CHAPTER II

SOCIAL RESEMBLANCES AND IMITATION

IN the preceding chapter I merely stated, without developing, the thesis that imitation is the cause of all social likeness. But this formula must not be lightly accepted; to grasp its truth and that of the two analogous formulas relating to biological and physical resemblances, it must be thoroughly understood. Upon our first glance at societies, exceptions and objections seem to abound.

1. In the first place, many points of anatomical or physiological likeness between two living species belonging to different types cannot be explained, apparently, by hereditary repetition, because in many cases the common progenitor to whom they may both be traced, is, or theoretically should be, without the characteristics in question. The whale, for example, assuredly does not inherit its fishlike shape from the common hypothetical forefather from which both fish and mammals must have developed. If a bee reminds us in its flight of a bird, we have still less reason for thinking that bird and bee have inherited their wings and elytra from their very remote ancestor, who was probably a creeping and non-flying creature. The same observation may be made about the similar instincts that are displayed, according to Darwin and Romanes, by many animals of very distant species. Take, for example, the instinct to sham death as a means of escape from danger. This instinct is common to the fox, to certain insects, spiders, serpents, and birds. In this case, similarity of instinct can be accounted for only through homogeneity of physical environment. All these heterogeneous creatures have depended upon the same environment for the satisfaction of those fundamental wants which are essential to all life and which are identical in each one of them. Now, homogeneity of physical environment is nothing else but the uniform propagation of homogeneous waves of light or heat’or sound through air or water that is itself composed of atoms in constant and uniform vibration. As for the homogeneity of the fundamental functions and properties of every cell, of all protoplasm (of nutrition, for example, or of irritability), must it not be explained through the molecular constitution of the ever homogeneous chemical elements of life, that is, according to hypothesis, through the inner rhythms of their indefinitely repeated movements, rather than through the transmission of characteristics, by fission or some other kind of reproduction, from the first protoplasmic germ, admitting that in the beginning only a single germ was spontaneously formed? Therefore, although the above class of analogies is not due to the vital or hereditary form of repetition, it has originated in its physical or vibratory form.

In like manner there are always between two separate peoples who have reached an original civilisation by independent routes, certain general resemblances in language, mythology, politics, industry, art, and literature, where mutual imitation plays no part. Quatrefages relates that “when Cook visited the New Zealanders, they were strangely like the Highlanders of Rob Roy and MacIvoy” (Espèce humaine, p. 336). Now, resemblance between the social organisation of the Maoris and the ancient Scotch clans is certainly not due to any common ground of traditions, and no philologist would amuse himself by deriving their respective tongues from a common parent language. When Cortez reached Mexico, he found that the Aztecs, like many Old-World nations, were possessed of a king and orders of nobility and of agricultural and industrial classes. Their agriculture, with its floating islands and perfected system of irrigation, was suggestive of China; their architecture, their painting, and their hieroglyphic writing, of Eygpt. Their calendar testified, in spite of its peculiar character, to astronomical knowledge which corresponded to that of contemporary Europeans. Although their religion was sanguinary, it resembled Christianity in some of its rites, particularly in those of baptism and confession. In certain instances the coincidences of detail are so astonishing that they have led some people to believe that Old-World arts and institutions were brought over directly by shipwrecked Europeans.¹ But in these comparisons and in an infinite number of others of the same kind, is it not nearer the truth to recognise the fundamental unity of human nature on the one hand and the uniformity of external nature on the other? In human nature, those organic wants whose satisfaction is the end of all social evolution are everywhere the same; all human beings have the same senses and the same brain structure. In external nature, about the same resources are offered for the satisfaction of about the same wants, and approximately the same spectacles to approximately the same eyes, consequently the world’s industries, arts, perceptions, myths, and theories must be all pretty much alike. These resemblances, like those referred to above, would be instances of the general principle that all likeness is born of repetition. But, although they are themselves social, they are caused by repetitions of a biological or physical order, by the hereditary transmission of the human functions and organs which constitute the human races, and by the vibratory transmission of the temperatures, colours, sounds, electrical currents, and chemical affinities which constitute the climes and soils inhabited and cultivated by man.

Here we have the objection or the exception in its full force. In spite of its apparent gravity, it. merely offers an opportunity of copying in sociology a distinction that is usual in comparative anatomy between analogies and homologies. Now, resemblances such as that between the insect’s elytra and the bird’s wings seem superficial and meaningless to the naturalist. They may be very striking, but he pays no attention to them.¹ He almost denies their existence. Whereas he attaches the highest value to resemblances between the wing of the bird, the limb of the reptile, and the fin of the fish. From his point of view these are close and deep-seated resemblances, quite different from the former kind. If this form of discrimination is legitimate for the naturalist, I do not see why the sociologist should be refused the right of treating the functional analogies of different languages, religions, governments, and civilisations with equal contempt, and their anatomical homologies with equal respect. Philologists and mythologists are already filled with this spirit. To the philologist there is no significance in the fact that the word for deity in Aztec is teotl, and in Greek, théos. In this he sees nothing but a coincidence; consequently he does not assert that teotl and théos are the same word. On the other hand, he does undertake to prove that bischop is the same word as episcopus.² The reason of this is that no linguistic element should ever be detached at any instant in its evolution from all its anterior transformations nor considered apart from the other elements which it reflects and which reflect it. Accordingly, any likeness that may be proved to exist between the isolated phases of two vocables which have been taken from their own language families and so separated from all that which goes to make up their real life is only a factitious connection between two abstractions and not a true link between two real things. This consideration may be generalised.¹

But this answer, which is nothing more than the denial of troublesome resemblances, is inadequate. On the contrary, I hold that there certainly are many real and important resemblances which have been spontaneously produced between civilisations without any known or probable means of intercommunication. Moreover, I admit that, in general, when the current of human genius has once set towards inventions and discoveries, it finds itself confined by a sum of subjective and objective conditions, like a river by its banks, between narrow limits of development. Accordingly, even in distant regions there may be a certain approximate similarity between its channels. It may even chance to show, less often, however, than we might suppose, a parallelism of certain pregnant ideas,¹ of ideas which may be very simple or, at times, quite complicated, which have appeared independently and which are equivalent to, if not identical with, one another.² But, in the first place, in as much as men have been forced by the uniformity of their organic wants to follow the same trend of ideas, we have a fact that belongs to the biological, and not to the social, order of resemblances. Consequently the biological and not the social principle of repetition is applicable. Parallelly when conditions of light and sound, identical to all intents and purposes, force animals belonging to different families to develop organs of sight and hearing which are not without some points of resemblance, the likeness, in this respect, is physical, not biological; it depends upon vibration, and therefore comes under the principle of physical repetition.

Finally, how and why did human genius come to run its course at all, unless by virtue of certain initial causes which, in arousing it from its original torpor, also stirred up, one by one, the deep potential wants of the human soul? And were not these causes certain primordial and capital inventions and discoveries which began to spread through imitation and which inspired their imitators with a taste for invention and discovery? The first crude conceptions of the rudiments of language and religion on the part of some ape-man (I will speculate later on upon how this was done) carried man over the threshold from the animal to the social world. This difficult step must have been an unique event; without it, our richly developed world would have been chained to the limbo of unrealised possibilities. Without this spark, the flame of progress would never have been kindled in the primæval forests of savagery. This original act of imagination and its spread through imitation was the true cause, the sine qua non of progress. The immediate acts of imitation which it prompted were not its sole results. It suggested other acts of imagination which in turn suggested new acts and so on without end.

Thus everything is related to it. Every social resemblance precedes from that initial act of imitation of which it was the subject. I think I may compare it to that no less extraordinary event which occurred on the globe, many thousands of centuries in advance, when, for the first time, a tiny mass of protoplasm originated in some unknown way and began to multiply by fission. Every resemblance between existing forms of life is the outcome of this first repetition in heredity. For it would be futile to conjecture, purely gratuitously, that protoplasm, or language, or mythology originated at more than one centre of creation. As a matter of fact, granted the hypothesis of polygenism, we could not deny that, after a more or less prolonged struggle and competition, the best and most prolific of the different spontaneous specimens must have triumphed alone in the extermination or assimilation of its rivals.

There are two facts which we should not overlook: first, that the desire to invent and discover grows, like any other desire, with its satisfaction; second, that every invention resolves itself into the timely intersection in one mind of a current of imitation with another current which re-enforces it, or with an intense perception of some objective fact which throws new light on some old idea, or with the lively experience of a need that finds unhoped-for resources in some familiar practice. But if we analyse the feelings and perceptions in question, we shall find that they themselves may be resolved almost entirely, and more and more completely as civilisation advances, into psychological elements formed under the influence of example. Every natural phenomenon is seen through the prisms and coloured glasses of a mother tongue, or national religion, or ruling prejudice, or scientific theory, from which the most unbiassed and unimpassioned observation cannot emancipate itself without self-destruction. Moreover, every organic want is experienced in the characteristic form which has been sanctioned by surrounding example. The social environment, in defining and actualising this form, has, in truth, appropriated it. Even desires for nutrition and reproduction have been transformed, so to speak, into national products. Sexual desire is changed into a desire to be married according to the different religious rites of different localities. Desire for food is expressed in one place as a desire for a certain kind of bread or meat, in another, for a certain kind of grain or vegetable. This is all the more true of the natural desire for amusement. It expresses itself as desire for circus sports, for bull-fights, for classical tragedies, for naturalistic novels, for chess, for piquet, for whist. From this point of view several lines of imitation intersected one another in the brilliant eighteenth-century idea of applying the steam-engine, which had already been employed in factories, to the satisfaction of the desire for ocean travel—a desire which had originated through the spread of many antecedent naval inventions. The subsequent adaptation of the screw to the steamboat, both of which had been known of separately for a long time, was a similar idea. When Harvey had optical proof of the valves of the veins, and when this combined in his mind with his existing anatomical knowledge, he discovered the circulation of the blood. This discovery was hardly anything more, on the whole, than the encounter of traditional truths with others (namely, with the methods and practices which Harvey had long followed docilely as a disciple, and which alone enabled him to finally advance his master proposition). The development of a new theorem in the mind of a geometrician through the combination of two old theorems is pretty nearly analogous.

Since, then, all inventions and discoveries are composed of prior imitations; excepting certain extraneous accretions, of themselves unfruitful, and since these composites are themselves imitated and are destined to become, in turn, elements of still more complex combinations, it follows that there is a genealogical tree of such successful initiatives and that they appear in an irreversible, although otherwise indeterminate, sequence, suggestive of the pangenetic theory of the old philosophers. Every successful invention actualises one of the thousand possible, or rather, given certain conditions, necessary, inventions, which are carried in the womb of its parent invention, and by its appearance it annihilates the majority of those possibilities and makes possible a host of heretofore impossible inventions. These latter inventions will or will not come into existence according to the extent and direction of the radiation of its imitation through communities which are already illuminated by other lights. To be sure, only the most useful, if you please, of the future inventions—and by most useful I mean those which best answer the problems of the time—will survive, for every invention, like every discovery, is an answer to a problem. But aside from the fact that these problems,¹ inasmuch as they are themselves the vague expressions of certain indefinite wants, are capable of manifold solutions; the point of interest is to know how, why, and by whom they have been raised; why one date was chosen rather than another, and, finally, why one solution was chosen in one place, and another in another place.² All this depends upon individual initiatives, upon the nature of the scholars and inventors of the past. From the earliest of these, the greatest, perhaps, our avalanche of progress has rolled down out of the zenith of history.

It is difficult for us to imagine how necessary genius and exceptional circumstances were for the development of the simplest ideas. To tame and make use of harmless indigenous animals, instead of merely hunting them, would seem at first to be the most natural, as well as the most fruitful, of initiatives, an inevitable initiative, in fact. Yet we know that, although the horse originally belonged to the American fauna, it had disappeared from America when that continent was discovered, and, according to Bourdeau, its disappearance is generally explained (Conquête du monde animal) on the ground that “in many places (in the Old World as well) it had been annihilated by the hunter for food, before the herdsman had conceived the idea of domesticating it.” And so we see that this idea was far from being an inevitable one. The domestication of the horse depended upon some individual accident. It had to occur in some one place whence it could spread through imitation. But what is true of this quadruped is undoubtedly true of all domestic animals and of all cultivated plants. Now, can we imagine humanity without these prime inventions!

In general, if we do not wish to explain resemblances between communities which are separated by more or less insurmountable obstacles (although these may not have existed in the past), through the common possession of some entirely forgotten primitive model, only one other explanation, as a rule, remains. Each community must have exhausted all the inventions which were possible in a given line save the one adopted, and eliminated all its other useless or less useful ideas. But the comparative barrenness of imagination which characterises primitive people is opposed to this hypothesis. We should then accept the former hypothesis and refuse to renounce it without good reason. Is it certain, for example, that the idea of building lake dwellings came to the ancient inhabitants of both Switzerland and New Guinea without any suggestion of imitation? The same question arises in relation to the cutting and polishing of flints, to the use of tendons and fishbones for sewing, or to the rubbing together of two pieces of wood for fire. Before we deny the possibility of a diffusion of these ideas through a world-wide process of gradual and prolonged imitation, the immense duration of prehistoric times must be brought to mind, and we must not overlook the evidence of the existence of relations between very distant peoples not only in the age of bronze, when tin was sometimes brought from a great distance, but also in the smooth stone and perhaps even in the rough stone age. The great invasions which have raged at all periods of history must have aided and often universalised the spread of civilising ideas. Even in prehistoric times this was true. Indeed it must have been especially true in those times, for the ease with which great conquests are effected depends upon the primitive and disintegrated nature of the people to be conquered. The irruption of the Mongols in the thirteenth century is a good instance of these periodic deluges, and we know that it broke down, in the full tide of mediævalism, the closest of race barriers and put China and Hindustan into communication with each other and with Europe.¹

Even in default of such violent events, a world-wide interchange of examples could not have failed to take place eventually. At this point, let me make the following general remark: The majority of historians are not inclined to admit the influence of one civilisation upon another unless they can prove the existence of some intercommercial or military relations. They think, implicitly, that the action of one nation upon another at a distance, of Egypt upon Mesopotamia, for example, or of China upon the Roman Empire, presupposes the transportation of troops or the sending of ships or caravans from one to the other. They would not admit, for example, that currents of Babylonian and Egyptian civilisation may have intermingled before the conquest of Mesopotamia by Egypt in the sixteenth century before our era. Oppositely, in virtue of the same point of view, as soon as a similarity of works of art, of monuments, of tombs, of mortuary relics, proves to them the action of one civilisation upon another, they at once conclude that wars or regular transactions of some kind must have occurred between them.

In view of the relations which I have established between the three forms of universal repetition, the above preconception suggests the error of the old-time physicists, who saw in every physical action between two distant bodies, like the imparting of heat or light, the proof of a transmission of matter. Did not Newton himself think that the diffusion of solar light was produced by the emission of particles projected by the sun through boundless space? There is as much difference between my point of view and the ordinary one as there is in optics between the vibratory theory and the theory of emission. Of course I do not deny that social action is effected, or rather aroused, by the movements of armies or merchant vessels; but I challenge the view that such movements are the sole or even the principal mode through which the contagion of civilisation takes place. Men of different civilisations come into mutual contact on their respective frontiers, where, independently of war or trade, they are naturally inclined to imitate one another. And so, without its being necessary for them to displace one another in the sense of checking the spread of one another’s examples, they continually and over unlimited distances react upon one another, just as the molecules of the sea drive forward its waves without displacing one another in their direction. Consequently, long before the arrival of Pharaoh’s army in Babylon, sundry external observances and industrial secrets had passed from hand to hand, in some way or other, from Egypt to Babylon.

Here we have the first principle of history. Let us note closely the continuity, the power and the irresistibility of its action. Given the necessary time, it will inevitably reach out to the ends of the earth. Now, in view of the fact that man’s past is to be reckoned in hundreds of thousands of years, there is ample reason to think that it must have spread through the entire universe before the nearby historic ages which we call antiquity, began.

Moreover, it is not necessary that the thing which is propagated should be beautiful or useful or rational. In the Middle Ages, for example, a grotesque custom existed in many different places of parading, seated backwards upon an ass, husbands who had been beaten by their wives. Obviously such an absurd idea could not have arisen spontaneously at the same time in different brains. Was it not due to imitation? And yet M. Baudrillart is led by current prejudice to believe that popular festivals originated of themselves without any conscious or deliberate individual initiative. “The festivals of Tarasque at Tarascon, of Graouilli at Metz, of Loup vert at Jumièges, of Gargouille at Rouen, and many others, he says, were never established, in all probability, by a formal decree [I admit this] or by premeditated desire [the error is here]; they were made periodic by unanimous and spontaneous agreement.. . .” Imagine thousands of people simultaneously conceiving and spontaneously carrying out such extraordinary things!

To sum up, everything which is social and non-vital or non-physical in the phenomena of societies is caused by imitation. This is true of both social similarities and dissimilarities. And so, the epithet natural is generally and not improperly bestowed upon the spontaneous and non-suggested resemblances which arise between different societies in every order of social facts. If we like to look at societies on the side of their spontaneous resemblances, we have the right to call this aspect of their laws, cults, governments, customs and crimes, natural law, natural religion, natural governments, natural industry, natural art (I do not mean naturalistic art), natural crime. Now, such spontaneous resemblances have, of course, some significance. But, unfortunately, we waste our time in trying to get at their exact meaning, and because of their irremediable vagueness and arbitrariness of character, they must end by repelling the positive and scientifically trained mind.

I may be reminded of the fact that although imitation is a social thing, the tendency to imitate in order to avoid the trouble of inventing, a tendency which is born of instinctive indolence, is an absolutely natural thing. But although this tendency may, of necessity, precede the first social act, the act whereby it is satisfied, yet its own strength and direction varies very much according to the nature of existing habits of imitation. It may still be argued that this tendency is only one form of a desire which I myself hold to be innate and deep-seated and from which I deduce, later on, all the laws of social reason, namely, desire for a maximum of strong and stable belief. If these laws exist, the resemblances which they produce in people’s ideas and institutions have, in as much as there can be nothing social in their origin, a natural and non-social cause. For example, the savages of America, Africa, and Asia all explain sickness on the ground of diabolical possession, the entrance of evil spirits into the body of the diseased—this, in itself, is quite a singular coincidence; then when they have once adopted this explanation they all conceive of the idea of curing through exorcism as a logical outcome. In reply, I say that although it cannot be denied that there is a certain logical orientation on the part of the presocial man, the desire for logical co-ordination has been enhanced and directed by the influences of the social environment, where it is subject to the widest and strangest fluctuations, and where, like every other desire, it waxes strong and definite according to the measure of satisfaction which it receives. We shall see the proof of this at another time.

2. This leads me to examine another leading objection which may be raised against me. As a matter of fact, I have gained little in proving that all civilisations, even the most divergent, are rays from a single primordial centre, if there are reasons for thinking that, after a certain point, the distance between them begins to diminish rather than increase, and that, whatever may have been the point of departure, the evolution of languages, myths, crafts, laws, sciences, and arts has been drawing nearer and nearer to a beaten track, so that their goal must always have been the same, predetermined and inevitable.

It is for us to ascertain if this hypothesis be true. It is not true. Let me first point out the extravagant consequence that it involves. It implies that, given sufficient time, the scientific spirit must lead, no matter what its path of speculation may be, to the infinitesimal calculus in mathematics, to the law of gravitation in astronomy, to the union of forces in physics, to atomism in chemistry, and in biology to natural selection or to some other ulterior form of evolution. Moreover, since the industrial and the military and the artistic imagination must have depended upon this would-be unique and inevitable science in their search for the means of satisfying virtually innate wants, it follows that the invention of the locomotive and the electric telegraph, for example, of torpedoes and Krupp guns, of Wagnerian opera and naturalistic novels, was a necessary thing, more necessary, perhaps, than the simplest expression of the art of pottery. Now, unless I am much mistaken, one might as well say that from its very beginnings and throughout all its metamorphoses, life tended to give birth to certain predetermined forms of existence and that the duck-bill, for example, or the lizard or ophrys or cactus or man himself was a necessary occurrence. Would it not be more plausible to admit that the ever fresh problem of life was of itself undertermined and susceptible of multiple solutions?

The illusion which I am opposing owes its verisimilitude to a kind of quid pro quo. The progress of civilisation is unquestionably manifest in the gradual equalisation that is being established throughout an ever vaster territory. This process is so thorough that some day, perhaps, a single stable and definite social type will cover the entire surface of a globe¹ that was formerly divided up among a thousand different unrelated or rival types. But does the work of universal equalisation in which we are taking part reveal the slightest common movement on the part of different societies towards the same pole? Not in the least, since the equalisation is plainly due to the submersion of the greater number of our original civilisations by the overflow of one whose waters are advancing in continually enlarging circles of imitation. To see how far independent civilisations are from tending to merge together spontaneously, let us compare in their stages of final development the Byzantine Empire of the Middle Ages, for example, with the Chinese Empire of the same epoch. Both civilisations had long since put forth all their fruit and reached their extreme limits of growth. The question at issue is whether in this final state of consummation they resembled each other more than they did at any previous time. It seems to me that the very opposite is much more true. Compare Saint Sophia with its mosaics to a pagoda with its porcelains, the mystic miniatures of Byzantine manuscripts to the flat paintings of Chinese vases, the life of a mandarin occupied with literary frivolities and setting but an intermittent example of labour to that of a Byzantine bishop, devoted to the mingled ruses and subtleties of diplomacy and theology, etc. The contrast is complete between the ideal of exquisite landscape gardening, of swarming families, and of lowered morality that is dear to one of these peoples, and the ideal of Christian salvation, of monastic celibacy and of ascetic perfection which fascinates the other. It is difficult to class under the same term of religion the ancestor-worship which is the basis of the one, and the worship of divine personages or of saints which is the soul of the other. But if I go back to the most ancient ages of those Greeks and Romans whose twofold culture was amalgamated and completed in the Lower Empire, I shall find a family organisation which would seem to be patterned after that of China. In fact, in the ancient Aryan, and, I may add, Semitic, family, we find, as in the Chinese family, not only the worship of ancestors and of household gods, we also find the same contrivances for honouring the dead, namely, food offerings and the singing of hymns accompanied by genuflexion. We find, too, the same fictions, particularly the fiction of adoption whose purpose is to accomplish, in spite of the occasional barrenness of wives, the chief end in view, the perpetuation with the family of the family-cult.

We shall have the counterproof of this truth, if, instead of comparing two original peoples at two successive phases of their history, we compare two classes or two social levels in each of them. The traveller, to be sure, will observe that there is greater dissimilarity in many European countries, even in the most backward, between the common people who have remained faithful to their ancient customs than between persons belonging to the upper classes. But it is because the latter have been the first to be touched by the rays of invading fashion; here the resemblance is obviously the child of imitation. On the other hand, when two nations have remained hermetically shut off from each other, there are certainly greater differences between the ideas, the tastes, and the habits of their nobles or clergy than between those of their farmers or mechanics.

The reason of this is that the more civilised a nation or class becomes, the more it escapes from the narrow banks in whose thraldom the same universal corporeal wants have hemmed its development. It flows out into the freedom of the æsthetic life, where its ship of art is wafted at the pleasure of the breezes with which its own past fills its sails. If civilisation were only the full expansion of organic life by means of the social environment, this would not be so; but it seems as if life, in expanding in this way, sought above all to free itself from itself, to break through its own circle; as if it bloomed only to wither away, as if nothing were more essential to it (this is the case with all reality, perhaps), than to rid itself of its very essence. Accordingly, the superfluity, the luxury, the thing of beauty, I mean the special thing of beauty which every nation and every age makes its own, is, in every society, the pre-eminently social thing; it is the raison d’être of all the rest, of all that which is useful and necessary. Now we shall see that the exclusively imitative origin of resemblances becomes more and more indisputable as one passes from things of use to things of beauty. Artistic habits of eye, born of ancient individual caprice in art, become super-organic wants which the artist is obliged to satisfy, and which singularly limit the field of his fancy. But this imitation, which has nothing vital in it, varies as much as possible with time and place. Thus the eye of the Greek, beginning with a certain epoch, needed to see his columns in keeping with the Ionic or Corinthian order, whereas the eye of the Egyptian, under the Old Empire, exacted a square pier, and, under the Middle Empire, a column with lotos-bulb capital. Here, in this sphere of pure art, or rather of almost pure art, for architecture will always be an industrial art, my formula relating to imitation as the unique cause of true social resemblances, applies to the very letter.

It would apply still more exactly in sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. In fact, the æsthetic ideas and judgments to which art corresponds, do not exist before it. They have nothing in them that is fixed and uniform. They differ from the bodily wants and sense-perceptions which in a certain measure predetermine works of industry and force them to repeat themselves vaguely among different peoples. When a product belongs both to industry and to art, we must expect it to be like other products from foreign and independent sources in its industrial characteristics and to differ from them on its æsthetic side. In general, this differential element seems of slight importance to the practical man. Are not the monuments, the vases, the furniture, and the hymns and epics of different civilisations differentiated from each merely in detail? But detail, the characteristic shade, the turn of the sentence, the peculiar colouring, all this is style and manner; to the artist it is more important than anything else. The pointed arch of one place, the semi-circular of another, the pediment of still another, is both the most visible and most significant character of its respective society. It is the master-form which controls, instead of being controlled by, utilities, and, in this respect, it may well be likened to those morphological characteristics which rule over functions and by which living types are recognised. This is the reason why we can deny from the æsthetic, that is, from the most purely social, point of view, that any real likeness exists between works which differ from each other only in detail. We can assert, for example, that the graceful little Egyptian temple at Elephante is, in spite of its appearance, unlike a peripteral Greek temple. Consequently, we can set aside the question of ascertaining if this resemblance is not a proof that, as Champollion thought, Greece copied Egypt. After all, this amounts to saying that the formula applies the more exactly, the more it is a question of like products satisfying wants which are more artificial than natural, that is, which belong to a social rather than vital order of things. From this we may infer that if certain products ever intersected each other, products that were inspired by exclusively social motives, and that were absolutely disconnected from any vital functions, this principle would be verified with the utmost exactness.

There has been much talk among artists of an alleged law of development which would subject the fine arts to turn forever in the same circle and repeat themselves indefinitely. Unfortunately no one has ever been able to formulate it with any precision without running foul of the facts. This observation may be likewise applied, although in a lesser degree, as we should expect from what has preceded, to the development of religions, languages, governments, laws, morals, and sciences. Although M. Perrot shares in the aforesaid current prejudice, yet in his Histoire de l’art he is forced to admit that the evolution of architectural orders did not pass through analagous phases in Egypt and Greece. When the most ancient stone columns of both places came to take the place of wooden piers, they undoubtedly began by more or less faithfully imitating them and they retained for a long-time this counterfeit character; and in both countries the native plants, the acanthus in Greece, the lotos or palm in Egypt, were reproduced in the ornamentation of the capitals. Again, without doubt, the Greek or Egyptian column, massive and undivided as it was in the beginning, came to be subdivided into three parts, the capital, the shaft, and the base. Finally, the decoration of the capital in Greece and of the entire column in Egypt undoubtedly went on, becoming more and more complicated and surcharged with fresh ornamentation.

But of these three analogies, the first is only another witness to our first principle, the instinctive imitativeness of social man, and the third sets off for us a necessary corollary of this principle, the gradual accumulation of non-contradictory inventions, thanks to the conservation and diffusion of each of them through the imitation of which each is the centre of radiation. As for the second, it is one of those functional analogies of which I spoke above. In fact, as soon as the need of shelter came to require dwellings of a certain elevation for its satisfaction, this tripartite division of the column was pretty much necessitated by the nature of the materials used and by the law of gravity. If we wish to get at the truth of the pseudo-law of religious or political or other kinds of development which I have just been criticising in passing, we shall see that it may be resolved into resemblances which fall within the three preceding categories. If any fails to fall within them, it is because imitation has intervened. For example, the point of similarity between Christianity and Buddhism, but especially between Christianity and the worship of Krishna, are so multiple, that they have seemed sufficient to some of the most learned authorities, notably to Weber, to justify the affirmation that an historical relationship exists between the aforesaid religions. The conjecture is the less astonishing because it is about proselyting religions.

Besides,—and here the significant divergences will stand out,—among the Greeks the proportion of the supports were always modified in the same direction, “a higher and higher fraction expressed the ratio between the height of the shaft and its diameter. The Doric of the Parthenon is more slender than that of the old temple of Corinth; it is less so than the Roman Doric. This was not the case in Egypt, its forms did not tend to grow more tapering with the lapse of the centuries. The proportions of the polygonal or of the fascicular column of Beni-Hassan are not more thickset than those of the columns of much earlier monuments.”¹ We even find the contrary of this, the exact inverse of Hellenic evolution. “There are thus,” concludes the author I cite from, “capricious oscillations in the course of Egyptian art. It is less regular than that of classic art; it does not seem to be governed by an equally severe internal logic.”²

I prefer to say that it follows from this that art is unwilling to be shut up in a formula, since, at times, this formula, if formula there be, seems to apply, whereas at other times it is plain that it does not apply at all, and precisely in that which to the eyes of those who know concerns the most important, the most expressive, and the most profound characteristics. When it is a question of looking at the column from the utilitarian point of view, external conditions narrowly circumscribe the field of architectural invention and impose certain fundamental ideas upon it like themes for variation. But when once the strait was crossed along which all schools had to follow in almost parallel courses, the schools turned in different directions and drifted apart; and yet they were not more free, only each obeyed merely the inspirations of its own peculiar genius. From now on, there is an end to coincidences, and dissimilarities are deepened.¹ The individual influence of great masters, either living or dead, becomes sovereign and preponderant in the transformations of their arts. In this way the “capricious oscillations” of Egyptian architecture may be explained; and, if the development of Greek architecture appears to be more rectilinear, is this not an illusion? If we do not limit ourselves to the consideration of two or three remarkable centuries of Greek development, if we include the entire unfolding of Greek art from its scarcely known beginnings to its final Byzantine transformations, shall we not see that that increasing need of more slender proportions which M. Perrot points out, begins, at a certain epoch, to diminish? The birth and growth of this optical need was due to a series of elegant and graceful artists, just as generations of solid builders made the need of massive solidity a general and permanent thing on the banks of the Nile. And yet contributions of a different style were not lacking when an architect of originality, one less inclined to conform to the national genius than to reform it, made his appearance on the scene. But how much these considerations would gain by being illustrated by examples taken from the higher arts, from painting and poetry and music!