VIII

Since being is having (avoir), it follows that everything must be avid (avide). Now, if there is anything so obvious as to strike everyone's eye, it is surely this avidity, the immense ambition which from end to end of the world, from the vibrating atom or the prolific animalcule to the conquering king, fills and moves every being. Every possibility tends towards its realization, every reality tends towards its universalization. Every possibility tends to realize itself, to characterize itself precisely: whence the overflowing of variations above and across the living themes, both physical and social. Every reality, every characteristic, once formed, tends to universalize itself. This is the reason why light and heat radiate and why electricity propagates with such evident rapidity, and the least atomic vibration aspires by itself to fill the infinite ether, a goal to which every other vibration lays a competing claim. This is why every species, every living race be it barely formed, multiplying in a geometric progression, would soon cover the entire globe, if it did not come up against its equally fertile rivals, and not only species and races, but all minimally distinct particularities, and even their ailments, a fact which rules out any teleological explanation of fertility falsely considered as a means to the preservation of forms. Finally, this is why any social product whatever which has its own more or less well-defined character, an industrial product, a line of verse, a formula, some political idea which appears one day in a corner of someone's brain, dreams like Alexander of the conquest of the world, seeks to project itself in thousands and millions of copies everywhere men live, and stops in this path only when blocked by the force of its no less ambitious rival. The three principal forms of universal repetition, wave-like, generative, imitative, as I have said elsewhere,⁶¹ are so many procedures of government and instruments of conquest which give rise to the three kinds of physical, vital, and social invasion: vibratory radiation, generative expansion, and the contagion of the example.

The child is born a despot: like an African king, as far as he is concerned, the other exists only to serve him. Years of punishment and educational constriction are required to cure him of this error. We may say that all laws and rules, chemical discipline, vital discipline, or social discipline, are so many additional brakes intended to restrain this omnivorous appetite of every being. In general we are rarely conscious of them, we civilized men, subjected to their tyranny from our cradles. Our ambition is aborted, crushed even in the egg, and yet how deep must it be to break forth here and there in history through the least crack in the dykes of our habit, defying centuries of hereditary constriction, in bursts such as Caesar or Napoleon I!

To come up against one's limit, to have one's impotence confirmed: what a terrible shock for every man and, above all, what a surprise! Surely, in this universal pretention of the infinitely small to the infinitely great, and in the universal and eternal shock which results, there is some ground for pessimism. For one unique development, so many billions of abortions! Our concept of matter accurately reflects the essentially frustrating (contrariant) nature of the world around us. The psychologists are right, more right than they know: external reality exists for us only by its property of resisting us, a resistance which is moreover not only haptic, in its solidity, but also visual in its opacity, voluntative in its inobedience to our wishes, intellectual in its impenetrability to our thought. To say that matter is solid is to say that it is inobedient: despite all illusions to the contrary, it is a relation between it and us, and not between it and itself, which is described by the former attribute as much as by the latter.

Is there any hope of a remedy for this state of affairs? No, to judge by the inductions suggested by the example of our societies: inequality will rather grow more and more between the victors and the vanquished of the world. The victory of the former and the defeat of the latter will grow every day more complete. Indeed, one of the most certain indicators of the progress of a people's civilization is that the making of great reputations, great military or industrial undertakings, great reforms, and radical reorganizations become possible. In other words, the progress of civilization, in eliminating dialects and diffusing a single language, in effacing differences in customs and establishing a universal code of law, in nourishing citizens' minds uniformly by means of newspapers, which are more in demand than books, and in a thousand other ways, essentially facilitates the ever more complete, ever less fragmented realization of a unique individual plan by the whole mass of the nation. Hence, thousands of different plans which might, at a less advanced stage, have made a step towards fulfilment concurrently with the destined victor, are doomed to be fatally stifled. John Stuart Mill says very well in his Principles of Political Economy: 'In proportion as [human beings] put off the qualities of the savage, they become amenable to discipline; capable of adhering to plans concerted beforehand,

and about which they may not have been consulted; of subordinating their individual caprice to a preconceived determination, and performing severally the parts allotted to them in a combined undertaking'.⁶²

At length, after many centuries, we can see to what point nations should be conducted by such progress: to a degree of icy splendour and pure regularity which is almost mineral or crystalline, and which forms a striking contrast to the bizarre grace and the deeply alive complexity of their beginnings.

Leaving such speculations aside, and confining ourselves to positive facts, the formation of each thing by propagation starting from a point is not in doubt, and justifies us in admitting the existence of leading elements (éléments-chefs). It will be objected that it is difficult to discover, among the myriad subjects of one of these stellar or molecular, organic or urban States which I imagine, the true master, the founder, centre and focus of these spheres and radiations of similar actions, which are repeated and regulated harmoniously. This is because in reality there exist an infinite number of centres and foci, from different points of view and to varying degrees. To consider only the most important of these centres, there still exists, we maintain, at the heart of the sun, the conquering atom which by its individual action extended by degrees to the whole primordial nebula, disrupted the contented state of equilibrium which, we are told, the latter enjoyed. Little by little, its attractive influence created a mass, while around it other atoms, its crowned vassals, followed its example in separately gathering together several fragments of its vast empire, and shaped the planets. And, since this first beginning of time, have these triumphant atoms, imitated by their slaves who exert their own attractive power, ever ceased for an instant their attraction and vibration? In spreading like a contagion through infinite space, has their condensatory power diminished? No, for its imitators are not only its rivals, but its collaborators.

Likewise, what prodigious conquerors are the infinitesimal germs, which succeed in submitting to their dominion a mass millions of times greater than their minute size! What a treasury of admirable inventions, of ingenious recipes for the exploitation and direction of others, emanates from these microscopic cells, whose genius and whose smallness should equally amaze us!

But when I speak of conquest and ambition with respect to cellular societies, it is rather of propaganda and devotion that I should speak. This is all metaphorical, of course, but nonetheless one should choose one's terminology and points of comparison wisely; and moreover I would ask the reader not to forget that, if belief and desire, in the pure and abstract sense in which I understand these two great forces, the only two quantities of the soul, have the universality which I ascribe to them, it is barely metaphorical to use the term idea for the application of belief-force to internal qualitative indicators (which, however, bear no relation to our sensations and images)—the term intention for the application of desire-force to one of these quasi-ideas—the term propaganda for the communication from element to element, not of course a verbal communication but of unknown specific character, of the quasi-intention formed by an originating element,—the term conversion for the internal transformation of an element into which there enters, in place of its own quasi-intention, that of another, and so on. Bearing these remarks in mind, let us proceed.

When an empire wishes to extend its power, it sends, to a single point on the globe and not a large number of points at once, not a single man but an enormous army which, once this point is conquered, directs elsewhere its force of devastation. By contrast, when the leader of a religion wishes to disseminate it, he sends out missionaries as widely as possible, to all points of the compass, to create a widely dispersed body of isolated men charged with announcing the good news and winning souls by persuasion. Now, I submit that, in this respect, the processes by which living things propagate themselves resemble apostolic propaganda much more than military annexation. And, if one adds to this point of similarity a hundred more, if one observes that each living species, like a church or a religious community, is a world closed to rival groups, and yet hospitable and avid for new recruits,—a world which is enigmatic and undecipherable from the outside, where mysterious passwords known only to the faithful are exchanged,—a conservative world in which all must conform scrupulously and indefinitely, with remarkable selflessness, to the traditional rites,—a world which is highly hierarchical, yet whose inequalities seem never to provoke rebellion—a world at once highly active and highly regulated, highly persistent and highly flexible, capable of adapting readily to changes of circumstance and yet persevering in its age-old beliefs; then it will be clear that I am not abusing the freedom of analogy by comparing biological phenomena to the religious dimensions of our societies rather than to their military, industrial, scientific or artistic aspects.

In certain respects, an army resembles an organism just as closely as does a convent. The same discipline, the same rigorous subordination, the same power of group solidarity, pertain in an organism as in a regiment. The mode of nutrition (that is, recruitment) is also the same, by intussusception, by the periodic incorporation of recruits, filling the structure to a quota which is never exceeded. However, in other no less important respects, the difference is striking: regimentation transforms and regenerates the conscript less than nutritive assimilation does the alimentary cell, or religious conversion the neophyte. Military education never penetrates the conscript's inmost heart. Hence the lesser persistence and shorter duration of military organizations. Even in barbarian societies, their transformations are somewhat abrupt and frequent, unless they are in a wholly undeveloped state, in which case their incoherence prevents us from comparing them to living things, even the simplest. Finally, when an army grows, when a regiment reproduces, this reproduction never takes place, as does that of living things, by the emission of a unique element around which foreign elements subsequently gather. A regiment can reproduce only by dissiparity; a single soldier or officer, asked hypothetically to form a body of troops in a foreign country by his own efforts, would find himself absolutely unable to form a platoon of four men with him as corporal.

In virtue of these differential characteristics, life appears to us as something respectable and sacred, as a great and generous enterprise of salvation and redemption of the elements which are chained up in the tight bonds of chemistry; and it is surely to misunderstand its nature if we consider its evolution, with Darwin, as a series of military operations where destruction is the companion and condition of victory. This great and prevalent prejudice seems to be confirmed by the distressing spectacle of living beings devouring one another; upon seeing a cat's claw attack a bird's nest, the heart is deeply moved and takes to decrying life's egotism and cruelty. Life, however, is neither egotistical nor cruel and, before casting such aspersions on it, we should ask ourselves whether it is possible to interpret its most repellent actions in a way which can reconcile this horror with the admiration which we cannot but feel for the beauty of its works. From the point of view of our hypothesis, nothing could be easier. When a living thing destroys another to eat it, the elements of the destroyer intend perhaps to offer to the elements of the destroyed the same kind of service which the faithful of a religion think they offer the sectaries of another cult in breaking their temples, their clerical institutions, their religious ties, and endeavouring to convert them to the 'true faith'. What is thus destroyed is beings' exterior, the elements endowed with faith and love, but faith and love themselves are not sacrificed. In general, it must be acknowledged, it is higher forms of life which absorb and assimilate the lower, just as the greatest and most developed religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, convert the fetishists and not vice versa.

With this concept of life, need I add how one may conceive consciousness and death? I call consciousness, soul, mind, the transitory victory of an eternal element, which by some favourable chance rises above the obscure realm of the infinitesimal, to rule a people of brothers who are now become his subjects, subjects them for a little while to his law, handed down by his predecessors and slightly amended by him, or marked by his royal seal; and I call death the gradual or sudden dethroning, the voluntary or forced abdication of this spiritual conqueror who, like Darius after Arbela and Napoleon after Waterloo, Charles V at Yuste and Diocletian at Salona,⁶³ but even more completely stripped bare once more, returns to the infinitesimal where it was born and whence it came, perhaps lamented, certainly not invariable and, who knows? not unconscious.

Let us not then say the other life or nothingness, let us say non-life, without prejudging the question. Non-life is not necessarily non-being, any more than is non-ego; and the arguments of certain philosophers against the possibility of existence after death carry no more weight than those of idealist sceptics against the reality of the external world.—That life is preferable to non-life; again, nothing is less well established. Perhaps life is nothing but a time of trials, a drudgery of schoolboy exercises undergone by the monads who, on graduating from this hard and mystical school, find themselves purged of their former need for universal domination. I am persuaded that few among them, once fallen from the cerebral throne, have any wish to return. Restored to their original state, to absolute independence, they give up their power over the body without suffering and without hoping to return, and enjoy for all eternity the divine state into which they were plunged in the last moment of life, exemption from all evils and all desires, though not from all loves, and the certainty of possessing a concealed and everlasting good.

Thus death would be explained; thus life would be justified, by the purgation of desire ... But enough hypotheses. Will you, dear reader, forgive me this attempt at metaphysics?

Notes

61. [Trans. Note: Tarde develops this tripartite scheme of forms of repetition at length in The Laws of Imitation (Les Lois de l'imitation).]↩
62. [Trans. Note: J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, IV.1, vol. II, 5th ed., London, Parker, Son & Bourn 1862, p. 261, §2.]↩
63. [Trans. Note: The final defeats and abdications of great imperial rulers: Darius III of Persia was defeated by Alexander the Great at Arbela (331 BCE) and Napoleon by British and Prussian forces at Waterloo (1815); Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, retired to the monastery of Yuste in Extremadura (1556) after his abdication, and Diocletian, Roman Emperor, to his palace near Salona in Dalmatia (in present-day Split, Croatia; 305 CE.)]↩