PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

IN this work I have endeavoured to point out as clearly as possible the purely social side of human phenomena, as distinct from their vital and physical characteristics. It just happens, however, that the point of view which is helpful in noting this distinction is the very one which presents the greatest number of the closest and most natural analogies between the facts of society and the facts of nature. Many years ago I formulated and partly developed in the Revue philosophique my fundamental thought,—“the key to almost every lock,” as one of our greatest philosophers of history graciously wrote to me;—and as the plan of the present work was already in my mind at that time, many of those articles have been readily incorporated as chapters of this book.¹ I am but setting them in the place for which they were originally intended. Sociologists who have already honoured these fragmentary expositions with their notice, now have the opportunity, if they desire it, to criticise my point of view in its entirety. Any harsh treatment of myself I will forgive, providing my thought be received with leniency. This is not at all impossible. In fact, my conception might have a grievance against me just as seed might complain of its soil. But then I hope that through this publication it will reach someone better fitted to develop it than I am.

I have tried, then, to outline a pure sociology. This is tantamount to saying a general sociology. The laws of such a science, as I understand it, apply to every society, past, present, or future, just as the laws of general physiology apply to every species, living, extinct, or conceivable. The simplicity of such principles equals their generality, and I grant that it is much easier to lay them down and even to prove them, than to follow them through the labyrinth of their particular applications. Their formulation is nevertheless necessary.

Formerly, a philosophy of history or nature meant a narrow system of historical or scientific interpretation. It sought to explain the whole group or series of historic facts or natural phenomena, as presented in some inevitable order or sequence. Such attempts were bound to fail. The actual can be explained only as a part of the vast contingent, that is, of that which, given certain conditions, is necessary. In this it swims, like a star in infinite space. The very idea of law rests upon the conception of such a firmament of facts.

Given certain unknown primordial conditions, existence was, of course, bound to be as it is. But why were these conditions given and no others? There is something irrational here at the bottom of the inevitable. Moreover, in the worlds of life and matter, as well as in that of society, the actual seems to be a mere fragment of the potential. Witness the character of the heavens, dotted arbitrarily with suns and nebulæ. Witness the strange nature of certain faunas and floras. Witness the distorted and disjointed aspects of those societies that lie heaped up side by side under social ruins and abortions. In this respect, as in many others which I shall indicate in passing, the three great divisions of existence are very much alike.

Chapter V, on the Logical Laws of Imitation, is merely the toothing-stone of a future work which is intended to complete this one. A proper development of the subject would have led me beyond the limits of this volume.

The ideas which I have presented may supply new solutions for the political or other questions upon which we now stand divided. But it seemed to me that it was unnecessary to undertake to deduce them. It would, moreover, have taken me away from my immediate subject. Nor will the class of readers for whom I am writing reproach me for resisting the charm of such concrete subjects. Besides, I could not have succumbed to it without going beyond the limits of this work.

One word more in justification of my dedication. I am not the pupil, or even the disciple, of Cournot. I have never met him. But I take it as one of the happy chances of my life that I read a great deal of this writer after I left college. I have often thought that he needed only to have been born in England or Germany and to have had his work translated into a French teeming with solecisms to be famous among us all. Above all, I shall never forget that at a dreary period of my youth, when I was suffering from my eyes, and limited of necessity to one book, it was Cournot who saved me from mental starvation. But I shall certainly be ridiculed unless I add another much less disinterested sentiment to this old-fashioned one of intellectual gratitude. If my book fail of a welcome,—a contingency for which a philosopher must always be prepared in France, even if he have hitherto had but to congratulate himself upon the good will of the public,—this dedication will prove a consolation to me. Cournot was the Sainte-Beuve of philosophic criticism; possessed of originality and discrimination, he was a thinker of universal erudition as well as insight; he was a profound geometrician, an unparalleled logician, and as an economist he was the unrecognised precursor of modern economists; to sum it all up, Cournot was an Auguste Comte, purified, condensed, and refined. In realising, then, that such a man continued to be obscure during his lifetime, and that even since his death he has not been very well known, in realising this how could I ever dare to complain of not having had greater success?