CHAPTER III

WHAT IS A SOCIETY?

THE meaning which I attach to society can be clearly enough inferred from what has preceded, but it is proper to express this fundamental notion still more precisely.

I

What is a society? The general answer is as follows: It is a group of distinct individuals who render one another mutual services. But this definition is as false as it is clear. It has been the source of all those confusions which have so often been made between so-called animal societies, or the majority of them, and the only true societies, which do include, in a certain connection, a small number of animals.¹

For this wholly economic notion, a notion which bases the social group upon mutual helpfulness, it might be an advantage to substitute a purely juristic conception of society. In this case, an individual would not be associated with those to whom he was useful or who were useful to him, but with those, and only with those, who had established over him recognised rights of law, custom, and conventionality, or over whom he had analogous rights, with or without reciprocity. But we shall see that although this is a preferable point of view, yet it unduly restricts the social group, just as the economic point of view unduly enlarges it. Finally, we might think of the social tie as entirely political or religious in character. Belief in the same religion or collaboration for the same patriotic purpose, a purpose common to all the associates and one absolutely distinct from their different individual wants, for whose satisfaction it matters little whether they aid each other or not, would constitute a true social relationship. Such moral and mental unanimity is undoubtedly characteristic of mature societies; but it is also true that social ties may begin without it. They exist, for example, among Europeans of different nationalities. Consequently, this definition is too narrow. Moreover, the conformity of aims and beliefs of which we are speaking, this mental likeness, which may characterise tens and hundreds of millions of men at the same time, is not born all of a sudden. It is produced little by little, and extends from one man to another by means of imitation. This, then, is always the point to which we must return.

If the relation of one social unit to another consisted essentially of an exchange of services, we should not only have to recognise the right of animal groups to be called societies, we should have to admit that they were the societies par excellence. The mutual services of shepherd and husbandman, of hunter and fisherman, of baker and butcher, are far less than those which the different sexes of white ants render one another. Among animals themselves, the most typical societies would not be formed by the highest, by bees, ants, horses, and beavers, but by the lowest, by the siphonophoræ, for example, where division of labour is so complete that eating and digesting are carried on separately by different individuals. There can be no more signal interchange of services than this. Applying this view to mankind it might be said, without irony, that the strength of the social tie between men was in proportion to the degree of their reciprocal usefulness. The master who shelters and nourishes his slave and the noble who defends and protects his serf, in return for their subordinate services, are examples of mutual service. The reciprocity is gained, to be sure, by force; but that fact is insignificant if the economic point of view is the primary one and if we think that it is bound to encroach more and more upon the juristic point of view.. . Consequently, the social tie between the Spartan and the helot, or between a noble and his serf, or between a Hindoo warrior and a Hindoo merchant, is stronger than that between free Spartan citizens, or that between the feudal nobles of a single country, or that between the helots or serfs who live in the same village, in spite of the fact that the members of all these classes may possess the same customs and language and religion!

We have erred in thinking that societies in becoming civilised have favoured economic at the expense of juristic relations. In doing this, we forget that all labour and service and exchange is based upon a true system of contract, a system which is guaranteed by more and more formal and complex legislation; and we forget that to this accumulation of legal rules are added commercial and other kinds of usages which have the force of law, besides a host of all kinds of procedures, from the simple but general formalities of polite manners to electoral and parliamentary practices.¹ Society is far more a system of mutually determined engagements and agreements, of rights and duties, than a system of mutual services. This is the reason why it is established between beings who are alike or who differ little from each other. Economic production exacts a specialisation of aptitudes. If this specialisation were fully developed in accordance with the logically inevitable although unexpressed wish of economists, we should have as many distinct human species as there are miners, farmers, weavers, lawyers, physicians, etc. But, fortunately, the assured and undeniable preponderance of juridical relations prevents any excessive differentiation of workers. In fact, it is continually diminishing such distinctions. Here Law, it is true, is only one form or outcome of man’s inclination towards imitation. Is it from the standpoint of utilitarianism that the peasant is given an education and instructed in his rights when as the result of this kind of education the rural population may desert its plough and spade and the double mammal of husbandry and herding may dry up? The cult of equality has outweighed any fear of this latter contingency. We have wished to promote in the social scale certain classes which formerly, in spite of a constant exchange of services, did not come in for so much consideration and, consequently, we have appreciated that it was necessary to assimilate them through the contagion of imitation with the members of a higher grade of society. To put it better, it was necessary to bring into their mental and social life ideas, desires, and needs, in a word, individual elements like those which constituted the mind and character of the members of that society.

Beings which differ greatly in kind, the shark, for example, and the little fish which he uses as a mouth scavenger, or man and the domestic animals, can be of much service to each other, and at times, like the huntsman and his dog or like men and women very different as they often are from each other, work together in a common undertaking. But the recognition and assumption by two beings of mutual rights and obligations involves one indispensable condition, the possession of a common foundation of ideas and traditions, of a common language or interpreter. These close points of likeness are formed by education, which is one of the forms by which imitation spreads. For this reason the recognition of mutual responsibilities never arose between the Spanish or English conquerors of America and the conquered natives. In this case; racial dissimilarity either played a much smaller rôle than difference of language, custom, or religion; or it served merely as an added cause of incompatibility.¹ This is the reason, on the other hand, that a close chain of reciprocal rights and obligations united all members of the feudal tree from its topmost branch to its nethermost root in an eminently juridical institution. Here, in fact, Christian propagandism had produced in the twelfth century the most profound mental assimilation from the emperor to the serf that has ever been seen. And it was essentially because of this network of rights, that feudal Europe formed from one end of it to the other a true society, the society of Christendom, which was as widespread as Romanism (Romanitas) in the best days of the Roman Empire. If we require any counter-proof of this, we may find it in the fact that a real social tie is never established between the Chinese and Hindoo emigrants to the Antilles and their white masters by their reciprocity of services, or even by their bilateral contracts, for they never become assimilated to one another. Here two or three distinct civilisations, two or three distinct groups of inventions which have spread out through imitation in their own particular spheres, come into mutual contact and mutual service, but there is no society in the true sense of the word.

The Hindoo caste system was based mainly on an economic conception of society. Castes were distinct races which were of vast assistance to one another. We see, then, that the tendency to subordinate moral considerations of rights to utilitarian considerations of service and occupation does not denote an advanced state of civilisation. This tendency diminishes, in fact, as mankind improves and as industry itself progresses¹ In reality, the civilised man of to-day is inclined to do without the assistance of his fellow. He appeals less and less to the professional specialist who is fundamentally unlike himself and more and more to the forces of subjugated nature. Is not the social ideal of the future the enlarged reproduction of the city of antiquity, where slaves would be replaced by machines,—an idea that has been tediously reiterated,—and where a small homogeneous group of citizens in constant imitation and assimilation of one another, but independent and self-sufficient in other respects, in times of peace at least, would constitute the sum total of civilised men? Economic solidarity establishes a vital rather than a social tie between workers and no organisation of labour will ever be comparable, in this respect, to the most imperfect organism. Juridical solidarity has, on the other hand, a purely social character, because it presupposes the kind of similarity that is due to imitation. Given this similarity, and we have, notwithstanding a lack of recognised rights, a beginning of society. Louis XIV did not recognise the fact that his subjects had any claims whatsoever upon him, and his subjects shared his delusion; nevertheless, he was socially related to them, because both he and they were products of the same classical and Christian education, because everyone from the Court at Paris to the heart of Brittany and Provence looked up to him as a model, and because he himself was unconsciously reacted upon by the influence of his courtiers, a kind of diffused imitation experienced by him in return for that radiating from him.

Social relations, I repeat, are much closer between individuals who resemble each other in occupation and education, even if they are competitors, than between those who stand most in need of each other. Lawyers, journalists, magistrates, all professional men, are cases in point. So society has been properly defined by common speech as a group of people who, although they may disagree in ideas and sentiments, yet, having had the same kind of bringing up, have a common meeting ground and see and influence one another for pleasure. As for the employees of the same shop or factory who meet together for mutual assistance or collaboration, they constitute a commercial or industrial society, not a society pure and simple, not a society in the unqualified sense of the word.¹

A nation, which is a kind of super-organic organism made up of co-operative castes and classes and professions, is quite different from a society. This distinction is obvious in the denationalisation and socialisation which is taking place to-day among hundreds of millions of men. It does not seem to me that the multiple uniformities to which we are hastening in language, education, instruction, etc., have as yet proved to be the fittest ways to assure the accomplishment of the innumerable tasks which nations and associations of individuals have heretofore divided up among themselves. It may well be that the scholar-peasant is not a better farmer for his learning, nor the soldier a better disciplined or, who knows, a braver fighter. But when we bring the steadfast partisans of progress face to face with these threatening possibilities, it is because we do not have the point of view which they, perhaps unconsciously, hold. They wish for the most intense kind of socialisation, not for the highest and strongest kind of social organisation, quite a different thing. They would be satisfied, if need be, by an exuberance of social life in a weakened social organisation. We have still to learn how desirable this end may be. Let us hold this question in reserve.

The fret and instability of modern societies must seem inexplicable to economists and, in general, to those sociologists who base society upon reciprocal utility. As a matter of fact, reciprocity of services between different classes and different nations does plainly exist, and it increases day by day, thanks to the co-operation of law and custom, with the utmost rapidity. But we forget that the individuals who compose these classes and nations are becoming even more rapidly and thoroughly assimilated, although this process of imitation is still hindered by irritating obstacles, by customs, and even by laws which are, perhaps, the more irritating the less discouraging they appear to be.

Contemporary civilisation in England, America, France, in all modern countries, tends to diminish the intellectual difference, which was becoming more and more deep and far-reaching, between men and women by opening up most of men’s occupations to women and by letting the latter share in almost all the advantages of training and education of the former. In this respect, civilisation treats the weaker sex just as it treated the peasant or free agricultural labourer when it took him out of the distinct caste into which it had gradually come to put him and replaced him in the big social group. Now, is social utility the end in view in either case? Were these transformations brought about to enable either class to be more successful in performing its special function, in cultivating the soil, or in nourishing and caring for children? On the contrary, many pessimists like myself foresee the time when, in consequence of these changes, we shall be without agricultural labourers, without nurses, and even without mothers who can or will nourish the continually decreasing number of their children. But because the enlargement of the social circle was the end in view and because the assimilation of women with men, of peasants with townsmen, was an indispensable condition of this socialisation, assimilation had to occur.

As early as the eighteenth century, in a more restricted social circle, in the brilliant social life of the common meeting ground of the salon, both sexes were brought closer together in tastes and ideas than they were in the Middle Ages; and we know that this social advantage was bought at the price of family fruitfulness and even at that of family honour. And yet people were happy under these circumstances, because a higher necessity impels the social circle, be it what it may, to continually widen its circumference.

Am I socially related to other men who may belong to the same physical type and possess the same organs and the same senses that I do? Am I socially related to an educated deaf mute who may closely resemble me in face and figure? No, I am not. Inversely, the animals of La Fontaine’s fables, the fox, the cricket, the cat, and the dog, live together in society, in spite of the difference in species which separates them, because they all speak the same language.¹ We eat, drink, digest, walk, or cry without being taught. These acts are purely vital. But talking requires the hearing of conversation, as we know from the case of deaf mutes who are dumb because they are deaf. Consequently, I begin to feel a social kinship with everyone who talks, even if it be in a strange tongue, providing our two idioms appear to me to have some common source. This social tie may be weak and inadequate, but it gains in strength as other common traits, all originating in imitation, are added to it.

Society may therefore be defined as a group of beings who are apt to imitate one another, or who, without actual imitation, are alike in their possession of common traits which are ancient copies of the same model.

II

We must not confuse the social type of a given place or period, as it is more or less incompletely reproduced in every member of the social group, with the social group itself. What constitutes this type? A certain number of wants and ideas which have been created by thousands of time-accumulated inventions and discoveries. These wants harmonise to a certain extent, that is, they contribute to the supremacy of some dominant desire which is the soul of a given epoch or people. The ideas or beliefs also harmonise more or less; that is, they are logically related to one another or, at least, they do not in general mutually contradict one another. This twofold, always incomplete, and, in certain notes, discordant accord, which is gradually established between things which have been fortuitously produced and brought together, may be perfectly well compared to what is called in a living body organic adaptation. But it has the advantage of being free from the mystery which is inherent in this latter kind of harmony; it points out in extremely clear terms the relations of means to an end or of consequences to a principle, two relations which amount, after all, to one, the latter one of the two. What is the meaning of the incompatibility or discord that may exist between two organs, or conformations, or characteristics taken from two different species? We do not know, but we do know that when two ideas are incompatible it means that one of them implies a negative to the affirmative of the other and that for the same reason the consistency of two ideas means the lack, or the apparent lack, of all such implications. Finally, we know that when two ideas more or less agree, it is because the one implies in a more or less considerable number of its aspects the affirmation of a more or less considerable number of the points which the other affirms. There is nothing lessobscure, nothing more enlightening, than these psychical acts of affirmation and negation. In them the whole life of the mind is wrapped up. Nor is there anything more intelligible than their opposition. In it is expressed the opposition between desire and repulsion, between velle and nolle. Thus we see that a social type or what is called a particular civilisation is a veritable system, a more or less coherent theory, whose inner contradictions eventually strengthen themselves or eventually break out and force its disruption. Under such conditions it is easy to understand why there are certain pure and strong types of civilisation and certain mixed and feeble types, and why the purest types change and decay upon the addition of new inventions which stimulate new desires and beliefs and disturb the balance of old desires and faiths; why, in other words, all inventions cannot be added to others, and why many can merely be substituted for others, those, namely, that stimulate desires and beliefs which are implicitly or explicitly contradictory in all the logical exactness of the word. Therefore, in the oscillations of history there is nothing but endless additions and subtractions of quantities of faith or desire which are brought forward by discoveries and which reinforce or neutralise one another, like intersecting vibrations.

This is the national type which, as I have said, is repeated in every member of the nation. It is like a great seal, which makes an imperfect mark upon the bits of wax which it stamps, but which could not be completely recast without comparing all its impressions.

III

What I defined above was really not so much society, in the common sense of the word, as sociality. A society is always in different degrees an association, and association is to sociality, to imitativeness, so to speak, what organisation is to vitality, or what molecular structure is to the elasticity of the ether. Here are some new analogies in addition to those which seemed to me to be presented in such abundance by the three great forms of Universal Repetition. But, perhaps, in order to fully understand sociality in its relative form, the only one in which in various degrees it actually occurs, it may be well to conceive of it, hypothetically, as perfect and absolute. In its hypothetical form it would consist of such an intense concentration of urban life that as soon as a good idea arose in one mind it would be instantaneously transmitted to all minds throughout the city. This hypothesis is analogous to that of physicists who state that if the elasticity of the ether were perfect, luminious excitations, etc., would be transmitted without lapse of time. Would it not be useful for biologists to conceive, on their part, of an absolute irritability incarnated in a kind of ideal protoplasm, a conception which would help them to understand the varying vitality of real protoplasm?

With this for our starting point, if we wish to carry our analogy straight through, life would be merely the organisation of protoplasmic irritability, matter, the organisation of ethereal elasticity, and society, the organisation of imitativeness. Now, it is almost superfluous to remark that the hypothesis which was conceived of by Thompson and adopted by Wurtz on the origin of atoms and molecules, the vortex theory, extremely plausible and probable as it is, to say the least, as well as the universally accepted protoplasmic theory of life, fully answers one of the demands of our point of view. Given a mass of children who have been brought up together and given the same education in the same environment and who have not yet separated into classes and professions, and we have the ground-matter of society. It kneads this mass, and then, through an artificial and inevitable differentiation of functions, develops it into a nation. Given a mass of protoplasm, i. e., of homogeneous molecules, which can be, but have not been, organised, and which have all been assimilated by virtue of the obscure mode of reproduction from which they originated, and we have the ground-matter of life. From it, cells, tissues, individuals, and species are formed. Finally, given a mass of homogeneous ether whose elements are thrilled by the same rapidly exchanging vibrations, according to our theoretical chemists, and we have the ground-matter of matter. From this the corpuscles of all bodies, however heterogeneous they may be, are made. For a body is merely an accord of differentiated and subordinated vibrations which have been separately produced in distinct and interwoven series, just as an organism is only an accord of different elementary and harmonious inward reproductions, of distinct and interwoven kinds of histological elements, or just as a nation is only an accord of traditions, customs, teachings, tendencies, and ideas which have spread in different ways through imitation, but which are subordinate to one another in a fraternal and mutually helpful hierarchy.

The law of differentiation, then, comes into play here. But it is not superfluous to note that the homogeneity upon which it acts under three superimposed forms is a superficial, although real, homogeneity, and that, if we continue the analogy, our sociological point of view would lead us to admit that in protoplasm there are some elements which have highly individualistic features under their mask of apparent uniformity, and that in ether itself the atoms are individually as characteristic as the children of the best disciplined school may be. Heterogeneity, not homogeneity, is at the heart of things. Could anything be more improbable or more absurd than the co-existence of an endless number of elements created to be co-eternally alike? Things are not born alike, they become alike. And, besides, is not the inborn diversity of the elements the sole possible justification of their variability?

I might be willing to go still further and say that without this initial and fundamental heterogeneity, the homogeneity which screens and disguises it never would or could have occurred. In fact, all homogeneity is a likeness of parts and all likeness is the outcome of an assimilation which has been produced by the voluntary or non-voluntary repetition of what was in the beginning an individual innovation. But there is something more to be said. When the homogeneity in question, when ether or protoplasm, when a mass of people who have been levelled down and put upon a footing of equality, becomes differentiated in order to become organised, do we not find, judging from what passes in our own societies at least, that the change in its character is another effect of the very same cause? After proselytism has assimilated a people, despotism steps in to rule over them and impose a hierarchy upon them; but despot and apostle are alike refractory individuals upon whom the democratic or aristocratic yoke of others has been a burden. For every individual conflict or outbreak which succeeds in this way there are, of course, hundreds of millions which are suppressed, but which are, nevertheless, the nursery of the great innovations of the future. This wealth of variations, this exuberance of picturesque fancies and erratic designs which Nature unrolls so magnificently under her austere garb of time-honoured laws, repetitions, and rhythms can have but one source; the tumultuous originality of elements that have been but partly brought under these yokes of nature, the radical and innate diversity that bursts out through all these uniformities of law to be transfigured upon the fair surface of things.

I will not follow up these last considerations, for they would lead us away from our subject. I only wished to point out that our search for law, i. e., for like facts either in nature or history, must not make us forget their hidden agents, agents which are both original and individual. Passing on, then, we may draw a useful lesson from what preceded, namely, that the assimilation together with the equalisation of the members of a society is not, as we are led to think, the final term of a prior social progression; it is, on the contrary, the point of departure for a new social advance. Every new form of civilisation begins in this way. In the homogeneous and democratic communities of the early Christians, the bishop was merely one of the faithful and the pope was not to be distinguished from the bishop. In the Frankish army, booty was distributed in equal portions between the king and his companions-in-arms. The first caliphs to succeed Mahomet argued in court like simple Mahometans; the equality of all the sons of the Prophet before the Koran had not yet become the mere fiction which the equality of Frenchmen or Europeans before the law is eventually bound to become. Then, by degrees, a radical inequality, the condition of solid organisation, came to be hollowed out in the Arab world, somewhat as the ecclesiastical hierarchy of Catholicism or the feudal pryamid of the Middle Ages was formed. The past speaks for the future. Equality is only a transition between two hierarchies, just as liberty is only a passage between two disciplines. But this does not mean that the confidence and power, the knowledge and security, of every citizen do not go on increasing from age to age.

Now let us take up another aspect of our foregoing thought. Homogeneous and democratic communities precede churches and states, for the same reason, I say, that tissues precede organs. Moreover, once tissues and communities have been formed, they become organic and hierarchical for the same reason which caused their formation in the first place. The growth of still undifferentiated and unutilised tissue is evidence of the peculiar ambition and eagerness of the germ which propagates itself in this way, just as the creation of a club or circle or fraternity of kindred spirits is evidence of the ambition of the enterprising man who originated it in order to spread some plan or idea of his own. Now, the community becomes consolidated into a hierarchical corporation, and tissue becomes organic, for the sake of self-propagation and self-defence against existing or anticipated enemies. For the living or for the social being, to act and function is a necessary condition for the conservation and extension of its essential nature, for the early development of which it was at first enough for it to multiply uniform copies of itself. But self-propagation and not self-organisation is the prime demand of the social as well as of the vital thing. Organisation is but the means of which propagation, of which generative or imitative repetition, is the end.

To sum up, to the question which I began by asking: What is society? I have answered: Society is imitation. We have still to ask: What is imitation? Here the sociologist should yield to the psychologist.

IV

1. Taine sums up the thought of the most eminent physiologists when he happily remarks that the brain is a repeating organ for the senses and is itself made up of elements which repeat one another. In fact, the sight of such a congery of like cells and fibres makes any other idea impossible. Moreover, direct proof is at hand in the numerous observations and experiments which show that the cutting away of one hemisphere of the brain, and even the removal of much of the substance of the other, affects only the intensity, without at all changing the integrity, of the intellectual functions. The part that was removed, therefore, did not collaborate with the part that remained; both parts could only copy and reinforce each other. Their relation was not economic and utilitarian, but imitative and social in the sense that I use that term. Whatever may be the cellular function which calls forth thought (a highly complex vibration, perhaps?), there is no doubt that it is reproduced and multiplied in the interior of the brain every moment of our mental life and that to every distinct perception a distinct cellular function corresponds. The indefinite and inexhaustible continuation of these intricate and richly intersecting radiations constitutes memory and habit. When the multiplying repetition in question is confined to the nervous system, we have memory; when it spreads out into the muscular system, we have habit. Memory, so to speak, is a purely nervous habit; habit is both a nervous and a muscular memory.

Thus every act of perception, in as much as it involves an act of memory, which it always does, implies a kind of habit, an unconscious imitation of self by self. There is, evidently, nothing social in this. When the nervous system is sufficiently excited to set in motion a certain set of muscles, habit, properly speaking, appears. It is another case of non-social, or, as I might better say, of presocial or subsocial self-imitation. This does not mean that, as alleged, an idea is an abortive act. Action is only the following up of an idea, the acquisition of a steadfast faith. Muscle works only for the enrichment of nerves and brain.

But if the remembered idea or image was originally lodged in the mind through conversation or reading, if the habitual act originated in the view or knowledge of a similar act on the part of others, these acts of memory and habit are social as well as psychological facts, and they show us the kind of imitation of which I have already spoken at such length.¹ Here we have memory and habit which are not individual, but collective. Just as a man does not see, listen, walk, stand, write, play the flute, or, what is more, invent or imagine, except by means of many co-ordinated muscular memories, so a society could not exist or change or advance a single step unless it possessed an untold store of blind routine and slavish imitation which was constantly being added to by successive generations.

2. What is the-essential nature of the suggestion which passes from one cerebral cell to another and which constitutes mental life? We do not know.¹ Do we know anything more about the essence of the suggestion which passes from one person to another and which constitutes social life? We do not; for if we take this phenomenon in itself, in its higher state of purity and intensity, we find it related to one of the most mysterious of facts, a fact which is being studied with intense curiosity by the baffled philosophic alienists of the day, i. e., somnambulism.² If you re-read contemporaneous works on this subject, especially those of Richet, Binet and Féré, Beaunis, Bernheim, Delbœuf, I shall not seem fanciful in thinking of the social man as a veritable somnambulist. I think, on the contrary, that I am conforming to the most rigorous scientific method in endeavouring to explain the complex by the simple, the compound by the element, and to throw light upon the mixed and complicated social tie, as we know it, by means of a social tie which is very pure, which is reduced to its simplest expression, and which is so happily realised for the edification of the sociologist in a state of somnambulism. Let us take the hypothetical case of a man who has been removed from every extra-social influence, from the direct view of natural objects, and from the instinctive obsessions of his different senses, and who has communication only with those like himself or, more especially, to simplify the question, with one person like himself. Is not such an ideal subject the proper one through which to study by experiment and observation the really essential characteristics of social relations, set free in this way from all complicating influences of a natural or physical order? But are not hypnotism and somnambulism the exact realisation of this hypothesis? Then I shall not excite surprise if I briefly review the principal phenomena of these singular states and if I find both magnified and diminutised, both overt and covert, forms of them in social phenomena. Through such a comparison, we may perhaps come to a better understanding of the fact that is called abnormal by showing to what extent it is general, and of the fact that is general by perceiving its distinctive traits in high relief in the apparent anomaly.

The social like the hypnotic state is only a form of dream, a dream of command and a dream of action. Both the somnambulist and the social man are possessed by the illusion that their ideas, all of which have been suggested to them, are spontaneous. To appreciate the truth of this sociological point of view, we must not take ourselves into consideration, for should we admit this truth about ourselves, we would then be escaping from the blindness which it affirms; and in this way a counter argument might be made out. Let us call to mind some ancient people whose civilisation differs widely from our own, the Egyptians, or Spartans, or Hebrews. Did not that people think, like us, that they were autonomous, although, in reality, they were but the unconscious puppets whose strings were pulled by their ancestors or political leaders or prophets, when they were not being pulled by their own contemporaries? What distinguishes us modern Europeans from these alien and primitive societies is the fact that the magnetisation has become mutual, so to speak, at least to a certain extent; and because we, in our democratic pride, a little exaggerate this reciprocity, because, moreover, forgetting that in becoming mutual, this magnetisation, the source of all faith and obedience, has become general, we err in flattering ourselves that we have become less credulous and docile, less imitative, in short, than our ancestors. This is a fallacy, and we shall have to rid ourselves of it. But even if the aforesaid notion were true, it would nevertheless be clear that before the relations of model and copyist, of master and subject, of apostle and neophyte, had become reciprocal or alternative, as we ordinarily see them in our democratic society, they must of necessity have begun by being one-sided and irreversible. Hence castes. Even in the most democratic societies, the one-sidedness and irreversibility in question always exist at the basis of social imitations, i. e, in the family. For the father is and always will be his son’s first master, priest, and model. Every society, even at present, begins in this way.

Therefore, in the beginning of every old society, there must have been, a fortiori, a great display of authority exercised by certain supremely imperious and positive individuals. Did they rule through terror and imposture, as alleged? This explanation is obviously inadequate. They ruled through their prestige. The example of the magnetiser alone can make us realise the profound meaning of this word. The magnetiser does not need to lie or terrorise to secure the blind belief and the passive obedience of his magnetised subject. He has prestige—that tells the story. That means, I think, that there is in the magnetised subject a certain potential force of belief and desire which is anchored in all kinds of sleeping but unforgotten memories, and that this force seeks expression just as the water of a lake seeks an outlet. The magnetiser alone is able through a chain of singular circumstances to open the necessary outlet to this force. All forms of prestige are alike; they differ only in degree. We have prestige in the eyes of anyone in so far as we answer his need of affirming or of willing some given thing. Nor is it necessary for the magnetiser to speak in order to be believed and obeyed. He need only act; an almost imperceptible gesture is sufficient.

This movement, together with the thought and feeling which it expresses, is immediately reproduced. Maudsley says that he is not sure that the somnambulist is not enabled to read unconsciously what is in the mind through “an unconscious imitation of the attitude and expression of the person whose exact muscular contradictions are instinctively copied.”¹ Let us observe that the magnetised subjects imitates the magnetiser, but that the latter does not imitate the former. Mutual imitation, mutual prestige or sympathy, in the meaning of Adam Smith, is produced only in our so-called waking life and among people who seem to exercise no magnetic influence over one another. If, then, I have put prestige, and not sympathy, at the foundation and origin of society, it is because, as I have said before, the unilateral must have preceded the reciprocal.² Without an age of authority, however surprising this fact may be, an age of comparative fraternity would never have existed. But, to return, why should we really marvel at the one-sided, passive imitation of the somnambulist? Any act of any one of our fellows inspires us who are lookers-on with the more or less irrational idea of imitation. If we at times resist this tendency, it is because it is neutralised by some antagonistic suggestions of memory or perception. Since the somnambulist is for the time being deprived of this power of resistance, he can illustrate for us the imitative quiescence of the social being in so far as he is social, i. e., in so far as he has relations exclusively with his fellows and, especially, with one of his fellows.

If the social man were not at the same time a natural being, open and sensitive to the impressions of external nature and of alien societies, he would never be capable of change. Like associates would remain forever incapable of changing spontaneously the type of traditional ideas and desires which had been impressed upon them by the conventional teaching of their parents, priests, or leaders. Certain peoples have been known to approach singularly close to this condition. Nascent communities, like young children, are, in general, indifferent and insensible to all which does not concern man or the kind of man whom they resemble, the man of their own race or tribe.¹ “The somnambulist sees and hears,” says A. Maury, “only what enters into the preoccupations of his dream.” In other words, all his power of belief and desire is concentrated on a single point. Is not this the exact effect of obedience and imitation through fascination? Is not fascination a genuine neurosis, a kind of unconscious polarisation of love and faith?

Now many great men from Rameses to Alexander, from Alexander to Mahomet, from Mahomet to Napoleon, have thus polarised the soul of their people! How often has a prolonged gaze upon the brilliant point of one man’s glory or genius thrown a whole people into a state of catalepsy! The torpor that appears in somnambulism is, as we know, only superficial; it masks an intense excitement. This is the reason why the somnambulist does not hesitate to perform great feats of strength and skill. A similar phenomenon occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century when military France fell into a passive and, at the same time, feverish state of mingled torpor and excitement and performed prodigies in obedience to the gesture of its imperial fascinator. There is nothing better fitted than this atavistic phenomenon to plunge us into the remote past, to make us realise the influence which must have been exerted upon their contemporaries by those great semi-mythical persons to whom all civilisations trace their origin and to whom their legends attribute the revelation of all their knowledge, laws, and industries. Oannes in Babylon, Quetz-alcoatl in Mexico, the divine pre-Menes dynasties in Egypt, etc., are cases in point.² Under close observation, all these kinggods who figure in mythologies and dynasties are seen to be inventors or importers of foreign inventions. They are, in a word, initiators. Thanks to the deep and intense stupor caused by their first miracles, each of their assertions and commands opened out an immense vent to the vast, vague, and impotent aspirations, to the blind and futile desires for faith and activity, which they had called into being.

At present, when we speak of obedience, we mean a conscious and voluntary act. But primitive obedience was far different. When the subject weeps at the bidding of the hypnotist, it is not the ego only, but the whole organism, that obeys. The obedience of crowds and armies to their demagogues and captains is, at times, almost equally strange. And so is their credulity. “It is a curious sight,” says M. Charles Richet, “to see a somnambulist make gestures of distaste and nausea and experience real suffocation when an empty bottle is put under his nose and he is told that it contains ammonia, or, on the other hand, to see him inhale ammonia without showing the least discomfort when he is told that it is pure water.” We have a strange analogy in the artificial, absurd, and extravagant, but none the less deep, active, and obstinate, beliefs of ancient peoples, of those, indeed, who were the freest and the most cultivated of all the ancients; and this, too, long after their first phase of autocratic theocracy had passed away. Were not the most abominable monstrosities, Greek love, for example, deemed worthy of the songs of Anacreon and Theocritus and of the philosophy of Plato? Were not serpents, cats, bulls, and cows worshipped by prostrate populations? Were not mysteries, metempsychoses, dogmas in absolute contradiction to the direct evidence of the senses, not to speak of such absurdities as the arts of augury, astrology, and sorcery, unanimously believed in? On the other hand, were not the most natural sentiments repressed with horror, paternal love, for example, in communities where the uncle took precedence over the father, or sexual jealousy among tribes whose wives were owned in common? Has not the most impressive beauty of nature or art been overlooked or condemned, and this even in modern times, because it violated the taste of the period? The attitude of the Romans towards the picturesqueness of the Alps or Pyrenees, or that of our own seventeenth and eighteenth centuries towards the masterpieces of Shakespeare or the art of Holland, is an example. In short, are not the clearest experiences and observations controverted and the most palpable truths arraigned, whenever they come into opposition with the traditional ideas that are the antique offspring of prestige and faith?

Civilised peoples flatter themselves with thinking that they have escaped from this dogmatic slumber. Their error can be explained. The oftener a person has been magnetised, the easier and quicker is it for him to be remagnetised. This fact shows us how it is that societies come to imitate one another with increasing ease and rapidity. As they become civilised and, consequently, more and more imitative, they also become less and less aware that they are imitating. In this particular, mankind is like the individual man. A child is, unquestionably, a true somnambulist; the older it grows, the more complex its dream becomes, until it thinks that, because of this very complexity, it has been awakened. But the child errs. When a ten- or twelve-year-old boy leaves his family for school, he seems to himself to have become demagnetised, to have been aroused from his dream of parental respect and admiration. Whereas, in reality, he becomes still more prone to admiration and imitation in his submission to the ascendency of one of his masters or, better still, of some prestigeful classmate. The alleged awakening is only a change or piling up of slumbers. In the substitution of fashion-magnetisation for custom-magnetisation, the usual symptom of incipient social revolution, we have an analogous, although magnified, phenomenon.

We should also observe, however, that as the suggestions of example become more numerous and diversified around an individual, each of them loses in intensity, and the individual becomes freer to determine his choice according to the preference of his own character, on the one hand, and on the other, according to certain logical laws which I will discuss elsewhere. Thus it is certain that the progress of civilisation renders subjection to imitation at once more personal and more rational. We are just as much enslaved as our ancestors by the examples of our environment, but we make a better use of them through our more logical and more individual choice, one adapted to our own ends and to our particular nature. And yet, as we shall see, this does not keep extra-logical and prestigeful influences from always playing a very considerable part.

This part is remarkably potent and interesting in the case of an individual who suddenly passes from an impoverished environment to one rich in all kinds of suggestions. Then there is no need of such a brilliant and striking object as personal glory or genius to bewitch him and to put him to sleep. The college freshman, the Japanese traveller in Europe, the countryman in Paris, are as stupefied as if they were in a state of catalepsy. Their attention is so bent upon everything they see and hear, especially upon the actions of the human beings around them, that it is absolutely withdrawn from everything they have previously seen and heard, or even thought of or done. It is not that their memory is destroyed, for it has never been as alert or as quick to respond to the slightest word which recalls to them, with a wealth of hallucinating detail, their distant country, their home, or their previous existence. But memory becomes absolutely paralysed; all its own spontaneity is lost. In this singular condition of intensely concentrated attention, of passive and vivid imagination, these stupefied and fevered beings inevitably yield themselves to the magical charm of their new environment. They believe everything that they see, and they continue in this state for a long time. It is always more fatiguing to think for one’s self than to think through the minds of others. Besides, whenever a man lives in an animated environment, in a highly strung and diversified society which is continually supplying him with fresh sights, with new books and music and with constantly renewed conversation, he gradually refrains from all intellectual effort; his mind, growing more and more stultified and, at the same time, more and more excited, becomes, as I have said, somnambulistic. Such a state of mind is characteristic of many city dwellers. The noise and movement of the streets, the display of shop-windows, and the wild and unbridled rush of existence affect them like magnetic passes. Now, is not city life a concentrated and exaggerated type of social life?

If these persons end by becoming examples themselves, this also is due to imitation. Suppose a somnambulist should imitate his medium to the point of becoming a medium himself and magnetising a third person, who, in turn, would imitate him, and so on, indefinitely. Is not social life this very thing? Terraces of consecutive and connected magnetisations are the rule; the mutual magnetisation of which I spoke above is exceptional. In general, a naturally prestigeful man will stimulate thousands of people to copy him in every particular, even in that of his prestige, thereby enabling them to influence, in turn, millions of inferior men. It is only at rare moments, after the movement down the scale is spent, that an inverse movement takes place and that, in a period of democracy, millions of men collectively fascinate and tyrannise over their quondam mediums. If every society stands forth as a hierarchy, it is because every society reveals the terracing of which I have just spoken and to which, in order to be stable, its hierarchy must correspond.

Besides, social somnambulism, as I have said already, is not brought about through fear or the power of conquest, but through admiration and a sense of brilliant and irksome superiority. And so it sometimes happens that the conqueror is magnetised by the conquered. Just as a savage chief or a social upstart is all eyes and ears, is charmed or intimidated in spite of his pride, in the midst of a great city, or in a fashionable drawing room. But he sees and hears only what astonishes him and holds him captive; for a singular mixture of anæsthesia and hyperæthesia of the senses is the dominant characteristic of somnambulists. Consequently, they copy all the usages, the language, the accent, etc., of their new environment. The Germans did this in the Roman world. They forgot German and spoke Latin. They composed hexameters. They bathed in marble baths. They dubbed themselves patricians. The Romans themselves did this in the Athens which they had conquered. The Hyksos conquerors of Egypt were subjugated by its civilisation.

But is there any need to ransack history for examples? Let us look nearer home. The kind of momentary paralysis of mind, tongue, and arm, the profound agitation of the whole being and the lack of self-possession which is called intimidation, deserves special study. The intimidated man loses, under the gaze of another person, his self-possession and is wont to become manageable and malleable by others. He feels this and struggles against it, but his only success lies in bringing himself to an awkward standstill; he is still strong enough to neutralise any external impetus, but not strong enough to regain the mastery of his own power of motion. It will be admitted, perhaps, that this singular state, a state that we have all more or less passed through at a certain age, has a great many points in common with somnambulism. But when timidity is routed, when one is put at his ease, as they say, has demagnetisation set in? Far from that, to be put at one’s ease in a given society is to adopt its manners and fashions, to speak its dialect, to copy its gestures, in short, to finally abandon one’s self unresistingly to the many surrounding currents of subtle influences against which one first struggled in vain, and to abandon one’s self so completely that all consciousness of this self-abandonment is lost. Timidity is a conscious and, consequently, an incomplete magnetisation. It may be compared to that drowsy state which precedes the profound slumber in which the somnambulist moves and speaks. It is a nascent social state which accompanies every transition from one society to another, or from the limits of the family to a wider social life.

It is for this reason, perhaps, that so-called rough diamonds, people who strongly rebel against assimilation and who are really unsociable, remain timid during their whole life. They are but partially subject to somnambulism. On the other hand, are not people who never feel awkward and embarrassed, who never experience any real timidity upon entering a drawing room or a lecture hall, or any corresponding stupor in taking up a science or art for the first time (for the trouble produced by entrance into a new calling whose difficulties frighten one and whose prescribed methods do violence to one’s old habits, may be perfectly well compared to intimidation), are not such people sociable in the highest degree? Are they not excellent copyists, i. e., devoid of any particular avocation or any controlling ideas, and do they not possess the eminently Chinese or Japanese faculty of speedily adapting themselves to their environment? In their readiness to fall asleep, are they not somnambulists of the first order? Intimidation plays an immense part in society under the name of Respect. Everyone will acknowledge this, and, although the part is sometimes misinterpreted, it is never in the least exaggerated. Respect is neither unmixed fear nor unmixed love, nor is it merely the combination of the two, although it is a fear which is beloved by him who entertains it. Respect is, primarily, the impression of an example by one person upon another who is psychologically polarised. Of course we must distinguish the respect of which we are conscious from that which we dissemble to ourselves under an assumed contempt. But taking this distinction into account, it is evident that whomsoever we imitate we respect, and that whomsoever we respect we imitate or tend to imitate. There is no surer sign of a displacement of social authority than deviations in the current of these examples. The man or the woman of the world who reflects the slang or undress of the labourer or the intonation of the actress, has more respect and deference for the person copied than he or she is himself or herself aware. Now what society would last for a single day without the general and continuous circulation of both the above forms of respect?

But I must not dwell any longer upon the above comparison. At any rate, I hope that I have at least made my reader feel that to thoroughly understand the essential social fact, as I perceive it, knowledge of the infinitely subtle facts of mind is necessary, and that the roots of even what seems to be the simplest and most superficial kind of sociology strike far down into the depths of the most inward and hidden parts of psychology and physiology. Society is imitation and imitation is a kind of somnambulism. This is the epitome of this chapter. As for the second part of the proposition, I beg the reader’s indulgence for any exaggeration I may have been guilty of. I must also remove a possible objection. It may be urged that submission to some ascendency does not always mean following the example of the person whom we trust and obey. But does not belief in anyone always mean belief in that which he believes or seems to believe? Does not obedience to someone mean that we will that which he wills or seems to will? Inventions are not made to order, nor are discoveries undertaken as a result of persuasive suggestion. Consequently, to be credulous and docile, and to be so as pre-eminently as the somnambulist and the social man, is to be, primarily, imitative. To innovate, to discover, to awake for an instant from his dream of home and country, the individual must escape, for the time being, from his social surroundings. Such unusual audacity makes him super-social rather than social.

One word more. We have just seen that memory as well as habit, or muscular memory, as I have already called it, is very keen in the case of somnambulists or quasi-somnambulists, while their credulity and docility are extreme. In other words their imitation of self (memory and habit are, in fact, nothing more than this) is as remarkable as their imitation of others. Is there no connection between these two facts? “It cannot be too clearly apprehended,” Maudsley says emphatically, “that there is a sort of innate tendency to mimicry in the nervous system.”¹ If this tendency is inherent in the final nerve elements, we may be permitted to conjecture that the relations between the cells within the same brain have some analogy to the singular relation between two brains, one of which fascinates the other, and that this relation consists of a special polarisation in the latter of the belief and desire which are stored up in each of its elements. In this way, perhaps, certain curious facts might be explained, the fact, for example, that in dreams there is a spontaneous arrangement of images which combine together according to some inward logic, and which are evidently under the control of one of them which imposes itself upon the others, and gives them their tone through the superiority, undoubtedly, of the nervous element in which it was contained and from which it issued.²