NOTES

INTRODUCTION BY DR. HENRY FRANKLIN GIDDINGS

1 The Criminal, p. 42.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

1 They have been modified, or amplified, as Chapters I, III, IV, V. Chapter I was published in September, 1882; Chapter III, in 1884; Chapter IV, in October and November, 1883; Chapter V, in 1888. Several other sociological articles were published in the same collection and were also intended for future revision, but it has seemed unnecessary to embody them in this volume.

In another work, La Philosophie pénale, I have developed the application of my point of view to social crime and punishment. My Criminalité comparée is an earlier attempt in the same direction.

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

1 Or of the same brain, if it is a question of imitation of self; for memory or habit, its two branches, must be connected, in order to be well understood, with imitation of others, the only kind of imitation which we are concerned with here. The psychological is explained by the social just because the social sprang from the psychological.

1 Dogma, that is to say, any idea, religious or otherwise, political, for example, which takes root in the mind of any social unit through the pressure of his environment.

CHAPTER I.—UNIVERSAL REPETITION

1 Among the higher species of ants, according to M. Espinas, “the individual develops an astonishing initiative.” [Des Sociétés animales, p. 223; Alfred Espinas, Paris, 1877. The italics are M. Tarde’s—Tr.]. How do the labours and migrations of ant-swarms begin? Is it through a common, instinctive, and spontaneous impulse which starts from all the associates at the same time and under the pressure of outward circumstances which are experienced simultaneously by all? On the contrary, a single ant begins by leaving the others and undertaking the work; then it strikes its neighbours with its antennæ to summon their aid, and the contagion of imitation does the rest.

2 [Ibid, p. 272.—Tr.]

1 “Scientific knowledge need not necessarily take its starting-point from the most minute hypothetical and unknown things. It begins wherever matter forms units of a like order which can be compared with and measured by one another, and wherever such units combine as units of a higher order and thus serve in themselves as a standard of comparison for the latter.” (Von Naegeli. Address at the congress of German naturalists in 1877).

1 When I speak of the invention of gunpowder, of the telegraph, of railroads, etc., I mean, of course, the group of accumulated and yet distinguishable and numerable inventions which have been necessary for the production of gunpowder, or telegraphy, or railroads.

1 Since this was written I have outlined a theory of invention in my Logique sociale (F. Alcan, 1895).

1 I must not be accused of the absurd idea of denying in all of this the influence of race upon social facts But I think that on account of the number of its acquired characteristics, race is the outcome, and not the source, of these facts, and only in this hitherto ignored sense does it appear to me to come within the special province of the sociologist.

1 The objection may be raised that increasing or diminishing series as shown in the continuous statistics of a given number of years, are never regular, and are often upset by checks and reactions. Without dwelling upon this point, I may say that, in my opinion, these checks and reactions are always indicative of the interference of some new invention, which, in its turn, is spread abroad. I explain diminishing series in the same way, and in considering them we must be careful not to infer that at the end of a certain time, after it has been imitated more and more, a social thing tends to become disimitated On the contrary, its tendency to invade the world continues unchanged, and if there be, not any disimitation, but any continuous falling off of imitation, its rivals are alone to blame.

1 The likeness which I have pointed out between heredity and imitation is verified even in the relation of each of these two forms of universal Repetition to its special form of Creation or Invention. As long as a society is young, vigorous, and progressive, inventions, new projects, and successful initiatives follow one another in rapid succession, and hasten social changes; then, when the inventive sap is exhausted, imitation still continues upon its course. India, China, and the late Roman Empire are examples in point. Now this is also true of the world of life. For example, M. Gaudry says in referring to the crinoïdea (echinoderms) [Enchaînment du monde animal (secondary period)]: “They have lost that marvellous diversity of form which was one of the luxuries of the primary period; no longer having the power of much self-mutation, they still retain that of producing individuals like themselves.” But this is not always so. In the geological epochs, certain families or types of animals disappeared after their most brilliant period. This was the case with the ammouite, that wonderful fossil which flourished in such exuberant variety, during the secondary period, and which was, subsequently, annihilated forever. This was also the case with those brief and brilliant civilisations which, like ephemeral stars, glittered for a day in the sky of history, and were then suddenly extinguished. I refer to the Persia of Cyrus, to some of the Greek republics, to the south of France at the time of the war of the Albigenses, to the Italian republics, etc. When the creative power of these civilisations was worn out, not even the power to reproduce themselves remained. In fact, in most cases, they would have been precluded from doing so by their own violent destruction.

1 If, as Ribot thinks, memory is only the cerebral form of nutrition, if, on the other hand, nutrition is only an internal generation, finally, if Imitation is nothing but social memory (see my Logique sociale on this subject), it follows that there is not only an analogy, as I have shown, between Generation and Imitation, but a fundamental identity. Imitation, the elementary and persistent social phenomenon, would be the social sequel and equivalent of Generation taken in its most comprehensive sense to include Nutrition.

CHAPTER II.—SOCIAL RESEMBLANCES AND IMITATION

1 In fact, there are many striking points of comparison. Civilisation in America, as in Europe, has passed successively “from the age of stone to the age of bronze by the same methods and under the same forms. The teocalli of Mexico correspond to the pyramids of Egypt; the mounds of North America may be compared to the tumuh of Brittany and Scythia; the pylônes of Peru reproduce those of Etruria and Egypt” (Clemence Royer, Revue scientifique, July 31, 1886). It is a still more surprising fact that the only affinities of the Basque tongue seem to be with certain of the American languages. The bearing of these resemblances is weakened by the fact that the points of comparison are not drawn from two given civilisations, but, more artificially, from a large number of different civilisations in both the Old World and the New.

1 The phenomenon of mimicry receives more attention. Hitherto this enigma has been undecipherable, but if the key to it were really given by natural selection, it might be explained by the ordinary laws of heredity, by the hereditary fixation and accumulation of the individual variations most favourable to the welfare of the species which, in this way, comes to take on the lineaments of another as a disguise.

2 The coincidence is the more singular, too, because the tl in teotl may be ignored, since this combination of consonants is the regular termination of Mexican words Téo and théô (in the dative) have absolutely the same sense and the same sound.

1 Although customs of mutilation, circumcision, for example, tattooing, or cutting the hair, in sign of religious or political subordination, are found in the most distant parts of the globe, in America and in Polynesia, as well as in the Old World; although the totems of the South American savages remind us, if only a little, of the coats of arms of our mediæval knights, etc; these coincidences and resemblances merely prove that actions are governed by beliefs, and that beliefs are largely suggested to man through the phenomena of external nature and through the innate tendencies of his own nature. The depths of human nature are the same everywhere, and in the phenomena of external nature there is, in spite of climatic variation, more similarity than dissimilarity. I admit that such analogies may not be caused by imitation. But they are at any rate only gross and indefinite. They are without sociological significance, just as the fact that insects are possessed of limbs, like vertebrates, and of eyes and wings, like birds, is insignificant from a biological point of view. On the other hand, although the bird’s wing looks very different from the wing of the bat, they are really part of the same evolution and are possessed of the same past and of the possibility of experiencing the same future. In their successive transformations, these organs correspond in an endless number of particulars. They are homologous. Whereas, the bird’s wing never has anything in common with the wing of the insect, except during one phase of their very unlike developments.

Did the same ceremonies and the same religious meaning attach to circumcision among the Aztecs as among the Hebrews? On the contrary, there was as much difference between them as between the Aztec rite of confession and ours. And yet this matter of ceremonies is the important thing from the social point of view; for it is the special part of the social environment which is directed by individual activity. Besides, this part is constantly on the increase.

1 They are all the more apt to be simple ideas, ideas exacting but a slight effort of the imagination. This is true of some of the strangest freaks of custom. For example, in reading the work of M. Jametel upon China, I was surprised to see an account of the custom of eructation practised as an act of courtesy at the close of a meal. Now, according to M Garnier and M Hugonnet (La Grèce nouvelle, 1889), the same ceremony is observed by modern Greeks. In both countries, evidently, the desire to give ample proof of repletion had suggested this ridiculous, although natural, custom.

2 The same needs, for example, both in the Old World and in the New, prompted the ideas of domesticating the ox and taming the chamois in the former, and in the latter, of taming the bison, the buffalo, and the llama. (See Bourdeau, Conquête du monde animal, p. 212)

1 In politics they are called questions: the Eastern question, the social question, etc.

2 Sometimes the same solution is adopted almost everywhere, although the problem may have lent itself to other solutions. That is, you may say, because the choice in question is the most natural one. True, but is not this the very reason, perhaps, why, although it was disclosed only in one place, and not everywhere at the same time, it ended by spreading in all directions? For example, almost all primitive peoples think of the future abode of the wicked as subterranean and of that of the good as celestial. The similarity of such conceptions is often minute According to Tylor, the Salish Indians of Oregon believe that the bad dwell after death in a place of eternal snow, where they “are tantalised by the sight of game which they cannot kill, and water which they cannot drink” [Primitive Culture, II, 84, Edward B. Tylor, London, 1871.—Tr]

1 In a very interesting article in the Revue des Deux Mondes of May 1, 1890, M. Goblet d’Alviella aptly comments upon the rapidity and facility of the circulation of religious symbols by means of travellers, of slavery, and of currency, the latter of which is a veritable system of moving bas-reliefs. This is true also of political symbols. The two-headed eagle, for example, on the arms of both the Emperor of Austria and the Czar of Russia has come down to them from the ancient Germanic empire. It was brought there through the Eastern expedition of Frederick the Second in the thirteenth century, when he borrowed it from the Turks. Furthermore, M. Goblet d’Alviella says that there are reasons for thinking that the astonishing likeness between this two-headed eagle and the eagle which is also two-headed and which figures upon the most ancient bas-reliefs of Mesopotamia, is due to a series of imitations. Note in this same article the reference to the widespread imitation of the Gamma cross as a luck piece It is probable, on the other hand, that the idea of using the cross to symbolise the god of the air or the compass-card arose spontaneously and not through imitation in Mesopotamia and in the Aztec empire.

1 In the long run, however, as we shall see later on, the exclusive imitation of custom will have to prevail over the proselyting imitation of fashion As a result of this law, the disintegration of mankind into distinct states and civilisations may very possibly be the final stage of society Only, these civilisations will be less in number and greater in scale than those of past or present times.

1 [Histoire de Part, 1, 574, Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, Paris, 1882.—Tr.]

2 [Ibid, II, 575—Tr.]

1 Do we find anything analogous to the obelisk outside of Egypt? It is because obelisks do not answer to a need that is for the most part natural, like doors or windows or like columns in so far as they are supports, but to a need that is almost entirely social.

CHAPTER III.—WHAT IS A SOCIETY?

1 I should be sorry to have the reader find any implicit criticism in these lines of the work of M. Espinas upon “Animal Societies” That work is redeemed by too many true and profound insights to be arraigned for the confusion referred to in the text.

1 It is a mistake to think that the rule of ceremony, of ceremonial government, to use Spencer’s term, is on the decline. At the side of outgrown conventions or dying-out ceremonial, vigorous ceremonies arise and multiply under the name of conventions.

1 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when military and civil populations were radically unlike, the standards of the time justified the perpetration of every kind of outrage, of rape, pillage, massacre, etc., by campaigning troops upon either friendly or hostile civilians. But among themselves soldiers were more sparing of one another.

1 In his remarkable work on Cinematics, Reuleaux, the German director of the Industrial Academy of Berlin, observes that industrial progress demonstrates more clearly every day that economists err in attaching undue importance to the division of labour. It is the coordination which results from it that deserves the chief praise. This is true also of “the division of organic labour”; without an admirable organic harmony, it would not be in the slightest degree a step in vital progress. “The principle of machine work,” M. Reuleaux remarks in particular, “contradicts, in part, at any rate, the principle of division of labour. . . . In the most improved modern factories, the men who tend the different machines are shifted from one place to another in order to break the monotony of their work.” An increasing specialisation in the work of the machine produces the opposite result in the work of the mechanic. Otherwise, as Reuleaux observes, the workman would become more mechanical as the machine became a better workman.

1 Both lawyers and physicians vie with fellow professionals for public patronage, but, in the legal profession, community of work tempers the heat and bitterness of competition and selfish resentment and necessarily develops certain fraternal relations. Among physicians, on the contrary, nothing takes the edge off their struggle and rivalry; for as a rule they do not work together. Consequently, paroxysms of professional hatred and animosity characterise the medical fraternity, and, I may add, all bodies of men, such as notaries, pharmacists, or merchants, who work independently of one another.

1 Romanes devotes one very interesting chapter in his Mental Evolution in Animals to the influence of imitation upon the origin and development of instincts. This influence is much greater and more farspread than we suppose. It is not only the related and even the unrelated individuals of the same species who copy one another,—many song birds learn to sing only through the teaching of their mothers or companions.—individuals of different species as well borrow both the useful and the unmeaning peculiarities of one another. Here we see the deep-seated desire to imitate for the sake of imitation, the desire which is the original source of all our arts. A mocking-bird can imitate a cock’s crow so accurately that the very hens are deceived. Darwin thought that some hive-bees that he had observed had borrowed from the humble-bees their ingenious method of sucking the nectar of certain flowers by boring their under sides. Certain birds and insects and animals are creatures of genius, and genius even in the animal world can count upon some measure of success. Only, these social attempts prove abortive for lack of language. Not man only, but every animal, reaches out according to his degree of mentality to a social life as the sine qua non of mental development. Why is this? Because the cerebral function, the mind, is distinguished from other functions in not being a simple adaptation of definite means to definite ends, but in being an adaptation to many indeterminate ends which depend more or less upon chance to be made definite through the same far-reaching means by which they are in the first instance pursued, namely, through imitation of outside things. This infinite outside, this outer world which is pictured, represented. imitated, by sensation and intelligence, is primarily universal nature in its continual and irresistible action by suggestion upon the animal’s brain and muscular system; later on, however, it is pre-eminently the social environment.

1 While correcting the proofs of my second edition, I read in the Revue de métaphysique a brief review of an article of Mr. Baldwin’s which appeared in 1894 in Mind under the title of Imitation. A Chapter in the Natural History of Consciousness. “Mr Baldwin,” writes his reviewer, “wishes to define and generalise the theories of Tarde. Biological imitation, or imitation which is primarily subcortical, is a circular reaction of the nerves, that is, it reproduces its own stimulus. Psychological or cortical imitation is habit (expressed in the principle of identity) and accommodation (expressed in the principle of sufficient reason). It is, in short, sociological, plastic, and only secondarily subcortical.”

1 At the time when the foregoing and the following considerations first appeared in print, in November, 1884, in the Revue philosophique, hypnotic suggestion was but barely spoken of and the idea of universal social suggestion, an idea which has since been so strongly emphasised by Bernheim and others, was cast up against me as an untenable paradox Nothing could be commoner than this view at present.

2 This old-fashioned term shows that at the time of the first publication of this passage the word hypnotism had not as yet been altogether substituted for somnambulism.

1 The Pathology of Mind [p. 69. Henry Maudsley, M. D., New York, 1890. The italics are the author’s.—Tr.].

2 On this point I need correction. Sympathy is certainly the primary source of sociability and the hidden or overt soul of every kind of imitation, even of imitation which is envious and calculating, even of imitation of an enemy. Only, it is certain that sympathy itself begins by being one-sided instead of mutual.

1 Science, then, is the source of every social revolution. It is this extra-social research which opens for us the windows of the social phalanstery in which we live and lets in the light of the universe. How many phantoms are scattered by this light! But then, too, how many perfectly preserved mummies it crumbles into dust dust!

2 In his profound Asiatic studies of the religious and social customs of the Far East, Sir Alfred Lyall (who seems to have studied on the spot the actual formation of tribes and clans in certain parts of India) attributes a preponderating influence in primitive societies to the individual action of men of note “To borrow Carlyle’s words,” he says, “the perplexed jungle of primitive society springs out of many roots, but the hero is the tap-root from which in a great degree all the rest were nourished and grown. In Europe, where the landmarks of nationalities are fixed, and the fabric of civilisation firmly entrenched, people are often inclined to treat as legendary the enormous part in the foundation of their race or institutions attributed by primitive races to their heroic ancestor. Yet it may be difficult to overrate the impression which must have been produced by daring and successful exploits upon the primitive world, where the free impulsive play of a great man’s forces is little controlled by artificial barriers. . . . In such times, whether a group which is formed upon the open surface of society shall spread out into a clan or tribe, or break up prematurely, seems to depend very much upon the strength and energy of its founder” [Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social, p 168, Sir Alfred C. Lyall, K. C. B., C. I. E., second edition, London, 1834—Tr.].

1 [Mental Pathology, p. 68—Tr.]

2 This view agrees with the master thought developed by M. Paulhan in his profoundly thoughtful work upon mental activity. (Alcan, 1889.)

CHAPTER IV.—WHAT IS HISTORY? ARCHÆOLOGY AND STATISTICS

1 If they are imitated, it is against the wish of their authors, as was the case, for example, with the turning movement of Ulm which the Germans copied so skilfully against the nephew of Napoleon.

1 As an example of the indirect influence of imitation upon invention, we know that as a result of the growing fashion in France of taking water-cures, the advantage (?) of discovering new mineral springs was realised, and between the years 1838 and 1863 the waters of two hundred and thirty-four new springs were discovered or collected.

1 The character of our pre-existing wants and purposes does not alone influence or determine us in choosing the thoughts and acts, the creeds and careers, which we are always copying from others. The laws of respective countries, the prohibition of a certain industry, for example, or free trade, or obligatory instruction in a given branch of knowledge, are also factors. But laws act upon imitation in the same way, at bottom, as wants and purposes. They both rule over us, and the only difference in their rule is that the one is an outward master and the other an inward tyrant. Moreover, laws are only the expression of the ruling wants and purposes of the governing class at a given time, and these wants and purposes may be always explained in the way that I have already indicated.

1 [Lectures on the Early History of Institutions, p. 225, Sir Hemy Sumner Maine, K. C. S. I, LL D, F. R. S, New York, 1875.—Tr.]

1 At first sight the striking similarity of the axes and arrowheads, and the other flint tools and weapons, which were discovered on both the old and the new continent, might seem to be the result of a mere coincidence, which the identity of human wants in war, hunting clothing, etc, would sufficiently explain. But we already know the objections which could be raised against this explanation. Moreover, we must note the fact that polished axes, arrowheads, and even idols of jade and jadeite, stones that were absolutely unknown throughout the American continent, have been found in Mexico. Is not this a proof that during the stone age the germs of civilisation were carried over from the Old World to the New?. The event of such an importation in later periods is doubtful (see M. de Nadaillac, Amérique préhistorique, p. 542).

1 I know that the curiosity of the antiquarian is often vain and puerile. Even the greatest among them, men like Schliemann, seem more bent upon discovering something relating to a celebrated individual, to a Hector or Priam or Agamemnon, than upon following out the course of the principal inventions of the past. But the personal aim and motive of the workers is one thing, the net gain and specific fruit of their work, another.

1 According to the statistics of railroads, omnibuses, excursion steamers, etc., their receipts diminish regularly every Friday. This points to the very widespread, although much weakened, prejudice about the danger of undertaking anything at all on that day of the week. If we followed the variations in this periodic diminution from year to year, the gradual decline of the absurd belief in question might be easily calculated.

1 It may be that universal suffrage is of no value except on one of its sides, a side hitherto overlooked. It has decided value as an intermittent study in political statistics, through which a nation is made conscious of the changes in its desires and opinions in vital matters. To work under the conditions which are required for the calculation of probabilities, this study must be based upon very large numbers. Hence the necessity for extending the franchise as much as possible, and, especially, of absolutely universalising so-called universal suffrage. (On this subject, see an article published in my Études pénales et sociales).

1 At the same time, they tend to entrench themselves, and their progress extensively hastens their progress intensively. Let us note, incidentally, that there is no past or present enthusiasm or fanaticism of historic importance that cannot be explained through this interaction of the imitation of self with the imitation of others.

1 This increase is not peculiar to the nineteenth century. M. Delahante says (Une famille de finances au XVIII^e siècle) that under the ancient régime “the ferme générale brought in to the government a steadily increasing revenue of from one hundred to one hundred and sixty millions. [I, 195, Paris, 1880—Tr.]

1 When a belief or desire has ceased to spread, it can nevertheless continue to send down roots into its circumscribed field. Take, for example, a religion, or a revolutionary doctrine, after its period of conquest. Besides, a gradual taking-root of this kind presents, like the gradual expansion which it follows or accompanies, certain well-defined and analogous phases. In the beginning, when belief is still contested, it is conscious judgment; just as nascent desire is, for the same reason, purpose or volition. Subsequently, thanks to an unanimity which grows and which strengthens the convictions and volitions of each individual, judgment passes over into principle or dogma or almost unconscious quasi-perception, and purpose, into pure passion or desire Finally, dogmatic quasi-perception, finding itself more and more jostled by the direct perceptions of opposing and stronger senses, ceases to gain in strength, and acquired desire, coming into greater and greater opposition with certain innate and more energetic desires, is arrested, in its turn, in its downward movement into the depths of the heart.

1 Or else the drop is only apparent. Under the ancient régime, the consumption of tobacco was continually increasing, just as it is at present. This fact was proved by the steady increase of the taxes collected under the fermes générales From thirteen millions in 1730 there was a rise to twenty-six millions in 1758, when there was a sudden drop in the receipts. It seemed at first to point to a restriction of the consumption, but it was then shown that the revenue was simply the victim of a fraud that had been organised on an immense scale. See on this subject M. Delahante’s book, Une famille de finance au XVIII^e siècle. II. 312. and the following. To return to the advance in the consumption of tobacco, it increased from thirteen millions in 1730 to seventy-four millions in 1835, and then to one hundred and fifty-three millions in 1855, and to two hundred and ninety millions in 1875 And yet this rate tends to slacken. It is remarkable that the American Indians who taught us the use of tobacco, have recently altogether lost the habits of tobacco and snuff.

1 According to Burckhardt, Florence and Venice must have been the cradle of statistics “Fleets, armies, power and political influence, fall under the debit and credit of a trader’s ledger” [The Civilization of the Period of the Renaissance in Italy, 1, 97, Jacob Burckhardt. English translation by S. G. C. Middlemore, London, 1878—Tr.]. We find detailed statistics in Milan dating from 1288. In reality, embryonic statistics must have always existed in even the most ignorant and negligent states, just as there are rudimentary senses in the very lowest animals.

CHAPTER V.—THE LOGICAL LAWS OF IMITATION

1 Philologists all recognise the immense rôle played by analogy in their science. See Sayce in particular on this point.

1 See his Essais de linguistique evolutionniste, previously cited.

1 Curtius, the historian, has borrowed this expression from his brother, the philologist. See his History of Greece [I, 24, English translation by A. W. Ward, M. A., London, 1868—Tr.].

2 We also know that when one of many rival dialects like those, for example, of Greece or of mediæval France, succeeds in supplanting its competitors and in crushing them back into the rank of patois, this privilege is not always and never altogether due to its intrinsic merits. It owes it primarily to political triumphs, and to the real or fancied superiority of the province in which it was first spoken. It was thanks to the prestige of Paris that the speech of the Isle of France became the French language. We may note, in passing, that the laws of imitation serve to explain both the inward transformations of a language and its outward diffusion.

1 I take the liberty of referring the reader, if he be a psychologist, to two articles which I published in August and September, 1880, in the Revue philosophique upon belief and desire and the possibility of measuring them. These articles were republished unrevised in my Essais et mélanges sociologiques. Since then my ideas on this subject have been somewhat modified. But let me state in what respects. At present I realise that I may have somewhat exaggerated the rôle of belief and desire in individual psychology, and I no longer affirm that these two aspects of the ego are the only things in us which are susceptible of addition and diminution. On the other hand, I now attribute to them a greater importance in social psychology. We may admit that there are other quantities in the soul; we may concede to the psycho-physicists, for example, in spite of M. Bergson’s remarkable study on the Données immédiates de la conscience—which conforms so well in other respects to my own point of view on this subject—that the intensity of sensations, considered apart from their relation to reason, and apart from the amount of attention which is bestowed upon them, changes in degree without changing in nature, and that it therefore lends itself to experimental measurement. But it is nevertheless true that, from the social standpoint, belief and desire bear a unique character that is well adapted to distinguish them from simple sensation. This character consists in the fact that the contagion of mutual example re-enforces beliefs and desires that are alike, and weakens or strengthens, according to circumstances, beliefs and desires that are unlike, among all those individuals who experience them at the same time and who are conscious of so experiencing them. Whereas, although a visual or auditory sensation may be felt in a theatre, for example, in the midst of a crowd attentive to the same concert or spectacle, it is in no way modified by the simultaneity of the analogous impressions experienced by the surrounding public. From certain astounding historical occurrences we may infer how intense a man’s belief or desire may become, when it is also experienced by everybody else around him. For example, even in the depraved but still credulous Italy of the Renaissance, epidemics of repentance burst out from time to time, which, as Burckhardt says, touched even the most hardened consciences. These epidemics, of which the one at Florence of 1494-98, under Savonarola, is only one among hundreds,—for one occurred after every plague or disaster,—revealed the deep and steady activity of the Christian faith Wherever souls are possessed of the same faith or ideal, intermittent outbursts of similar contagions are the result. We ourselves no longer have epidemics of penitence, unless they are in the form of contagious pilgrimages—those unique manifestations of the power of suggestion,—but we do have epidemics of luxury, of gambling, of lotteries, of stock-speculation, of gigantic railroad undertakings, as well as epidemics of Hegelianism, Darwinism, etc.

1 The body of a child contains more vital activity, in proportion to its size, than that of a mature man. The relative vitality of the adult has diminished.

1 Let us fully understand each other on this point too. In the course of civilisation desires increase in number, but decrease in strength, whereas truth and security are both multiplied and strengthened at an even more rapid rate. The contrast is amore striking one, if the condition of barbarity, and not that of savagery, be taken as the starting point of the evolution of civilisation. The latter state, according to our present means of observation, is the final term of a social evolution complete in itself, not the first term of a higher evolution.

1 M. Barth, for example, says that “Buddhism carried in itself the denial, not of the régime of castes in general, but of the caste of the Brahmans, and this without respect to any doctrine of equality, and without, for its part, having any thought of revolt. Thus it is quite possible that the opposition which existed remained for long an unconscious one on both sides” [The Religions of India, pp. 125-26, A Barth, English translation by Rev J. Wood, London, 1882—Tr]. Finally, it became flagrant, but, for all that, and here was another unconscious contradiction, “the name brahman remained a title of honour among the Buddhists, and in Ceylon it was given to kings” [Ibid., p 127. Tr.] somewhat as the titles of count and marauis are valued in our own democratic society, in spite of its stand against the principles of feudalism.

1 Now we can see why the process of unifying the national faith by the expulsion of religious or political heretics (the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, every kind of religious persecution) is always far from accomplishing its object. It keeps a population, to be sure, ignorant of those contradictions which might undermine their beliefs, but, although it may maintain the latter, it also precludes additions to their number. For the ignorance of contradictions which dulls the critical sense also sterilises the imagination and dims the consciousness of mutual confirmations. Moreover, a time comes when, as Colins says, enquiry can no longer be repressed.

1 I might just as well have said teleological as logical, just as, later on, the term logical union means teleological union as well. But it seemed well to identify the two points of view in this chapter at least.

1 Under the inroads, however, of poverty, disease, or general misfortune a want may disappear without being replaced at all; or it may be replaced only by increased intensity on the part of lower wants which have become excessive and exclusive of all others. Then a decline or set-back instead of an advance in civilisation takes place.

1 A greater number of bills may be up for consideration, but there are never more than two in conflict at the same time in the hesitating mind of the law-maker.

1 A distinction has been made between constitutions that are made to order, or, if you like, improvised, and contract constitutions that are formed little by little (see M. Boutmy). This distinction is elsewhere of importance. But, in the last analysis, constitutions that are made to order themselves result from a transaction between the opposing parties in the bosom of the parliament from which they spring. Only in these cases, there is but one struggle, and one contract, whereas the English Constitution, for example, was the outcome of a great number of struggles and contracts between pre-existent powers.

1 In a treatise published in August and September, 1889, in the Revue philosophique, under the title of Catégories logiques et instituitions sociales, and reproduced in my Logique sociale (1894), I have developed at length the parallel which I have here confined myself to indicating.

1 We sometimes have, or, rather, we think we have, these happy surprises in politics and religion as well as in industry. Renan makes a somewhat similar remark. “In great historic movements,” he says (the early Church, the Reformation, the French Revolution), “there is a moment of exaltation when men, bound together by some common work (Peter and Paul, Lutherans and Calvinists, Montagnards and Girondists, etc.), turn from or kill one another for some shadow of a difference, and then there is a moment of reconciliation when the attempt is made to prove that the apparent enemies have been really working together in sympathy for the same end. After a time a single doctrine issues forth from all this discord, and perfect agreement reigns (or seems to reign) between the followers of those who had once anathematised one another” (Les Evangèles). In moments of exaltation the slightest shades of difference must lead to violence, for in the extraordinary light of an exalted conscience this shadow, this partial mutual contradiction, is perceived, and, since every man at such times embodies himself wholly in the thesis which he has adopted, and devotes himself absolutely to its unlimited propagation, the suppression of any thesis that contradicts his own involves the murder of him or them in whom the former is embodied. Later, when the first actors have disappeared and been replaced by less enthusiastic successors, the lukewarmness of opposite convictions lets us throw a convenient veil over their mutual contradictions. A mere lowering of the general plane of belief has brought about this change.

1 This is so true that already in the sixteenth century we find “opposed to syndicates of employers (corporations), syndicates of organised labourers” (see Louis Guibert, Les anciennes corporations en Limousin, etc.) Combinations of workmen in Paris, in Lyons, and elsewhere, “supply the printers, the bakers, the hatters, with resources with which to resist their masters.”

CHAPTER VI.—EXTRA-LOGICAL INFLUENCES

1 Nothing equals the strangeness of certain cults unless it be their persistence. But the same thing may be said of language. It is a fixed caprice, an established, everlasting disorder, like that of the starry heavens. What is stranger or more irrational than the use of the word cabinet to designate a group of ministers, or of the word Porte as a name for the Ottoman government? What logical relation exists between the words horse, equus, ἵππος, and the animal they represent? And yet no law, however sensible and useful it may be, is followed with the same degree of readiness, constancy, and respect as the custom of using accepted words, however outlandish they may appear. In the same way, what resemblance is there, at bottom, between that chain of sacramental ceremonies which is called the Mass, and the sentiment of high morality and refined spirituality of which it is a means of expression among Catholic populations? Mass is another word in point; and we know the tenacity of this old word. The difficulty for a whole people to agree at the same time upon the choice of a better term, or to renounce their needs of expression, sacred or secular, is really insurmountable; for such an agreement would be possible only through the spread of imitation, and not through contact. For this reason, although religious persecutions which are directed towards the suppression or replacement of some cult appear to be highly rational, they are, in reality, most absurd; about as absurd as linguistic persecutions. The latter never succeed in their aim to substitute one language for another, except, at times, through the spontaneous imitation of a superior, of a conqueror by the conquered.

1 Some of these rites are very strange. At the moment when, on the night of the wedding, the marriage of the Emperor of China is consummated, two great personages are present at the solemnity, and sing a love duet in the imperial alcove.

2 Everything that is true in Spencer’s chapter on what he calls ceremonial government implicitly confirms the above. The writer errs in thinking, as he seems to do, that ceremony is decreasing, and that its sway is strongest in the beginnings of societies. But what he takes for primitive societies had already a long past behind them in which the so-called rule of ceremony had already been slowly formed.

1 This advance from within to without, from the thing signified to the sign, really answers an innate need of logic, and, therefore, the considerations based upon it might have found a place, up to a certain point, in the preceding chapter.

1 Children take the most lively pleasure in reproducing all the striking sounds, even more than in copying the gestures, in their environment.

1 At any rate, during the ascendency of a people. It is only in its decline that it sees judgments of disparagement spread more rapidly than judgments of admiration.

1 Moreover, commands began by being set examples. I have indicated the steps in the gradual transformation of example into command in the preface of my Logique sociale, p. vii “In a band of monkeys, horses, dogs, or even bees or ants, the leader sets an example of the act which he mentally orders and the rest of the band imitate him. Gradually the imperative intention is separated from the initiative of the act which is commanded and with which it was at first merged. Finally the leader merely outlines the act: later on, he reduces it to a gesture and then to some sign, a cry, a look, an attitude, and, finally, to an articulate sound. But the word always calls up the image of the act to be performed,—a familiar act, of course, for a stroke of genius cannot be described in advance,—and this image is equivalent to the primitive example set by the leader.”

1 This must be so, let us observe, if the action at a distance of one brain upon another, which I call imitation, is to be classed with hypnotic suggestion, in so far, at least, as a normal and continuous phenomenon may be compared with a rare anomaly which it reproduces on a larger but much less intense scale. We know how credulous and docile the hypnotic subject becomes. We know what a good comedian he is. We know, too, how deeply the personality which is suggested to him becomes incarnated in him. We know that at first it penetrates, or appears to penetrate into his very heart and character before it expresses itself in his posture or gesture or speech. His dominant characteristics are absolute credulity and docility.

2 Bodin writes that “in the matter of dress he will always be rated dull and loutish who does not apparel himself in the prevailing fashion which has come to us from Spain with the farthingale.”

1 After a certain point, the more superficial social inequalities become, the harder they are for inferiors to endure. The cause of this is that after they have been softened down beyond a certain point, they fail to produce either admiration or credulity or obedience, all of which dispositions make for social strength, and they, therefore, lose their raison d’être. Then they inspire envy, and envy helps to make them disappear. The demands of utility are analogous, in this case, to those of beauty. The beautiful rules out any compromise between an ellipse and a circle or between a parallelogram and a square. As soon as the disproportion between the two axes of the ellipse or between the length and breadth of the parallelogram ceases to be sufficiently pronounced, our æsthetic sense desires its suppression altogether, and the smaller the disproportion, the stronger our wish or desire. Now as soon as an approximate equality is effected between the different classes of a society, envy itself, having accomplished its work of assimilation, tends to disappear; and then its work is endangered by this very extreme. The need of individual divergence, of dissimilation, or, as we say, of liberty, grows out of the equality which is born of resemblance; and society would return to the disintegration of savagery, providing new causes of inequality did not arise. But arise they always do.

1 I do not mean to deny that the outside of the model is sometimes imitated to the exclusion of the inside. But when we begin in this way, as women and children often do (less often, however, than one might think), with outward imitation, we stop short there; whereas, if we begin with inward imitation, we pass on from it to the other. Dostoïesky tells us that after some years of prison life he became like his fellow convicts superficially. “Their habits, their ideas, their dress, left their colour upon me and became mine on the surface, without penetrating at all into my inner nature.”

1 “Ceremonial is the great museum of history,” observes M. Paul Viollet with much truth. If this is so, and we can hardly doubt it, it is time to dispose of Spencer’s idea of ceremony as primitive government. A museum is far from being a primitive thing which is complete at birth and which shrinks in course of time. It takes a long time for it to be formed and enlarged. Besides, it replenishes itself from age to age.

1 It seems that before the Japanese came into communication with China they possessed a syllabic writing, or several, in fact, of much greater usefulness and convenience than the Chinese writing; but as soon as this youthful and pre-eminently suggestible people felt the prestige of the superiority which they attributed to the mandarins, they adopted Chinese writing to the hindrance of their own progress.

1 [II, 340—Tr.]

1 The point to which this craze can go may be seen from the following example. In 1705, according to the Marquis d’Argenson, the very valets of men of high rank had servants.

2 [Histoire de luxe, III, 440.—Tr.

1 Abundant proof that the same condition existed in Germany is given by Johannes Janssen. For example, “in Pomerania and the island of Rugen, . . . the peasants are rich. They wear none but English garments or others as good. Their dress is as fine as that formerly worn by the burghers or nobles” [Die allgemeinen Zustande des deutschen Volkes beim Ausgang des Mittelalters, p. 312, ninth edition, Freiburg, 1883—Tr.].

These lines are quoted by Janssen from Kantzow, a Pomeranian historian of the time. We learn from sermons that silken garments were being worn by the peasants. In Italy, according to Burckhardt, there was at the same period the same descent of luxury to all classes.

2 This contagion of luxury has often been an instrument for the spread of useful things. Our most useful species (animal), Bourdeau says in his Conquête du monde animal, were originally bred for amusement rather than for the then unforseen advantages which its domestication might procure. The same motive leads us to-day to search for new and peculiar species, and in primitive times every animal that was conquered had this charm of novelty. Formerly in Rome and Greece a duck or a goose was presented as a love-token to the beloved woman or child. In the time of Cæsar the Britons kept chickens and geese for luxurious display, not for consumption. . .; in the sixteenth century the Indian duck and turkey ornamented the parks of the nobility before they descended into the ranks of ordinary poultry to be banished to the barnyard. . . . This movement is logical and necessary. Only the wealthy classes are able to have costly lessons and make hazardous experiments. But when success is assured the gain becomes general.”

If the Gallic nobility began to adopt the speech and customs of Rome, after the conquest, it was because then, for the first time, they felt the superiority of Rome. Why did the American Indians never adopt European civilisation? Because their immense pride kept them from considering themselves inferior to Anglo-Americans. On the other hand, the negroes of America, who have been accustomed to recognise the supremacy of the whites, even after the abolition of slavery, have had a very strong and noticeable tendency to copy their masters, or their sometime masters, in everything.

1 Let me anticipate an objection. It may be urged that in imitating foreign fashions in dress, armour, and furniture, the Mediterranean aristocracy in the time of the Phœnicians, and the European aristocracy at the time of the Venetian commerce, proceeded ab exterioribus ad interiora; but this would be a mistake. Both these aristocracies succumbed to the prestige of some dominating nation, of Egypt or of Assyria, of Italy or of Constantinople. The literature of these countries had penetrated them before their arts; their glory had subjugated them. The social function of aristocracies is to initiate populations into an admiration and envy of foreign things, and thus to cut a way for fashion-imitation as a substitute for custom-imitation.

2 Another example: it was through the Roman aristocracy, during the days of the Scipios, that Greek ideas and Greek speech and civilisation reached Rome.

3 It sometimes, or, even, often, happens that the conquerors pattern themselves after the conquered, borrowing their habits, their laws, and their language. The Franks in Gaul became Latinised and spoke a Romance tongue. The same thing happened to the Normans in England, to the Varangians in Russia, etc. But in these cases it was because the conqueror felt the social superiority of the conquered, and the more real and appreciated this superiority the more faithfully was the latter reflected by the former. As the Anglo-Saxon was only slightly superior to the Norman of William the Conqueror, there was a fusion of two civilisations and, especially, of two languages, into one civilisation and into one new language, rather than a triumph of the Saxon element. Besides, we know that the Gallo-Roman nobility survived the invasion and continued to take the lead.

1 In India, according to Barth, the Brahmans are at the head of all religious innovations, the source, in that country, of all changes whatsoever.

1 The instructive traveller, Abbé Pelitot, says that among the Esquimaux the men, but not the women, pray in the morning and evening. With us the opposite is the more frequent occurrence. In this connection the Revue scientifique (November 21, 1888) justly remarks that “among all primitive peoples, religion, like war and hunting, is the function of the men.” From this fact, we may properly infer that if religion survives longer in the hearts and in the habits of women, it is because they originally adopted it from the example of their lords and masters. Another confirmation of our law.

1 “How does it happen,” queries M. Melchoir de Vogué, “that the negro fetich worshippers who are pursued by the man-hunting negro Moslems adopt with so much facility the Mahometan faith of their persecutors?” It is the imitation of a superior. But it is necessary for the superior to be near; the superiority must not be great enough to discourage imitation. That is the reason why Christianity makes little progress among negroes. Whereas the conquests of Islam among them are almost as rapid as the conquests of the days of Mahomet.

1 Tocqueville shows in a masterly way (Démocratie en Amérique) that “the sway of journalism must extend as men grow more and more equal.”

1 See Histoire générale of Lavisse and Rambaud, II, 431 and following.

1 At first it would seem as if the law of imitation from above to below were inapplicable to the propagation of Christianity in view of its original spread among the lower classes. It is true that its progress amounted to little until it won over the upper classes and even the Imperial court. But we should note, especially, that Christianity began to spread in cities, in large cities first, and that it was only later that it reached the country districts where the lowest class of peasants (pagani) made their home. Fustel de Coulanges (Monarchie franque, p. 517) draws attention to this urban propagation of Christianity. Early Christianity like modern socialism spread through the capitals. “This contagious evil,” Pliny writes to Trajan, “has spread not only in the cities, but also in the towns and villages.”

1 Preaching, like all other branches of rhetorical art, had fashions in the past whose variety compensated for the relative immutability of dogma. Here again the laws of imitation apply. When scholasticism came in at the Sorbonne, first the divines of Paris, then those of the provincial towns, and finally those of the rural districts, fell to preaching according to set argumentative forms, and we have to be familiar with the ordinary force of the currents of imitation to conceive how this dry and repellent manner of preaching could have been established. Later, at the polished court of Louis XIV, the preachers, who were by this time courtiers and men of the world themselves, adapted the language of society to their Advent or Lenten or other kinds of sermons, and then this reform spread little by little from the Court to the Capital, from the Capital to the big and then to the smaller cities. But at the time when La Bruyère wrote, this practice had only begun to spread abroad, as we may see from the following remark: “Scholasticism has at last been banished from all the pulpits of the large cities and relegated to towns and villages for the instruction and salvation of the labourer and wine-dresser.”

1 Political mania, like drunkenness, began by being the privilege of the upper classes. A century ago this passion thrived among great lords and ladies, and among the scholars of the land, whereas the people and even the lower middle classes remained comparatively indifferent to this kind of emotion. In our own day, the higher classes and people of education are apt to take relatively little interest in politics or to discuss them with unwarranted moderation. In the conversations of fashionable society such questions occur merely incidentally, in the course of gossip, as we may see from the insignificant place that they hold in the journals which picture “society.” But as this passion for dangerous problems abates on top, it descends and spreads from one social level to another. The time will come when a combination of political mania and alcoholism will raise the folly of the masses to the highest pitch. Of course, I do not wish to associate religious or even superstitious faith or practice with the above aberrations. But I may be allowed to point out, as one of the explanations of the religiosity of the masses of the people, that in very remote antiquity religion began by being the exclusive luxury of a few patricians before it became a general and vulgarised need of the plebeians.

Fortunately the passion for politics was not the only thing to spread in this way, the love of country was spreading at the same time. The sentiment of patriotism first arose in the ranks of the aristocracy, whence it afterwards passed down, little by little, through imitation, to the middle classes and to the common people. On this point the democratic historian, Perrens, may be credited. “The sentiment of patriotism,” he says, “was not popularised until after the Hundred Years War, but it had already had a long life among the gentry; it had already appeared in the twelfth century in the poems which they had inspired. Douce France is from that time on a favourite expression in the poetry of chivalry. After the disaster of Poitiers, it burst out for a time among the middle classes and the common people.”

1 It has been noticed that all the Roman provinces west of the Adriatic (Italy, Sicily, Spain, Gaul, Germany, etc.) were more or less easily Latinised, and had to adopt the laws, language, and customs of Rome; whereas in the East, even after the conquest of Greece, the Greek language and civilisation continued to hold their own and even to spread. This was because the superiority of the Romans was recognised by those whom they had conquered in the West, by the Celts, Iberians, Germans, etc., whereas Greek nationality refused, even after its downfall, to confess itself inferior to the barbarians of the Tiber, and preserved its proud sentiment of intellectual pre-eminence. For a like reason, the Gallo-Romans, who were conquered at a later date, refused to assimilate with the Germans. An entirely analagous thing occurs whenever the common people come into power and set to imitating the manners and customs of a fallen aristocracy whom they have always recognised as holding the sceptre of the refinements of life. The prestige of Rome and Constantinople, as well as of Athens, was magnified by their very downfall.

It is evident that all the external history of Rome is explained by the law of imitation from upper to lower. Its internal history is explained in the same way. The Roman plebs raised itself up only through copying the customs and then the prerogatives and privileges of the patricians, beginning with legal marriage.

1 Let me add that the idea of nobility arose at a time when the physical and moral qualities that were necessary to make use of the very simple military engines and methods of the period were readily developed by proper training and were easily transmitted by inheritance, much more easily than the subtle characteristics of modern times. And so the son of a powerful warrior generally came to have a well-founded reputation of his own.

1 From this it follows that everywhere, at any given moment in history, the superior classes belong to races that are more mixed and complex and artificial than those of the inferior classes. In Egypt, the fellah has remained like the ancient Egyptians, whereas his masters have fallen away from the ancient type. The higher the class, the more extensive its matrimonial market. The higher you mount in the ranks of the old French nobility, the more scattered do you find its marriages. The royal family was at the top and it had all Europe for its matrimonial domain.

1 See Vie des sociétés, p. 159.

1 This attempt to solve the problem of feudalism must not be confounded with an hypothesis which has been put forth concerning the origin of the nobility. It has been queried whether the Frankish nobility is not derived, physiologically, from the antrustions M. Glasson denies this, and, apparently, with reason. Nobles are born (in the vital meaning of the word) from royal functionaries whose functions have become hereditary. This does not preclude the fact that in gaining the inheritance they must have thought of the antrustions and desired to have them themselves.

1 [Histoire du droit et des institutions de la France, II, 482. E. Glasson, Paris, 1888—Tr.]

2 [Ibid., II, 483.—Tr.]

CHAPTER VII.—EXTRA-LOGICAL INFLUENCES (CONTINUED)—CUSTOM AND FASHION

1 Just as from the social point of view, or, at least, from the point of view of temporary, if not lasting, social peace, it is much more important that beliefs should be held in common than that they should be true,—hence the supreme importance of religions;—so, from the same point of view, the important thing in the matter of public instruction is the common, much more than the useful, nature of knowledge; or, rather, the principal utility of knowledge consists in its being common property, consists in its very diffusion. It is certainly easy to prove that the teaching of Greek and Latin is not the most useful thing in relation to human wants (aside from the want which we are about to discuss), any more than such and such religious dogmas are among the things of which we have the best proofs. The only advantage, but it is a big one, of maintaining this instruction, is in not breaking the chain between generations, in not cutting ourselves off too sharply and too utterly from our forefathers and from each other; in conforming ourselves as members of an educated class to one another and to our forebears in order that, united by the tie of imitating the same model, we shall not fail to form one single society. Although a youth might possess much truer and much more valuable knowledge than our collegiate students, if he did not know what they knew, he would be socially estranged from them. This is, at bottom, the real and inner reason, whether avowed or unconscious, why, even in spite of unanimous criticism, respect for so many archaic things persists. There is no stronger confirmation than this of the conception of the social tie that has been brought out in this book.

1 See Dostoïesky’s Maison des morts. And so in Siberia, in speaking of a man twenty years old, they say: “My respects to old man so-and-so.”

1 The most exaggerated expression of this negative subjection of generation to imitation is found in the monastic orders which exact, together with the vow of obedience (or, rather, of both obedience and conformity in belief), the vow of chastity.

1 The frenzy for foreign imitation which reigns at present in Japan is exceptional, but not as much so as one might think. I hope, in this chapter, to dispose my reader to surmise that similar fevers have appeared here and there from the most remote period of antiquity, and that this hypothesis can alone explain many obscure events.

1 I agree entirely with those philologists who assert that language did not appear spontaneously in an infinite number of places and families at the same time. However natural the desire of communicating one’s thoughts to one’s fellows may have become, it was certainly not able to bring the invention of speech into existence everywhere at the same time. Besides, let me remark that this desire was developed through the very speech which satisfied it, and did not exist before it, so to speak. It is extremely likely that it was experienced exceptionally violently by some savage of genius, and that through him the first manifestations of language took place in a single family. From this family, as from a centre, the example of this fruitful innovation spread very rapidly, and straightway brought to speaking families so great an advantage over non-speaking families, that the latter speedily disappeared; so that from that time on the faculty of speech became the characteristic of the human species. Only,—and on this point we must uphold M. Sayce and other eminent philologists who oppose the monogenists,—it was not so much the first crude products of linguistic invention which were imitated as this new direction of the inventor’s spirit. All ingenious members of primitive families were more inspired when they heard spoken words for the first time to invent articulations like those, or pretty much like those, which they had heard, than to reproduce the very same articulations. This must have been the great occupation of the nascent imagination. Sayce also says very truly: “It is perfectly plain that at a certain period of social life the tendency to express one’s self inarticulate language must have been irresistible. Man must have rejoiced, like the savage or like the child of to-day in exploiting his newly acquired power. The child never tires of repeating the words which it has learned; the savage and the primary scholar of imitating new ones.” Hence the originally infinite multiplicity of tongues. That unity of language which is imagined by the partisans of monogenism cannot be attributed to the beginning, but only to the end, of philological evolution. “Modern races are only the chosen remainder of an innumerable variety of vanished species. As much can certainly be said of languages. . . . Here and there certain languages have been stereotyped and spared by some happy selection; here and there the fragments of certain others may be found; but the largest number have perished as utterly as the animals of geological antiquity. . . . Pliny tells us that in Cocylium there were more than three hundred dialects. Sagard reckoned in 1631 that among the Hurons of North America the same language was rarely found in two villages or even in two families within the same village.” And this is not surprising, if we call to mind the permanent hostility which separates all families in primitive times. The following statement is still stranger: “In the island of Tasmania, a population of fifty persons had no less than four dialects.”

1 And how rapidly this takes place at times! The following is one example among a thousand Friedlander tells us that “not more than twenty years had elapsed after the entire submission of Pannonia, when Velleius Paterculus wrote his history, and when knowledge of the Latin language and even that of its literature had spread to a host of places in the wild and rough and wholly barbarous region which included Hungary, together with the eastern part of Austria.”

1 [Democracy in America, II, 82, Alexis de Tocqueville. English translation by Henry Reeve, Cambridge, 1863, 2d edition.—Tr.]

1 It seems to have passed even beyond the limits of the Empire. I find the proof of this in the fact that about the same period German and even Slavonic experienced transformations that were quite like those in the transition of Latin to the Romance tongues. Cournot observes that “according to Grimm and Bopp, the use of the auxiliary verb for the conjugation of the perfect tense did not begin to appear in the Germanic languages before the eighth or ninth century.” Let him who can explain this coincidence on any other ground than that of imitation.

1 Even in the substitution of the Romance tongues for Latin, and in spite of the grammatical refinements of these nascent tongues, this tendency is satisfied by their analytical character and simplified construction.

2 It is true, according to Lyall’s recent and direct observations, that through the aid of numerous fictions ancient Hindoo cults have succeeded in assimilating, by way of conversion, many non-Aryan peoples in India. But the latter have the name of having been Aryanised. And, besides, those very fictions by which they elude the rigour of the ancient regulation testify to the degree of its former severity.

1 Let me add that in the most exclusive religions, the desire to imitate the foreigner, the inclination to be in keeping with certain dominating international fashions, even in matters of religion, is experienced much more than one might suppose. For example, Israel, before the time of Samuel, was troubled and embarrassed in the midst of other nations because it had no national god “in the manner of other peoples.” (See Darmesteter, Les Prophètes) It needed both a god and a king upon the model adopted by its neighbours. “Give us a king to judge us, as other peoples have,” says the Hebrew people to Samuel. It is certain that a like sentiment resulted upon a hundred other occasions, and for a hundred other peoples, in unifying the types of divinity and monarchy which obtained in regions of more or less vast dimensions.

1 For the original universality of the patriarchal family among those peoples, at least, who were destined for civilisation, see the extensive proof given by Sumner Maine in his Ancient Law.

1 Hence the apotheosis of inventors which is such an important source of mythologies “Among the Phœnicians, as among the Iranians, the invention of fire and the beginning of a divine worship seem to be closely related. In reading the Biblical, Phœnician, Babylonian, and Iranian cosmogonies, side by side, we recognise in them the intention to represent in the succession of generic, instead of individual personages, the succession of the inventions and developments which had guided the human race up to the time when the cosmogones were written” (Littré Fragments de philosophie Positive) [p 311 Paris, 1876—Tr.].

1 This undoubtedly is the reason why, in prehistoric coves, we never find among their flint implements any complete animal skeleton, not even those of cave bears.

1 Let me add to this a consideration of a more sentimental nature, which will present in a still more favourable light the primitive adoration of animals. Originally, the social group is so small that it is unable to satisfy the greed of sociability which it has itself developed. This want grows more rapidly, much more rapidly, than the group. Consequently, those sentiments which find difficulty in venting themselves in the relations of man with his fellows, scattered as they are, and, especially in his relations to his friends and associates, the only ones that he can be with to any extent, must pour themselves out upon the creatures of nature, and especially upon the animals that are in constant contact with primitive man. This is perhaps the partial explanation of the great part which both wild and domestic animality plays in the life of the savage and the early troglodyte. The drawings of mammoths, of whales, of lions, etc, upon their ivory plates or staffs of command testify to their zoolatry, or, rather, to their theriolatry.

Goblet d’Alviella is quite right in seeing in these first attempts at art a response to the needs of deity, rather than to still undeveloped æsthetic needs. These mysterious gods, these god-beasts, must have inspired a strange kind of terror, a terror as strange as their monstrous shapes, as well as a singular kind of piety, a servile admiration which, in spite of its servility, was a touching and true form of adoration. Whatever terrifies always ends by being adored. But this animal idolatry is only part of the semi-social relations which primitive man created between himself and animal nature. On the other side, the domestic animals probably inspired in him a certain genuinely paternal or filial tenderness. There is still a trace of this in the affectionate care that the peasant daily bestows upon his cattle; he is never separated from them without regret. An animal slave, like a human slave, is easily taken into the family.

It is probable, therefore, that in the beginning the cords of the heart that were set in vibration by nature and, especially, by animal nature, were of much greater importance compared with those that were stirred by human society than their actual relative importance. An attempt was made to gain real social intercourse with animals; hence the attribution of language to animals, as Goblet d’Alviella reasonably surmises.

1 On this point I refer my readers to the Mythology of Mr Andrew Lang. [Published in the Encyclopœdia Britannica.—Tr.]

2 On the other hand, I readily admit that the interdiction, which is so frequent in ancient religions, against eating the flesh of certain animals, is explained by totemism and not at all by motives of hygiene. These motives were trumped up afterwards, like those of the somnambulist, who is quick to act on suggestion, to justify himself in his own eyes for the unconscious act of obedience which he is about to commit.

1 Inventions in matters of domestication are so significant that, like those relating to the conquest of minerals, they have seemed adequate to characterise different civilisations. Just as ages are marked out as the rough stone age or the polished stone age, as the age of bronze, as the age of iron, so the peoples possessing oxen and cows (the primitive Aryas), or horses (Turanians, Arabs), or asses (Egyptians), or camels (the desert Nomads), or reindeer (Laps), etc, are, or may be, distinguished accordingly.

2 They were “either in the form of woman with horns on both sides of the breast, or in the form of cows.”

1 In Greece and Rome, especially, the more or less advanced spiritualisation of a religion which had been hitherto materialistic was accompanied by the substitution of a priesthood, recruited by voluntary consecration, by election or by lot, for an originally hereditary priesthood. This innovation took place at Athens about 510 B. C., through the reform of Cleisthenes, who completed the work of Solon and suppressed the four ancient tribes, which were religious corporations based upon consanguinity, and replaced them with new tribes composed of demes, a purely territorial division. Sacerdotal functions became, in consequence, elective. A similar change was effected at Sparta and in many other Greek cities at the same epoch, just when philosophy had begun to creep into dogma. At Rome the fight between the patricians and the plebeians turned largely on the question whether the functions of the flamens, the salians, the vestals, and the sacrificial king should continue to be hereditary or should be passed on through election. A moment came, towards the end of the Republic, when the light of Greece had begun to shine upon it, when the plebs, who had already gained access to the different magistracies which had before that been reserved to the patricians, likewise obtained a right to aspire to the sacerdotal dignities which the superior caste had kept to itself and transmitted as a privilege of birth. This was one of the last conquests of the plebs.

1 May we wait long for its solution! For the sake of freedom of thought may the inappreciable intellectual anarchy which Auguste Comte deplored be prolonged!

1 At any given period there will always seem to be, among the most prominent communities, one to embody the spirit of conservatism, and another, the spirit of novelty. But if we go back to the past of each, we shall see the contrast reversed. In our own days, the antithesis has been represented until recently by England and France, just as in ancient Greece it was represented by the conservative Dorians and the innovating Ionians. This has been repeated ad nauseam. Boutmy writes in his Études de droit constitutionnel, that “in France a natural and immediate authority is given to those ideas (political) which are sentimentally based upon the unity of mankind in general. In England it is given to those ideas that are sentimentally based upon ties with preceding generations. We are content only with a broad and extensive conception which everybody may share with us, and before whose articles of universal legislation all will bow. The English are satisfied with a narrow and intensive conception in which the centuries of their national life are seen in perspective, one after the other.”

In other words, we enthuse over ideas which are capable of spreading through free and external imitation, since we have generally received them ourselves through this kind of imitation; whereas, our neighbours care only for those ideas which are and which can only be transmitted through an exclusive and hereditary form of imitation. But, it may be said in passing, that English parliamentarism is not precluded by its original character from communicating itself from one people to another, travelling by means of the freest and most general kind of contagion that has ever been seen. Then, we know that in the seventeenth century, England personified the spirit of revolution in comparison with monarchical France; and, now, after a rest of two centuries, do we not feel that the revolutionary yeast is working on British soil, thanks to the germs of radical or socialistic ideas that have been introduced from the Continent? It may easily happen that when this crisis is raging among the islanders across the Channel, the foundation of a national government will be finally laid in France.

Let me add that the distinction which M. Boutmy draws between those constitutions which explicitly aspire to universality and those which are content to last during the life of a given race or nation, suggests the distinction between open and proselyting religions and exclusive and non-proselyting religions. According to this analogy, the French system holds the future in its hands, since proselyting religions always have the advantage of their rivals. But just as the most expansive cult finally settles down and closes its doors, the most cosmopolitan system of government ends, as we shall see, by becoming, in its turn, an ancestral custom.

1 [Ward’s translation, I, 147.—Tr.]

1 Similarly, ecclesiastical administration took on an imperial garb during the Empire, and a feudal one during the Middle Ages.

1 [Middlemore’s translation, I, 128—Tr.]

2 The eighteenth century inaugurated the reign of fashion on a large scale. This fact is very evident in the particulars of morals and institutions of this century. At this time, for example, the secret ballot came into use in municipal elections, and M. Albert Babeau tells us (in his work on the city of the old régime) that this was a fashion. He adds that already in the sixteenth century—another age of invading fashions—the corporation of Angers had adopted this manner of voting, justifying itself by the usages at “the elections of senators at Venice, Genoa, Milan, and Rome.” “So alert and eager for models was the municipal spirit at this time!”

1 In reality it must have appeared many times long before this.

2 [Ibid., 187, footnote 3.—Tr.]

1 The author gives us the reason of its pre-eminent contagiousness. The colonists of New England, the Puritan immigrants, were the only people to cross the ocean to work for an idea.

2 [Reeve’s translation, I, 37.—Tr.]

1 Comte, and not Mr. Spencer, was the author of the antithesis between the industrial and the militant types of society. Comte did more than merely point out this antithesis; he often developed it; he even exaggerated it. He established, for example, an indissoluble tie between industrial evolution and artistic evolution, a tie that practically belied classical antiquity. Still, there is much truth at bottom in this point of view.

Only, even while exaggerating the merits of industrial activity and its superiority over the activity of war, Comte was careful not to carry this distinction to the point of considering it the line of cleavage, so to speak, in sociology. He knew that religious evolution, the succession and differentiation of theological and scientific forms and ideas, has a far-reaching control over these secondary considerations. And this is what Mr. Spencer failed to see.

1 Is it by any chance the habit of fighting which strengthens authority and makes it hereditary? It is not; a victorious war might, of course, lead to the extension of a pre-existing nobility, or it might even create a new nobility, but only on the condition that the given society lived under the rule of custom and was thus predisposed to make all power hereditary. Otherwise, it would not have this effect at all. Could twenty years of continual warfare create a feudal system in modern Europe? It might create a dictatorship, based upon an even more insolent plutocracy than that of to-day; nothing more. In fact, every nobility is, originally, rural, patriarchal, and domestic. Aristocracies are particularly vigorous and unchangeable when they are not belligerent. The Swiss aristocracy is an example. In spite of its republican and federal form, it was perpetuated up to our own times long after the rest of the continent had set towards democracy. If, in spite of this, the idea of militancy is generally associated with aristocratic control, it is because the territorial disintegration which is produced by the aristocratic preponderance of custom multiplies the occasions of armed conflicts. Industrialism is so little incompatible with militancy that the city that was perhaps the most warlike city of the Middle Ages. Florence, was at the same epoch the most industrial region of Europe. Ancient Athens is another example.

1 Even in the United States, in spite of the essentially peaceful character of its people, a universal tendency towards centralisation may be observed. The Journal des économistes says (July, 1886) that in the March number of the Political Science Quarterly, an American review published in Boston, an article of Mr. Burgess’ tends to prove that “an internal process is going on to reduce the importance of the States to that of provinces or departments and to augment the importance of the Union. Moreover, the author proves that the Union has always had precedence over the States.” See also on this subject the interesting and instructive work of M. Claudio Jannet upon the États-Unis contemporains. (Fourth edition, 1888).

1 [Reeve’s translation, II, 315-6.—Tr]

In an attentive reading of Tocqueville it may be perceived that although he never troubles himself to formulate the principle of imitation he is always running across it, and curiously enumerating its consequences. But if he had expressed it clearly and placed it at the head of his deductions, he would, I think, have been spared many minor errors and contradictions. He justly remarks that “no society can prosper without like beliefs, or, rather, there is none that subsists without them; for without common ideas, there is no common action, and without common action, men there may be, but not a social body.” This means, at bottom, that the true social relation consists in imitation, since similarity of ideas, I mean of those ideas which are needed by society, is always acquired, never inborn. It is through equality that he justly explains the omnipotence of majorities—the redoubtable problem of the future—and the singular potency of public opinion in democratic states, a sort of “immense pressure” which is brought to bear by the spirit of all upon the spirit of each. On the other hand, he explains equality by means of similarity, of which, truly speaking, it is only one aspect. He says that only when men resemble each other to a certain extent do they recognise each other’s mutual rights. What is there to add to this? Only one word, but it is indispensable: the fact that imitation must have and has caused this similarity, a similarity which was not in the least innate. Imitation, then, is the essentially social action from which everything proceeds.

“In democratic centuries,” Tocqueville says again, “men’s extreme mobility and their impatient desires cause them to move continually from one locality to another, and cause the inhabitants of different countries to intermingle, to see and hear each other and borrow from each other. And so it is not only the members of one nation who grow alike; nations themselves are assimilated.” Under the term of democratic revolution, the effects of a preponderance of fashion-imitation could not be better described. He offers an ingenious and, I think, valid reason for that tendency of democracies towards general and abstract ideas which makes them lose sight of living realities; namely, that as men grow more alike, they find less difficulty in looking at themselves collectively, in summing themselves up, and they thereby acquire the habit of seeing everything in this way. This is another effect of imitation. I have taken these examples among a thousand similar ones. Again he writes. “It is not so much the rational desire to remain united which keeps a great number of citizens under one government, as the instinctive and, in a way, involuntary agreement which results from a similarity of sentiments and opinions.”

1 For the rôle of imitation and of social logic in the formation of law, see my Transformations du droit.

1 [Histoire du droit et des institutions de l’Allemagne, p. 159 Frédéric de Schulte. French translation by Marcel Fournier. Paris, 1882.—Tr]

2 [Ibid, p. 162.—Tr.]

1 See my Philosophie pénale (edited by Storck, 1890).

1 Thus ideas and dogmas spread more easily than usages, and the latter were assimilated but slowly in the train of the former. This fact is an example of what I have said above about the progress of imitation from within out.

1 Besides, this similarity is far from being complete. M. Émile Rivière, who has given much study to the fauna of prehistoric caves, remarks upon the extreme rarity of the remains of fish in the grottoes of Mentone. He is suprised by this fact, and has difficulty in explaining how it was that a seaboard people and one whose sea was so abounding in fish were so little or not at all addicted to fishing. Is not the most simple explanation of this curious phenomenon the fact that these cave dwellers had not yet had the idea of inventing adequate or fitting means of catching the fish off their coasts?

1 [It is unnecessary to point out to American readers the infelicity of this illustration; but it may be well, for the benefit of English readers of Mrs. Trollope or Charles Dickens, to state that it is not founded on fact—Tr.]

1 Periods of fashion-imitation may be recognised by the effacement of certain characteristics which had previously distinguished the different professions. This means, in fact, that each individual looks about him and seeks to copy people in other occupations instead of choosing his patron, his chief, the head of his professional family, for his unique model.

Voltaire writes, for example, in his Siècle de Louis XIV: “Formerly all the different conditions of life could be recognised by their characteristic defects. Military people and young men who were about to enter upon the profession of war had an exaggerated vivacity, and members of the legal profession, a forbidding gravity, to which the habit of always wearing their robes, even in the royal court, contributed not a little. This was also the case in the medical profession and in the universities. Merchants still wore mean attire when they met together, and when they called upon ministers of state. In those days the greatest merchants were but common men. But as soon as citizens began to meet together in public buildings, at public spectacles and promenades, in order to enjoy the amenities of life, the outward appearance of them all became little by little almost identical. Nowadays, we perceive that polite manners have made their way through all conditions of life. All these changes gradually reacted upon the provinces.”

Broca used to say that memory is not a simple faculty. Every cerebral function has its particular memory and its own habits. I shall say as much of imitation, the social memory. Every social function, and, especially, every pursuit, has its own particular style, that is, its own proper channel and current of imitation. Professional imitation deserves a special study. It should be subdivided into two chapters, one upon the prejudices and the other upon the customs that characterise every profession. At certain times, professional imitation runs in a narrow channel, at other times, it spreads at large, and different kinds of professional imitation connect with one another.

1 “The Bushmen, who have been decimated by hunger, are surrounded by pastoral peoples. And, for centuries, they have preyed upon their neighbours’ herds, only to destroy them; the idea of breeding animals themselves has never occurred to them” (Zaborowski, Revue scientifique, December 17, 1892.) In this case, desire for consumption has so far preceded desire for production, that the latter has not yet shown itself.

1 In his interesting work, entitled Politique internationale, M. Novicow seems to think that a nationality that is worthy of the name should produce the arts and literature that it consumes. This is a mistake, I think. According to this, as long as we in modern Europe were principally fed upon Greek and Latin literature, there was no such thing as French, or English, or Spanish, or German nationality.

2 The fifteen- or eighteen-months-old infant cannot talk, but he can understand his mother’s speech. According to Houzeau, certain animals, monkeys and dogs, come to guess the meaning of their masters’ words. They, too, consume language before they produce it.

1 “The woollen industry of Rome,” says Roscher, “is distinguished by the solidity of its products, for which monastic dress, whose fashion does not change, has set the standard.”

2 This does not mean that the Middle Ages were unacquainted with the charms of fashion. From the time of the thirteenth century, according to Cibrario, the nobility delighted “to dress in germents borrowed from the most distant nations, like the Saracens and Sclavonians.” Florentine women wore the “crude green” of Cambria. Changes of fashion in everything bearing upon dress were pretty frequent among the nobility and the wealthy middle classes. They were much less frequent, however, than they are to-day in all articles whatsoever, and among all classes “The dress of the common people,” says M. Rambaud, “changed very little during the Middle Ages.” This is because it remained a matter of tradition “On the other hand,” he adds, “the wealthy classes had a capricious variety of fashions.” This is because they experienced the influence of fashion. At all periods, in antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages, it is notable that the rule of fashion accompanies the brilliant and ascendant phases of civilisations. “The Persians,” says Herodotus, “are most curious concerning foreign usages. In fact, they have copied the dress of the Medea . . . and in war they use Egyptian cuirasses. They have borrowed pederasty from the Greeks.”

1 See Jusserand, La Vie nomade, in the Middle Ages.

2 There is one astonishing fact which reveals both the prestige of Rome, and man’s tendency to imitate his conqueror, namely, the fact that so odd and inconvenient a habit as that of eating in a reclining position became general throughout the Empire, or, at least, throughout the higher classes. From this usage was derived a luxury with which we are no longer familiar, the eating as distinguished from the sleeping couch; and, I may add, from the nuptial couch, which differed from both.

3 There were, however, thanks to the spread of Roman models, even in the barbarian world, exporting industries. The barbarians insensibly became Latinised in their wants and tastes, and, “little by little,” says Amédée Thierry, “the use of Roman merchandise became so general, that the garments of the Sarmatian and the German were made either out of goods produced in the neighbouring provinces, or in Italy” (Tableau de l’empire romain).

1 The slow progress of industry during the Middle Ages, and even in the beginning of the modern era, has also been attributed to the absurdity of sumptuary laws, and the narrow and mechanical organisation of corporations. But here again we have but the consequences of my explanation. Sumptuary laws checked or deadened the tendency to imitate one class on the part of other classes; and corporate monopoly prevented outside producers from copying the processes in use by members of the corporation. It has been said that the industrial prosperity of Germany, even before 1871, was due to its tariff union or Zollverein. But suppose that those petty principalities, those free towns, those hundreds of past fragments of present-day Germany, had kept their several characteristic wants and luxuries, would any tariff union have been possible? Certainly not.

1 This gave rise to an entirely new luxury, let me say in passing, to one which the most luxurious Romans never dreamed of, to the luxury of shrines and reliquaries.

1 On this subject, I take the liberty of referring the reader to two articles which I wrote for the Revue philosophique, in September and October, 1881, under the title La Psychologie en économie politique. See, especially, p. 405 and the following in that volume of the Revue. I dealt more comprehensively with the same subject in 1888, in the Revue économique of M. Gide, under the title Les deux Sens de la valeur. (These studies were reproduced with additions in my Logique sociale, 1894.)

1 Journal des iconontistes, February, 1882

2 In this case, as everywhere else, we see that the higher up we go in the social scale, the slighter the attachment we find to native habits, and the greater the openness to contagions of foreign things.

1 Up to the last days of the Roman Empire, public spectacles and celebrations in which all the forms of art were displayed, made part of the solemnities of religion. Moreover, the ancients were not at all familiar with the entirely modern distinction between secular and sacred music.

1 Buckle, as we see, was strangely mistaken when he contrasted the immutability of morality with the progressive character of intelligence and science. The immutability is only one of degree; and in this relative sense the antithesis is true.

1 The Roman plebeians were assimilated with the patricians through imitation. According to Vico, the Roman plebs began by demanding “not the right of contracting marriages with the patricians, but of contracting marriages like those of the patricians, cunnubia patrum, and not cum patribus.”

1 Another cause which may have contributed to softening the lot of the Athenian slaves, was, I think the inferiority in which women were kept at Athens, and in all the rest of Greece. We see in the Alcestis of Euripides, in Xenophon, and elsewhere, that Greek women inspired their slaves with an affectionate attachment, due, undoubtedly, to their common life and common subjection. They strove side by side for emancipation.

1 See on this subject my Criminalité comparée, p. 188 and the following, and my Philosophie pénale.

2 We can follow, in certain epochs, the stages of this development. Up to Socrates, only the spirit of the city reigned in the little Greek republics; from Socrates to Plato, after the Persian wars and the work of fusion which followed them, the spirit of Greek nationality appeared (like French patriotism after the Hundred Years’ War). Even Plato thinks of the Greek and of the Barbarian as two distinct beings, although his theory of ideas ought to have had the good effect, at least, of bringing them together in his thought under the idea of man. The conquests of Alexander extend Greece to the middle of Asia, the distinction between Greece and Persia, “those two sisters,” is wiped out, and the moral field is singularly enlarged; but outside of the combination of Persian and Greek, man is not recognised as a brother. Under the Roman conquest, Greece, Italy, Spain, Gaul, Africa, and even Germany, come into the charmed circle.

1 At Florence, the trades which were called the arts, and which deserved this name, were, indisputably, the cradle of the fine-arts.

1 Hence the individualistic character of fashion-morality, analogous to that of fashion-art. This means that in the eyes of the artist, as in those of the moralist, individuals begin to count for something in themselves. But this does not prevent duty in times of fashion having very general, although very fleeting, interests for its object, just as the works of art of the same times excel in photographing under the lineaments of an individual, widespread, although highly variable, psychological states. I have pointed out above the naturalistic character of fashion-morality and of fashion-art. “In the second half of the sixteenth century,” M. Brunetière very truly says, “beneath the religious wars, the great question at stake is to know whether the antique morality, the morality that was founded in theology on the dogma of the fall of man, but in reality upon the experience of the natural perversity of man, is to be ousted from the government of human conduct, and whether nature alone will suffice from this time on to maintain the social institution.” Here, it will be noted, incidentally, that the inspiration of naturalism and individualism coincides with the inspiration of optimism. Is it that pessimism, I mean true pessimism (the pessimism of Christianity and Janseism, for example), not the pure kind, belongs to ages of custom, and optimism to ages of fashion?

CHAPTER VIII.—REMARKS AND COROLLARIES

1 Let me express the full depth of my thought upon the unknown and unknowable source of universal repetitions. It may be that an immense and all-pervasive ambition is not a sufficient explanation. I confess that at times another occurs to me. I reflect upon the fact that delight in endless and tireless self-repetition is one of the signs of love; that it is the peculiarity of love, both in art and life, to continually say and resay the same thing, to continually picture and repicture the same subject. Then I ask myself whether this universe, which seems to delight in its monotonous repetitions, might not reveal, in its depths, an infinite outpouring of hidden love, greater even than that of ambition. I cannot keep from conjecturing that all things, in spite of intestine struggles, have been made, separately, con amore, and that only in this lies, evil and misfortune notwithstanding, the explanation of their beauty. And yet, at other times, in reflecting upon death, I am led to justify pessimism. Everything repeats itself, and nothing persists. These are the two characteristics of our universe, the second growing out of the first. Why should it be chimerical to conceive of a perfect world, of a world that was both stable and original, where everything lasted, and where nothing repeated itself? But a truce to these dreams!

1 On this subject see Spencer’s Sociology, Vol III., where he tells how gifts, which are at first voluntary and one-sided (either from the superior to the inferior, or inversely), become, little by little, habitual, obligatory, and reciprocal. But Spencer forgets to tell of the leading part played by imitation in all of this.

1 I refer to human relations; for in the relations of primitive man to animals—relations which have no direct bearing upon sociology—the opposite seems to have occurred, since, as we have seen already, man fought with savage beasts before he had the means to hunt them.

2 In the beginning the administration of the sacrament was gratuitous; it was an out-and-out gift. (On this subject see Paul Viollet, Histoire du droit français, p. 385). “Little by little, communities came to respond to these gifts with others, with presents that were spontaneous, and not in the least obligatory, until, finally, these offerings came to be dues. Fire-insurance companies are societies for mutual aid. They date back to 1786 under this reciprocal form. But they were preceded by non-mutual benefit societies, by systematic almsgiving for the benefit of sufferers from fire (see Babeau, La Ville sous l’ancien régime, II, 146) The right of divorce began by being one-sided, to the exclusive advantage of the husband, before it became reciprocal, etc.

1 The more mutual services of all kinds become, in the course of industrial and commercial progress, the more arbitrary and capricious is the character assumed by the wants which are thereby satisfied. The consumer, who is also a producer, determines more and more how he is to be served, and when he is to be served. He determines to make everything cater to his momentary desires, no matter how fleeting and extravagant they may be. This is called, in high-flown language, the emancipation of the individual. Now, this may be readily explained through the laws of imitation. In the beginning, capriciousness is the monopoly of the master, the pater families or king, who has himself waited upon by his children, his slaves, or his subjects without reciprocity. It is also the monopoly of the god whom prostrate adorers serve, without the right of demanding any equivalent from him for the sacrifices made at his feet. Therefore, if reciprocity of services has only been brought about, in the long run, by a prolonged and free-spread imitation of the one-sided service by which heads of families, kings, and the nobility modelled upon them, gods and demi-gods are benefited, it is natural for consumers, in seeking to ape the rulers of a past time, in their character of consumers at least, to affect to give to their needs an air of somewhat royal and divine caprice. In this way our growing democratic independence and self-sufficiency has come in a straight line from theocratic and monarchical absolutism.

1 Or, in case the superior did make obeisances, and pays visits and compliments, it was always the inferior who began the saluting, the visiting, and the complimenting. At that time there was an obligatory salutation of class by class—as of rank by rank; to-day, we know only the salutation of man by man, and it is arranged in such away that the same man is not always the first to bow. We find a description in La Bruyère of the transition of the unilateral to the reciprocal courtesy. His Ménippe, when people bow to him “is embarrassed to know whether or not he should return it, and, while he is deliberating, you have already passed him by.” This trait is truly obsolete. Do we ever see anyone, in these days, no matter how high his position, hesitating to return the greeting of the humblest of his fellow citizens?

1 I do not use the words reversible and irreversible in the same sense which they have in legal phraseology and in the dictionary, but in the construction which is given to them by physicists, especially in thermodynamics, where a mechanism is called reversible which can act indifferently in either of two opposite directions.

1 See Giard’s article in the Revue scientifique, December 1, 1888.

1 What becomes here of the famous law of progressive differentiation considered as a necessity of universal evolution?

2 See Babeau, La Ville sous l’ancien régime.

1 Let us note that through a regular and uninterrupted series of transformations, the ecclesiastical organisation of Christian Europe passed from an evangelical, equality-loving democracy to the aristocracy of the early bishops, then to the modified monarchy of the Bishop of Rome, as it was limited by the Councils, and, finally, to the absolutism of papal infallibility. This is the exact opposite of the evolution accomplished by secular society. But, on the other hand, in this case as in that, the evolution has been from multiformity to uniformity, from disintegration to centralisation.

1 The Byzantine Empire was the goal of Greco-Roman civilisation; the Chinese Empire, of Chinese civilisation; the Mogul Empire, of Hindoo civilisation; the Empire of the Pharaohs, of Egyptian civilisation, etc.

2 M. Gide expressly refers to the “laws of imitation,” for he was one of the first to accept my point of view, and in his Principes d’économie politique he gives a pretty good place to my theory of value, the application of this general point of view, as I presented it a long time ago, in several articles in the Revue philosophique.

1 Historians err in feeling, or affecting to feel, an unjustifiable contempt for all great social similarities in language, religion, politics, art, etc., which have been visibly effected by the imitation of some prestigious model, whether or not the prestige be that of a conqueror or merely of a stranger. They are wont to treat with scorn the great agglomerations of peoples, the great social unities, the Roman Empire, for example, which are made possible in this way, and to declare them factitious. This does not keep them from highly valuing, over-valuing, in fact, other similarities, other unities, which they consider natural and spontaneous. They are not aware that these are also caused by imitation, by imitation which is, in certain cases, unconscious and unthinking, instead of conscious and deliberate, but which is nevertheless imitation. Superstitious reverence for the unconscious, and ignorance of the leading part played in human affairs by imitation in its many overt or hidden forms, give rise in the best minds to many such contradictions.

Here is an example, which I borrow from the very erudite Histoire des institutions politiques of M. Viollet (p. 256). This distinguished historian belongs to the very large number of those who contrast the senility of the Roman Empire with the fruitful and spirited adolescence of the German barbarians. He considers that the great imperial unity is artificial and, by contrast, he is led to consider that every little unity produced by the break-up of the Empire is natural and spontaneous. The frightful chaos from the sixth to the tenth century, which was relieved only by the period of Charlemagne, the glorious and conscious imitator of the Cæsars, seems to him to be only a crisis in racial development; its gloom is “an aurora.” It all seems admirable to him first the disintegration, and yet this is evidently a step backward, for I do not know how many centuries, and then, and this seems contradictory to me, the obvious but futile inclination to reconstruct the broken unity, under the form of re-enlarging nationalities. “The Occident,” he says, “as it was happily and definitely disintegrated, having no longer any uncontested tie but that of a community of religious and philosophic beliefs, or any similar institutions, but institutions which were born spontaneously, so to speak, from similar wants, was about to present the admirable spectacle of a diversity a thousand times richer, more fruitful, and more harmonious than the best-planned homogeneity.” Now, let us not forget that, had it not been for the long duration of the Empire, for the age-long propagation of currents of imitation in language, ideas, manners, and institutions, there would have been no similarity of wants between so many originally heterogeneous peoples. And, as for community of religious as well as of philosophic beliefs, this was clearly due to those multiple conversions, to those imitative contagions between minds and souls that the unity of the Roman Empire alone made possible. Thus, that which the writer I have quoted so much admired as being contrary to a factitious imperial unity, is, in its origin, imperial. Suppress that, and nothing remains but the unrestricted disintegration which takes us back to a state of savagery.

If we fully comprehended the truth of the observation, that, unless man in society is inventing, a rare occurrence, or unless he is following impulses which are of a purely organic origin, likewise a rarer and rarer occurrence, he is always, in act or thought, imitating, whether he is conscious of it or not, whether he yields to a so-called imitative impulse or whether he makes a rational and deliberate choice from among the models which are offered to him to imitate; if we knew this, if this were our starting-point, we would be cautious of admiring, with a childish superstition, the great currents of unconscious and thoughtless imitation in social phenomena, and we would, on the other hand, recognise the superiority of acts of voluntary and rational imitation.

We would also recognise how invincible and irresistible, in virtue of the laws of imitation, is the immense impetus of all things towards uniformity. I do not deny the picturesque side of the “rich diversity “that the chaotic period of the Merovingians and Carlovingians was a factor in producing in the great feudal period. But in modern times has there not been a return to uniformity, and even an enlargement of it; in short, is not our present civilisation by way of being cast in a single unique mould? Nowadays, have we not to seek the depths of some African desert or Chinese village to avoid seeing the same hats and dresses, the same cigars, the same newspapers?

Thus, in spite of the political disintegration which has persisted, although in a minor degree, a social level has been reconstructed. This cannot be imputed to a political unity, as in the case of the Roman Empire, as if it were its sole or principal cause. The Roman conquest favoured and hastened the social assimilation of Europe, and in doing that it rendered a great service to the cause of civilisation. since civilisation is precisely nothing else than this work of unification, of social complication, of mutual and harmonious imitation. But, even without the Roman conquest, social unity would have been brought about in Europe—only it would have been accomplished in the same way as that of Asia or Africa was accomplished; that is, less well, and less peacefully. It would have entailed fearful massacres, and, without doubt, the progress of inventions and discoveries would have been less advanced, just as happened in Asia and Africa.

And so I do not join with those who consider that imperial unity was disastrous because of the very memory that it left behind, a memory which proved a source of delusion for the Middle Ages. “This dire idea of universal monarchy lasted for more than a thousand years.” Dire in what? Is it not evident that the small degree of higher order and harmony which persisted in this anarchy of warring fiefs, the political dust of the imperial block, was due to the very dream and memory of the Empire, and that without the pope, the spiritual emperor, or even without the German Cæsar, this dust might have been incapable of ever regaining life and organisation?

1 Our inclination to imitate stranger or neighbour does not increase in proportion to the multiplication of our relations with him. Of course when there are practically no relations at all, there is no tendency to imitate him, because there is no knowledge of him; but, on the other hand, when we know him too well to be able to continue in our envy or admiration of him, we no longer take him for our model. There is, therefore, a certain point between too little and too much communication, where the highest degree of the need of imitating others may be formed. How shall we determine this point? It is a difficult matter. We may say that it is the optical point where we are near enough to have all the illusion of the scenery without being near enough to be aware of the stage machinery.

It is essential to note the consequence of the preceding fact. It follows that the multiplied communications between peoples and classes, through railroads, telegraphs, and telephones, will result in leading them back to a taste for and a pious observance of their distinctive idiosyncrasies, and of their particular habits and customs. Is not the present return to the spirit of nationality due in part, in slight part, to this cause, in spite of the fact that its chief cause is militarism?