VI

Thus the extension of this most eminently lucid of points of view, namely the sociological, to the totality of phenomena is destined to radically transform the scientific concept of the relation of conditions to result. In still another respect it brings about a profound change in this relation. The principal objection against the monadic doctrine, as stated above, is that it introduces, or appears to introduce, as much complexity at the base of the phenomena as at their summit. What, we will be asked, explains the spiritual complexity of the agents by which we hope to explain all else? I have already met this objection by denying the hypothesized complexity, if it is to be supposed that belief and desire are all there is to the monads. However, it may be posited, in my view correctly, that their content cannot be reduced to these two quantities alone. I shall shortly state what more I attribute to them. Returning to the stated objection, then, I shall attack it at its very source, in the widespread prejudice according to which the result is always more complex than its conditions, and the action more differentiated than its agents, whence it follows that universal evolution is necessarily a movement from the homogenous to the heterogeneous, in a progressive and constant process of differentiation. Spencer has the merit, in particular in his chapter on the instability of the homogenous,³⁹ of having magisterially formulated this belief, and elevated it to the status of law. The truth is that difference comes about by differing and that change comes about by changing and, in thus being given as ends to themselves, change and difference attest to their necessary and absolute character; but it is not and cannot be proven that the total amount of difference and change in the world is either growing or diminishing. If we look at the social world, the only one known to us from the inside: we see agents, men, much more differentiated and more sharply characterized as individuals, and richer in continual variations, than are the mechanisms of government or the systems of laws or of beliefs, or even dictionaries or grammars, and this differentiation is maintained by their competition. A historical fact is simpler and clearer than the states of mind of any of its actors. Moreover, as the population of social groups grows and the brains of their members are enriched with new ideas and new sentiments, the functioning of their administrations, their codes of law and conduct, their catechisms, and the very structure of their languages become simpler and more regular, rather as scientific theories become simpler as they are filled with more numerous and diverse facts. Our railway stations are constructed to a simpler and more standardized form than the castles of the Middle Ages, even though the former draw on a much more diverse range of resources and skills. At the same time we see that, if the progress of civilization in certain respects diversifies individual human beings, it does so only on condition of levelling them in other respects by the growing uniformity of their laws, their habits, their customs, and their languages. In general, the similarity of these collective factors encourages the intellectual and moral dissimilarity of individuals, and extends their sphere of action; and besides, if in the course of the civilizing movement, institutions, customs, clothing, industrial products and so on, differ much less between one point and another in a given territory, they differ much more from one moment to another in a given span of time.

As for the formula of the instability of the homogenous, it presupposes that the more homogenous something is, the more unstable its internal equilibrium, to the extent that if it were absolutely homogenous, it would be unable to subsist from one moment to the next. However, it is remarkable that space is the only type of absolute homogeneity known to us, if its reality be admitted, as Spencer does. How can it be, if this law holds, that this perfectly homogenous system of points and volumes has subsisted unalterably since the beginning of time? To be sure, this argument no longer holds if the reality of space be denied, but regardless, this putative law is contradicted by a thousand examples of relative homogeneity arising from heterogeneity, the most striking of which are furnished by the observation of either human or animal societies. The aggregation of polyps, animals which are often very complicated, forms a colony or polypary, an extremely rudimentary form of aquatic vegetable. The aggregation of men in tribes or nations gives birth to a language, an inferior species of plant whose historical vegetation,⁴⁰ growth and flourishing, to use their own expressions, are studied by philosophers.

This, to repeat, is why the infusion of a sociological spirit into the sciences would be eminently conducive to curing them of this prejudice against which I have taken arms. It would then be clear how we should understand this great and beautiful principle of differentiation, which Spencer extended so successfully without, however, being able to reconcile it, as I believe we must, with the no less certain principle of universal co-ordination. The primordial nebula⁴¹ appears to us shrouded in the mists of time, and it is perhaps due only to this distance that it displays to us the homogeneity which forms the point of departure for all cosmogonic theories. Do we have the least knowledge of what antecedent diversities were sacrificed by the condensation of the elements into similar atoms, of the atoms into molecules and celestial spheres,

of molecules into cells and so on, for the benefit of the diversities which came after them (and which were admittedly greater than the former, which is not to say that the one grew from the other)? We know a little better, but still do not fully understand, what it cost to a people of free and wandering savages to agglomerate themselves into bands, and to bands to settle in cities, circling about a pivot of fixed institutions. But when, before our eyes, the provincial diversity of customs, of costumes, of ideas, of accents, and of physical forms, is being levelled by modernity, by the unity of weights and measures, of language, of accent, and even of conversation—a levelling which is the necessary condition for all these minds to come into contact with one another, that is, to begin to work, and to develop more freely their individual characteristics—then the tears of poets and of artists attest to the price of the social picturesqueness which has been sacrificed for the sake of these advantages. Are the newly created differences more considerable than the old ones, in virtue of being more advantageous because they respond to a greater number of desires? No. We have an unfortunate and inexplicable tendency to imagine everything unknown to us as homogenous. Since the former geological states of the planet are much less well known to us than its current state, we think it certain that they were less differentiated, a prejudice against which Lyell frequently protests.⁴² Before the telescope which revealed to us the multiformity of nebulae, of stellar forms, double and variable stars, was the universal dream not of immutable and incorruptible heavens beyond those known to us?⁴³ And in the realm of the infinitely small, which, much more than the infinitely large, has remained inaccessible to our observations, does one not still dream of the philosopher's stone in a thousand forms, the identical atoms of the chemists, or the so-called homogenous protoplasm of the naturalists? But everywhere where a scientist digs beneath the indistinction which is apparent to us, he discovers an unexpected treasury of distinctions. It was once thought that animalcula were homogenous. Ehrenberg⁴⁴ examined them through the microscope, and from then on, as Perrier says, 'the soul of everything he did was the belief in the equal complexity of all animals', from infusoria to man. Since solids and liquids are more accessible to our senses than are gases, and the latter more accessible than is ethereal nature, we think that solids or liquids are more different from each other than are gases, and in physics we speak of ether and not of ethers (although Laplace uses this plural) as we would speak only of gas and not of gases, if the latter were known to us only by their physical effects—which are remarkably similar—to the exclusion of their chemical properties. When water vapour crystallizes into a thousand different needles or simply liquefies into flowing water, does this condensation really, as we are inclined to think, entail an increase in the differences inherent in the water molecules? No; let us not forget the freedom which the latter formerly enjoyed in the state of gaseous dispersion, their movement in every direction, their impacts, and their infinitely varied distances. Is it then that the differences have decreased? Again, no: all that has happened is that one kind of difference has been substituted for another, that is, internal differences for mutually external ones.

To exist is to differ; difference is, in a sense, the truly substantial side of things; it is at once their ownmost possession and that which they hold most in common. This must be our starting point, and we must refrain from further explaining this principle, since all things come back to it—including identity, which is more usually, but mistakenly, taken as the point of departure. For identity is only the minimal degree of difference and hence a kind of difference, and an infinitely rare kind, as rest is only a special case of movement, and the circle only a particular variety of ellipse. To begin from the primordial identity is to posit at the origin of things a prodigiously improbable singularity, an impossible coincidence of multiple beings, at once distinct from and similar to one another; or else the inexplicable mystery of a single simple being, which would subsequently, for no comprehensible reason, suffer division. It is to commit a similar error to that of the ancient astronomers who, in their chimerical explanations of the solar system, began with the circle and not with the ellipse, on the basis that the former is more perfect. Difference is the alpha and omega of the universe; everything begins with difference, with the elements whose innate diversity (which various reasons make probable) can in my view be the only justification of their multiplicity;

everything ends with difference, where, in the higher phenomena of thought and history, it finally breaks free of the narrow circles in which it had bound itself, namely the atomic vortex and the vital vortex, and transforming the very obstacle it faced into a fulcrum, surpasses and transfigures itself. It seems to me that all similarities and all phenomenal repetitions are only intermediaries, which will inevitably be found to be interposed between some elementary diversities which are more or less obliterated, and the transcendent diversities produced by their partial immolation.

We might also observe that every sufficiently prolonged process of evolution exhibits a succession and interlacing of phenomenal layers which are remarkable alternately for the regularity and the caprice, the permanence and the fugacity, of the relations they present to us. The example of society is eminently well-suited to promote an awareness of this central fact, and at the same time to indicate its true significance, by showing that in this series where identity and difference, the indistinct and the well-characterized each reciprocally make use of the other over and over again, the initial and final term is always difference, the characteristic, the bizarre and inexplicable agitation at the basis of all things, which reappears more clearly and sharply after each successive effacement. The speech of men, each with a different accent, intonation, and timbre of voice and gesture: this veritable chaos of discordant heterogeneities is the social element. But at length, general habits of language emerge from this confused Babel, and are formulated as grammatical laws. In their turn the latter serve, by bringing into relation a greater number of speakers, only to throw into relief the particular individual turn taken by their ideas: another kind of discord. And they succeed all the more in the diversification of minds to the extent that they are themselves more fixed and uniform. Take poets, for example. When a language is newly born, they take hold of it and bend it to their disordered fantasy. However, after a certain period of babbling, rhythms and prosodic laws are formulated and imposed; and this takes place in all poetries, be they Hindu, Greek or French. Uniformity appears anew. What purpose does it serve? To better unfold the poets' imaginative resources and to add lustre to each one's individual hue. In proportion to the growing regularity of the rhythmical beating, as it were, of the wings of poetry, its flight paradoxically becomes more capricious. Victor Hugo's prosody with its subtle rules is at once more complex and more rigorous than Racine's. We could equally well have considered scientists rather than poets, and the observation would have led to the same results. Each scientist works apart from the others, although he utilizes their work, thanks to their common language; he puts his temperament, his soul, into the research he undertakes; all is defined, all is individual.

If we could gather in a single place all the researchers who are collectively constructing a science at an early stage of its development (organic chemistry, for example, meteorology, or linguistics), there could be no more bizarre pandemonium than this scientific furnace. And yet in this furnace an impersonal monument is forged,⁴⁵ an edifice in glacial grey, where the least trace of the multicoloured psychological states which built it seems to have been absolutely erased. But let us pause for a moment. Science itself is certainly not the last word in progress. Let us imagine it finished, complete, and condensed into a definitive catechism which could easily be installed in a corner of everyone's memory; in this way a vastly greater quantity of energy than we can presently imagine would be made available in the human brain for other uses. It would then become clear that the perfect systematization and universal propagation of scientific orthodoxy had had for its ultimate and supreme rationale the extraordinary flourishing of hypotheses, of philosophical heresies, of an endless series of self-invented systems, and of extraordinary lyrical and dramatic fantasies, in which, thanks to the impersonality of scientific knowledge, each mind's profound need to universalize its particular nuance and to set its seal upon the world could be fully satisfied. Intelligence followed to its logical conclusion will in the end be nothing more than the handmaiden of imagination.

Shall we consider social evolution in its economic, administrative, or military aspect? We will again observe the same law. Industry, from a primitive phase where each does whatsoever and howsoever he likes, evolves rapidly to a second phase where professions and corporations are established, with their fixed and traditional processes of manufacture which seem created to stifle genius, which would be nothing but a useless encumbrance; but on the contrary, by this very constraint, the genius of inventions and of arts is fortified and emerges incomparably more fecund than before. Commerce, from a primitive phase with no fixed or general prices, requiring perpetual haggling, and favouring individual shrewdness and cunning, evolves to produce the uniform and regulated course of our great modern markets, provided with their special thermometers known as stock exchanges; and in the end, far from crushing individual skill beneath the authority of number, the regularity and almost physical inevitability of the overall economic facts support the unbridled impulse to speculation and the spirit of enterprise which take hold of these facts and play upon them, and in which the least psychological particularities of the players break forth lawlessly in sudden triumphs or catastrophes. The incoherence and administrative quirks of a nation in its embryonic state are gradually replaced by unity, stable administration and centralized power, all to the greater glory of statesmen, who are the operators of this machine and make use of it to accomplish their historic deeds, each one sui generis like its author, a marvellous accident of planetary forces. Finally, the indisciplined hordes of barbarian societies are superseded by our fine mechanized armies, in which the individual is nothing but a tool in the hands of a great captain who throws him into some battle dissimilar to every other, with its own name and date, reproducing on the vastly enlarged scale of the battlefield the particular psychological state which is his during the action.

It can thus be seen from these examples that, strangely enough, order and simplicity are manifest in the composite even though foreign to its elements, and then once more disappear in the higher composites, and so on up the scale. But in the case of social evolutions and social aggregations, of which we form a part and where we have the advantage of being able to grasp at the same time the two ends of the chain, the lowest and the highest stones of the edifice, we can clearly see that order and simplicity are simply mediating terms, alembics in which elementary diversity is potently transfigured and, as it were, sublimated. The poet and the philosopher essentially, and secondarily the inventor, the artist, the speculator, the politician, and the tactician: these are the terminal flowers of any national tree;⁴⁶their blossoming depends upon the work of all the aborted germs of innate, extrasocial (or in some cases anti-social) characteristics, which every private citizen brought with him into the world, and which in most cases were stifled in the cradle by education, that indispensable but false leveller.

These innate characteristics, the first term of the social series, are at the same time the last term of the vital series. In attempting to transcend the latter in its turn, we would traverse first of all the specific form, harmoniously constituted and regularly repeated over centuries, whose variations these characteristics are,—then the critical period in which this form was shaped by a coincidence of multiple causes in unexpected juxtapositions,—then the previous forms whence the specific form derives and their analogous formations,— then the cell, and finally the formless or protean protoplasm, with its sudden whims which no law may grasp.—Here again the alpha and the omega is diversity, in all its vividness.

But is the protoplasm, the first term of the vital series, not also the final term of the chemical series? The latter, if we reascend it in its turn, displays the less and less complex molecular forms of organic chemistry, and the similarly less and less complex molecular forms of inorganic chemistry, all regularly constructed and probably consisting of harmonious cycles of periodic rhythmical movements, but each separated from the others by tumultuous and disordered crises of their combinations; and thus we arrive by conjecture at the simplest atom or atoms, from which all the others are built. But is this, then, the initial element? No. For the simplest atom is a material form, a vortex, as we are told, a vibratory rhythm of a certain kind, something by all appearances infinitely complex. This complexity has been confirmed more than ever by the studies of highly rarefied gases conducted since the invention of the radiometer, in which it seems to be possible to see the gaseous atom individually. For example, in this ultra-gaseous world, a ray of light does not always travel in a straight line;⁴⁷ the closer we approach to the individual element, the more variable the observed phenomena. Clerk Maxwell has established that the molecules in the same gas move with very different speeds, even though their average speed may be identical.⁴⁸ Spottiswoode, of the Royal Society of London, says: 'This is because the simplicity of nature as we currently understand it is in reality the result of an infinite complexity, and because, beneath the appearance of uniformity, we find a diversity whose depths and secrets we have not begun to fathom'.⁴⁹ Crookes expresses himself similarly with relation to radiant matter: 'The greatest problems of the future will find their solution in this unexplored domain [of the infinitely small], where doubtless the fundamental, subtle, marvellous and profound realities are to be found'.⁵⁰ Would he so express himself if he regarded the ultimate elements, in the vulgar fashion, as identical exemplars of an unvarying form? Because every chemical substance translates itself to our eyes by a special vibration imprinted on the ether, one is led to believe that this faculty of vibrating in a certain way is identical in every similar atom and that they have no other properties. It is as if one said of a grove of pines or poplars, heard at a distance and recognized by its particular whisper or murmur, simple and monotonous, that the leaves of the pine or the poplar consist of a characteristic and invariable quivering. Thus, as with society, as with life, chemistry appears to bear witness to the necessity of universal difference, the principle and end of all hierarchies and all developments.

Diversity, and not unity, is at the heart of things: this conclusion, in any case, follows for us from a general remark which a simple glance at the world and at the sciences allows us to make. Everywhere an exuberant richness of unheard-of variations and modulations springs forth from these permanent themes which are called living species and stellar systems, and from equilibria of all kinds, and in the end destroys and renews them utterly, and yet in no case do the forces or laws which we are used to calling principles have variety as a term or as their goal. Forces, we are told, exist to serve laws, and all laws apply to phenomena to the extent that the latter are perfect repetitions and not repetitions with variations; all laws manifestly tend to ensure the exact reproduction of the themes and the indefinitely prolonged stability of all kinds of equilibria, and to prevent their alteration or renewal. The great crankshaft of our solar system is made in order to turn eternally.

The doubts which might have persisted on this point after Laplace were dispelled by Le Verrier.⁵¹ Every living species wants to perpetuate itself endlessly; something in it struggles to maintain its existence against everything which endeavours to dissolve it. In this respect it is like a government, or like the most precarious ministry whose essential role is always to proclaim, believe and wish that it is installed in power for all eternity. There is no long-extinct plant or animal species, now extant only as a fossil, which did not once embody a legislative assurance, an apparently well-founded certainty of living as long as the Earth. All these things which have passed away were once called to endless life, supported by physical, chemical, and vital laws, as our despots and our ministers by their code of laws and by their army. Our solar system too will doubtless perish, like so many others whose wreckage is visible in the skies; and indeed, who knows if the molecular forms themselves will not disappear, having come into existence in the course of the ages at the expense of those which preceded them?

But how can all of this have died, or how could it die? How, if there is in the universe nothing but supposedly immutable and all-powerful laws aiming at stable equilibria, and a supposedly immutable substance to which these laws apply, how could the action of these laws on this substance produce this magnificent flourishing of varieties which rejuvenates the universe at every moment, and this series of unexpected revolutions which transfigure it? How could the least ornament creep into these austere rhythms and enliven even a little the eternal psalmody of the world? From the marriage of the monotonous and the homogenous what could be born but tedium? If everything comes from identity, aims at identity and returns to identity, what is the source of this dazzling torrent of variety? We may be certain that the fundamental nature of things is not as poor, as drab, or as colourless as has been supposed. Forms are only brakes and laws are only dykes erected in vain against the overflowing of revolutionary differences and civil dissensions, in which the laws and forms of tomorrow secretly take shape, and which, in spite of the yokes upon yokes they bear, in spite of chemical and vital discipline, in spite of reason, in spite of celestial mechanics, will one distant day, like the people of a nation, sweep away all barriers and from their very wreckage construct the instrument of a still higher diversity.

Let us insist on this central truth: we may approach it by remarking that, in all great regular mechanisms—the social mechanism, the vital mechanism, the stellar mechanism, or the molecular mechanism—all the internal revolts which in the end break them apart are provoked by a similar condition: their constitutive elements, the soldiers of these diverse regiments, the temporary incarnation of their laws, always belong only by one aspect of their being to the world they constitute, and by other aspects escape it. This world would not exist without them; without the world, conversely, the elements would still be something. The attributes which each element possesses in virtue of its incorporation into its regiment do not form the whole of its nature; it has other tendencies and other instincts which come to it from its other regimentations; and, moreover (we will shortly see the necessity of this corollary), still others which come to it from its basic nature, from itself, from its own fundamental substance which is the basis of its struggle against the collective power of which it forms a part. This collective is wider but no less deep than the element, but it is a merely artificial being, a composite made up of aspects and façades of other beings.—This hypothesis can easily be verified in the case of social elements. If they were only social, and in particular only national, it would follow that societies and nations would exist without change for all eternity. But, in spite of our great debt to the social and national environment, it is clear that we do not owe everything to it. At the same time as being French or English, we are mammals, and as such there circulate in our blood not only the germs of social instincts which predispose us to imitate our peers, to believe what they believe and want what they want, but also the seeds of non-social instincts, including some which are anti-social. Surely, if society had made us in our entirety, it would have made us entirely sociable. It is therefore from the depths of organic life (and from deeper still, we believe) that there wells up among our cities this magma of discord, hatred and envy, which on occasion submerges them. It is hardly possible to enumerate all the States overthrown by sexual love, all the cults it has undermined or denatured, all the languages it has corrupted, and also all the colonies it has founded, all the religions it has ameliorated and made gentle, all the barbaric idioms it has civilized, all the arts whose life-blood it has been! Rebellion and rejuvenation indeed spring from a single source. In truth, all that is truly social is the imitation of one's compatriots and ancestors,⁵² in the broadest sense of the term.

If the elements of societies are vital in nature, the organic elements of living bodies are chemical. One of the errors of the older physiology was to think that as soon as they enter into an organism, chemical substances abdicate all their properties and are penetrated to their innermost heart, to their most secret core, by the mysterious influence of life. Our contemporary physiologists have entirely dispelled this error. A molecule which forms part of an organic body, therefore, belongs at once to two worlds which are foreign or hostile to one another. Can it be denied that this independence of the chemical nature of corporeal elements with respect to their organic nature helps to explain the perturbations, the deviations and the fortunate recastings of living forms? Indeed, it seems to me that we must go yet further and recognize that only this independence can account for the resistance of some parts of the organs to the acceptance of the inherited living form, and for the necessity which sometimes obliges life (that is, the collection of molecules which have remained obedient) to finally come to a compromise with the rebellious faction of molecules by adopting a new form. In effect, then, the only truly vital process seems to be generation (of which nutrition and cellular regeneration are only special cases), in conformity with the hereditary form.

Is this the final word? Perhaps not; the analogy suggests that chemical and astronomical laws themselves are not supported on nothingness, but that their domain of application is populated by tiny beings already endowed with inner characters and innate diversities, diversities which are in no way accommodated to the particularities of the celestial or chemical machinery. It is true that we cannot perceive in chemical bodies the trace of any accidental ailment or deviation which we could see as parallel to organic disorders or social revolutions. But, since there do currently exist chemical heterogeneities, there doubtless existed, in some far distant era, chemical formations. Were these formations simultaneous? Did hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, etc., appear at the same instant in the heart of a single amorphous substance which was previously non-chemical? If this is judged improbable, or rather impossible, we must admit that an originary atomic form transmitted through vibration, starting from a point—that of hydrogen, for example—imposed itself throughout the whole or almost the whole of material extension, and that, by breaking away in succession from the primordial hydrogen, at long intervals of time, all the other so-called simple bodies—whose atomic weights, as we know, are often exact multiples of that of hydrogen—were formed. But how can we explain such fission on the hypothesis that the primitive elements are perfectly homogenous and governed by the same law, which, it seems to me, should rather consolidate by the identity of their structure the identity and immutability of their nature? Will it perhaps be argued that the accidents of astronomical evolution involving the primitive elements could have produced or catalysed chemical formations? Unfortunately this hypothesis seems to me to have been very clearly ruled out by the discovery of the spectroscope. Since, according to this instrument, all the so-called simple bodies or many of them enter into the composition of the most distant planets and stars, which have evolved independently of each other, common sense tells us that the simple bodies were formed before the stars, as cloth before clothes. It follows that the piecemeal dismembering of the primitive substance admits of only one explanation: namely, that the particles were originally dissimilar, and that their schisms were caused by this essential dissimilarity. There is thus some reason to think that hydrogen, for example, as it exists today after so many successive eliminations or emigrations, is noticeably different from the ur-hydrogen, which would have been a pell-mell of discordant atoms. The same observation applies to all the simple bodies which were subsequently engendered. In being thus exhausted and reduced, each was consolidated in its equilibrium, and fortified by its very losses. But, if so, it is highly improbable, despite the extraordinary stability thus acquired by the oldest atomic or molecular forms, that complete similarity obtains among the elements which subsist in each. It would have sufficed, for the refining of each form to come to an end, if the internal differences of its elements had diminished to a point where it was no longer impossible for the elements to coexist. These infinitesimal citizens of mysterious cities are so distant from us⁵³ that it is no wonder that the noise of their internal discord does not reach us, and their internal differences, if they exist as I believe, must be of a fineness which cannot be apprehended by our gross instruments. However, the polymorphism of certain elements is a sufficient indicator that they harbour dissidences, and we know enough of these to have some suspicion of the troubles and disparities which afflict the fundamental nature of the principal substances employed by life, in particular carbon. How can it be admitted that the atoms of a single substance bond with each other so as to form what Gerhardt calls hydrogen hydride, chlorine chloride, etc., while persisting in elevating to the status of dogma the perfect similarity of the multiple atoms of a single substance? Does not such a union presuppose a difference of at least an equal magnitude to the sexual difference which allows two individuals of a single species to unite intimately, and without which they could only bump together?

If we observe that the element in which these unions of atom to similar atom have been most clearly demonstrated to be probable, and indeed almost certain, namely carbon, is also the element which manifests itself to us in its pure state in the most varied aspects, diamond, graphite, coal, etc., the preceding induction will be confirmed. It is no surprise that the body most fertile in varieties reveals most clearly the vigorous marriages between its constituent atoms ... Carbon is the differentiated element par excellence.

Wurtz says: 'The affinity of carbon for carbon is the cause of the infinite variety and the immense number of the combinations of carbon; it is the raison d'être of organic chemistry. No other element possesses to the same degree this master-property of carbon, this faculty which its atoms have of combining with one another, of fastening onto one another, of forming this framework, so variable in its form, its dimensions, its solidity, and which serves, as it were, as the basis of other materials'.⁵⁴

After carbon, the bodies which have to the greatest degree this capacity for being partially or entirely saturated by themselves are oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen; remarkably enough, exactly those substances utilized by life!

Besides, one significant fact should give us pause for reflection: life began on this globe at a particular time and in a particular place. Why at this place and not elsewhere, if the same substances were composed of the same elements? Let us even admit that life is only a particular, highly complex chemical combination. Nonetheless, how could it have been born, if not from an element unlike all the others?

Notes

39. [Trans. Note: Herbert Spencer, First Principles, 5th ed., London, Williams & Norgate, 1887, ch. 13, pp. 401-430.]↩
40. [Trans. Note: The use of the term 'vegetation' (végétation) to mean growth or development in general is less common now than in Tarde's time in both English and French.]↩
41. [Trans. Note: The cloud from which the solar system coalesced.]↩
42. [Trans. Note: Charles Lyell (1797-1875), geologist. Lyell's 'uniformitarianism' emphasized the identity of the basic geological laws and processes from the distant past to the present.]↩
43. [Trans. Note: Tarde presumably has in mind Aristotelian cosmology, in which the heavens beyond the moon are made of a fifth element (aether), which is not found in the sublunary world, and which unlike the four earthly elements, does not admit of any change other than local motion.]↩
44. [Trans. Note: Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg (1795-1876), naturalist.]↩
45. [Trans. Note: Reading se forge with the 1893 text; the 1895 text has se forme (takes shape).]↩
46. I do not at all mean to place all of these on the same level. Among other differences, one may harbour hopes or dreams of a life of perfected civilization, when everyone would have his own poetry and his own philosophy, but one cannot imagine a life where everyone had his own great discovery, his own grand prize in the lottery, or his own political or military role.↩
47. [Trans. Note: For this finding, see W. Crookes (1879) 'On the illumination of lines of molecular pressure, and the trajectory of molecules', Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, no. 175, pp.135-164. The 'ultra-gaseous' or 'radiant matter' state refers to matter in an extreme state of rarefaction, where each molecule is 'allowed to obey its own motions or laws without interference', and can be seen as an individual rather than part of an 'aggregate' (W. Crookes (1880) 'On a fourth state of matter', Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, no. 30, pp. 469-472. William Crookes (1832-1919), chemist and physicist.]↩
48. [Trans. Note: James Clerk Marxwell (1831-1879), physicist. The reference is to his statistical description of gas kinetics (the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution).]↩
49. [Trans. Note: The citation has not been traced.]↩
50. [Trans. Note: W. Crookes, the citation has not been traced.]↩
51. [Trans. Note: Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827, mathematician and astronomer) was instrumental in developing a mechanical theory of the stability of the solar system. Urbain Le Verrier's (1811-1877) prediction of the planet Neptune (1846) and its subsequent discovery by observation provided further confirmation of Laplace's model.]↩
52. In progressive societies, it is increasingly one's compatriots rather than one's ancestors who are imitated, and the converse in stationary societies. But to associate always and everywhere means to assimilate, that is, to imitate.↩
53. I say distant from us, not only by the incommensurable distance between their smallness and our relative immensity, and, conversely, between their relative apparent eternity and our brief duration (a very strange and perhaps imaginary contrast), but also by the profound heterogeneity of their inner nature and ours.↩
54. [Trans. Note: Adolphe Wurtz (1817-1884), chemist. The citation has not been traced.]↩