needs separate examination.

Moreover, let us be sure that we understand the exact bearing of the considerations in hand as well as of those that have preceded. In the first place, we know that they are based on the hypothesis that the influence of prestige, of alleged superiority, is neither partly nor wholly neutralised by the action of logical laws. However lowly or even despised may be the author or introducer of a new idea of relatively striking truth or utility, it always ends by spreading through the public. Thus the evangel of slaves and Jews spread throughout the aristocratic Roman world because it was more adapted than polytheism to answer the main problems of the Roman conscience. Thus at a certain period in ancient Egypt the use of the horse was introduced from Asia in spite of the Egyptians’ contempt for Asiatics, because for many kinds of work the horse was obviously preferable to the mule, which had been in use up to that time. There are innumerable examples of this kind. Similarly, the most objective of examples, a word detached from its meaning, a religious rite from its dogma, a peculiarity of custom from the want which it expresses, a work or art from the social ideal which it embodies, may readily spread in a strange environment whose ruling needs and principles find it to their advantage to replace their usual methods of expression by this new one which is perhaps more picturesque, or more clear, or more forcible.

In the second place, even when the action of logical laws does not intervene, it is not only the superior who causes himself to be copied by the inferior, the patrician by the plebeian, the nobleman by the commoner, the cleric by the layman, and, at a later period, the Parisian by the provincial, the townsman by the peasant, etc., it is also the inferior who, in a certain measure, much less, to be sure, is copied, or is likely to be copied, by the superior. When two men are together for a long time, whatever may be their difference in station, they end by imitating each other reciprocally, although, of the two, the one imitates much the more, the other much the less. The colder body imparts its heat to the warmer. The haughtiest country gentleman cannot keep his accent, his manners, and his point of view from being a little like those of his servants and tenants. For the same reason many provincialisms and countrified expressions creep into the language of cities, and even capitals, and slang phrases penetrate at times into drawing rooms. This influence from the bottom to the top of a scale characterises all classes of facts. Nevertheless, on the whole, it is the generous radiation of the warm body towards the cold, not the insignificant radiation of the cold body towards the warm, that is the main fact in physics and the one which explains the final tendency of the universe towards an everlasting equilibrium of temperature. Similarly, in sociology, the radiation of examples from above to below is the only fact worth consideration because of the general levelling which it tends to produce in the human world.

1. Now let me endeavour to elucidate the truth which we are discussing. There is nothing more natural than that those who love each other should copy each other, or, rather, as this phenomenon always begins by being one-sided, that the lover should copy the beloved. But in proof of the depth which is reached by the action of imitation in man’s heart we see people aping one another everywhere, even in their fights. The conquered never fail to copy their conquerors if only to prepare for their revenge. When they borrow the military organisation of their conquerors they are careful to say and they sincerely think that their sole motive is a utilitarian calculation. But we shall find this explanation inadequate, if we compare this fact with a considerable number of correlated facts in which the sentiment of utility plays no part whatsoever.

For example, the conquered do not merely borrow the superior weapons, the longer range guns, and the more admirable methods of their conqueror; they also take from him many of his insignificant military peculiarities and habits, whose acclimatisation, granted that it were possible, would raise difficulties wholly out of proportion to its feeble advantages. During the thirteenth century Florence and Sienna, who were always at war with each other, arrayed troops against each other that were not only organised in the same way, but that were also preceded by that strange cart (carroccio) and singular bell (martinella) which were at first peculiar to Lombardy, that is, to what was for a long time the most powerful part of Italy (so much so that Lombard and Italian had the same meaning), and which were then imported with certain modifications to Florence, whence, thanks to the prestige of that flourishing city, they spread to its hostile neighbours. And yet the cart was an encumbrance and the bell a real danger. Why, then, should both Florence and Sienna have copied those peculiarities instead of keeping to their own customs? For the same reason that the lower classes of society, that is, the defeated, or the sons of the defeated, in civil wars, copy the dress, the manners, the speech, the vices, etc., of the upper classes. It will not be said, in this instance, that the imitation is a military operation in view of revenge. It is simply the satisfaction of a special fundamental need in social life the final consequence of which is the preparation through many conflicts of conditions of future peace.¹

Whatever may be the organisation of a society, aristocratic or democratic, we may be sure, if we see imitation making rapid strides in it, that the inequality between its different levels is very great, besides being more or less apparent. And we have only to learn the set of its main current of examples, overlooking the unimportant back eddies, to discover the real social power. If the nation is on an aristocratic basis the thing is very simple. Given the opportunity, a nobility will always and everywhere imitate its leaders, its kings or suzerains, and the people, likewise, given the opportunity, its nobility. Baudrillart writes in his Histoire de luxe that at Constantinople under the Byzantine emperors, “the court looks up to the prince, the city looks to the court for its model, and the poor man gazes upon the rich man and wishes to share in his luxury.”¹ The same was true in France under Louis XIV. Saint-Simon writes on the same subject of luxury: “It is a sore that once introduced becomes an internal, all-devouring cancer, for it quickly communicates itself from the court at Paris to the provinces and the armies.” M. de Barante writes that in the fifteenth century “it was purposed to strictly forbid all those games, dice, cards, or rackets, which had found a way to the people in imitation of the court.” The innumerable card players that we see in the inns and taverns of to-day are, then, unwitting copyists of our old royal courts. Forms and rules of politeness have spread through the same channel. Courtesy comes from the court, as civility comes from the city. The accent of the court and, later on, that of the capital spread little by little to all classes and to all provinces of the nation. We may be sure that in times past there were a Babylonian accent, a Ninevite accent, a Memphite accent, just as there are to-day a Parisian accent, a Florentine accent, and a Berlin accent. This transmission of accent, precisely because it is one of the most unconscious, irresistible, and inexplicable forms of imitation, very properly illustrates the depth of that force and the truth of that law which I am expounding. When we see that the influence of the upper classes upon the lower, of townsmen upon rustics, of colonial whites upon native blacks, of adults upon children, of upper classmen upon lower, is felt even in the matter of accent, we can no longer doubt that it is felt a fortiori in matters of writing, gesture, facial expression, dress, and custom.

The tendency to ape the hierarchical superior and the rapidity with which this inclination has at all times satisfied itself, at the slightest touch of public prosperity, deserve to be indicated.¹ The frequency of the sumptuary edicts during the entire period of the old régime is a proof of this, just as the multiplicity of a river’s dykes bears witness to the impetuosity of its currents. The first French Court dates from Charles VIII; but we must not think that the imitative contagion of court manners and luxury took several centuries to reach down to the common people of France. From the time of Louis XII its influence was felt everywhere. The disasters of the religious wars arrested its development in the sixteenth century, but, in the following century, it started up again very rapidly. Then the miseries brought on by the last war of the Grand Monarch occasioned another setback. During the eighteenth century there was a fresh start; under the Revolution, another reaction. In the time of the First Empire the advance began again on a great scale; but from that time on it took a democratic form about which we need not trouble ourselves for the moment. Under Francis I and Henry II the spread of the luxury begun under Louis XII continued. At this period a sumptuary law forbade “all peasants, labourers, and valets, unless attached to princes, to wear silken doublets or hose overladen or puffed out with silk.” From 1543 to the time of the League there were eight important ordinances against luxury. “Some of them,” says Baudrillart, “apply to every French subject; they interdict the use of cloth of gold, of silver, or of silk.”² Such was the general elegance that prevailed on the eve of the religious wars.¹ To justify laws in restraint of trade “one of the reasons most frequently cited was the fact that France was ruining itself in the purchase of objects of luxury.” Besides, the same fact is revealed in the prosperity of the industries of luxury which presuppose an extensive patronage.²

If we go still farther back to classical antiquity, the same law will be verified. We learn from a text of Sidonius Apollinaris that the speaking of Latin was begun in Gaul by the Gallic nobility and spread from them, together with Roman morals and ideas, into the bosom of the people.

Here is another example. Let us picture to ourselves the basin of the Mediterranean in the eighth century before Christ; at the moment of the great Tyrian or Sidonian prosperity, when the Phœnicians, the European carriers of the arts of Egypt and Assyria, were arousing among the Greeks and other peoples a taste for luxurious and beautiful things. These merchants were not like modern English traders in cheap and common fabrics; like the mediæval Venetians, they were wont to display along the seaboard fine products that appealed to the rich people of all countries, purple garments, perfumes, golden cups, figurines, costly armour, exvoto offerings, graceful and charming ornaments. Thus all over, in Sardinia, in Etruria, in Greece, in the Archipelago, in Asia Minor, and in Gaul, the highest classes, the chosen few, might be seen wearing helmets, swords, bracelets, and tunics which were more or less alike from one end to the other of this vast region, while beneath them the plebeian population continued to be differentiated from one another by their characteristic dress and weapons. And yet, although these plebeians differed so much from their leaders on the outside, they closely resembled them in their ideas and passions, in their religious superstitions and ethical principles.

In the fourteenth or fifteenth century of our era, exactly the same spectacle would have struck the Arthur Young of that time in travelling through France and Europe. At this epoch the same Venetian products had spread everywhere and were inundating and assimilating palaces and chateaux and city mansions, whereas, although the same religion and morality prevailed in huts and cottages as in noble and sumptuous dwellings, the former still retained their distinct and original characteristics. Now, little by little, from above to below, assimilation has so advanced both in antiquity and in modern times, that finally a great carrying trade, not for the use of the few, but for that of the entire mass of a vast people, has become possible,—to the great advantage of the England of to-day, of the America of to-morrow.¹

Therefore the apologists for aristocracy have, in my opinion, passed over its best justification. The principal rôle of a nobility, its distinguishing mark, is its initiative, if not inventive, character. Invention can start from the lowest ranks of the people, but its extension depends upon the existence of some lofty social elevation, a kind of social water-tower, whence a continuous water-fall of imitation may descend. At every period and in every country the aristocratic body has been open to foreign novelties and has been quick to import them,² just as the staff of an army is the best-informed part of the army on the subject of foreign military innovations, and the most apt in adopting them intelligently, thereby rendering as much service as by the discipline which it inspires. As long as its vitality endures, a nobility may be recognised by this characteristic. When, on the other hand, it throws itself back upon traditions, jealously attaches itself to them and defends them against the attacks of a people whom it had previously accustomed to changes, it is safe to say that its great work is done, however useful it may be in this complementary rôle of moderator, and that its decline has set in.³

2. In this respect, in spite of appearances to the contrary, the ecclesiastical resembles the civil hierarchy. Certainly, had it not been for the strongly aristocratic constitution of the Christian clergy, the spread of the same dogmas and, later on, of the same rites, could never have covered such an immense space as it did, and produced, in spite of the disintegration of feudal society, that great unity of spirit and ritual called Christianity. It was because of the lack of such a pyramidal organisation that, although Protestanism appeared at an epoch of great national centralisation instead of disintegration, at an epoch, therefore, which was highly favourable for the diffusion of one uniform doctrine or cult, it was, nevertheless, split up into an endless number of sects. Now, as long as the pontifical court and the episcopal body of the Catholic clergy continued to be an active aristocracy, their special characteristic was their monopoly of religious initiatives; and the singular complexity of the dogmas and cult which were enriched and expanded at each council and synod testified to their initiating propensity. Through these numerous and frequently reform reunions, the bishops and abbots kept in touch with new fashions in theology, in casuistry, and in liturgy, and enabled these fashions to reach downwards.¹ Their taste for innovation went even farther; it was not confined to the religious sphere. The higher clergy became depraved at the end of the Middle Ages for the same reason for which, later on, the French nobility became enervated. It was because, at that epoch, it was the pre-eminently superior and controlling class, the first to be touched by the dawn of a new civilisation. If the ecclesiastical pinnacles of the Europe of that day had withstood the influence of new inventions and discoveries, and, consequently, of new manners and morals, the arrival of modern civilisation would have certainly been retarded for several centuries if not indefinitely postponed.

In a period of theocratic aristocracy, if the hovel copies the chateau, the chateau copies some church or temple, first in its style of architecture and then in the different forms of art and luxury which develop in it before spreading down to lower circles. In the Middle Ages the cathedral goldsmith and cabinet-maker set the standard for the secular artisans who filled the dwellings of the nobles with Gothic jewelry and furniture. Sculpture, painting, poetry, and music were secularised in the same way. Just as the royal courts created, under the form of flattery and of narrow and one-sided courtesy, the habit of reciprocal and general amiability and politeness, and just as the example of the command of one chief or of the privileges of a chosen few had only to spread to give birth to law, the command of each to all and of all to each, so we find in the beginning of every literature some sacred book, the Book of all others, the book of which all later secular books are merely sanctuary-stolen reflections, in the beginning of all writing some historic writing, in the beginning of all music some religious dirge or lyric, at the beginning of all sculpture some idol, at the beginning of all painting some tomb or temple fresco or some monachal illumination of the sacred book. . . . Temples, then, antedate palaces, in the right of being considered the secular, and, for a long time, the indispensable centres of the spread of civilisation in the extrinsic and superficial meaning of the word as well as in its intrinsic and deeper meaning, in matters of art and elegance as well as in those of maxim and conviction.¹

3. It is during the periods when the sacerdotal rule is declining and when ecclesiastical teaching is becoming less and less the source of beliefs that the art and luxury of priestly examples come to be more and more closely followed, and that there is no fear of profaning the decorative sides of worship in secularising them. In the same way when aristocratic rule begins to weaken, and when less obedience is paid to privileged classes, people are emboldened to copy them in external things. We know that this conforms to advance ab exterioribus ad exteriora, but it is also in part explained by the application of another very general law, which should be combined with that concerning the imitation of superiors. If the latter were unconditional, the most superior thing would be the one to be most imitated; but, in reality, the thing that is most imitated is the most superior one of those that arc nearest. In fact, the influence of the model’s example is efficacious inversely to its distance as well as directly to its superiority. Distance is understood here in its sociological meaning. However distant in space a stranger may be, he is close by, from this point of view, if we have numerous and daily relations with him and if we have every facility to satisfy our desire to imitate him. This law of the imitation of the nearest, of the least distant, explains the gradual and consecutive character of the spread of an example that has been set by the highest social ranks. We may infer, as its corollary, when we see a lower class setting itself to imitating for the first time a much higher class, that the distance between the two had diminished.¹

4. A period is called democratic as soon as the distance between all classes has lessened enough, through various causes, to allow of the external imitation of the highest by the lowest. In every democracy, then, like our own, where the fever of subjective and objective assimilation is intense, we may be sure of the existence of an established or incipient social hierarchy of recognised superiors, of superiors through heredity or selection. In our own case it is not difficult to perceive by whom the ancient aristocracy was replaced after the sceptre of the refinements of life had in large part slipped from its grasp. In the first place the administrative hierarchy has been growing more complicated, adding to its height by increasing the number of its grades and to its breadth by increasing the number of its functionaries. The same thing is true in the case of our military hierarchy because of the reasons which have forced modern European States to become military nations. Prelates and princes of the blood, monks and cavaliers, monasteries and chateaux have been suppressed to give place to publicists¹ and financiers, to artists and politicians, to theatres, banks, bazaars, barracks, government buildings, and to the other monuments that are grouped within the circumference of a capital. Here celebrities of every kind congregate. Now what are all the different kinds and degrees of glory or notoriety that are known to society, but a brilliant hierarchy of either filled or vacant places which the public alone is free, or thinks it is free, to dispose of?

Now, instead of becoming more simple and more humble, this aristocracy of place, this platform of brilliant stations, grows more and more impressive through the very effect of democratic transformations which lower national and class walls and give a more and more universal and international suffrage to the candidates for fame. The amount of glory that may be divided among the actors increases in proportion to the number of the spectators who are clapping or hissing in the pit, and the distance between the most obscure onlooker and the most applauded player enlarges accordingly. The apotheosis of Victor Hugo, an impossible occurrence thirty years ago, revealed the existence of a high mountain of literary glory which has been recently raised up, like the Pyrenees in the past, from out of a vast and unbroken plain, and which, with its train of minor peaks, piled up at its base, offers itself henceforward to the ambition of future poets. Invisible mountains of this kind are ever springing up through the pavements of big cities, where they crowd upon each other like the roofs of houses. In the prodigious growth, in the hypertrophy of great cities and, especially, of capitals, where oppressive privileges take root and ramify, while the last traces of the privileges of the past are jealously effaced, is to be found the kind of inequality which modern life creates and which it finds indispensable, in fact, in managing and promoting the great currents of its industrial production and consumption, i. e., of imitation on an immense scale. The course of a Ganges like this necessitated a Himalayas. Paris is the Himalayas of France. Paris unquestionably rules more royally and more orientally, over the provinces than the court ever ruled over the city. Every day the telegraph or the railroad distributes its ready-made ideas, wishes, conversations, revolutions, its readymade dresses and furniture, throughout the whole of France. The suggestive and imperious fascination which it instantaneously exerts over this vast territory is so profound, so complete, and so sustained, that it no longer surprises anyone. This kind of magnetisation has become chronic. It is called liberty and equality. It is futile for the city labourer to consider himself a democrat in working for the destruction of the middle classes (engaged as he is in rising into the middle class himself); he is none the less an aristocrat himself, the much admired and the much envied aristocrat of the peasant. The peasant is to the labourer what the labourer is to his employer. This is the cause of the emigration out of the rural districts.

Although the sworn communes of the Middle Ages grew out of a spirit of hostility against the local over-lord and against feudalism in general, nevertheless, as M. Luchaire informs us, their effect and their aim was to raise the city in which they were established to the rank of a collective seigniory, the vassal or suzerain of other seigniories, receiving or contributing feudal dues and having its own rank in the feudal hierarchy. The seals of the communes generally represented military emblems, a foot soldier, or an armed knight on a galloping horse, like the seals of the nobility. The same writer, in his exhaustive historical work on the subject, has proved that the emancipating movement of the communes of the twelfth century was not confined to the cities but that, following their example, the mere villages on their outskirts or beyond freed themselves in the same way, by confederation. The historians have hitherto ignored this fact, but it is nevertheless incontestable that, in the Middle Ages, there were first urban communes and then rural communes. It is a remarkable thing that the same order is followed even in the case of agricultural innovations. Roscher says, for example, that “it was in the town that the modern system of rent, of ground rent, was first substituted for feudal dues, as may be seen from the Charter, of Ghent of 1259 in the Warnkoenig.” Let me add that contrary to the opinion of Augustin Thierry the emancipation of the communes was not caused by popular insurrection, by a spontaneous uprising of lowly artisan corporations, but, as recent historical research has shown,¹ by an originally very exclusive league of rich merchants who were already associated in guilds or religious brotherhoods and who formed the aristocracy of the city. “They were transformed into real leagues and ranged behind themselves the rest of the inhabitants, so that the commune started, in general, from a league of all the inhabitants grouped together under the oath of the middle-class aristocracy.”

A capital, a great modern city, is the first choice, the cream, so to speak, of the population. While the numerical importance of the two sexes is about equal in a nation taken as a whole, the number of men in great centres is notably larger than that of women. Besides, the proportion of adults is far greater in the cities than it is in the rest of the country. Finally, and above all, the cities attract to themselves from all directions the most active brains and the most nervous organisms, the fittest to utilise modern inventions. This is the way in which they form the modern aristocracy, a select, non-hereditary, but liberally recruited body; and yet this does not keep it in the least from being as scornful of the lower rural population as were ever the nobles of the old régime of the common people.¹ This new aristocracy is as selfish, as rapacious, and as destructive as the ancient aristocracy, and if, like all aristocracies, it did not speedily renew itself by the incoming of new elements, it also would quickly perish from the vices which eat into it, from tuberculosis and syphilis, its characteristic diseases, from poverty, its curse, from alcoholism, from all those causes which render its death rate unusually high in spite of its exceptionally distinguished constituency.

Modern capitals not only help to suppress and equalise all the subordinate parts of their nation, they also aid in the assimilation of the different communities lying between them, and from this point of view they again play the rôle of the ancient royal courts. Under the Plantagenets, the luxuries of France and England were, in spite of the infrequency of travel and international relations, strikingly alike. This similarity can be explained only as an outcome of the influence of the constant communication between the French and English courts. The courts were, therefore, mutual centres of light and colour. Through the constant interplay of their rays over national frontiers, they supplied people with their first examples of a certain kind of uniformity. To-day the capitals, the daughters of the courts, take their place. In them all eventually successful initiatives are concentrated, towards them all eyes turn, and as they are in constantly reciprocal relations, universal uniformity, offset by a perpetual variability, must be the result of their prolonged preponderance. Let me add that, in their reciprocal relations, the movement of imitation from above to below is also observed. There is always one capital after which the others are likely to pattern themselves both at heart and on the surface, just as formerly there was always one court which was the general model. It is the capital of the preponderating people, or of the people that had preponderated up to the time in question, just as formerly it was the court of the victorious king or of the king who had been long accustomed to victory in spite of recent defeats.¹

In democratic countries, as Tocqueville remarks, majorities, as well as capitals, have prestige. “As citizens become more equal and more alike the tendency of each to blindly believe in a given man or class diminishes. The disposition to believe the masses increases and public opinion guides society more and more.” Since the majority becomes the real political power, the universally recognised superior, its prestige is submitted to for the same reason that that of a monarch or nobility was formerly bowed down to. But there is still another reason. “In times of equality men have no faith in one another because of their mutual likeness; but this very resemblance inspires them with an almost unlimited confidence in the judgement of the public; for it seems improbable to them that when all have the same amount of light, the truth should not be found on the side of the greatest number.” This appears logical and mathematical; if men are like units, then it is the greatest sum of these units which must be in the right. But in reality this is an illusion are based upon a constant oversight of the rôle played here by imitation. When an idea arises in triumph from the ballot-box we should be infinitely less inclined to bow down before it if we realised that nine hundred and ninety-nine thousandths of the votes that it polled were but echoes. Even the most careful historians are constantly misled by this and are inclined to enthuse with the crowd over the unanimity of certain popular wishes which the people’s leaders have inspired, as if it were something marvellous. Unanimities should be greatly distrusted. Nothing is a better indication of the intensity of the imitative impulse.

Everything, even progress towards equality, is effected by imitation and by the imitation of superior classes. Before political and social equality between all classes of society was possible or even conceivable, it had to be established on a small scale in one of them. Now, it was first seen to occur on top. From Louis XI to Louis XVI the different grades of nobility which had formerly, in the time of great vassals and of pure feudalism, been separated by such impassable distances were steadily levelled, and, thanks to the crushing prestige of royalty and to the comparative multiplicity of the points of contact between all men of gentle birth, fusion was brought about even between the nobility of the sword and the nobility of the gown. Now, strange to say, while this levelling was being accomplished on top, the innumerable sections of the middle classes and the common people continued to hold aloof from one another with even intensified class vanity until the eve of ’89. Read Tocqueville for an enumeration, for example, of the different grades of upper, middle, and lower middle classes in a town of the ancient régime at this date. There was certainly more antagonism between the consuls and the petty merchants of the eighteenth century than between those of the Middle Ages. The apparent paradox may therefore be safely advanced that the real preparatory work in behalf of modern equality was carried on in the past, not by the middle classes, but by the nobility. In this respect, as well as in the diffusion of philosophic ideas and in the impetus that was given to industry through a taste for exotic fashions, aristocracy was the unconscious mother of modern times. Moreover, these causes are linked together. If the royal courts had not levelled the ranks of the nobility, the literary and, consequently, the philosophic, radiations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would not have darted forth, and fashion-imitation, the love of foreign-bred innovations, would never have prevailed over ancestor-imitation in the bosom of the ruling and influential caste. Consequently, the original centre of all these centres is the king.¹

Thus, whether the social organisation be theocratic, aristocratic, or democratic, the course of imitation always follows the same law. It proceeds, given equal distances, from superior to inferior, and, in the latter, from within to without. One essential point of difference, however, must be noted. When the standard-setting points of superiority are transmitted by heredity, as in the case of the ancient nobility and in the priesthood of a caste system, or communicated by consecration (a kind of fictitious heredity or adoption), as in the case of acquired nobility and of the Buddhist and Christian priesthood, they are inherent in the person himself considered under all his aspects. The supposedly superior individual is copied in all respects. He appears to copy no one below himself, and this is approximately true. The relation of the model to the copy is, consequently, almost one-sided. But when for this aristocracy based on the vital tie of real or fictitious affiliation an aristocracy of purely social factors, recruited by spontaneous choice, is substituted, prestige attaches only to the special aspect in which the individual is prominent. He is imitated in this respect only, all others are overlooked.

The man no longer exists who is imitated in every thing, and he who is most imitated himself imitates, in some particulars, some one of his imitators. Thus imitation, in becoming generalised, has also become mutualised and specialised.

5. It is not enough, however, to say that imitation spreads from above to below; I must be more definite about the concept of the superiority in question. Shall we say that it is always the higher political or economic classes who set the standard? It is not. At those times, for example, when power, and with power enhanced facility for acquiring wealth, is in the hands of the people’s representatives, the latter are desired to be rather than estimated to be superior by those who elect and elevate them. Now, the privilege of having one’s self reflected on all sides belongs to the kind of superiority which is believed in, not to that which is merely desired. In fact, to desire a man’s promotion is to realise that he is not already high up, and that fact alone often keeps him from having prestige. This is the reason why so many successful candidates have so little weight with their electors. But, in this case, the classes or persons who have real prestige are those classes that have had power and wealth up to a still recent period, even if they have actually been despoiled of them, or those persons who, through their eminent and timely talents, are on the road to fame and fortune. Again, when a man has been powerful or rich for a long time, he inevitably wins consideration through the conviction that gradually comes to people that he really deserves his advantages. So, in spite of everything, the two ideas of power and wealth are sure to be connected with that of social superiority.

They are connected, however, as effect to cause. It behooves us to go back to the cause, to learn what are the qualities which lead or have led men, or groups of men, to power and wealth and which make them the objects of the admiration, envy, and imitation of their neighbours. In primitive times they were physical vigour and skill, physical bravery; later, skill in war and eloquence in council; still later, æsthetic imagination, industrial ingenuity, scientific genius. In brief, the superiority which is imitated is the superiority which is understood;¹ and that which is understood is what is believed, or seen, to be conducive to benefits which are appreciated because they satisfy certain wants. I may say, parenthetically, that these wants are derived, to be sure, from organic life, but that their social mould and channel are made by the example of others. Sometimes these benefits are vast domains, great herds of cattle, numerous leuds or vassals seated around the immense tables of their over-lords, sometimes they are capital cities and a constituency of devoted electors. Again they may be men’s hopes of heaven and the credit they are supposed to have with great personages beyond the grave.

If I am asked, What is the series of social superiorities which takes place in the course of civilisation? I shall answer that it depends upon that series of social goods which are successively pursued under so many changing forms by the majority of men of a given epoch and country. Now, what impels and directs this latter series? It is the sequence of both mutually helpful and mutually hindering inventions and discoveries which present themselves one after the other to the human mind, in the irreversible, to a certain extent, and inevitable order that is indicated by social logic. The discovery of the advantage of cave dwellings, the invention of stone weapons, of bows and arrows, of bone needles, of fire from the friction of wood, etc. kindled for the first troglodytes their ideal of happiness,—a lucky hunt, fur garments, game (human, at times!) eaten in the recesses of a smoke-filled cave. Later on, the discovery of certain ideas of natural history and the important and immensely fruitful invention of domesticating animals brought a change of ideal; great herds of cattle under patriarchal supervision was the new dream. Then the discovery of the first elements of astronomy, the invention of domesticating plants, i. e., of agriculture, the discovery of metals and the invention of architecture made possible a dream of great domains peopled by slaves and dominated over by a palace, the model of houses to come. Finally, the discovery of the sciences, from the nascent physics of the Greeks and the babbling chemistry of the Egyptians up to our own learned treatises, and the invention of arts and industries, from the hymn to the drama or from the grindstone to the steam mill, made possible the gradual building up of the happiness of our millionaires, the piling up of their bank accounts or of their government or real-estate securities. So much for wealth. As for power, the same considerations apply in the succession of its historic forms.

In view of these facts, a definite answer shapes itself to the question we are concerned with. The qualities which make a man superior in any country and at any period are those which enable him to understand the group of discoveries and to make use of the group of inventions which have already appeared. Sometimes, quite often, in fact, it is some accidental or objective condition rather than personal qualities which enable an individual to make use of, or, for a time, monopolise the leading inventions of his day; and, in general, these two factors are in combination. Although the tribe or city where a progressive idea or a superior industrial process or a more powerful military engine happens to appear, may be inferior in race and culture, yet it will retain a monopoly of the novelty for a long time. It may have been due to such a change as this that the Turanians had the advantage throughout remote antiquity of being almost the only people to practise metallurgy. The prosperity of the Phœnicians is partly explained through the discovery on their shores of the little purple-producing shell-fish. From this a great maritime export-trade arose which was most timely in encouraging the natural bent of these Semitic peoples towards navigation. The first people to domesticate the elephant or horse must have derived immense advantage from them in war. Formerly, the mere fact of being the son of a father who was possessed of the natural qualities demanded by the civilisation of his day was an advantageous condition which stood in lieu of those qualities. The idea of hereditary nobility came about in this way.¹ Finally, when a given locality has long held the privilege of attracting to itself those individuals who are the best endowed from the point of view of contemporary ambition, a presumption of superiority attaches, as I have said before, to residence in that place, and this is one of the most favourable circumstances for the happy employment of the resources furnished by the civilisation of the time. In our own day, when science and industry are the great bodies of discoveries and inventions which we must appropriate in order to grow rich, it is advantageous to live in the great cities where scholars, inventors, and capitalists are concentrated. This is so much the case that it is often enough for a woman who is a newcomer in a provincial town, to be a Parisian, to set the style in the place. During the feudal period, when the art of war, which was then the unique source of territorial wealth, was the customary privilege of the lord of the castle, the castle inmate, however lowly his station, far outranked the citizen. This was not so in Italy, however. There the cities learned how to organise bodies of militia to keep the neighbouring castles under control. When the royal court came to be formed, the courtiers of Versailles totally eclipsed, for like reasons, the Notables of Paris, the royal favour having become the supreme prize.

We must see that social superiority always and everywhere consists of objective circumstances or of subjective traits which aid in the exploitation of existing discoveries and inventions. Now let us remove to one side the first of these two sources of superiority and turn our attention to the matter of subjective traits. Here, undoubtedly, the qualities which make a man, or a group of men, superior, are always bodily characteristics or personal qualities; nevertheless, the character of their superiority is wholly social, since it consists in their pre-eminent aptitude to carry out the objects of social thought. From the very beginnings of humanity, when physical force is supposed to have ruled superior, the successful savage was not the most vigorous one; he was the most agile one, the one most skilful in handling bow and club and sling, in cutting stone. Nowadays it is useless for a man to be muscular and well-proportioned; unless he also possesses that cerebral hypertrophy which was once abnormal and disastrous, but which is now normally exacted by the exigencies of our civilisation, he is condemned to defeat. Between these two extremes there is, perhaps, no peculiarity of race or temperament, no morbid or monstrous trait which has not had its day of glory and expansion. Were we not surprised by the bestial although royal and authoritative type of the recently unearthed Rameses the Great? How many of our instinctive criminals would have been heroes in other days! How many madmen would have had statues and altars erected to them!

But through this oscillating multiformity, which explains the partly fortuitous character of inventions and discoveries, it is easy to remark, on the whole, the gradual decline of aptitudes that are muscular rather than nervous and the concomitant progress of aptitudes that are nervous rather than muscular. The countryman is muscular; the citizen is nervous; the same distinction exists between the civilised and the uncivilised man. Why is this? There are two reasons. In the first place, social logic eliminates a smaller number of contradictory discoveries and inventions than the number of the consistent ones which it accumulates; and the resulting excess of complexity necessitates a more highly developed cerebral capacity and a more perfect cerebral organisation. In the second place, the accumulation of mechanical inventions puts an increasing number of animal, chemical, and physical forces at the disposition of man and frees him day by day from having to reinforce them with muscular labour.¹

Racial or individual differentiation is, we see, like a musical instrument upon which inventive genius is free to play under the general guidance of social logic. This has an important corollary for historians. If you are seeking the cause of a people’s prosperity or decay you must look for it in the peculiarities of its organism which rendered it particularly fit to make use of contemporaneous knowledge, or in the appearance of new knowledge which it was not physically able to utilise as it had its old knowledge. If the elements of a civilisation are given and you wish to describe with accuracy its parent race, on its mental side, at any rate, the same principle will serve as a guide. In this way we have been able, instinctively, to describe the psychology of the primitive Etruscan or Babylonian. A people who were marvellously gifted for the chase and whose very agility and more brilliant parts unfitted them for pastoral occupations, had inevitably, in spite of their vigour, to succumb in a pastoral period, just as nowadays, in our industrial cities the old-fashioned poetic or artistic temperament succumbs. In general, the advent of some new race corresponds to every fresh influx of important, civilisation-shaping inventions. It may be because the established race was born without the traits required in the exploitation of the rising ideas, or, because, although it may once have have had these traits, it has come to lose them while it was controlled by its old ideas. Every established civilisation ends by creating its own race. Our own civilisation, for example, is engaged in shaping for itself the American of the future.

Let me conclude with the observation that the social peaks, the classes or nations which are most imitated by others, are those within which the greatest amount of reciprocal imitation goes on. Great modern cities are characterised by the intensity of their imitation of internal things; it is proportionate to the density of their population and to the multiform multiplicity of the relations of their inhabitants. This, as M. Bordier justly remarks, accounts for the “epidemic and contagious” nature of their fashions and vices, as well as of their maladies and of all the striking phenomena which occur in them. Formerly, the aristocratic classes, especially the royal courts, were distinguished by this same characteristic.¹

6. The law which I have been developing is certainly very simple; but I think that if we do not lose it from view certain points of history which have hitherto been obscure may be cleared up. To cite one only, what is more shadowy than the formation of the feudal system during the Merovingian and Carolingian period? In spite of the service of Fustel de Coulanges in throwing light upon this subject by revealing the Roman origins of many alleged German institutions, many sides of the question are still obscure, and I certainly do not pretend to scatter all their shadows. But I take the liberty of pointing out to historians who are throwing light upon these dark places that among other things they may have failed to sufficiently reckon with the examples set by the Merovingian king and the inevitable radiations of these examples. The majority of historians have not taken the trouble to notice that the feudal tie of the lord to his vassal as it was constituted and generalised in the ninth and tenth centuries is strangely like the relation between the king and his antrustions as it existed in some of the royal palaces during the fifth and sixth centuries. If historians have noted this fact, they have not classified it properly. The antrustion is devoted body and soul to his king, like a vassal to his lord, in return for the protection which shields him. In the beginning, to be sure, the antrustionship is temporary, but it soon becomes hereditary and proprietary as well. M. Glasson writes that “land grants were at an early time attached to the antrustionship, and this dignity was transmitted from father to son long before the capitulary of Kiersy recognised the hereditary character of benefices and offices.” Thus, the two main features of feudalism, inheritance and land-tenure, existed in the case of the antrustion before existing in the case of the beneficiary. Is it not natural to see in the latter a manifolded copyist of the former, and for the same reason to consider the beneficiaries of beneficiaries, the petty vassals of a great vassal, as new imitative editions of the same model?¹ It is a controverted question,” as M. Glasson puts it, “whether the king alone had antrustions or whether the great nobles were also entitled to have them. In my opinion no decisive reason can be given on one side or the other.” But how can we admit that the nobles could have withstood the desire to have the same kind of body-guards as those of their monarch? Call to mind La Fontaine’s line: “Every petty prince has his ambassadors.” The oath of homage and allegiance is another characteristic of the feudal tie; and is it not a multiplied copy of the oath of fidelity pledged to the Merovingian kings by their subjects? There is nothing analogous to this oath under the Roman Empire. It would have been very surprising if this peculiar custom had not made an impression, and if, later on, when suzerains had come to exact the same kind of an oath from their followers, it had not been the thing to suggest this idea to them. Finally, is not the origin of most of the feudal rights explained quite naturally by certain of the imposts or rents that were the dues of the Merovingian monarch? M. Glasson says, for example, that “the custom of making gifts to the king under certain circumstances, notably on the occasion of fêtes or marriages, already existed under the Merovingians. . . . The first Carolingians regulated this custom and changed these gifts into a direct tax.”¹ Now, later on “under feudalism, the nobles exacted similar gifts from their vassals,”² on precisely the same kind of occasions. Is not this significant? Why should not these royal examples have been imitated when it is known that so many others were imitated, especially those which help to explain to us the characteristics taken on by mediæval serfdom? It has been asked how it was that the serf of the Merovingian period, from whom his master could exact almost arbitrarily any service whatsoever, came to evolve into the serf of the eleventh century from whom only a fixed quit-rent could be demanded? The answer has been made in drawing attention to the fact that this substitution of a fixed for an arbitrary arrangement began by being an innovation in the royal and ecclesiastical domains. To quote again from the learned author I have already cited, “the nobles imitated the Church, the abbeys, and the king in all their acts, and the quit-rent tended to become a fixed charge everywhere.”

Fustel de Coulanges is too clear-sighted to have altogether misinterpreted the importance of the antrustions. In his Origines du système féodal, where he studies minutely the Roman, Gothic, and German sources of feudalism, he dedicates a few pages, but only a few, to the king’s trust in the midst of long chapters upon the Roman precarium, upon benefices, patronage, etc. It is a pity, in my humble opinion, that he puts the first of these subjects in the same or, in fact, in a considerably lower rank than the others, and I think that he would have escaped this error had he reckoned upon the universal tendency of men to copy one another, and, above all, had he considered the particularly contagious nature of royal example in all periods of history. To be sure, the Roman precarium and even the various kinds of benefice and patronage, Germanic, Roman, or Gallic, are merely modes of land appropriation and of personal subjection; they are without any military character and, in general, they lack the religious sanction of the oath. Those customs are undoubtedly the conditions and even the very roots of the feudal tie, but they do not constitute it. They are too trivial and too widespread among the most diverse nations to explain adequately one of the most original forms of society that the world has ever seen. Only when these different sources met in a single current in the court of the Merovingian king, in a military and sacramental setting, did the germ of feudalism really expand. Our eminent historian seems to almost recognise this in the following remarkable passage (p. 332): “We already find here,” he says, in concluding his over-short chapter on the royal trust, “certain features which will persist in feudalism. In the first place we find as essentials, the oath and the contract; we also find that the oath is taken in its characteristic form, upon the hand of the chief, sword at side. Finally, we find certain terms which are also characteristic, the terms trusty man [fidèle], friend, peer, and, in particular, the Germanic term which corresponds to the term man [homme].” The italics are mine. Truly, I cannot conceive why the author did not attach more importance later on to such striking analogies. We shall reread his book in vain to find anything in all his careful analyses of other institutions which is anywhere near as closely suggestive of feudalism.

Only one feature, I repeat, is lacking in this picture of perfect resemblance. The title of antrustion is purely individual, it is not inherited. A man becomes a king’s antrustion by spontaneous agreement. The title of vassal in the tenth century is, on the contrary, hereditary, and although the necessity of new investiture with every generation, through the plighting of a new oath of homage and allegiance, is recognised, as a matter of fact it merely testifies to the original voluntary and contractual nature of a tie which has eventually come to be innate and hereditary. This difference is explained by another law of imitation which we are about to discuss, the law by which fashion entrenches itself as custom, i. e., the hereditary consolidation of what began by spreading itself contagiously from contemporary to contemporary.

After all, the preceding historical hypothesis is only offered as a specimen of the services which, in more skilful and scholarly hands, might be rendered by the application of the general ideas which we have been developing.