The laws of imitation

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THE

LAWS OF IMITATION

BY
GABRIEL TARDE

Professor in the College de France, Member of the Institute

TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND
FRENCH EDITION BY ^

ELSIE CLEWS PARSONS

Lecturer on Sociology in Barnard College

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS
Professor of Sociology in Columbia University

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1903

COPYRIGHT, 1903

BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Published September, 1903

THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.

\

INTRODUCTION

GABRIEL TARDE, whose most interesting and important
book is here given to American readers, is Professor of
Modern Philosophy in the College de France, and a member
of the Lnstitut. A true philosopher, but also a man of af-
fairs, with wide intellectual sympathies, M. Tarde is a writer
of great charm, and his influence among his own countrymen
and abroad has steadily increased since he began, in 1880,
to contribute to the Revue philosophique. American
scholars, long familiar with M. Tarde's suggestive works,
have felt that his thought should be made more accessible
to English-speaking readers. Hitherto only a little book,
Les Lois sociales, presenting a mere outline of his philos-
ophy, has been translated.

4 M. Tarde was born in 1843, at Sarlat, Dordogne. After

2 school days were over, instead of entering upon university

1® life at Bordeaux, or Montpellier, or Paris, he took up legal

^ studies, and presently became juge d 'instruction in his

native town. This office he held for nearly eighteen years,

years of keen observation, but also of much solitude, of

patient reflection, of the gradual unfolding of original ideas

O of man, of society, and of the world, which were presently

^ to combine in a complete philosophical scheme.

A born student of human nature, M. Tarde was from the

first interested in that oldest of philosophical problems, the

explanation of motive. He early perceived not only that

motive may be resolved into terms of belief and desire, but

v? also that it may be measured. This discovery had, of

course, been made before by Bentham, Cournot, Menger,

Walras, and Jevons, but Tarde's presentation of the sub-

fO ject in his first contribution to the Revue philosophique, on

La Croyance et le desir, possibility de leur mesure, was

independent and original.

iii

302723

iv Introduction

But motives, and those impersonal forces that are not
motives, work out results in an orderly fashion, by definite
modes, which are the chief subject-matter of scientific study,
and to the explanation of modes of activity M. Tarde was
to make noteworthy contributions. Among the phenomena
that early arrested his attention was imitation. From his
office of magistrate he observed the large part that imitation
plays in criminal conduct. Does it play a smaller part in
normal conduct? Very rapidly M. Tarde's ardent mind
ranged over the field of history, followed the spread of
Western civilisation, and reviewed the development of lan-
guage, the evolution of art, of law, and of institutions. The
evidence was overwhelming that in all the affairs of men,
whether of good or of evil report, imitation is an ever-pres-
ent factor; and to a philosophical mind the implication
was obvious, that there must be psychological or sociolog-
ical laws of imitation, worthy of most thorough study.

At this time sociology was represented in France by dis-
ciples of Comte and by a few interested readers of Herbert
Spencer. The thoughts of the Comtists did not range far
beyond the " hierarchy of the sciences," and the " three
stages " of history. To demonstrate the place of sociology
in the " hierarchy," or to show that a social fact belonged
to one or another " stage," was very nearly the limit of
Comtist sociological ambition. The Spencerians, on the
other hand, seizing upon Spencer's proposition that society
is an organism, — but neglecting most of the psychological
and historical elements of his system, — were busy elaborat-
ing biological analogies.

With such notions M. Tarde had, and could have, no
sympathy. He felt that if the study of society was to be
erected into a science, a beginning must be made, not by
demonstrating the logical and rightful place of sociology
in the sisterhood of sciences, and not by exploiting the anal-
ogy of institutions to organic life, but rather by thoroughly
examining the nature and combinations of some distinc-
tively social phenomenon. The fact — the relationship or
activity — if such there be, in virtue of which society is

Introduction v

itself, a differentiated thing, and not merely a part of some-
thing else, that fact the sociologist should understand
through and through, and in all its bearings, and should
make it the corner-stone of his system. That elemental
social fact M. Tarde believed he had discovered in the
phenomenon of imitation.

Too profoundly philosophical, however, to view any fact
in even partial isolation, M. Tarde perceived that imitation,
as a social form, is only one mode of a universal activity,
of that endless repetition, throughout nature, which in the
physical realm we know as the undulations of ether, the
vibrations of material bodies, the swing of the planets in
their orbits, the alternations of light and darkness, and of
seasons, the succession of life and death. Here, then, was
not only a fundamental truth of social science, but also a
first principle of cosmic philosophy.

His first tentative studies of the laws of universal repeti-
tion in physical nature and in history, and of imitation as
the distinctive social fact, M. Tarde published between 1882
and 1884 in the Revue philosophique. Among articles
which, in substance, afterwards reappeared as chapters of
Les Lois de V imitation, were those entitled Les Traits
communs de la nature et de I'histoire, L'Archeologie et
la statistique, and Qu'est-ce qu'une societe? Other
articles, setting forth the same underlying principles, but
having a more practical aim, and presenting views born of
the author's professional experience as a magistrate, were
afterwards incorporated in the volumes, La Criminalite
comparee and La Philosophic penale (1891). Of these
and other writings by our author on criminology, Havelock
Ellis says : " He touches on all the various problems of crime
with ever-ready intelligence and acuteness, and a rare charm
of literary style, illuminating with suggestive criticism
everything that he touches." 1

The first edition of Les Lois de limitation appeared
in 1890; a second in 1895. M. Tarde had now conceived
a complete philosophy of phenomenal existence, and he
1 The Criminal, p. 42.

vi Introduction

rapidly converted it into literary embodiment. Unlike
philosophers in general, M. Tarde is compact and brief in
his systematic work; discursive in his varied writings illus-
trative of principles or practical by application. His whole
philosophical system is set forth in three volumes of mod-
erate dimensions. Les Lois de I3 imitation is an exposition
of the facts and laws of universal repetition. In La
Logique sociale, which appeared in 1895, we have our
author's explanation of the way in which elemental phe-
nomena, undergoing endless repetition, are combined in con-
crete groups, bodies, systems, especially mental and social
systems. This process is a logic, a synthesis, of repetitions.
It includes adaptation, invention, and organisation. The
chapters on the laws of invention are brilliant examples of
M. Tarde's originality and many-sided knowledge. The
third volume of the system, L'Opposition universelle, was
published in 1897. Here was developed the theory of a
third universal form and aspect of natural phenomena —
namely, conflict.

The chronological: order of these publications did not
correspond exactly to their logical order, as parts of a sys-
tem. The latter was presented in a series of lectures in
1897 at tne College Libre des Sciences Sociales. The order
there given was " The Repetition of Phenomena," " The
Opposition of Phenomena," " The Adaptation of Phenom-
ena." These lectures were published in 1898, under the
title already mentioned, Les Lois sociales.

M. Tarde's abilities, and in particular his knowledge of
criminal statistics and penology, had ere this drawn atten-
tion to him as a man whom the state could not overlook,
and in 1894 he was called to Paris to assume charge of the
Bureau of Statistics of the Ministry of Justice. This posi-
tion he held until his election as Professor of Modern Philos-
ophy in the College de France in 1900. In this latter year
he was elected also a member of the Institute of France.

M. Tarde's later writings present his philosophical and
sociological views under many aspects. They include:
Les Transformations du droit, Les Transformations du

Introduction vii

pouvoir, L* Opinion et la joule, Etudes penales et sociales,
Essais et Melanges sociologiques, Etudes de psychologic
penale, and Psychologic economique.

It is not the purpose of these brief lines of introduction
to attempt any estimate of M. Tarde's place in philosophy,
or to offer any criticism of his sociological views. The
object is rather to indicate the place which " The Laws of
Imitation" holds among the many writings of a gifted and
widely influential author, in the belief that those who read
this volume will wish to look into at least some of the
others.

Of the quality of Mrs. Parsons' translation the reader
himself will judge. It is enough here to say that Mrs.
Parsons has sought with painstaking fidelity to convey to
English readers the exact meaning of the original text.

FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS

Columbia University

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

IN this work I have endeavoured to point out as clearly as
possible the purely social side of human phenomena, as dis-
tinct from their vital and physical characteristics. It just
happens, however, that the point of view which is helpful
in noting this distinction is the very one which presents the
greatest number of the closest and most natural analogies
between the facts of society and the facts of nature. Many
years ago I formulated and partly developed in the Revue
philosophique my fundamental thought, — " the key to
almost every lock," as one of our greatest philosophers of
history graciously wrote to me; — and as the plan of the
present work was already in my mind at that time, many of
those articles have been readily incorporated as chapters of
this book.1 I am but setting them in the place for which
they were originally intended. Sociologists who have
already honoured these fragmentary expositions with their
notice, now have the opportunity, if they desire it, to criti-
cise my point of view in its entirety. Any harsh treatment
of myself I will forgive, providing my thought be received
with leniency. This is not at all impossible. In fact, my
conception might have a grievance against me just as seed
might complain of its soil. But then I hope that through
this publication it will reach someone better fitted to
develop it than I am.

I have tried, then, to outline a pure sociology. This is

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

In another work, La Philosophie penale, I have developed the applica-
tion of my point of view to social crime and punishment. My Crimi-
nalite comparee is an earlier attempt in the same direction.

x Preface to the First Edition

tantamount to saying a general sociology. The laws of
such a science, as I understand it, apply to every society,
past, present, or future, just as the laws of general physi-
ology apply to every species, living, extinct, or conceivable.
The simplicity of such principles equals their generality,
and I grant that it is much easier to lay them down and even
to prove them, than to follow them through the labyrinth
of their particular applications. Their formulation is
nevertheless necessary.

Formerly, a philosophy of history or nature meant a nar-
row system of historical or scientific interpretation. It
sought to explain the whole group or series of historic facts
or natural phenomena, as presented in some inevitable order
or sequence. Such attempts were bound to fail. The
actual can be explained only as a part of the vast contingent,
that is, of that which, given certain conditions, is necessary.
In this it swims, like a star in infinite space. The very
idea of law rests upon the conception of such a firmament
of facts.

Given certain unknown primordial conditions, existence
was, of course, bound to be as it is. But why were these
conditions given and no others? There is something irra-
tional here at the bottom of the inevitable. Moreover, in
the worlds of life and matter, as well as in that of society,
the actual seems to be a mere fragment of the potential.
Witness the character of the heavens, dotted arbitrarily
with suns and nebulae. Witness the strange nature of cer-
tain faunas and floras. Witness the distorted and disjointed
aspects of those societies that lie heaped up side by side
under social ruins and abortions. In this respect, as in many
others which I shall indicate in passing, the three great divi-
sions of existence are very much alike.

Chapter V, on the Logical Laws of Imitation, is merely
the toothing-stone of a future work which is intended to
complete this one. A proper development of the subject
would have led me beyond the limits of this volume.

The ideas which I have presented may supply new solu-
tions for the political or other questions upon which we now1

Preface to the First Edition xi

stand divided. But it seemed to me that it was unnecessary
to undertake to deduce them. It would, moreover, have
taken me away from my immediate subject. Nor will the
class of readers for whom I am writing reproach me for
resisting the charm of such concrete subjects. Besides, I
could not have succumbed to it without going beyond the
limits of this work.

One word more in justification of my dedication. I am
not the pupil, or even the disciple, of Cournot. I have never
met him. But I take it as one of the happy chances of my
life that I read a great deal of this writer after I left college.
I have often thought that he needed only to have been born
in England or Germany and to have had his work trans-
lated into a French teeming with solecisms to be famous
among us all. Above all, I shall never forget that at a dreary
period of my youth, when I was suffering from my eyes,
and limited of necessity to one book, it was Cournot who
saved me from mental starvation. But I shall certainly
be ridiculed unless I add another much less disinterested
sentiment to this old-fashioned one of intellectual gratitude.
If my book fail of a welcome, — a contingency for which a
philosopher must always be prepared in France, even if he
have hitherto had but to congratulate himself upon the good
will of the public, — this dedication will prove a consolation
to me. Cournot was the Sainte-Beuve of philosophic crit-
icism; possessed of originality and discrimination, he was a
thinker of universal erudition as well as insight; he was a
profound geometrician, an unparalleled logician, and as an
economist he was the unrecognised precursor of modern
economists; to sum it all up, Cournot was an Auguste
Comte, purified, condensed, and refined. In realising, then,
that such a man continued to be obscure during his lifetime,
and that even since his death he has not been very well
known, in realising this how could I ever dare to complain
of not having had greater success?

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

SINCE the first edition of this book I have published its
sequel and complement under the title of La Logique sociale.

In saying this I think that I have implicitly answered
certain objections which the reader of The Laws of Imita-
tion might have raised. However, it will not be useless
to give a few brief points of explanation on this subject.

I have been criticised here and there " for having often
called by the name of imitation certain facts which this name
did not at all fit." This criticism, coming from a philo-
sophic pen, astonishes me. In fact, when a philosopher
needs a word to express a new generalisation, he must
choose between two things; he must choose a neologism, if
he is put to it, or he must decide, and this is unquestionably
better, to stretch the meaning of some old term. The whole
question is one of finding out whether I have overstretched
— I do not say from the point of view of the dictionary def-
inition, but from that of a deeper conception of things — the
meaning of the word imitation.

Now I am well aware that I am not conforming to ordi-
nary usage when I say that when a man unconsciously and
involuntarily reflects the opinion of others, or allows an
action of others to be suggested to him, he imitates this idea
or act. And yet, if he knowingly and deliberately borrows
some trick of thought or action from his neighbour, people
agree that in this case the use of the word in question is
legitimate. Nothing, however, is less scientific that the
establishment of this absolute separation, of this abrupt
break, between the voluntary and the involuntary, between
the conscious and the unconscious. Do we not pass by
insensible degrees from deliberate volition to almost me-
chanical habit? And does the same act absolutely change
its nature during this transition? I do not mean to say

xiv Preface to the Second Edition

that I deny the importance of the psychological change that
is produced in this way. But on its social side the phe-
nomenon has remained the same. No one has a right to
criticise the extension of the meaning of the word in
question as unjustifiable unless in extending it I have de-
formed or obscured its sense. But I have always given it
a very precise and characteristic meaning, that of the action
at a distance of one mind upon another, and of action which
consists of a quasi-photographic reproduction of a cerebral
image upon the sensitive plate of another brain.1 If the
photographic plate became conscious at a given mo-
ment of what was happening to it, would the nature of
the phenomenon be essentially changed? By imitation I
mean every impression of an inter-psychical photography,
so to speak, willed or not willed, passive or active. If we
observe that wherever there is a social relation between two
living beings, there we have imitation in this sense of the
word (either of one by the other or of others by both, when,
for example, a man converses with another in a common
language, making new verbal proofs from very old nega-
tives), we shall have to admit that a sociologist was justified
in taking this notion as a look-out post.

I might have been much more justly criticised for having
overstretched the meaning of the word invention. I have
certainly applied this name to all individual initiatives, not
only without considering the extent in which they are self-
conscious — for the individual often innovates unconsciously,
and, as a matter of fact, the most imitative man is an inno-
vator on some side or other — but without paying the slight-
est attention in the world to the degree of difficulty or merit
of the innovation in question. This is not because I have
failed to recognise the importance of this last consideration.
Some inventions are so easy to conceive of that we may
admit the fact that they have arisen of themselves, without

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

Preface to the Second Edition xv

borrowing, in almost all primitive societies, and that their
first accidental appearance here or there has little signifi-
cance. Other discoveries, on the contrary, are so difficult
that the happy advent of the genius who made them
may be considered a pre-eminently singular and important
chance of fortune. Well, in spite of all this, I think
that even here I have been justified in doing some slight
violence to common speech in characterising as inventions
or discoveries the most simple innovations, all the more
so because the easiest are not always the least fruitful nor
the most difficult the least useless. What is really unjusti-
fiable, on the other hand, is the elastic meaning that is given
by many naturalistic sociologists to the word heredity.
They use this word indifferently to express the transmission
of vital characteristics through reproduction and the trans-
mission of ideas and customs, of social things, by ancestral
tradition, by domestic education, and by custom-imitation.

Let me add that a neologism from the Greek would have
been the easiest thing in the world to conceive of. Instead
of saying invention or imitation I might have readily forged
two new words. Now let me dismiss this petty and unin-
teresting quibble. I have been sometimes charged with
exaggeration, and this is a more serious thing, in the use of
the two notions in question. It is rather a commonplace
criticism, to be sure, and one which every innovator must
expect even when he has erred on the side of too much re-
serve in the expression of his thoughts. We may be sure
that if a Greek philosopher had undertaken to say that the
sun might possibly be as big as the Peloponnesus, his best
friends would have been unanimous in recognising the fact
that there was something true at the bottom of his ingenious
paradox, but that he was evidently exaggerating. In gen-
eral, my critics did not consider the end which I had in
view. I desired to unfold the purely sociological side of
human facts, intentionally ignoring their biological side,
although I am well aware that the latter is inseparable from
the former. My plan allowed me to indicate, without devel-
oping to any extent, the relations of the three principal

xvi Preface to the Second Edition

forms of universal repetition, especially the relation of
heredity to imitation. But I have said enough, I think, to
leave no doubt as to my views on the importance of race and
physical environment.

Besides, if I say that the distinctive character of every
social relation, of every social fact, is to be imitated, is
this saying, as certain superficial readers have seemed to
believe, that in my eyes there is no social relation, no
social fact, no social cause, but imitation? One might
as well say that every function of life could be reduced to
reproduction and every vital phenomenon to heredity be-
cause in every living being everything is a matter of genera-
tion and inheritance. Social relations are as manifold, as
numerous, and as diverse, as the objects of the desires and
ideas of man, and as the helps or hindrances that each of
these desires and ideas lends or presents to the similar or
dissimilar tendencies and opinions of others. In the midst
of this infinite complexity we may note that these varied
social relations (talking and listening, beseeching and being
beseeched, commanding and obeying, producing and con-
suming, etc.) belong to two groups; the one tends to
transmit from one man to another, persuasively or authori-
tatively, willingly or unwillingly, a belief; the other, a desire.
In other words, the first group consists of various kinds or
degrees of instruction; the second, of various kinds or de-
grees of command. And it is precisely because the
human acts which are imitated have this dogmatic or com-
manding character that imitation is a social tie, for it is
either dogma1 or power which binds men together. (Peo-
ple have seen only the half of this truth, and seen that badly,
when they have said that social facts were distinguished
by their constrained and coercive character. In saying
this, they have failed to recognise the spontaneity of the
greater part of popular credulity and docility.)

Therefore I think that I have not erred through exag-

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

Preface to the Second Edition xvii

geration in this book; and so I have reprinted it without
eliminating anything. I have sinned rather through omis-
sion. I have said nothing at all about a form of imitation
which plays a big role in societies, particularly in contempo-
rary societies, and I shall make haste here to make good this
omission. There are two ways of imitating, as a matter
of fact, namely, to act exactly like one's model, or to do
exactly the contrary. Hence the necessity of those diver-
gences which Spencer points out, without explaining, in his
law of progressive differentiation. Nothing can be affirmed
without suggesting, no matter how simple the social en-
vironment, not only the idea that is affirmed, but the nega-
tion of this idea as well. This is the reason why the
supernatural, in asserting itself through theologies, suggests
naturalism, its negation. (See Espinas on this subject.)
This is the reason why the affirmation of idealism gives
birth to the idea of materialism; why the establishment of
monarchy engenders the idea of republicanism, etc.

Let us say, then, from this wider point of view, that a
society is a group of people who display many resemblances
produced either by imitation or by counter-imitation. For
men often counter-imitate one another, particularly when
they have neither the modesty to imitate directly nor the
power to invent. In counter-imitating one another, that is
to say, in doing or saying the exact opposite of what they
observe being done or said, they are becoming more and
more assimilated, just as much assimilated as if they did or
said precisely what was being done or said around them.
Next to conforming to custom in the matter of funerals,
marriages, visits, and manners, there is nothing more imita-
tive than fighting against one's natural inclination to follow
the current of these things, or than pretending to go against
it. In the Middle Ages the black mass arose from a counter-
imitation of the Catholic mass. In his book on the expres-
sion of the emotions, Darwin very properly gives a large
place to the need of counter-expression.

When a dogma is proclaimed, when a political pro-
gramme is announced, men fall into two unequal classes ;

xviii Preface to the Second Edition

there are those who are enthusiastic about it and those who
are not enthusiastic. There is no manifestation which does
not recruit supporters and which does not provoke the for-
mation of a group of non-supporters. Every positive affir-
mation, at the same time that it attracts to itself mediocre
and sheep-like minds, arouses somewhere or other in a brain
that is naturally rebellious, — this does not mean naturally
inventive, — a negation that is diametrically opposite and of
about equal strength. This reminds one of inductive
currents in physics. But both kinds of brains have the same
content of ideas and purposes. They are associated, although
they are adversaries, or, rather, because they are adver-
saries. Let us clearly distinguish between the imitative
propagation of questions and that of solutions. Because
a certain solution spreads in one place and another else-
where, this does not prevent the problem from having
spread in both places. Is it not evident that in every period,
among people in constant communication, particularly in
our own day because international relations have never be-
fore been so manifold, is it not evident that the calendar
of social and political debates is always the same? And
is not this resemblance due to a current of imitation
that may itself be explained by a diffusion of wants and
ideas through prior contagions of imitation? Is not this
the reason why labour questions are being agitated at the
present moment throughout Europe? No opinion is dis-
cussed by the press, about which, I repeat, the public is not
daily divided into two camps, those who agree with the
opinion and those who disagree. But the latter as well as
the former admit that it is impossible to be concerned for
the time being with anything other than the question which
is thus forced upon them. Only some wild and undisciplined
spirit will ruminate, now and then, in the whirl of the social
sea in which he is plunged, over strange and absolutely
hypothetical problems. Such men are the inventors of the
future.

We must be very careful not to confuse counter-imitation
with invention, its dangerous counterfeit. I do not mean

Preface to the Second Edition xix

that the former is worthless. Although it fosters the spirit
of partisanship, the spirit of either peaceful or warlike divi-
sion between men, it introduces them to the wholly social
pleasure of discussion. It is a witness to the sympathetic
origin of contradiction itself; the back currents themselves
are caused by the current. Nor must we confuse counter-
imitation with systematic non-imitation, a subject about
which I should also have spoken in this book. Non-imi-
tation is not always a simple negative fact. The fact of not
imitating when there is no contact — no social contact
through the practical impossibility of communication — is
merely a non-social relation, but the fact of not imitating
the neighbour who is in touch with us, puts us upon a foot-
ing of really anti-social relations with him. The refusal of
a people, a class, a town or a village, of a savage tribe iso-
lated on a civilised continent, to copy the dress, customs,
language, industry, and arts which make up the civilisation
of their neighbourhood is a continual declaration of antip-
athy to the form of society in question. It is thereby de-
clared absolutely and forever alien. Similarly, when a peo-
ple deliberately undertakes not to reproduce the examples of
its forefathers in the matter of rights, usages, and ideas, we
have a veritable disassociation of fathers and sons, a rupture
of the umbilical cord between the old and the new society.
Voluntary and persistent non-imitation in this sense has a
purgative role which is quite analagous to that rilled by what
I have called the logical duel. Just as the latter tends to
purge the social mass of mixed ideas and volitions, to elimi-
nate inequalities and discords, and to facilitate in this way
the synthetic action of the logical union; so non-imitation
of extraneous and heterogeneous models makes it possible
for the harmonious group of home models to extend and
prolong themselves, to entrench themselves in the custom-
imitation of which they are the object; and for the same
reason non-imitation of anterior models, when the moment
has come for civilising revolution, cuts a path for fashion-
imitation. It no longer finds any hindrance in the way of
its conquering activity.

xx Preface to the Second Edition

Is the unique or principal cause of this invincible obsti-
nacy— momentarily invincible — of non-imitation, as the
naturalistic school was led to think some years ago, racial
difference? Not the least in the world. In the first place,
in the case of non-imitation of ancestral examples, in revolu-
tionary periods, it is clear that this cause could not be
brought forward, since the new generation belongs to the
same race as the prior generations whose traditions it casts
aside. Then, in the case of non-imitation of the foreigner,
historical observation shows that resistance to outside in-
fluences is very far from being in proportion to the dis-
similarities of the physical traits which differentiate popula-
tions. Of all the nations conquered by Rome none was
more allied to her through blood than the populations of
Greek origin; and yet these were precisely the communities
where her language failed to spread and where her culture
and genius failed to be assimilated. Why was this? Because
they alone, in spite of their defeat, were able to retain their
fierce pride, their indelible feeling of superiority. On the
side of the idea that it is impossible for separate races to
borrow from one another one of the strongest arguments
that could have been cited thirty years ago was the hermet-
ical shutting out by the peoples of the Far East, Japan and
China, of all European culture. But from the still recent
day when the Japanese, foreign as they were to us in colour,
lineaments, and physical constitution, felt for the first time
that we were their superiors, they left off trying to shut out
the imitative radiation of our civilisation by the opaque
screen they had used before. They gave it, on the contrary,
the warmest of welcomes. The same thing will happen to
China if she ever makes up her mind to recognise that in
certain respects — not in all, I hope, for her sake — we have
the better of her. It is idle to argue that the transforma-
tion of Japan in the direction of Europe is more apparent
than real, more superficial than deep, that it is due to the
initiative of certain intelligent men who are followed by a
part of the upper classes, but that the great mass of the
nation remains hostile to this foreign inundation. To

Preface to the Second Edition xxi

argue after this fashion is to ignore the fact that every intel-
lectual and moral revolution that is destined to utterly recast
a people always begins in this way. A chosen few have
always imported the foreign examples that come little by
little to spread by fashion, to be consolidated into custom,
and to be developed and systematised by social logic. When
Christianity first reached the Germans, the Slavs, the Finns,
it started in the same way. Nothing is more consistent with
the " laws of imitation."

Does this mean that the action of race upon the course
of civilisation is overlooked from my point of view ? Not at
all. I have said that in passing from one ethnical environ-
ment to another the radiation of imitation is refracted; and
I add that this refraction may be enormous without its lead-
ing to any consequence that is in the least contradictory to
the ideas developed in this book. Only race as I see it is a
national product where, in the crucible of a special civilisa-
tion, different prehistoric races have been melted together,
intermingled, and assimilated. For every given civilisation
that is formed of ideas of genius, hailing a little from every-
where and brought into logical agreement somewhere or
other, creates in the long run the race, or races, in which
it is for a time embodied; and the inverse of this is not true,
namely, that every race makes its own civilisation. This
means, at bottom, that different human races, which are
quite different in this respect from different living species,
are collaborators as well as competitors ; that they are called
upon not only to fight and destroy each other for the good
of a small number of survivors, but to aid each other in the
age-long achievement of a common social work, of a great
final society whose unity will be the fruit of their very diver-
sity.

The laws of heredity that have been so well studied by
naturalists do not contradict in any respect the " laws of
imitation." On the other hand, they complete them, and
there is no concrete sociology that could separate these two
orders of consideration. If I separate them here, it is, I re-
peat, because the proper subject of this work is sociology

xxii Preface to the Second Edition

pure and abstract. Besides, I do not fail to point out what
their place is in the biological considerations which I am pur-
posely ignoring because I am leaving them to more compe-
tent hands. And this place is three-fold. To begin with, in
expressly developing the nation from the family — for the
primitive horde is made up of emigrants or exiles from the
family — I have clearly affirmed that if the social fact is a re-
lation of imitation, the social tie, the social group, is both imi-
tative and hereditary, in the second place, invention, from
which I derive everything thac is social, is not, in my
opinion, a purely social fact in its origin. It arises from the
intersection of an individual genius, an intermittent and
characteristic racial product, the ripe fruit of a series of
happy marriages, with the currents and radiations of imi-
tation which one day happened to cross each other in a more
or less exceptional brain. You may agree, if you wish,
with M. de Gobineau, that only the white races are invent-
ive, or with a contemporary anthropologist, that this privi-
lege belongs exclusively to the dolichocephalic races — all
this matters little from my point of view. And I might even
pretend that the radical and vital separation that is thus
established between the inventiveness of certain privileged
races and the imitativeness of all races is fitted to empha-
sise, a little unjustifiably, as a matter of fact, the truth of
my point of view. Finally, I have not only recognised the
influence of the vital environment upon imitation, an envi-
ronment in which it spreads while it is refracted, as I said
above, but in stating the law of the normal return of fashion
to custom, the rooting of innovations in customs and tradi-
tions, have I not again made heredity the necessary prop
of imitation? But we may accord to the biological side
of social facts the highest importance without going as far
as to maintain that there is a water-tight bulkhead between
different races, presumably primitive and presocial, which
makes any endosmosis or exosmosis of imitation impossible.
And this is the only thing which I deny. Taken in this
false and unjustifiable sense, the idea of race leads the soci-
ologist who has taken it for a guide to conceive of the end

Preface to the Second Edition xxiii

of social progress as a disintegration of peoples who are
walled about and shut off from one another and everlast-
ingly at war with one another. This kind of naturalism
is generally associated with a defence of militarism. On
the other hand, if we take the ideas of invention, imitation,
and social logic as a guiding thread, we are led to the more
reassuring perspective of a great future confluence — alas,
that it is not immediate — of multiple divisions of mankind
into a single peaceful human family. The idea of indefinite
progress, which is such a vague and obstinate idea, has nei-
ther a clear nor precise meaning except from this point of
view. The necessity of a progressive march towards a great
but distant goal is an outcome of the laws of imitation. This
goal, which becomes more and more accessible in spite of
apparent, although only transitory, set-backs, is the birth,
the development, and the universal spread, — whether under
an imperial or federated form is insignificant, — of a unique
society. And, as a matter of fact, among all the predic-
tions of Condorcet relating to social progress, the only ones
that have been realised — that, for example, relating to the
extension and gradual levelling down of European civilisa-
tion— are consequences of the laws in question. But if he
had considered these laws he would have expressed his
thought more exactly and precisely. When he predicts
that the inequality of different nations will continue to
diminish, he should have said social dissimilarity, and not;
inequality. For between the smallest and largest states the
disproportion of power, of territory, and even of wealth,
goes on increasing, and yet this condition does not stand
in the way of a constant progress of international assimi-
lation. And is it certain that inequality between individ-
uals must continually diminish in all respects as our illus-
trious philosopher also predicted? Inequality of genius or
talent? Not at all. Of comfort and wealth? I doubt it.
It is true that their inequality before the law has disappeared
or will before long disappear altogether. But why is this
so? Because the growing resemblance of individuals be-
tween whom all the customary barriers of reciprocal imita-

xxiv Preface to the Second Edition

tion have been broken down, and who imitate one another
more and more freely, to be sure, and yet more and more
necessarily, makes them feel with a growing and, eventually,
irresistible power the injustice of privilege.

Let us be sure, however, that we understand one another
about this progressive resemblance of individuals. Far
from smothering their true originality, it fosters and favours
it. What is contrary to personal pre-eminence is the imita-
tion of a single man whom people copy in everything. But
when, instead of patterning one's self after one person or
after a few, we borrow from a hundred, a thousand, or ten
thousand persons, each of whom is considered under a par-
ticular aspect, the elements of thought or action which we
subsequently combine, the very nature and choice of these
elementary copies, as well as their combination, expresses
and accentuates our original personality. And this is, per-
haps, the chief benefit that results from the prolonged
action of imitation. We might demand to what extent this
collective dream, this collective nightmare of society, was
worth its cost in blood and tears, if this grievous discipline,
this deceptive and despotic prestige, did not serve to free
the individual in calling forth, little by little, from the
depths of his heart, his freest impulses, his boldest introspec-
tion, his keenest insight into nature, and in developing
everywhere, not the savage individualities, not the clashing
and brutal soul-stuffs of bygone days, but those deep and
harmonious traits of the soul that are characteristic of per-
sonality as well as of civilisation, the harvest of both the
purest and most potent individualism and of consummate
sociability.

G. T.

May, 1895

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BY DR. HENRY FRANKLIN GIDDINGS, .... Hi

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION, lx

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION, xiii

CHAPTER I.— UNIVERSAL REPETITION

I. — The overlooked regularity from a certain point of view of
social facts. Their analogies with natural facts. The three forms
of Universal Repetition : undulation, generation, imitation. Social
science and social philosophy. Animal societies, I

II. — Three analogous laws in physics, in biology, in sociology.
WJiy everything is number and measure, . . " . . 14

III. and IV. — Analogies between tne three forms of Repetition.
They imply a cqmmon tendency towards a geometrical progression.
Linguistic, mythological, etc., refractions. Happy or unhappy in-
terferences of imitation. Conflict-interferences and combination-
interferences (inventions). Outline of social logic, 16

V.— ^Differences between the three forms ^f Rc-nejilir " Genera-
tion is unconditioned undulation, fu.iiai/ou to generation at a
distance. The abbreviation of embryonic phases, . . . -33

- CHAPTER II.— SOCIAL RESEMBLANCES AND
IMITATION

I. — Social resmblances which are not caused by imitation and
vital resemblances which are not caused by generation. A distinc-
tion between analogies and homologies in comparative sociology
like that in comparative anatomy. A genealogical tree of inventions
derived from master-inventions. The slow and inevitable propaga-
tion of examples even among sedentary and shut-in populations, 37

II. — Is there a law of civilisations which imposes upon them a
common direction or, at least, a common goal, and, consequently,
a law of increasing resemblances, even without imitation? Proofs
of the contrary, 51

CHAPTER III.— WHAT IS A SOCIETY?

I. — Inadequacy of the economic or even of the juristic concep-
tion : Animal societies. Nation and society not to be confused.

Definition. , 59

xxv

xxvi Contents

II.-, Definition of the social type, 68

III.— Perfect fnrialitv. Biological analogies. The hidden and
perhaps original agents of universal repetition, .... 69

IV. — An idea of Taine's. The contagion of ex?mnle and sug-
gestion. Analogies between the social and the hypnotic state.
Great men. Intimidation is a nasrent social state, ... 74

CHAPTER IV.— WHAT IS HISTORY? ARCHEOLOGY
AND STATISTICS

I. and II. — Distinction between the anthropologists and the
archaeologists. The archaeologist unconsciously holds my point
of view. Barrenness of invention characteristic of primitive times.
Imitation has been objective and widespread from the most remote
periods. What archaeology teaches us, 89

III. — The statistician sees things, at bottom, like the archaeolo-
gist. He pays exclusive attention to imitative editions of every
ancient and modern invention. Analogies and differences, . . 102

IV. and V. — What Statistics ought to be; its desiderata. The
interpretation of its curves, namely its rises, horizontals, and falls,
is given by my point of view. The tendency of all ideas and wants
to spread in a geometrical progression. The encounter, coales-
cence, and rivalry of these tendencies. Examples. The desire for
paternity and its variations. The desire for liberty and other
desires'. A general empirical law ; three phases ; importance of the
second, 109

VI. and VII. — The curves of Statistics and the flight of a bird.
The eye and ear considered as numerical registers of ethereal and
sonorous vibrations', representative statistics of the universe. The
probable future role of Statistics. Definition of History, . . 132

CHAPTER V.— THE LOGICAL LAWS OF IMITATION

The reason why, given a number of inventions, some are imi-
tated and some are not. Reasons of a natural order and of a social
order, and, among the latter, logical reasbns and ex^ra-logical
•influences. A linguistic example, . .... . . . 140

. I. — That which is imitated is belief or desire, a fundamental
antithesis. The Sper<-pn?n formula. Social progress and indi-
vidual thought. The need of invention and the -need of criticism
have the same source. Progress through the substitution and
progress through the accumulation of inventions, . . - . . 144

II. — The logical duel. Everything in history is a duel or a
union of inventions. The one always says yes and the other, no.
Linguistic, legislative, judicial, political, industrial, artistic duels.

Contents xxvii

Developments. Every duel is twofold, every adversary affirming
his own thesis at the same time that he denies that of his opponent.
The moment when the roles are reversed. The individual duel and
the social duel. The denouement: Three possible outcomes, . . 154

III. — The logical union. The period of accumulation which pre-
cedes the period of substitution must not be confused with that
which follows it. Distinction between the linguistic, religious,
political, etc., grammar and dictionary. The dictionary enlarges
more readily than the grammar improves, 173

Other considerations, 184

CHAPTER VI.— EXTRA-LOGICAL INFLUENCES

Different characteristics of imitation: I. Its increasing precision
and exactness; ceremonial and procedure. 2. Its conscious or un-
conscious character. The advance of imitation :

I. — From the inner to the outer man. Different physiological
functions compared from the^point of view of their transmissibility
by example. Primitive obedience and credulity. Dogmas are
transmitted before rites. Admiration precedes envy. Ideas are
communicated before expressions ; ends, before means. The ex-
planation of survivals by this law. Its universality. Its application
even to feminine imitation, . . . .... . . 194

II. — From the superior to the inferior. Exceptions to this law;
its truth comparable with that which governs the radiation of
heat i. Examples. The martinella and carroccio. The Phoeni-
cians and the Venetians. The utility of aristocracies. 2. Eccle-
siastical hierarchy and its effects. 3. The most superior, among
vhe least distant, is the one imitated. Distance in the social sense.
4. In democratic periods nobilities are replaced by great cities
which resemble them for good and evil. 5. In what social super-
iority consists; in subjective or objective characteristics which
favor the exploitation of inventions at a given time. 6. Applica-
tion to the problem of the origins of the feudal system, ., f ,' 213

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

Ages of custom when the ancient model, paternal or patriotic, is
supreme ; ages of fashion when the advantage is often with the new,
?xotic model. Through fashion, imitation is set free from genera-
tion. The relations of imitation and generation are like those of
generation and undulation. Transition from custom to fashion
followed by a return to a broader custom. The application of this
law :

I.— To languages. The rhythm of the diffusion of idioms. The

xxviii Contents

formation of the Romance languages. Characteristics and results

of the aforesaid transformations, 255

II. — To religions. All religions proceed from exclusivism to
proselytism ; they then withdraw into themselves. Reproduction of
these three phases from the most remote periods. Cult of the for-
eigner, not alone of the ancestor, from this time on. Worship of
the foreign beast. Why very ancient gods are soomorphic. Di-
vine fauna. Worship is a kind of superior domestication. Spirit-
ualisation of religions which spread through fashion. Moral
effects. The social importance of religions, 265

III. — To governments. The twofold origin of states, the family
and the horde. In every state, from remote antiquity, there have
been two parties, the party pf custom and the party of fashion.
Frequency of the phenomenon of royal families of foreign blood.
The fief an invention propagated by fascination; the same true of
the feudal monarchy; and of the modern monarchy. Liberalism
and cosmopolitanism. The final nationalisation of foreign impor-
tations. The way in which the United States were formed.
Augustus, Louis XIV., Pericles. Criticism of Spencer's antith-
esis between militarism and industrialism compared with that
of Tocqueville's between aristocracy and democracy, . . . 287

IV. — To legislations. Juridical evolution. Custom-law and
statute-law. Law is very multiform and very stable in times of
custom, very uniform and very changeable in times of fashion.
The spread of charters from town to town. Sumner Maine's
Ancient Law. The rhythm of the three phases applied to criminal
procedure. Successive characteristics of legislation. Classifica-
tion, 310

V. — To usages and wants (political economy). Multiformity
and stability of usages. Subsequent uniformity and rapid change.
Production and consumption, a distinction universally applicable.
The transmissibility of wants of consumption is always more rapid
than that of the wants of production. Consequences of this un-
equal rate. The ulterior outlet in times of custom, the exterior
outlet in times of fashion. Industry in the Middle Ages. Order
of the successive forms of extensive industry. The price of
fashion and the price of custom. Successive characteristics bor-
rowed from the economic world and from social aspects com-
pared, in changes of imitation. The reason of these changes, . 322

VI. — To morals and arts. Duties are in the beginning original
inventions. Gradual enlargement of the moral public and of the
art public. The art of custom is born from handicraft; it is
professional and national. The art of fashion is non-utilitarian
and exotic. Fashion-morality and custom-morality. Future prob-
abilities. The historic phenonemon of renascences, both moral
and aesthetic, .... 344

Contents xxix

CHAPTER VIII.— REMARKS AND COROLLARIES

Summing up and conclusion. All the laws of imitation viewed
from the same standpoint. Corollaries, 366

I. — The transition from the unilateral to the reciprocal. Ex-
amples: from decree to contract; from dogma to free-thought;
from man-hunting to war; from court manners to urbanity. The
necessity of these transformations, 371

II. — Distinction between the reversible and the irreversible in
history. The irreversible in consequence of the laws of imitation,
and the irreversible in consequence of the laws of invention. A
word in regard to the latter subject. Changes of custom are in a
certain measure irreversible as well. Great empires of the future.
Final individualism, 379

V
/

UNIVERSAL REPETITION
I

CAN we have a science or only a history, or, at most, a
philosophy of social phenomena? This question is always
open. And yet, if social facts are closely observed from a
certain point of view, they can be reduced, like other facts,
to series of minute and homogeneous phenomena and to
the formulas, or laws, which sum up these series. Why,
then, is the science of society still unborn, or born but re-
cently, among all its adult and vigorous sister sciences?
The chief reason is, I think, that we have thrown away the
substance for its shadow and substituted words for things.
We have thought it impossible to give a scientific look
to sociology except by giving it a biological or, better
still, a mechanical air. This is an attempt to light up the
known by the unknown. It is transforming a solar system
into a non-resolvable nebula in order to understand it better.
In social subjects we are exceptionally privileged in having
veritable causes, positive and specific acts, at first hand; this
condition is wholly lacking in every other subject of in-
vestigation. It is unnecessary, therefore, to rely for an
explanation of social facts upon those so-called general
causes which physicists and naturalists are obliged to
create under the name of force, energy, conditions of ex-
istence, and other verbal palliatives of their ignorance of the
real groundwork of things.

But are we to consider that human acts are the sole fac-
tors of history? Surely this is too simple ! And so we bind
ourselves to Contrive other causes on the type of those use-
ful fictions which are elsewhere imposed upon us, and we

2 Laws of Imitation

congratulate ourselves upon being able at times to give an
entirely impersonal colour to human phenomena by reason
of our lofty, but, truly speaking, obscure, point of view. Let
us ward off this vague idealism. Let us likewise ward off
the vapid individualism which consists in explaining social
changes as the caprices of certain great men. On the other
hand, let us explain these changes through the more or less
fortuitous appearance, as to time and place, of certain
great ideas, or rather, of a considerable number of both
major and minor ideas, of ideas which are generally anony-
mous and usually of obscure birth; which are simple or
abstruse; which are seldom illustrious, but which are always
novel. Because of this latter attribute, I shall take the
liberty of baptising them collectively inventions or discover-
ies. By these two terms I mean any kind of an innovation
or improvement, however slight, which is made in any pre-
vious innovation throughout the range of social phenomena
— language, religion, politics, law, industry, or art. At the
moment when this novel thing, big or little as it may be, is
conceived of, or determined by, an individual, nothing ap-
pears to change in the social body, — just as nothing changes
in the physical appearance of an organism which a harmful
or beneficent microbe has just invaded, — and the gradual
changes caused by the introduction of the new element seem
to follow, without visible break, upon the anterior social
changes into whose current they have glided. Hence arises
the illusion which leads philosophers of history into affirming
that there is a real and fundamental continuity in historic
metamorphoses. The true causes can be reduced to a chain of
ideas which are, to be sure, very numerous, but which are
in themselves distinct and discontinuous, although they are
connected by the much more numerous acts of imitation
which are modelled upon them.

Our starting-point lies here in the re-inspiring initiatives
which bring new wants, together with new satisfactions,
into the world, and which then, through spontaneous and
unconscious or artificial and deliberate imitation, propagate
or tend to propagate, themselves, at a more or less rapid,

Universal Repetition 3

but regular, rate, like a wave of light, or like a family of
termites. The regularity to which I refer is not in the
least apparent in social things until they are resolved into
their several elements, when it is found to lie in the simplest
of them, in combinations of distinct inventions, in flashes of
genius which have been accumulated and changed into
commonplace lights. I confess that this is an extremely
difficult analysis. Socially, everything is either invention
or imitation. And invention bears the same relation to
imitatio^n as a mountain to a river. There is certainly noth-
ing less subtle than this point of view; but in holding to it
boldly and unreservedly, in exploiting it from the most
trivial detail to the most complete synthesis of facts, we may,
perhaps, notice how well fitted it is to bring into relief all
the picturesqueness and, at the same time, all the simplicity
of history, and to reveal historic perspectives which may be
characterised by the freakishness of a rock-bound landscape,
or by the conventionality of a park walk. This is idealism
also, if you choose to call it so; but it is the idealism which
consists in explaining history through the ideas of its
actors, not through those of the historian.

If we consider the science of society from this point of
view, we shall at once see that human sociology is related to
animal sociologies, as a species to its genus, so to speak.
That it is an extraordinary and infinitely superior species, I
admit, but it is allied to the others, nevertheless. M. Espinas
expressly states in his admirable work on Societes ani-
males, a work which was written long before the first edi-
tion of this book, that the labours of ants may be very well
explained on the principle " of individual initiative followed
by imitation" This initiative is always an innovation or
invention that is equal to one of our own in boldness of
spirit. To conceive the idea of constructing an arch, or a
tunnel, at an appropriate point, an ant must be endowed
with an innovating instinct equal to, or surpassing, that of
our canal-digging or mountain-tunnelling engineers. Par-
enthetically it follows that imitation by masses of ants
of such novel initiatives strikingly belies the spirit of mutual

4 Laws of Imitation

hatred which is alleged to exist among animals.1 M.
Espinas is very frequently impressed in his observation of
the societies of our lower brethren by the important role
which is played in them by individual initiatives. Every
herd of wild cattle has its leaders, its influential heads. De-
velopments in the instincts of birds are explained by the
same author as " individual inventions which are afterwards
transmitted from generation to generation through direct
instruction." 2 In view of the fact that modification of in-
stinct is probably related to the same principle as the
genesis and modification of species, we may be tempted
to enquire whether the principle of the imitation of inven-
tion, or of something physiologically analogous, would not
be the clearest possible explanation of the ever-open problem
of the origin of species. But let us leave this question and
confine ourselves to the statement that both animal and
human societies may be explained from this point of view.

In the second place, and this is the special thesis of this
chapter, the subject of social science is seen, from this
standpoint, to present a remarkable analogy to the other
domains of general science, and, in this way, to become
re-embodied, so to speak, in the rest of the universe, where
it had before this the air of an outsider.

In every field of study, affirmations pure and simple enor-
mously outnumber explanations. And, in all cases, the
first data are simply affirmed; they are the extraordinary
and accidental facts, the premises and sources from which
proceeds all that which is subsequently explained. The
astronomer states that certain nebulae, certain celestial

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

2 [Ibid., p. 272.— Tr.]

Universal Repetition 5

bodies of a given mass and volume and at a given distance,
exist, or have existed. The chemist makes the same state-
ment about certain chemical substances, the physicist, about
certain kinds of ethereal vibrations, which he calls light,
electricity, and magnetism; the naturalist states that there
are certain principal organic types, to begin with, plants
and animals ; the physiographer states that there are certain
mountain chains, which he calls the Alps, the Andes, et
cetera. In teaching us about these capital facts from which
the rest are deduced, are these investigators doing the work,
strictly speaking, of scientists? They are not; they are
merely affirming certain facts, and they in no way differ
from the historian who chronicles the expedition of Alex-
ander or the discovery of printing. If there be any dif-
ference, it is, as we shall see, wholly to the advantage of
the historian. What, then, do we know in the scientific
sense of the word? Of course, we answer that we know
causes and effects. And when we have learned that, in the
case of two different events, the one is the outcome of the
other, or that both collaborate towards the same end, we
say that they have been explained. But let us imagine a
world where there is neither resemblance nor repetition, a
strange, but, if need be, an intelligible hypothesis; a world
where everything is novel and unforeseen, where the crea-
tive imagination, unchecked by memory, has full play, where
the motions of the stars are sporadic, where the agitations of
the ether are unrhythmical, and wheresuccessivegenerations
are without the common traits of an hereditary type. And
yet every apparition in such a phantasmagoria might be
produced and determined by another, and might even, in
its turn, become the cause of others. In such a world
causes and effects might still exist; but would any kind of
a science be possible? It would not be, because, to reiterate,
neither resemblances nor repetitions would be found there.
This is the essential point. Knowledge of causes is some-
times sufficient for foresight; but knowledge of resem-
blances always allows of enumeration and measurement, and
science depends primarily upon number and measure.

6 Laws of Imitation

More than this is, of course, necessary. As soon as a new
science has staked out its field of characteristic resem-
blances and repetitions, it must compare them and note the
bond of solidarity which unites their concomitant varia-
tions. But, as a matter of fact, the mind does not fully
understand nor clearly recognise the relation of cause and
effect, except in as much as the effect resembles or repeats
the cause, as, for example, when a sound wave produces an-
other sound wave, or a cell, another cell. There is noth-
ing more mysterious, one may say, than such reproductions.
I admit this; but when we have once accepted this mystery,
there is nothing clearer than the resulting series. Whereas,
every time that production does not mean reproduction of
self, we are entirely in the dark.1

When like things form parts of the same or of sup-
posedly the same whole, like the molecules of a volume of
hydrogen, or the woody cells of a tree, or the soldiers of a
regiment, the resemblance is referred to as a quantity in-
stead of a group. In other words, when the things which
repeat themselves remain united as they increase, like vibra-
tions of heat or electricity, accumulating within some heated
or electrified object, or like cells multiplying in the body
of a growing child, or like proselytes to a common religion,
in such cases the repetition is called a growth instead of a
series. In all of this I fail to see anything which would
differentiate the subject of social science.

Besides, whether resemblances and repetitions are in-
trinsic or extrinsic, quantities or groups, growths or series,
they are the necessary themes of the differences and varia-
tions which exist in all phenomena. They are the canvas of
their embroidery, the measure of their music. The wonder
world which I was picturing would be, at bottom, the least

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

Universal Repetition 7

richly differentiated of all possible worlds. How much
greater a renovator than revolution is our modern industrial
system, accumulation as it is of mutually imitative actions !
What is more monotonous than the free life of the savage in
comparison with the hemmed-in life of civilised man ? Would
any organic progress be possible without heredity ? Would
the exuberant variety of geological ages and of living
nature have sprung into existence independently of the
periodicity of the heavenly motions or of the wave-like
rhythm of the earth's forces?

Repetition exists, then, for the sake of variation. Other-
wise, the necessity of death (a problem which M. Delbceuf
considers in his book upon animate and inanimate matter,
almost impossible of solution), would be incomprehensible;
for why should not the top of life spin on, after it was
wound up, forever? But under the hypothesis that repeti-
tions exist only to embody all the phases of a certain unique
originality which seeks expression, death must inevitably
supervene after all these variations have been fully ef-
fected. I may note in this connection, in passing, that the
relation of universal to particular, a relation which fed the
entire philosophic controversy of the Middle Ages upon
nominalism and realism, is precisely that of repetition to
variation. Nominalism is the doctrine in accordance with
which individual characteristics or idiosyncracies are the
only significant realities. Realism, on the other hand, con-
siders only those traits worthy of attention and of the name
of reality through which a given individual resembles other
individuals and tends to reproduce himself in them. The
interest of this kind of speculation is apparent when we con-
sider that in politics individualism is a special kind of
nominalism, and socialism, a special kind of realism.

All repetition, social, vital, or physical, i. e., imitative,
hereditary, or vibratory repetition (to consider only the
most salient and typical forms of universal repetition),
springs from some innovation, just as every light radiates
from some central point, and thus throughout science the
normal appears to originate from the accidental. For the

8 Laws of Imitation

propagation of an attractive force or luminous vibration
from a heavenly body, or of a race of animals from an ances-
tral pair, or of a national idea or desire or religious rite
from a scholar or inventor or missionary, seem to us like
natural and regular phenomena; whereas we are constantly
surprised by the strange and partly non-formulable se-
quence or juxtaposition of their respective centres, i. e.,
the different crafts, religions, and social institutions, the
different organic types, the different chemical substances or
celestial masses from which all these radiations have issued.
All these admirable uniformities or series, — hydrogen, whose
multitudinous, star-scattered atoms are universally homo-
geneous, protoplasm, identical from one end to the other of
the scale of life, the roots of the Indo-European languages,
identical almost throughout civilisation, the expansion of
the light of a star in the immensity of space, the unbroken
sequence from geological times of incalculable generations
of marine species, the wonderfully faithful transmission of
words from the Coptic of the ancient Egyptians to us mod-
erns, etc., — all these innumerable masses of things of like
nature and of like affiliations, whose harmonious co-ex-
istence or equally harmonious succession we admire, are
related to physical, biological, and social accidents by a tie
which baffles us.

Here, also, the analogy between social and natural phe-
nomena is carried out. But we should not be surprised if
the former seem chaotic when we view them through the
medium of the historian, or even through that of the soci-
ologist, whereas the latter impress us, as they are presented
by physicist, chemist, or physiologist, as very well ordered
worlds. These latter scientists show us the subject
of their science only on the side of its characteristic re-
semblances and repetitions; they prudently conceal its cor-
responding heterogeneities and transformations (or trans-
substantiations). The historian and sociologist, on the
contrary, veil the regular and monotonous face of social
facts, — that part in which they are alike and repeat them-
selves,— and show us only their accidental and interesting,

Universal Repetition 9

their infinitely novel and diversified, aspect. If our subject
were, for example, the Gallo-Romans, the historian, even
the philosophic historian, would not think of leading us
step by step through conquered Gaul in order to show us
how every word, rite, edict, profession, custom, craft, law, or
military manoeuvre, how, in short, every special idea or need
which had been introduced from Rome had begun to spread
from the Pyrenees to the Rhine, and to win its way, after
more or less vigorous fighting against old Celtic customs
and ideas, to the mouths and arms and hearts and minds of
all the enthusiastic Gallic imitators of Rome and Caesar. At
any rate, if our historian had once led us upon this long
journey, he would not make us repeat it for every Latin
word or grammatical form, for every ritualistic form in
the Roman religion, for every military manoeuvre that was
taught to the legionaries by their officer-instructors, for
every variety of Roman architecture, for temple, basilica,
theatre, hippodrome, aqueduct, and atriumed villa, for every
school-taught verse of Virgil or Horace, for every Roman
law, or for every artistic or industrial process in Roman
civilisation that had been faithfully and continuously trans-
mitted from pedagogues and craftsmen to pupils and ap-
prentices. And yet it is only at this price that we can get
at an exact estimate of the great amount of regularity which
obtains in even the most fluctuating societies.

Then, after the introduction of Christianity, our historian
would certainly refrain from making us renew this tedious
peregrination in connection with every Christian rite which
propagated itself, in spite of resistance, through heathen
Gaul, like a wave of sound through air that is already
in vibration. Instead of this, he would inform us at what
date Julius Caesar conquered Gaul, or, again, at what date
certain saints came to that country to preach Christianity.
He might also enumerate the diverse elements out of which
the Roman civilisation and the Christian faith and morality
that were introduced into the Gallic world, were composed,
In this case, his problem is to understand and rationally, log-
ically, and scientifically, describe the extraordinary super-

io Laws of Imitation

position of Christianity upon Romanism, or rather, the
gradual process of Christian upon the gradual process
of Roman assimilation. In the separate treatment of
both Romanism and Christianity, he will meet with an
equally difficult problem in giving a rational explanation of
the strange juxtaposition of the very heterogeneous Etrus-
can, Greek, Oriental, and other fragments which constituted
the former, and of the incoherent Jewish, Egyptian, and
Byzantine ideas, ideas which were incoherent even in each
distinct group, which constituted the latter. This, how-
ever, is the arduous task which the philosopher of history
sets before himself and which he thinks that he cannot slur
over if he is to do the work of a scholar. He will, therefore,
wear himself out in trying to bring order out of disorder by
discovering some law or reason for these historic chances
and coincidences. He would do better to investigate how
and why harmonies sometimes proceed from these coinci-
dences and in what these harmonies consist. I will under-
take to do this further on.

In short, a historian of this kind is like the botanist who
would feel bound to ignore everything about the generation
of plants of the same species or variety, as well as every-
thing about their growth or nutrition, a kind of cellular
generation or regeneration of tissues; or like the physi-
cist who disdained to study the propagation of light or
heat or sound waves as they passed through different
mediums which were themselves in vibration. Can we
conceive of the former believing that the proper and
exclusive object of his science was an interlinking of unlike
species, beginning with the first alga and ending with the
last orchid, plus a profound justification of such a con-
catenation? Can we conceive of the latter convinced that
the sole end of his studies was investigation into the reason
why there were precisely seven known kinds of luminous
undulation, and why, including electricity and magnetism,
there were no other kinds of ethereal vibration? These are
certainly interesting questions, but although they are open
to philosophic, they are not open to scientific, discussion,

Universal Repetition 1 1

since their solution does not seem capable of admitting of
that high kind of probability which science exacts. It is
clear that the first condition of becoming an anatomist or
physiologist is the study of tissues, the aggregates of homo-
geneous cells and fibres and blood vessels, or the study of
functions, the accumulations of minute homogeneous con-
tractions, innervations, oxidations, or deoxidations, and
then, and above all, belief in the great architect of life,
in heredity. It is equally clear that it is of primary im-
portance to the chemist and physicist to examine many kinds
of gaseous, liquid, and solid masses, masses composed of
corpuscles which are absolutely alike, or of so-called physical
forces which are prodigious accumulations of minute, homo-
geneous vibrations. In fact, in the physical world, every-
thing refers, or is in course of being referred, to vibration.
Here everything is taking on more and more an essentially
vibratory character, just as in the animate world the re-
productive faculty, or the property of transmitting the
smallest peculiarities (which are usually of unknown ori-
gin) through inheritance, is coming more and more to be
thought inherent in the smallest cell.

And now my readers will realise, perhaps, that the social
being1, in the degree that he is social, is essentially imitative,
and that imitation plays a role in societies analogous to that
of heredity in organic life or to that of vibration among in-
organic bodies. If this is so, it ought to be admitted, in con-
sequence, that a human invention, by which a new kind of
imitation is started or a new series opened, — the invention
of gunpowder, for example,1 or windmills, or the Morse
telegraph, — stands in the same relation to social science as
the birth of a new vegetal or mineral species (or, on the
hypothesis of a gradual evolution, of each of the slow modi-
fications to which the new species is due), to biology, or as
the appearance of a new mode of motion comparable with

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

12 Laws of Imitation

light or electricity, or the formation of a new substance, to
physics or chemistry. Therefore, if we are to make a just
comparison, we must not compare the philosophic historian
who strives to discover a law for the odd groups and se-
quences of scientific, industrial, sesthetic, and political in-
ventions, to the physiologist or physicist, as we know him,
to Tyndall or Claude Bernard, but to a philosopher of nature
like Schelling or like Haeckel in his hours of riotous im-
agination.

We should then perceive that the crude incoherence of
historic facts, all of which facts are traceable to the dif-
ferent currents of imitation of which they are the point of
intersection, a point which is itself destined to be more or
less exactly copied, is no proof at all against the funda-
mental regularity of social life or the possibility of a social
science. Indeed, parts of this science exist in the petty
experience of each of us, and we have only to piece the frag-
ments together. Besides, a group of historic events would
certainly be far from appearing more incoherent than a
collection of living types or chemical substances. Why
then should we exact from the philosopher of history the
fine symmetrical and rational order that we do not dream of
demanding from the philosopher of science ? And yet there
is a distinction here which is entirely to the credit of the
historian. It is but recently that the naturalist has had any
glimpses that were at all clear of biological evolution, where-
as the historian was long ago aware of the continuity
of history. As for chemists and physicists, we may pass
them by. They dare not even yet forecast the time when
they will be able to trace out, in their turn, the genealogy of
simple substances, or when a work on the origin of atoms,
as successful as Darwin's Origin of Species, will be pub-
lished. It is true that M. Lecoq de Boisbaudran and M.
Mendelejeff thought that they had distinguished a natural
series of simple substances, and it is true that Boisbaudran's
discovery of gallium was made in connection with his
eminently philosophic speculations along this line. But
Ipon close consideration, perhaps neither the remarkable

Universal Repetition 13

attempts of these scientists nor the various systems of our
evolutionists on the genealogical ramification of living
types present any greater degree of precision or certainty
than sparkles in the ideas of Herbert Spencer, or even in
those of Vico, upon the so-called periodic and predestined
evolutions of society. The origin of atoms is much more
mysterious than the origin of species, and the origin of
species is, in turn, more mysterious than the origin of civili-
sations. We can compare extant living species with those
which have preceded them, the remains of which we find in
the earth's strata; but we have not the slightest trace of the
chemical substances which must have preceded in prehis-
toric astronomy, so to speak, in the unfathomable and un-
imaginable depths of the past, the actual chemical sub-
stances of the earth and stars. Consequently, chemistry,
which cannot even propound a problem of origins, is less
advanced, in this essential particular, than biology ; and, for
like reason, biology is, in reality, less advanced than soci-
ology.

From the foregoing, it is evident that social science and
social philosophy are distinct; that social science must deal
exclusively, like every other science, with a multitude of
homogeneous facts, with those facts which are carefully
concealed by the historians; that new and heterogeneous
facts, or historical facts, strictly speaking, are the special
domain of social philosophy; that from this point of view
social science might be as advanced as the other sciences,
and that social philosophy is actually much more so than
any other philosophy.

In the present volume, we are concerned only with the
science of society; moreover, we shall confine our discus-
sion to imitation and its laws. Later on, we shall have to
study the laws, or pseudo-laws, of invention.1 The two
questions are quite different, although they cannot be
wholly separated.

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

14 Laws of Imitation

II

After these long preliminaries, I must develop an im-
portant thesis which has so far been obscure and involved.
Science, as I have said, deals only with quantities and
growths, or, in more general terms, with the resemblances
and repetitions of phenomena.

This distinction, however, is realty superfluous and super-
ficial. Every advance in knowledge tends to strengthen
the conviction that all resemblance is due to repetition.
I think that this may be brought out in the three follow-
ing propositions :

1. All resemblances which are to be observed in the
chemical, or physical, or astronomical worlds (the atoms of
a single body, the waves of a single ray of light, the concen-
tric strata of attraction of which every heavenly body is
a centre), can be caused and explained solely by periodic,
and, for the most part, vibratory motions.

2. All resemblances of vital origin in the world of life
result from hereditary transmission, from either intra- or
extra-organic reproduction. It is through the relationship
between cells and the relationship between species that all
the different kinds of analogies and homologies which com-
parative anatomy points out between species, and histology,
between corporeal elements, are at present explained.

3. All resemblances of social origin in society are the
direct or indirect fruit of the various forms of imitation, —
custom-imitation or fashion-imitation, sympathy-imita-
tion or obedience-imitation, precept-imitation or education-
imitation; na'ive imitation, deliberate imitation, etc. In
this lies the excellence of the contemporaneous method
of explaining doctrines and institutions through their his-
tory. It is a method that is certain to come into more gen-
eral use. It is said that great geniuses, great inventors,
are apt to cross each other's paths. But, in the first
place, such coincidences are very rare, and when
they do occur, they are always due to the fact that

Universal Repetition 15

both authors of the same invention have drawn inde-
pendently from some common fund of instruction. This
fund consists of a mass of ancient traditions and of experi-
ences that are unorganised or that have been more or less
organised and imitatively transmitted through language,
the great vehicle of all imitations.

In this connection we may observe that modern philolo-
gists have relied so implicitly upon the foregoing proposi-
tion, that they have concluded, through analogy, that San-
skrit, Latin, Greek, German, Russian, and other kindred
tongues, belong in reality to one family, and that it had a
common progenitor in a language which was transmitted,
with the exception of certain modifications, through tradi-
tion. Each modification was, in truth, an anonymous lin-
guistic invention which was, in turn, perpetuated by imita-
tion. In the next chapter I will return to the development
and re-statement of our third proposition.

There is only one great class of universal resemblances
which seem at first as if they could not have been produced
by any form of repetition. This is the resemblance of the
parts of infinite space whose juxtaposition and immobility
are the very conditions of all motion whatsoever, whether
vibratory, or reproductive, or propagative and subduing.
But we must not pause over this apparent exception. It is
enough to have mentioned it. Its discussion would lead us
too far afield.

Turning aside from this anomaly, which may be illusory,
let us maintain the truth of our general proposition, and note
one of its direct consequences. If quantity signifies resem-
blance, if every resemblance proceeds from repetition, and if
every repetition is a vibration (or any other periodic move-
ment), a phenomenon of reproduction or an act of imitation,
it follows that, on the hypothesis that no motion is, or ever
has been, vibratory, no function hereditary, no act or idea
learned and copied, there would be no such thing as quantity
in the universe, and the science of mathematics would be
without any possible use or conceivable application. It also
follows upon the inverse hypothesis, that if our physical,

1 6 Laws of Imitation

vital, and social spheres were to enlarge the range of their
vibratory, reproductive, and propagative activities, our field
of calculation would be even more extensive and profound.
This fact is apparent in our European societies where the
extraordinary progress of fashion in all its forms, in dress,
food and housing, in wants and ideas, in institutions and
arts, is making a single type of European based upon several
hundreds of millions of examples. Is it not evident that it
is this prodigious levelling which has from its very begin-
ning made possible the birth and growth of statistical
science and of what has been so well called social physics,
political economy? Without fashion and custom, social
quantities would not exist, there would be no values, no
money, and, consequently, no science of wealth or finance.
(How was it possible, then, for economists to dream of for-
mulating theories of value in which the idea of imitation
had no part?) But the application of number and measure
to societies, which people are trying to make nowadays,
cannot help being partial and tentative. In this matter the
future has many surprises in store for us !

Ill

At this point we might develop the striking analogies,
the equally instructive differences, and the mutual relations
of the three main forms of universal repetition. We might
also seek for the explanation of their majestically inter-
woven rhythms and symmetries; we might question whether
the content of these forms resembled them or not, whether
the active and underlying substance of these well-ordered
phenomena shared in their sage uniformity, or whether it
did not perhaps contrast with them in being essentially
heterogeneous, like a people which gave no evidence in its
military or administrative exterior of the tumultuous idio-
syncracies which constituted it and which set its machinery
in motion.

This twofold subject would be too vast. In the first
part of it, however, there are certain obvious analogies

Universal Repetition 17

which we should note. In the first place, repetitions are
also multiplications or self-spreading contagions. If a stone
falls into the water, the first wave which it produces will
repeat itself in circling out to the confines of its basin. If
I light a match, the first undulation which I start in the
ether will instantly spread throughout a vast space. If one
couple of termites or of phylloxeras are transported to a
continent, they will ravish it within a few years. The per-
nicious erigeron of Canada, which has but quite recently
been imported from Europe, flourishes already in every un-
cultivated field. The well-known laws of Malthus and
Darwin on the tendency of the individuals of a species to
increase in geometrical progression, are true laws of human
radiation through reproduction. In the same way, a local
dialect that is spoken only by certain families, gradually be-
comes, through imitation, a national idiom. In the begin-
ning of societies, the art of chipping flint, of domesticating
dogs, of making bows, and, later, of leavening bread, of
working bronze, of extracting iron, etc., must have spread
like a contagion; since every arrow, every flake, every
morsel of bread, every thread of bronze, served both as
model and copy. Nowadays the diffusion of all kinds of
useful processes is brought about in the same way, except
that our increasing density of population and our advance
in civilisation prodigiously accelerate their diffusion, just
as velocity of sound is proportionate to density of me-
dium. Every social thing, that is to say, every invention
or discovery, tends to expands in its social environment, an
environment which itself, I might add, tends to self-expan-
sion, since it is essentially composed of like things, all of
which have infinite ambitions.

This tendency, however, here as in external nature, often
proves abortive through the competition of rival tendencies.
But this fact is of little importance to theory; besides, it
is metaphorical. Desire can no more be attributed to ideas
than to vibrations or species, and the fact in question must
be understood to mean that the scattered individual forces
which are inherent in the innumerable beings composing

1 8 Laws of Imitation

the environment where these forms propagate themselves,
have taken a common direction. In this sense, this tend-
ency towards expansion presupposes that the environment
in question is homogeneous, a condition which seems to be
well fulfilled by the ethereal or aerial medium of vibrations,
much less so by the geographical and chemical medium of
species, and infinitely less so by the social medium of ideas.
But it is a mistake, I think, to express this difference by
saying that the social medium is more complex than the
others. On the contrary, it is perhaps because it is numer-
ically much more simple, that it is farther from presenting
the required homogeneity; since a homogeneity that is real
on the surface merely, suffices. Besides, as the agglomera-
tions of human beings increase, the spread of ideas in a
regular geometrical progression is more marked. Let us
exaggerate this numerical increase to an extreme degree,
let us suppose that the social sphere in which an idea can
expand be composed not only of a group sufficiently nu-
merous to give birth to the principal moral varieties of the
human species, but also of thousands of uniform repeti-
tions of these groups, so that the uniformity of these repeti-
tions makes an apparent homogeneity, in spite of the in-
ternal complexity of each group. Have we not some reason
for thinking that this is the kind of homogeneity which
characterises all the simple and apparently uniform reali-
ties which external nature presents to us ? On this hypoth-
esis, it is evident that the success of an idea, the more or
less rapid rate at which it circulated on the day of its ap-
pearance, would supply the mathematical reason, in a way,
of its further progression. Given this condition, producers
of articles which satisfied prime needs and which were
therefore destined for universal consumption, would be able
to foretell from the demand in a given year, at a certain
price, what would be the demand in the following year, at
the same price, providing no check, prohibitive or otherwise,
intervened, or no superior article of the same class were dis-
covered.

It has been said that the faculty of foresight is the criter-

Universal Repetition 19

ion of science. Let us amend this to read, the faculty of
conditional foresight. The botanist, for example, can fore-
tell the form and colour of the fruit which a flower will pro-
duce, provided it be not killed by drought, or provided a
new and unexpected individual variety (a kind of secondary
biological invention) do not develop. The physicist can
state, at the moment a rifle-shot is discharged, that it will be
heard in a given number of seconds, at a given distance,
provided nothing intercept the sound in its passage, or
provided a louder sound, a discharge of cannon, for ex-
ample, be not heard during the given period. Now it is
precisely on the same ground that the sociologist is, strictly
speaking, a scientist. Given the centres, the approximate
velocities, and the tendency to separate or concurrent motion
of existing imitations, the sociologist is in a position to fore-
tell the social conditions of ten or twenty years hence, pro-
vided no reform or political revolution occur to hinder
this expansion and provided no rival centres arise mean-
while.

In this case, to be sure, the conditioning of events is
highly probable, more probable, perhaps, than in the others.
But it is only a difference of degree. Besides, let us observe
(as a matter that belongs to the philosophy and not to the
science of history), that the successful discoveries and in-
itiatives of the present vaguely determine the direction of
those of the future. Moreover, the social forces of any
real importance at any period are not composed of the nec-
essarily feeble imitations that have radiated from recent
inventions, but of the imitations of ancient inventions, rad-
iations which are alike more intense and more widespread
because they have had the necessary time in which to spread
out and become established as habits, customs, or so-
called physiological " race instincts."1 Our ignorance, there-
fore, of the unforeseen discoveries which will be made ten,

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

2O Laws of Imitation

twenty, or fifty years hence, of the art-inspiring master-
pieces which are to appear, of the battles and revolutions
and deeds of violence which will be noised abroad, does not
hinder us from almost accurately predicting, on the fore-
going hypothesis, the depth and direction of the current of
ideas and aspirations which our statesmen and our great
generals, poets, and musicians will have to follow and ren-
der navigable, or stem and combat.

As examples in support of the geometrical progress of
imitations, I might cite statistics of locomotive construc-
tion, or of the consumption of coffee, tobacco, etc.,
from the time they were first imported, to the time they
began to overstock the market.1 I will mention a dis-
covery which appears to be less favourable to my argument,
the discovery of America. This discovery was imitated
in the sense that the first voyage from Europe to America,
which was conceived of and executed by Columbus, came
to be repeated more and more frequently by subsequent
navigators. Every variation in these after-voyages con-
stituted a little discovery, which was grafted upon that of
the great Genoese, and which, in turn, found imitators.

I will take advantage of this example to open a paren-
thesis. America might have been discovered two centur-
ies earlier, or two centuries later, by an imaginative navi-
gator. If two centuries earlier, if in 1292, the opening
out of a new world had been offered to Philip the Fair,
during his bouts with Rome and his bold attempt at seculari-
sation and administrative centralisation, his ambition would

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

Universal Repetition 21

have surely been excited, and the arrival of the Modern
Age precipitated. Two centuries later, in 1692, America
would unquestionably have been of greater value to the
France of Henry IV. than to Spain, and the latter country,
not having had this rich prey to batten upon for two hundred
years, would have been, at that time, less rich and prosper-
ous. Who knows whether, under the first hypothesis, the
Hundred Years' War might not have been precluded and,
under the second, the empire of Charles V. ? At any rate,
the need of having colonies, a need which was both created
and satisfied by the discovery of Christopher Columbus
and one which has played such a leading role in the political
life of Europe since the fifteenth century, would not have
arisen until the seventeenth century, and, at the pres-
ent time, South America would belong to France, and
North America would not as yet amount to anything politi-
cally. What a difference to us ! And to think that Chris-
topher Columbus succeeded by a mere hair's breadth in his
enterprise! But a truce to these speculations upon the
contingencies of the past, although, in my opinion, they are
as well-founded and as significant as those of the future.

Here is another example, the most striking of all. The
Roman Empire has perished; but, as has been well said,
the conquest of Rome lives on forever. Through Chris-
tianity, Charlemagne extended it to the Germans; William
the Conqueror extended it to the Anglo-Saxons; and Co-
lumbus, to America. The Russians and the English are
extending it to Asia and to Australia, and, prospectively, to
the whole of Oceanica. Already Japan wishes for her turn to
be invaded; it seems as if China alone would offer any
serious resistance. But if we assume that China also
will become assimilated, we can say that Athens and Rome,
including Jerusalem, that is to say, the type of civilisation
formed by the group of their combined and co-ordinated
initiatives and master-thoughts, have conquered the en-
tire world. All races and nationalities will have con-
tributed to this unbounded contagious imitation of Greco-
Roman civilisation. The outcome would certainly have

22 Laws of Imitation

been different if Darius or Xerxes had conquered Greece and
reduced it to a Persian province; or if Islam had triumphed
over Charles Martel and invaded Europe; or if peaceful
and industrious China had been belligerent during the past
three thousand years, and had turned its spirit of invention
towards the art of war as well as towards the arts of
peace; or if, when America was discovered, gunpowder
and printing had not yet been invented and Europeans had
proved to be poorer fighters than the Aztecs or Incas. But
chance determined that the type to which we belong should
prevail over all other types of civilisation, over all the
clusters of radiant inventions which have flashed out spon-
taneously in different parts of the globe. Even if our
own type had not prevailed, another type would certainly
have triumphed in the long run, for one type was bound
to become universal, since all laid claim to universality,
that is to say, since all tended to propagate themselves
through imitation in a geometrical progression, like waves
of light or sound, or like animal or vegetal species.

IV

Let me point out a new order of analogies. Imitations
are modified in passing from one race or nation to another,
like vibrations or living types in passing from one environ-
ment to another. We see this, for example, in the transi-
tion of certain words, or religious myths, or military secrets,
or literary forms, from the Hindoos to the Germans, or
from the Latins to the Gauls. In certain cases, the record
of these modifications has been sufficiently full to suggest
what their general and uniform trend has been. This is
especially true of language; Grimm's, or, better still, Ray-
nouard's, laws might well be called the laws of linguistic
refraction.

According to Raynouard, when Latin words come under
Spanish or Gallic influences, they are consistently and char-
acteristically transformed. According to Grimm's laws,
a given consonant in German or English is equivalent to

Universal Repetition 23

another given consonant in Sanskrit or Greek. This fact
means, at bottom, that in passing from the primitive Aryan
to the Teutonic or Hellenic or Hindoo environments, the
parent-language has changed its consonants in a given
order, substituting, in one case, an aspirate for a hard check,
in another a hard check for an aspirate, etc.

If there were as many religions as there are languages
(and there are hardly enough of these to give an adequate
basis of comparison to certain general observations that
might be formulated into linguistic laws), and, above all,
if religious ideas were as numerous in every religion as
words in a language, we might have laws of mythological
refraction analagous to those of language. As it is, we
can only follow a given myth like that of Ceres or Apollo,
for example, through the modifications which have been
stamped upon it by the genius of the different peoples who
have adopted it. But there are so few myths to compare
in this way, that it is difficult to see any appreciable common
traits in the turns which they have been given by the same
people at different times, or anything more than a general
family resemblance. And yet have we not much to observe
in a study of the forms which the same religious ideas have
taken on as they passed from the Vedas to the doc-
trines of Brahma or Zoroaster, from Moses to Christ or
Mahomet, or as they circulated through the dissentient
Christian sects of the Greek, Roman, Anglican, and Gallic
churches? Perhaps I should say that all that could be has
already been observed along this line and that we have only
to draw upon this material.

Art critics have likewise had a confused premonition of
the laws of artistic refraction, so to speak. These laws are
peculiar to every people, in all epochs, and belong to every
definite centre of painting, music, architecture, a'nd poetry,
to Holland, Italy, France, etc. I will not press my point.
But is it purely metaphorical and puerile to say that Theoc-
ritus is refracted in Virgil; Menander, in Terence; Plato,
in Cicero; Euripides, in Racine?

Another analogy. Interferences occur between imita-

24 Laws of Imitation

tions, between social things, as well as between vibrations
and between living types. When two waves, two physical
things which are pretty much alike, and which have spread
separately from two distinct centres, meet together in the
same physical being, in the same particle of matter, the
impetus of each is increased or neutralised, as its direction
coincides with, or is diametrically opposed to, the direction
of the other. In the first case, a new and complex wave
sets in which is stronger than the others and which tends to
propagate itself in turn; in the second, struggle and
partial destruction follow, until one of the two rivals has
the better of the other. In the same way we know what
happens when two specific and sufficiently near types, two
vital things, which have been reproduced independently of
each other, generation after generation, come into mutual
contact, not merely in one place (as in the case of animals
which fight or devour one another, which would be a strictly
physical encounter), but, more than that, in the same
living being, in a germ cell fertilised by hybrid copulation,
the only kind of encounter and interference which is really
vital. In this case, either the offspring has greater vitality
than its parents and, being at the same time more fruitful
and prolific, transmits its distinctive characteristics to a
more numerous progeny, a veritable discovery of life, or
it is more puny, and gives birth to a few stunted descend-
ants, in whom the divorce of the incompatible characters of
their unnaturally united progenitors is hastened by the
distinct triumph of one in expelling the other. In the
same way, when two beliefs or two desires, or a belief
and a desire, in short, when two social things (in the
last analysis all social facts are beliefs or desires under the
different names of dogmas, sentiment, laws, wants, customs,
morals, etc:), have for a certain time travelled their separate
roads in the world by means of education or example,
i. e., of imitation, they often end by coming into mutual
contact. In order that their encounter and interference
may be really psychological and social, co-existence in
the same brain and participation in the same state of

Universal Repetition 25

mind and heart is not only necessary, but, in addition,
one must present itself either in support of, or in opposition
to the other, either as a principle, of which the other is a
corollary, or as an affirmative, of which the other is the nega-
tive. As for the beliefs and desires which seem neither to
aid nor injure, neither to confirm nor contradict, each other,
they cannot interfere with each other any more than two
heterogeneous waves or two livingtypes which are too distant
from each other to unite. If they do appear to help or con-
firm each other, they combine by the very fact of this ap-
pearance or perception into a new practical or theoretic dis-
covery, which is, in turn, bound to spread abroad, like its
components, in contagious imitation. In this case, there has
been a gain in the force of desire or belief, as in the corre-
sponding cases of propitious physical or biological interfer-
ence there was a gain in motor power or vitality. If, on the
other hand, the interfering social things, theses or aims, dog-
mas or interests, convictions or passions, are mutually hurt-
ful and antagonistic in the soul of an individual, or in that of
a whole people, both the individual and the community will
morally stagnate in doubt and indecision, until their soul is
rent in two by some sudden or prolonged effort, and the
less cherished belief or passion is sacrificed. Thus life
chooses between two miscoupled types. A particularly im-
portant case and one which differs slightly from the preced-
ing is that in which the two beliefs or desires, as well as the
belief and the desire, which interfere happily or unhappily
in the mind of an individual, are not experienced exclu-
sively by him, but in part by him, and in part by one of his
fellows. Here the interference consists in the fact that the
individual is aware of the confirmation or disproof of his
own idea by the idea of others, and of the advantage or
injury accruing to his own will from the will of others.
From this, sympathy and agreement, or antipathy and
war, result.1

1 The likeness which I have pointed out between heredity and imita-
tion is verified even in the relation of each of these two forms of uni-
versal Repetition to its special form of Creation or Invention. As long
as a society is young, vigorous, and progressive, inventions, new proj-

26 Laws of Imitation

But all of this, I feel, needs to be elucidated. Let us
distinguish between three hypotheses: the propitious inter-
ference of two beliefs, of two desires, and of a belief and a
desire; and let us subdivide each one of these divisions as
the subjects of interference are, or are not, found in the
same individual. Later on, I shall have a word to say
about unpropitious interferences.

i. If a conjecture which I have considered fairly prob-
able comes into my mind while I am reading or remem-
bering a fact which I think is almost certain, and if I sud-
denly perceive that the fact confirms the conjecture of
which it is a consequence (t. e., the particular proposition
which expresses the fact is included in the general proposi-
tion which expresses the conjecture), the conjecture im-
mediately becomes much more probable in my eyes, and, at
the same time, the fact appears to me to be an absolute
certainty. So that there is a gain in belief all along the
line. And the perception of this logical inclusion is a discov-
ery. Newton discovered nothing more than this when, hav-
ing brought his conjectured law of gravitation face to face
with the calculation of the distance from the moon to the

ects, and successful initiatives follow one another in rapid succession,
and hasten social changes ; then, when the inventive sap is exhausted,
imitation still continues upon its course. India, China, and the late
Roman Empire are examples in point. Now this is also true of the
world of life. For example, M. Gaudry says in referring to the
crinoidea (echinoderms) [Enchainment du monde animal (secondary
period)]: "They have lost that marvellous diversity of form which
was one of the luxuries of the primary period ; no longer having the
power of much self-mutation, they still retain that of producing indi-
viduals like themselves." But this is not always so. In the geologi-
cal epochs, certain families or types of animals disappeared after their
most brilliant period. This was the case with the ammonite, that
wonderful fossil which flourished in such exuberant variety, during
the secondary period, and which was, subsequently, annihilated forever.
This was also the case with those brief and brilliant civilisations which,
like ephemeral stars, glittered for a day in the sky of history, and
were then suddenly extinguished. I refer to the Persia of Cyrus, to
some of the Greek republics, to the south of France at the time of the
war of the Albigenses, to the Italian republics, etc. When the crea-
tive power of these civilisations was worn out, not even the power
to reproduce themselves remained. In fact, in most cases, they would
have been precluded from doing so by their own violent destruction.

Universal Repetition 27

earth, he perceived that this fact confirmed his hypothesis.
Let us suppose that, for a century long, an entire people
is led by one of its teachers, by St. Thomas Aquinas, for
example, or by Arnaud or Bossuet, to prove, or to think
that it is proving, that a like agreement exists between its re-
ligious dogmas and the contemporaneous state of its sciences.
Then we shall see such an overflowing river of faith as
that which fructified the logical and inventive and warlike
thirteenth and the Janseist and Gallican seventeenth centu-
ries. A harmony like this is nothing less than a discovery.
The Summa, the catechism of Port-Royal and the French
clergy, and all the philosophic systems of the period,
from Descartes himself to Leibnitz, are, in different
degrees, its various expressions. Now let us somewhat
modify our general proposition. Let us suppose that I am
inclined to endorse a principle which the friend with whom
I am talking absolutely refuses to accept. On the other hand,
he tells me certain facts which he thinks are true, but which
I take to be unverified. Subsequently, it seems to me, or
rather, if flashes upon me, that if these facts were proved,
they would fully confirm my principle. From now on, I,
also, am inclined to credit them; but the only gain in belief
has been one in regard to them, not in regard to my prin-
ciple. Besides, this kind of discovery is incomplete; it will
have no social effect until my friend either succeeds in im-
parting to me, through proofs, his belief, which is greater
than mine, in the reality of the facts, or I myself can prove
to him the truth of my principle. Here is precisely the ad-
vantage of a wide and free intellectual commerce.

2. The first mediaeval merchant who was both vain and
avaricious and who, in his unwillingness to forego either
commercial wealth or social position, came to perceive the
possibility of making avarice serve the ends of vanity,
through the purchase of a title of nobility for himself and
his family, thought he had made a fine discovery. And, as
a matter of fact, he had numerous imitators. Is it not true
that after this unhoped-for prospect, both his passions re-
doubled in strength? Did not his avarice increase because

28 Laws of Imitation

gold had gained a new value in his eyes, and his vanity,
because the object of his ambitious and hitherto-despaired-
of dream had come within reach ? To give, perhaps, a more
modern illustration, the first lawyer who reversed the usual
order of things by going into politics in order to make his
fortune, introduced neither a bad idea nor an ineffective
initiative. Let us take other instances. Suppose that I
am in love and that I also have a passion for rhyming. I
turn my love to inspiring my metromania. My love quick-
ens and my rhyming mania is intensified. How many
poetical works have originated in this kind of an inter-
ference! Suppose, again, that I am a philanthropist and
that I like notoriety. In this case, I will strive to distin-
guish myself in order to do more good to my fellows, and
I will strive to be useful to them, in order to make a name
for myself, etc., etc. In history the same phenomenon
occurs. After a long period of mutual opposition, Chris-
tian zeal combined with the contemporary passion for war-
like expeditions and produced the outbreak of the Crusades.
The invasion of Islam, the Jacqueries of '89 and of the years
following, and all revolutions in which so many base pas-
sions are yoked to noble ones, are notable examples. But,
happily, a still more contagious example was set in the be-
ginnings of social life by the first man who said : " I am
hungry and my neighbour is cold ; I will offer him this gar-
ment, which is useless to me, in exchange for some of the
food which he has in excess, and so my need of food will help
satisfy his need of clothing, and vice versa. In this ex-
cellent and very simple, but, for that time, highly original,
idea, industry, commerce, money, law, and all the arts origi-
nated. (I do not date the birth of society from this idea,
for society undoubtedly existed before exchange. It began
on the day when one man first copied another).

Let us note that all new forms of professional work, that
all new crafts, have arisen from analogous discoveries.
These discoveries have generally been anonymous, but
they are none the less positive and significant.

3. In historical importance, however, no mental inter-

Universal Repetition 29

ference equals that of a desire and a belief. But the numer-
ous cases in which a conviction or opinion fastens itself
upon an inclination, and effects it merely through inspiring
another desire, must not be included in this category. After
these cases have been eliminated, there still remains a con-
siderable number in which the supervening idea acts directly
upon the desire it has fallen in with and stimulated. Sup-
pose, for example, that I would like to be an orator in the
Chamber of Deputies, and I am straightway persuaded by
the compliment of a friend that I have recently displayed
true oratorical talent. This conviction enhances my am-
bition, and my ambition itself contributed to my conviction.
For the same reason, there is no historical error, no atrocious
or extravagant calumny or madness, which is not readily
entertained by the very political passion which it helps to
inflame. A belief will also stimulate a desire, now by
making its object seem mere attainable, now by stamping
it with its approval. It also happens, to complete our an-
alysis, that a man may realise that his own scheme will be
helped by the belief of others, although he may have no
share in their belief, nor they in his scheme. Such a reali-
sation is a -find that many an impostor has exploited and
still exploits.

This special kind of interferences and the important un-
named discoveries which result from them, are to be counted
among the chief forces which rule the world. What was the
patriotism of Greek or Roman but a passion nourished by an
illusion and vice versa; what was it but ambition, avarice, and
love of fame nourished by an exaggerated belief in their own
superiority, by the anthropocentric prejudice, the mistake
of imagining that this little point in space, the earth, was
the universe, and that on this little point Rome or Athens
was alone worthy of the gods' consideration? What are, in
large part, the fanaticism of the Arab, the proselytism of
the Christian, and the propagandism of Jacobin and revo-
lutionary doctrines but prodigious outgrowths of illusion-
fed passions and passion-fed illusions? And these forces
always arise from one person, from a single centre, long

30 Laws of Imitation

in advance, to be sure, of the moment when they break forth
and take on historical importance. An enthusiast, eaten up
with an impotent desire for conquest, or immortality,
or human regeneration, chances upon some idea which
opens an unhoped-for door to his aspirations. The idea
may be that of the Resurrection or the Millennium,
the dogma of popular sovereignty or some other formula
of the Social Contract. He embraces the idea, it exalts
him, and behold, a new apostle! In this way a political
or religious contagion is spread abroad. In this way a
whole people may be converted to Christianity, to Islam,
and, to-morrow, perhaps, to socialism.

In the preceding paragraphs we have discussed only
interference-combinations, interferences which result in
discovery and gain and add to the two psychological quan-
tities of desire and belief. But that long sequence of opera-
tions in moral arithmetic, which we call history, ushers in
at least as many interference-conflicts. When these sub-
jective antagonisms arise between the desires and beliefs of
a single individual, and only in this case, there is an absolute
diminution in the sum of those quantities. When they oc-
cur obscurely, here and there, in isolated individuals, they
pass by unnoticed except by psychologists. Then we have
(i) on the one side, the deceptions and gradual doubts of
bold theorists and political prophets as they come to see facts
giving the lie to their speculations and ridiculing their pre-
dictions, and the intellectual weakening of sincere and well-
informed believers who perceive the contradiction between
their science and their religion or philosophic systems; and,
on the other side, the private and juristic and parliamen-
tary discussions in which belief is rekindled instead of
smothered. Again, we have (2) on the one side, the en-
forced and bitter inaction, the slow suicide of a man strug-
gling between two incompatible aptitudes or inclinations,
between scientific ardour and literary aspirations, between
love and ambition, between pride and indolence, and, on the
other side, those various rivalries and competitions which
put every spring into action — what we call in these days

Universal Repetition 31

the struggle for existence. Finally, we have (3) on the one
side, the malady of despair, a state of intense longing and
intense self-doubt, the abyss of lovers and of those weary
with waiting, or the anguish of scruple and remorse, the
feeling of a soul which thinks ill of the object of its desire,
or well of the object of its aversion; and, on the other
side, the irritating resistance which is made to the under-
takings and eager passions of children and innovators by
parents who are convinced of their danger and impracti-
cability and by people of prudence and experience.

When these same phenomena (at bottom they are always
the same) are enacted upon a large scale and multiplied by
a large and powerful social current of imitation, they attain
historical importance. Under other names, they become,
( i ) on the one hand, the enervating scepticism of a people
caught between two hostile churches or religions or be-
tween the contradictions of its priests and its scientists; on
the other, the religious wars which are waged by one
people against another merely because of differences in re-
ligious belief; (2) on the one hand, the failure and inertia
of a people or class which has created for itself artificial
passions contrary to its natural instincts (i. e., at bottom, to
passions which also began by being artificial, by being
adopted from foreign sources, but which are much older than
the former passions), or desires inconsistent with its per-
manent interests, the desire for peace and comfort, for exam-
ple, when a redoubling of military spirit was indispensable;
on the other hand, the majority of external political wars;
(3) on the one hand, civil warfare and oppositions strictly
speaking, struggles between conservatives and revolution-
ists; on the other, the despair of a people or class which
is gradually sinking back into the historical oblivion whence
it had been drawn by some outburst of faith and enthusiasm,
or the irritation and oppression of a society distressed by a
conflict between its ancient maxims and traditions and its
new aspirations, between Christianity and chivalry, for ex-
ample, and industrialism and utilitarianism.

Now in the case of both individuals and societies, the

32 Laws of Imitation

doleful states of scepticism, inertia, and despair, and, still
more, the violent and more painful states of dispute, com-
bat, and opposition are quick to push man on to their own
undoing. Nevertheless, although man often succeeds in de-
livering himself for long periods from the former, which
imply the immediate weakening of his two master forces,
he never overcomes the latter, or if he does free himself
from them it is merely to fall into them again, since, up to
a certain point, they bring with them momentary gams of
belief and desire. Whence the interminable dissensions,
rivalries, and contradictions which befall mankind and which
each one can settle for himself only by adopting some
logical system of thought and conduct. Whence the im-
possibility, or the seeming impossibility, of extirpating the
wars and litigations from which everybody suffers, al-
though the subjective strife of desires and opinions which
afflicts some people generally ends for them in definite treat-
ies of peace. Whence the endless rebirth of the eternal
hydra-headed social question, a question which is not pecul-
iar to our own time, but which belongs to all time, for it
does not investigate into the outcome of the debilitating,
but into that of the violent, states of desire and belief. In
other words, it does not ask whether science or religion
will, or should, ultimately prevail in the great majority of
minds; whether desire for social order or rebellious out-
bursts of social envy, pride, and hatred will, or should, ulti-
mately prove the stronger in human hearts; whether a
positive and courageous resignation of old pretensions or,
on the contrary, a new outburst of hope and self-confidence
will help our sometime ruling classes to rid themselves
to their honour of their present torpor; whether the old mo-
rality will have the right and the power to influence society
again, or whether the society of the future will legitimately
establish a code of honour and morality in its own likeness.
The solution of these problems will not be long delayed, and
it is not difficult, even at present, to foresee its nature.
Whereas the problems which really constitute the social
question are arduous and difficult. The problems are these :

Universal Repetition 33

Is it a good or a bad thing for a complete intellectual
unanimity to be established through the expulsion or the
more or less tyrannical conversion of a dissenting minority,
and will this ever come about ? Is it a good or a bad thing
for commercial or professional or personal competition be-
tween individuals, as well as political and military com-
petition between societies, to come to be suppressed, the one
through the much-dreamed-of organisation of labour, or, at
least, through state socialism, and the other through a vast,
universal confederation, or, at least, through a new Euro-
pean equilibrium, the first step towards the United States
of Europe? Does the future hold this in store for us?
Is it a good or a bad thing for a strong and free social au-
thority, an absolutely sovereign authority, capable of gran-
diose things, as philanthropic and intelligent as possible,
to arise, untrammelled by outside control or resistance,
as a supreme imperial or constitutional power in the hands
of a single party or a single people? Have we any such
prospect in view?

This is the question, and stated thus it is a truly redoubt-
able one. Mankind, as well as the individual man, always
moves in the direction of the greatest truth and power, of
the greatest sum of conviction and confidence, in a word, of
the greatest attainable belief; and we may question whether
this maximum can be reached though the development of
discussion, competition, and criticism, or, inversely, through
their suppression and through the boundless opening out
through imitation of a single expanding and at che same
time compact thought or volition.

But the preceding digression has made us anticipate
questions which can be discussed more advantageously else-
where. Let us return to the subject of this chapter, and,
after reviewing the principal analogies between the three
forms of Repetition, let us note for a moment their equally
instructive points of difference. In the first place, the soli-

34 Laws of Imitation

darity of these forms is not reciprocal, it is one-sided.
Generation depends upon undulation, but undulation does
not depend upon generation. Imitation depends upon them
both; but they do not depend upon imitation. After two
thousand years, the manuscript of Cicero's Republic was
recovered and published. It became a source of inspira-
tion. This posthumous imitation would not have occurred
if the molecules of the parchment had not surely continued
to vibrate (if only from the effect of the surrounding tem-
perature) ; and if, in addition, human reproduction had
not gone on from Cicero to us without interrup-
tion. It is remarkable that here, as elsewhere, the most
complex and unconditioned term is always supported by
those which are least so. The inequality of the three
terms in this respect is, indeed, obvious. Vibrations are
linked together, being both isochronous and contiguous,
whereas living things are detached and separate from
each other, and their duration varies considerably. More-
over, the higher up in the scale they are, the more indepen-
dent they become. Generation is a free kind of undulation,
whose waves are worlds in themselves. Imitation does
still better; its influence is exerted not only over a great
distance, but over great intervals of time. It establishes
a pregnant relation between the inventor and his copier,
separated as they may be by thousands of years, between
Lycurgus and a member of the French Convention, between
the Roman painter of a Pompeiian fresco and the modern
decorator whom it has inspired. Imitation is generation
at a distance.1 It seems as if these three forms of repeti-
tion were three undertakings of its single endeavour to ex-
tend the field of its activity, to successfully cut off every

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

Universal Repetition 35

chance of revolt in elements which are always quick to over-
throw the yoke of law, and by more and more ingenious and
potent methods to constrain their tumultuous crowd to pro-
ceed in orderly masses of constantly increasing strength and
organisation. This advance may be illustrated by compar-
ing it to that of a cyclone or epidemic or insurrection. A
cyclone whirls from neighbourhood to neighbourhood ; none
of its blast ever tears from it to leap over intervening space
and carry its virus to a distance. An epidemic, on the other
hand, rages in a zig-zag line; it may spare one house or vil-i
lage among many, and it strikes down almost simultane-
ously those which are far apart. An insurrection will
spread still more freely from workshop to workshop, or
from capital to capital. It may start from a telegraphic an-
nouncement, or, at times, the contagion may even come
from the past, out of a dead and buried epoch.

There is still another important difference. In imita-
tion, the product is generally in a state of complete de-
velopment; it is spared the fumblings of the first workman.
This artistic kind of process is consequently much more
rapid than the vital process; embryonic phases and phases
of infancy and adolescence are suppressed. And yet life it-
self does not ignore the art of abbreviation. For if, as is
thought, embryonic phases repeat (with certain restric-
tions) the zoological and paleontological series of preced-
ing and allied species, it is clear that this individual re-
capitulation of a prolonged race elaboration must have be-
come marvellously succinct at last. But during the course
of the generations which pass under our own observation,
periods of gestation and growth are not noticeably cur-
tailed. The only fact that can be determined in this direc-
tion is the reproduction of hereditary traits or diseases at an
earlier age in the offspring than in the parent. Let us com-
pare this slight advance with the progress of our manufac-
tures. Our watches, pins, textiles, all our goods, are manu-
factured in one-tenth or one-hundredth part of the time
which they originally required. As for vibration, in what
an infinitesimal degree it shares in this faculty of accelera-

36 Laws of Imitation

tion ! Successive waves would be strictly isochronous, that
is, would take the same amount of time to be born, mature,
and die in, if their temperature remained constant. But
their oscillation necessarily results in the heating of their
medium (this fact is known, at least, in the case of sound
waves, according to the correction made in Newton's for-
mula by La Place), and in the consequent acceleration of
their rate. This brings with it but little saving of time,
however. There is infinitely more time gained from the
mechanisms for repetition which characterise life and,
especially, society; for the products of imitation, as I have
said before, are entirely free from the obligation to traverse,
even in abridgment, the steps of prior advances. Changes
in the world of life are also much less rapid than those in
society. The most earnest upholder of the doctrine of
rapid evolution will readily admit that the wing of the bird
did not replace the limb of the reptile as rapidly as our
modern locomotives were substituted for stage-coaches.
One of the consequences of this observation is to relegate
historic naturalism to its true place. According to this
view, social institutions, laws, ideas, literature, and arts must
always, of necessity, spring from the very bottom of a peo-
ple to slowly germinate and blossom forth like bulbs.
Nothing can ever be created, complete in all its parts, in a
nation's soil. This proposition holds true as long as a com-
munity has not passed beyond the natural phase of its ex-
istence, that in which, under the dominating rule of custom-
imitation, to which I will refer later on, its changes are as
much conditioned by heredity as by imitation pure and
simple. But as soon as imitation becomes freer, as soon as
a spirit of radicalism arises which threatens to carry out its
revolutionary programme overnight, we must beware of
any undue reassurance, against the possibility of such a
danger, that we might base upon the alleged laws of his-
toric growth. It is a mistake in politics not to believe in
the improbable and never to foresee what has not already
been seen.

CHAPTER II

SOCIAL RESEMBLANCES AND IMITATION

IN the preceding chapter I merely stated, without de-
veloping, 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 so-
cieties, exceptions and objections seem to abound.

i. In the first place, many points of anatomical or phy-
siological likeness between two living species belonging
to different types cannot be explained, apparently, by hered-
itary repetition, because in many cases the common pro-
genitor 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, spi-
ders, serpents, and birds. In this case, similarity of in-
stinct can be accounted for only through homogeneity of
physical environment. All these heterogeneous creatures
have depended upon the same environment for the satisfac-
tion of those fundamental wants which are essential to all
life and which are identical in each one of them. Now,

37

38 Laws of Imitation

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, al-
though 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 inde-
pendent 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 strange-
ly like the Highlanders of Rob Roy and Maclvoy " (Espece
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 respec-
tive 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 nobil-
ity and of agricultural and industrial classes. Their agricul-
ture, with its floating islands and perfected system of irri-
gation, was suggestive of China; their architecture, their
painting, and their hieroglyphic writing, of Eygpt. Their
calendar testified, in spite of its peculiar character, to astro-
nomical knowledge which corresponded to that of contempo-
rary Europeans. Although their religion was sanguinary, it

Social Resemblances and Imitation 39

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 recog-
nise 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 struc-
ture. In external nature, about the same resources are offered
for the satisfaction of about the same wants, and approxi-
mately 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 resem-
blances, 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 con-
stitute the human races, and by the vibratory transmission
of the temperatures, colours, sounds, electrical currents, and
chemical affinities which constitute the climes and soils in-
habited and cultivated by man.

Here we have the objection or the exception in its full

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

40 Laws of Imitation

force. In spite of its apparent gravity, it. merely offers an op-
portunity 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 civilisa-
tions with equal contempt, and their anatomical homologies
with equal respect. Philologists and mythologists are al-
ready 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, theos. In this he sees nothing but a
coincidence; consequently he does not assert that teotl and
theos are the same word. On the other hand, he does un-
dertake to prove that bischop is the same word as episco-
pus.z 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 be-
tween the isolated phases of two vocables which have been
taken from their own language families and so separated

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

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

Social Resemblances and Imitation 41

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 con-
trary, I hold that there certainly are many real and impor-
tant resemblances which have been spontaneously produced
between civilisations without any known or probable means
of intercommunication. Moreover, I admit that, in gene-
ral, 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. Accord-

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

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

42 Laws of Imitation

ingly, even in distant regions there may be a certain approx-
imate similarity between its channels. It may even chance
to show, less often, however, than we might suppose, a par-
allelism of certain pregnant ideas,1 of ideas which may be
yery simple or, at times, quite complicated, which have ap-
peared 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. Paral-
lelly 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 repeti-
tion.

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

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

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

Social Resemblances and Imitation 43

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 primaeval 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 resem-
blance 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 be-
tween 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 myth-
ology 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.

44 Laws of Imitation

and perceptions in question, we shall find that they them-
selves may be resolved almost entirely, and more and more
completely as civilisation advances, into psychological ele-
ments 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 sanc-
tioned by surrounding example. The social environment,
in defining and actualising this form, has, in truth, appro-
priated 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 accord-
ing 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 nat-
ural desire for amusement. It expresses itself as desire for
circus sports, for bull-fights, for classical tragedies, for nat-
uralistic 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 ap-
plying the steam-engine, which had already been em-
ployed 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 ad-
aptation 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 exist-
ing 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 proposi-

Social Resemblances and Imitation 45

tion). 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 other-
wise indeterminate, sequence, suggestive of the pange-
netic theory of the old philosophers. Every successful in-
vention 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 ap-
pearance it annihilates the majority of those possibilities
and makes possible a host of heretofore impossible inven-
tions. These latter inventions will or will not come into
existence according to the extent and direction* of the radia-
tion 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 dis-
covery, 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

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

2 Sometimes the same solution is adopted almost everywhere, although
the problem may have lent itself to other solutions. That is, you may
say, because the choice in question is the most natural one. True, but
is not this the very reason, perhaps, why, although it was disclosed only
in one place, and not everywhere at the same time, it ended by spreading
in all directions? For example, almost all primitive peoples think of
the future abode of the wicked as subterranean and of that of the good

46 Laws of Imitation

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 in-
digenous 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 be-
longed to the American fauna, it had disappeared from
America when that continent was discovered, and, according
to Bourdeau, its disappearance is generally explained (Con-
quete 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 imi-
tation. 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 in-
ventions !

In general, if we do not wish to explain resemblances be-
tween communities which are separated by more or less in-
surmountable obstacles (although these may not have
existed in the past), through the common possession of
some entirely forgotten primitive model, only one other ex-
planation, 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

as celestial. The similarity of such conceptions is often minute. Ac-
cording to Tylor, the Salish Indians of Oregon believe that the bad
dwell after death in a place of eternal snow, where they " are tantalised
by the sight of game which they cannot kill, and water which they
cannot drink" [Primitive Culture, II, 84, Edward B. Tylor, London,
1871.— Tr.]

Social Resemblances and Imitation 47

useless or less useful ideas. But the comparative barren-
ness 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 cut-
ting and polishing of flints, to the use of tendons and fish-
bones for sewing, or to the rubbing together of two pieces
of wood for fire. Before we deny the possibility of a diffu-
sion of these ideas through a world-wide process of gradual
and prolonged imitation, the immense duration of prehis-
toric times must be brought to mind, and we must not
overlook the evidence of the existence of relations be-
tween 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 medievalism, the closest of race barriers and
put China and Hindustan into communication with each
other and with Europe.1

1 In a very interesting article in the Revue des Deux Mondes of
May i, 1890, M. Goblet d'Alviella aptly comments upon the rapidity and
facility of the circulation of religious symbols by means of travellers,
of slavery, and of currency, the latter of which is a veritable system
of moving bas-reliefs. This is true also of political symbols. The
two-headed eagle, for example, on the arms of both the Emperor of
Austria and the Czar of Russia has come down to them from the
ancient Germanic empire. It was brought there through the Eastern
expedition of Frederick the Second in the thirteenth century, when he
borrowed it from the Turks. Furthermore, M. Goblet d'Alviella says

48 Laws of Imitation

Even in default of such violent events, a world-wide in-
terchange 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 precon-
ception 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 diffu-
sion 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 ordi-
nary one as there is in optics between the vibratory theory
and the theory of emission. Of course I do not deny that

that there are reasons for thinking that the astonishing likeness between
this two-headed eagle and the eagle which is also two-headed and which
figures upon the most ancient bas-reliefs of Mesopotamia, is due to a
series of imitations. Note in this same article the reference to the
widespread imitation of the Gamma cross as a luck piece. It is prob-
able, on the other hand, that the idea of using the cross to symbolise
the god of the air or the compass-card arose spontaneously and not
through imitation in Mesopotamia and in the Aztec empire.

Social Resemblances and Imitation 49

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 his-
toric 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 spon-
taneously 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 Jumieges, of Gargouille
at Rouen, and many others, he says, were never established,
in all probability, by a formal decree [I admit this] or

50 Laws of Imitation

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 im-
itation. This is true of both social similarities and dissimi-
larities. And so, the epithet natural is generally and not im-
properly 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 sponta-
neous 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 in-
stinctive indolence, is an absolutely natural thing. But al-
though 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 ex-
plain sickness on the ground of diabolical possession, the

Social Resemblances and Imitation 51

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 defi-
nite according to the measure of satisfaction which it re-
ceives. We shall see the proof of this at another time.

2. This leads me to examine another leading objec-
tion 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 conse-
quence 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 mathe-
matics, to the law of gravitation in astronomy, to the union
of forces in physics, to atomism in chemistry, and in bi-
ology to natural selection or to some other ulterior form
of evolution. Moreover, since the industrial and the mili-
tary 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 tele-
graph, for example, of torpedoes and Krupp guns, of
Wagnerian opera and naturalistic novels, was a necessary

52 Laws of Imitation

thing, more necessary, perhaps, than the simplest expres-
sion of the art of pottery. Now, unless I am much mis-
taken, 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 verisimili-
tude 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 differ-
ent 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 over-
flow of one whose waters are advancing in continually
enlarging circles of imitation. To see how far independent
civilisations are from tending to merge together spon-
taneously, let us compare in their stages of final develop-
ment 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

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

Social Resemblances and Imitation 53

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 di-
plomacy and theology, etc. The contrast is complete be-
tween the ideal of exquisite landscape gardening, of swarm-
ing families, and of lowered morality that is dear to one of
these peoples, and the ideal of Christian salvation, of mon-
astic 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 pat-
terned 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 ac-
companied by genuflexion. We find, too, the same fictions,
particularly the fiction of adoption whose purpose is to ac-
complish, 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 coun-
tries, even in the most backward, between the common peo-
ple 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

54 Laws of Imitation

the rays of invading fashion; here the resemblance is ob-
viously 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
aesthetic life, where its ship of art is wafted at the pleasure of
the breezes with which its own past fills its sails. If civilisa-
tion 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 es-
sential to it (this is the case with all reality, perhaps), 'than
to rid itself of its very essence. Accordingly, the super-
fluity, 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'etre of all the rest, of all that which is use-
ful 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 Co-
rinthian 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 archi-
tecture will always be an industrial art, my formula relating

Social Resemblances and Imitation 55

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 aesthetic ideas and judg-
ments 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 in-
dustry and force them to repeat themselves vaguely among
different peoples. When a product belongs both to in-
dustry and to art, we must expect it to be like other
products from foreign and independent sources in its in-
dustrial characteristics and to differ from them on its
aesthetic 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 any-
thing 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 recog-
nised. This is the reason why we can deny from the
aesthetic, 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 ex-
ample, 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

56 Laws of Imitation

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 ob-
servation may be likewise applied, although in a lesser de-
gree, 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 I' 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 un-
doubtedly 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 corol-
lary of this principle, the gradual accumulation of non-con-
tradictory inventions, thanks to the conservation and dif-
fusion 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

Social Resemblances and Imitation 57

a certain elevation for its satisfaction, this tripartite divi-
sion 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 re-
ligious 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 es-
pecially 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 astonish-
ing 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 polyg-
onal or of the fascicular column of Beni-Hassan are not
more thickset than those of the columns of much earlier
monuments." We even find the contrary of this, the
exact inverse of Hellenic evolution. " There are thus," con-
cludes 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 un-
willing to be shut up in a formula, since, at times, this
formula, if formula there be, seems to apply, whereas at

1 [Histoirc de I'art, I, 574, Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez, Paris,
1882.— TV.]

2 [Ibid., II, 57S-— TV.]

58 Laws of Imitation

other times it is plain that it does not apply at all, and pre-
cisely in that which to the eyes of those who know con-
cerns the most important, the most expressive, and the most
profound characteristics. When it is a question of look-
ing at the column from the utilitarian point of view, ex-
ternal conditions narrowly circumscribe the field of archi-
tectural 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 direc-
tions 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 architec-
ture may be explained; and, if the development of Greek
architecture appears to be more rectilinear, is this not an il-
lusion? 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 considera-
tions would gain by being illustrated by examples taken
from the higher arts, from painting and poetry and music !

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

CHAPTER III

WHAT IS A SOCIETY?

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 in-
clude, 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 ad-
vantage 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 conven-
tionality, 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 so-
cial group, just as the economic point of view unduly en-
larges it. Finally, we might think of the social tie as en-
tirely 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

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

60 Laws of Imitation

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 ma-
ture 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 es-
sentially 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 socie-
ties 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 siphonophorse, 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 saidj 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 ser-
vices, 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 be-
tween the Spartan and the helot, or between a noble and his

What is a Society ? 6 1

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 be-
tween 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 ser-
vice 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 accumula-
tion 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 engage-
ments 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 apt-
itudes. If this specialisation were fully developed in ac-
cordance with the logically inevitable although unexpressed
wish of economists, we should have as many distinct hu-
man species as there are miners, farmers, weavers, lawyers,
physicians, etc. But, fortunately, the assured and undeni-
able preponderance of juridical relations prevents any exces-
sive 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 imi-
tation. 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 popu-
lation may desert its plough and spade and the double
mammal of husbandry and herding may dry up? The

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

62 Laws of Imitation

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 con-
sideration 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, individ-
ual elements like those which constituted the mind and
character of the members of that society.

Beings which differ greatly in kind, the shark, for ex-
ample, 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 tradi-
tions, 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 con-
quered natives. In this case; racial dissimilarity either
played a much smaller role 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 in-
stitution. Here, in fact, Christian propagandism had

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

What is a Society ? 63

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 emi-
grants 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 imita-
tion in their own particular spheres, come into mutual con-
tact and mutual service, but there is no society in the true
sense of the word.

The Hindoo caste system was based mainly on an eco-
nomic 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 occupa-
tion does not denote an advanced state of civilisation.
This tendency diminishes, in fact, as mankind improves and
as industry itself progresses.1 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

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

64 Laws of Imitation

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 ma-
chines,— an idea that has been tediously reiterated, — and
where a small homogeneous group of citizens in constant
imitation and assimilation of one another, hut inde-
pendent 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 im-
perfect 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 simi-
larity, and we have, notwithstanding a lack of recognised
rights, a beginning of society. Louis XIV did not recog-
nise 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 educa-
tion, 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 indi-
viduals who resemble each other in occupation and edu-
cation, even if they are competitors, than between those
who stand most in need of each other. Lawyers, journal-
ists, magistrates, all professional men, are cases in point.
So society has been properly denned 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

What is a Society ? 65

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 ob-
vious 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 sol-
dier 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 un-
consciously, 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 satis-
fied, 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 sociolo-
gists 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 in-

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

66 Laws of Imitation

dividuals who compose these classes and nations are be-
coming even more rapidly and thoroughly assimilated,
although this process of imitation is still hindered by irri-
tating obstacles, by customs, and even by laws which are,
perhaps, the more irritating the less discouraging they ap-
pear 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 agri-
cultural 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 con-
sequence 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 cir-
cle was the end in view and because the assimilation of
^vomen with men, of peasants with townsmen, was an indis-
pensable 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 meet-
ing 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

What is a Society ? 67

circle, be it what it may, to continually widen its circum-
ference.

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 so-
ciety, 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 con-
versation, 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

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

68 Laws of Imitation

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 be-
tween 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 conse-
quences 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 differ-
ent 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

What is a Society ? 69

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 less obscure,
nothing more enlightening, than these psychical acts of af-
firmation 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 con-
ditions 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 ex-
actness of the word. Therefore, in the oscillations of his-
tory 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 an-
other, like intersecting vibrations.

This is the national type which, as I have said, is re-
peated 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.

Ill

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

70 Laws of Imitation

is to sociality, to imitativeness, so to speak, what organisa-
tion 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 va-
rious degrees it actually occurs, it may be well to conceive
of it, hypothetically, as perfect and absolute. In its hypo-
thetical form it would consist of such an intense concentra-
tion 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 trans-
mitted without lapse of time. Would it not be useful for
biologists to conceive, on their part, of an absolute irrita-
bility 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 organi-
sation of protoplasmic irritability, matter, the organisation
of ethereal elasticity, and society, the organisation of imi-
tativeness. 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 de-
mands of our point of view. Given a mass of children who
have been brought up together and given the same educa-
tion in the same environment and who have not yet sepa-
rated 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 ho-
mogeneous molecules, which can be, but have not been,

What is a Society? 71

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 corpus-
cles 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 pro-
duced 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 super-
ficial, 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 dis-
ciplined school may be. Heterogeneity, not homogeneity,
is at the heart of things. Could anything be more im-
probable 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 homogene-
ity which screens and disguises it never would or could have

72 Laws of Imitation

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 homo-
geneity in question, when ether or protoplasm, when a mass
of people who have been levelled down and put upon a foot-
ing 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 varia-
tions, 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 individ-
ual. 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 progres-
sion; it is, on the contrary, the point of departure for a
new social advance. Every new form of civilisation be-

What is a Society ? 73

gins 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 Prankish army, booty was dis-
tributed in equal portions between the king and his compan-
ions-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 organi-
sation, came to be hollowed out in the Arab world, some-
what 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 pre-
cede churches and states, for the same reason, I say, that
tissues precede organs. Moreover, once tissues and com-
munities have been formed, they become organic and hier-
archical 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 enter-
prising man who originated it in order to spread some plan
or idea of his own. Now, the community becomes con-
solidated into a hierarchical corporation, and tissue be-
comes 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

74 Laws of Imitation

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. Organi-
sation 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 soci-
ologist should yield to the psychologist.

IV

i. 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 nu-
merous 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, there-
fore, 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 per-
ception a distinct cellular function corresponds. The in-
definite 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,

What is a Society ? 75

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 sys-
tem 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 fol-
lowing 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 in-
dividual, 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 rou-
tine 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 consti-

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

76 Laws of Imitation

tutes mental life? We do not know.1 Do we know any-
thing 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 re-
lated to one of the most mysterious of facts, a fact which
is being studied with intense curiosity by the baffled philo-
sophic alienists of the day, i. e., somnambulism.2 If you
re-read contemporaneous works on this subject, especially
those of Richet, Binet and Fere, Beaunis, Bernheim, Del-
bceuf, 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 com-
pound 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 re-
moved from every extra-social influence, from the direct
view of natural objects, and from the instinctive obses-
sions 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 ex-
periment and observation the really essential characteristics
of social relations, set free in this way from all com-
plicating influences of a natural or physical order? But

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

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

What is a Society ? 77

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 understand-
ing of the fact that is called abnormal by showing to what
extent it is general, and of the fact that is general by per-
ceiving 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 som-
nambulist 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 sociolog-
ical point of view, we must not take ourselves into con-
sideration, for should we admit this truth about ourselves,
we would then be escaping from the blindness which it af-
firms; and in this way a counter argument might be made
out. Let us call to mind some ancient people whose civili-
sation differs widely from our own, the Egyptians, or Spar-
tans, 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 be-
come 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 be-
coming 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 fal-
lacy, 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 mas-

78 Laws of Imitation

ter and subject, of apostle and neophyte, had become re-
ciprocal 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 irreversi-
bility in question always exist at the basis of social imita-
tions, 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 ex-
ercised by certain supremely imperious and positive indi-
viduals. Did they rule through terror and imposture, as
alleged? This explanation is obviously inadequate. They
ruled through their prestige. The example of the magneti-
ser 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 mag-
netised 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 an-
chored 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 will-
ing some given thing. Nor is it necessary for the mag-
netiser to speak in order to be believed and obeyed. He
need only act; an almost imperceptible gesture is suffi-
cient.

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

What is a Society ? 79

copied."1 Let us observe that the magnetised subjects imi-
tates 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 au-
thority, however surprising this fact may be, an age of com-
parative fraternity would never have existed. But, to return,
why should we really marvel at the one-sided, passive imi-
tation 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 tend-
ency, it is because it is neutralised by some antagonistic
suggestions of memory or perception. Since the somnam-
bulist is for the time being deprived of this power of resist-
ance, 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 be-
ing, open and sensitive to the impressions of external na-
ture 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 conven-
tional teaching of their parents, priests, or leaders. Cer-
tain peoples have been known to approach singularly close
to this condition. Nascent communities, like young chil-
dren, are, in general, indifferent and insensible to all which

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

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

8o Laws of Imitation

does not concern man or the kind of man whom they re-
semble, the man of their own race or tribe.1 " The som-
nambulist 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 imita-
tion 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 per-
form great feats of strength and skill. A similar phenome-
non 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 im-
perial fascinator. There is nothing better fitted than this ata-
vistic 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. Cannes in Babylon, Quetz-alcoatl in
Mexico, the divine pre-Menes dynasties in Egypt, etc., are
cases in point.2 Under close observation, all these king-

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

2 In his profound Asiatic studies of the religious and social customs
of the Far East, Sir Alfred Lyall (who seems to have studied on the
spot the actual formation of tribes and clans in certain parts of India)

What is a Society ? 8 1

gods 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 con-
scious 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 suf-
focation 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 discom-
fort 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 an-
cient peoples, of those, indeed, who were the freest and the
most cultivated of all the ancients; and this, too, long after

attributes a preponderating influence in primitive societies to the indi-
vidual action of men of note. " To borrow Carlyle's words," he says,
"the perplexed jungle of primitive society springs out of many roots,
but the hero is the tap-root from which in a great degree all the rest
were nourished and grown. In Europe, where the landmarks of nation-
alities are fixed, and the fabric of civilisation firmly entrenched, people
are often inclined to treat as legendary the enormous part in the
foundation of their race or institutions attributed by primitive races
to their heroic ancestor. Yet it may be difficult to overrate the impres-
sion which must have been produced by daring and successful exploits
upon the primitive world, where the free impulsive play of a great
man's forces is little controlled by artificial barriers. ... In such
times, whether a group which is formed upon the open surface of
society shall spread out into a clan or tribe, or break up prematurely,
seems to depend very much upon the strength and energy of its
founder " [Asiatic Studies, Religious and Social, p. 168 ; Sir Alfred C.
Lyall, K. C. B., C. I. E., second edition, London, 1884. — TV.].

82 Laws of Imitation

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 ser-
pents, cats, bulls, and cows worshipped by prostrate popula-
tions ? Were not mysteries, metempsychoses, dogmas in ab-
solute 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 vio-
lated the taste of the period ? The attitude of the Romans to-
wards 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 ar-
raigned, whenever they come into opposition with the tra-
ditional 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 re-
magnetised. This fact shows us how it is that societies
come to imitate one another with increasing ease and ra-
pidity. 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 som-
nambulist; the older it grows, the more complex its dream
becomes, until it thinks that, because of this very complex-
ity, it has been awakened. But the child errs. When a
ten- or twelve-year-old boy leaves his family for school, he

What is a Society? 83

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 ad-
miration 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-mag-
netisation 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 in-
dividual 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 al-
ways 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 glqry or genius to bewitch him and to put him to
sleep. The college freshman, the Japanese traveller in Eu-
rope, 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 with-
drawn 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 re-

84 Laws of Imitation

spond 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 in-
tellectual effort; his mind, growing more and more stulti-
fied and, at the same time, more and more excited, be-
comes, 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 me-
dium 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 con-
nected magnetisations are the rule; the mutual magnetisa-
tion 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 in-
ferior 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

What is a Society ? 85

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 con-
queror 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 sin-
gular mixture of anaesthesia and hvperses.thesia of the senses,
is the dominant characteristic of somnambulists. Conse-
quently, 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 them-
selves 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 paral-
ysis 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-posses-
sion 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 som-
nambulism. But when timidity is routed, when one is put

86 Laws of Imitation

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 unresist-
ingly 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, con-
sequently, an incomplete magnetisation. It may be com-
pared 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 transi-
tion 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 dia-
monds, 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 cor-
responding stupor in taking up a science or art for the first
time (for the trouble produced by entrance into a new call-
ing 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 exagger-
ated. 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,

What is a Society ? 87

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 as-
sumed 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 circu-
lation of both the above forms of respect?

But I must not dwell any longer upon the above compari-
son. 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 prop-
osition, 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 as-
cendency 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 ? Inven-
tions are not made to order, nor are discoveries under-
taken 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

88 Laws of Imitation

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-som-
nambulists, 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." * 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 singu-
lar relation between two brains, one of which fascinates the
other, and that this relation consists of a special polarisa-
tion 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

1 [Mental Pathology, p. 68.— TV.]

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

CHAPTER IV

ARCHAEOLOGY AND STATISTICS

WHAT is history? This is the first question which pre-
sents itself to us. The most natural way for us to answer
it and, at the same time, formulate the laws of imitation, is
by turning our attention to two very distinct lines of re-
search which have been highly honoured in recent days, the
study of archaeology and the study of statistics. I will show
that as these studies have grown in value and fruitfulness, a
point of view similar to mine in the matter of social phe-
nomena has been unconsciously adopted in them and that, in
this respect, the general conclusions and salient points of
these two sciences, or, rather, of these two very dissimilar
methods, are seen to be remarkably similar. Let us first
consider the subject of archaeology.

When human skulls and implements of various kinds
happen to be found in some Gallo-Roman tomb, or in some
cave belonging to the stone age, the archaeologist keeps the
implements for himself and hands over the skulls to the an-
thropologist. The anthropologist studies races, the archae-
ologist, civilisations. It is useless for them to lock arms
with each other; they are, nevertheless, radically unlike, as
much as a horizontal line is unlike, even at the point of in-
tersection, the vertical line which may be erected upon it.
The anthropologist utterly ignores the biography of the Cro-
Magnon or Neanderthal man whom he is examining. He
cares nothing at all for this; his one aim is to distinguish

89

90 Laws of Imitation

the same racial character in one skull or skeleton after an-
other. Although this very racial character has been re-
produced and multiplied through heredity from some indi-
vidual peculiarity, still it is impossible for the anthropologist
to attempt to trace this back. The archaeologist likewise ig-
nores, three-quarters of the time, the names of the dead
whose ashes remain to be deciphered like an enigma and
looks for and sees in them only the artistic or industrial
process, or the characteristic desires and beliefs, or the rites,
dogmas, words, and grammatical forms that are revealed by
the contents of their tombs. And yet all these things were
transmitted and propagated by imitation from some single
and almost always unknown inventor for whose radiant in-
vention every one of the anonymous unearthed objects was
but an ephemeral vehicle, a mere place for growth.

The deeper the past in which the archaeologist buries him-
self the more he loses sight of personalities. Even manu-
scripts begin to be scarce prior to the twelfth century.
Besides, manuscripts, which are, for the most part, nothing
but official records, interest him primarily because of their
impersonal character. Then, nothing but buildings or their
ruins and, finally, nothing but a few remains of pottery and
bronze, of flint weapons and implements, survive for archae-
ological guess-work. And what a wonderful treasure of
facts and inferences, of invaluable information, has been
extracted in this humble shape from the earth's entrails
wherever the picks of modern excavators have penetrated,
in Italy, in Greece, in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Mesopota-
mia, in America ! There was a time when archaeology, like
numismatics, was only the servant of pragmatic history,
when the only merit that would have been recognised in the
present work of the Egyptologists was its confirmation of
the fragments of Manetho. At present, however, the roles
are inverted. Historians are nothing more than subordi-
nate guides, auxiliaries of those excavators who, revealing to
us the things about which the former are silent, give us the de-
tails, so to speak, of the fauna and flora, of the hidden wealth
of life and of the harmonious regularities of those lands

Archeology and Statistics 91

that are so picturesquely described by historic landscapists.
Through the archaeologists we know what particular group
of ideas, of professional or hieratic secrets, of peculiar de-
sires, constituted the individual whom the annalists call a
Roman or an Egyptian or a Persian. Below the surface, in
some way, of the violent and so-called culminating events
that are spoken of as conquests, invasions, or revolutions,
the archaeologists show us the daily and indefinite drift and
piling up of the sediments of true history, the stratifications
of successive and contagion-spread discoveries.

The archaeological point of view, therefore, is the best
from which to see that violent events which are in them-
selves dissimilar, and whose series are as irregular as moun-
tain ridges, have merely served to aid or hinder, to restrict
or enlarge, the quiet and even spread of various given ideas
of genius in certain more or less badly defined territories.
And just as Thucydides, Herodotus, and Livy become
mere cicerones, faithful or false as it happens, to the anti-
quarians, so the heroes of the historians, their generals,
statesmen, and legislators, may pass for the unconscious
and, at times, refractory servants of the numberless and ob-
scure inventors of bronze, of the art of weaving or writing,
of oar and sail and plough, whose very date and birthplace
cost the antiquarians even more effort to discover and locate
than their names. Of course there is no doubt but that
great warriors and statesmen have themselves had new and
brilliant ideas, true inventions in the big sense of the word,
but their inventions were bound not to be imitated.1 They
may be military plans or parliamentary measures, laws, de-
crees, or political revolutions, but they take no place in
history unless they promote or retard other kinds of inven-
tions which are already known and which are destined to
be peacefully imitated. History would pay no more at-
tention to the manoeuvres at Marathon, at Arabela, or at
Austerlitz than to so many skilful games of chess, were it

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

92 Laws of Imitation

not for the well-known influence which these victories had
respectively over the development of the arts of Greece in
Asia, and of French institutions in Europe.

History, as it is commonly understood, is, in short, only
the co-operation or opposition of certain non-imitable inven-
tions of merely temporary usefulness with or to a number of
useful and imitable inventions. As for the direct causation
of the latter by the former, it would be as impossible as the
creation of a lizard or" the development of the wing of a con-
dor through an upheaval of the Andes or Pyrenees. It is
true that the indirect action of the former is considerable,
for, as an invention is, after all, merely the singular inter-
section of heterogeneous imitations in one brain, — an excep-
tional brain, to be sure. — everything that opens fresh outlets
to the radiations of different imitations tends to multiply
the chances of such intersections.1

Here I shall open a parenthesis in order to anticipate an
objection. It may be urged that I am exaggerating the
social importance both of the sheepish tendency to imitate
and of the inventive imagination of mankind. Man does
not invent for the pleasure of inventing, but for the satis-
faction of some want that he experiences. Genius takes
its own time to unfold. Consequently, it is the series of
wants, not the series of inventions, which is the pre-em-
inently notable thing; and civilisation consists as much in
the gradual multiplication and replacing of wants as in the
gradual accumulation and substitution of arts and indus-
tries. On the other hand, man does not always imitate for
the pleasure of imitating either his ancestors or his foreign
contemporaries. Out of all those inventions, discoveries,
or theories which solicit his imitation or adhesion (his in-
tellectual imitation), he for the most part, or more and
more, imitates and adopts only those which seem to him to

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

Archaeology and Statistics 93

be useful and true. It is, then, a search for utility and
truth, not a tendency towards imitation, which characterises
the social man, and it were much better to define civilisation
as the growing utilisation or verification of. arts or ideas
than as the growing assimilation of muscular and cerebral
activities.

I answer by suggesting in the first place that, since the
desire for cannot precede the notion of an object, no social
desire can be prior to the invention by which the conception
of the commodity, or article, or service able to satisfy it,
was made possible. It is true that the invention was the re-
sponse to a vague desire, that, for example, the idea of the
electric telegraph solved the long-standing problem of a more
rapid epistolary form of communication. But it is in becom-
ing specific in this way that such a desire is spread and
strengthened, that it is born into the social world. Besides,
was it not developed itself by some past, or series of past, in-
ventions, as in the given example, by the establishment of a
postal service and, later, of the aerial telegraph ? Even phys-
ical needs cannot become social forces unless, as I have al-
ready had occasion to observe, they are made specific in an
analogous way. It is only too clear that the desire to smoke,
to drink tea or coffee, etc., did not appear until after the dis-
covery of tea, or coffee, or tobacco. Here is another ex-
ample among a thousand. " Clothing does not result from
modesty," M. Wiener justly observes (Le Perou); "on
the contrary, modesty appears as a result of clothing, that is
to say, the clothing which conceals any part of the human
body makes the nakedness of the part which we are accus-
tomed to see covered, appear indecent." In other words,
the desire to be clothed, in so far as it is a social desire, is
due to the discovery of clothing, of certain kinds of clothes.
Inventions are far from being, then, the simple effects of
social necessities; they are their causes. Nor do I think
that I have over-emphasised them. Inventors may, at given
times, direct their imagination in line with the vague desires
of the public, but we must not forget, I repeat, that these
popular desires have themselves been aroused by previous

94 Laws of Imitation

inventors who were in turn indirectly influenced by still
older inventors. This goes on until we finally find, on the
one hand, as the primordial and necessary basis of every
society and civilisation, certain simple, although very ar-
duous, inspirations which are due, undoubtedly, to a very
small number of innate and purely vital wants; and, on the
other hand, certain still more important chance discoveries
which were made for the mere pleasure of discovery, and
which were nothing more than the play of a naturally crea-
tive imagination. How many languages, religions, and
poems, how many industries even, have begun in this way !
So much for invention. The same answer may be made
in regard to imitation. It is true that we do not do every-
thing that we do through routine or fashion and that we
do not believe everything that we believe through prejudice
or on authority — although popular credulity, docility, and
passivity are immensely greater than is usually admitted.
But even when imitation is voluntary and deliberate, even
when we do and believe that which appears to be the most
useful and the most believable thing, our acts and thoughts
are predetermined. Our acts are what they are because
they are the fittest to satisfy and develop the wants which
previous imitation of other inventions had first seeded in us;
our thoughts, because they were the most consistent with the
knowledge acquired by us of other thoughts which were
themselves acquired because they were confirmed by other
preliminary ideas or by visual, tactile, and other kinds of
impressions which we got by renewing for ourselves certain
scientific experiences or observations, after the example of
those who first undertook them.1 Thus imitations, like in-

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

Archaeology and Statistics 95

ventions, are seen to be linked together one after the other,
in mutual if not in self dependence. If we follow back
this second chain as we did the first, we come, logically,
at last, to self-originating imitation, so to speak, to the
mental state of primitive savages who, like children, imi-
tate for the mere pleasure of imitating. This motive de-
termines most of their acts, all of the acts, in fact, which
belong to their social life. And so I have not overrated
the importance of imitation, either.

II

In brief, the picture of primitive society which rises be-
fore me is that of a feeble, wayward imagination scattered
here and there in the midst of a vast passive wiitativeness
which receives and perpetuates all its vagaries as the water
of a lake circles out under the stroke of a bird's wing on its
surface. It seems to me that archaeological researches fully
confirm this view. Sumner Maine says in his Early His-
tory of Institutions: " Mr. Taylor has justly observed the
true lesson of the new science of Comparative Mythology
is the barrenness in primitive times of the mental faculty
which we most associate with mental fertility, the Imagina-
tion. Comparative jurisprudence as might be expected
from the natural stability of law and custom yet more
strongly suggests the same inference." This observation
has only to be generalised. What is simpler, for example,
than to represent Fortune with a horn of plenty, or Venus
holding an apple in her hand? Yet Pausanias takes the
trouble to tell us that the former emblem was originally
conceived of by Bupalus, one of the oldest sculptors of
Greece, and the latter, by Canachus, a sculptor of y£gina.

sion of the ruling wants and purposes of the governing class at a given
time, and these wants and purposes may be always explained in the
way that I have already indicated.

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

96 Laws of Imitation

From these insignificant ideas in the minds of these two
men are derived, then, the innumerable statues of Fortune
and Venus which are characterised by these emblems.

Archaeological studies point to another fact which is just
as important although it has been less observed. They
show that in ancient times man was much less hermetically
bound up in his local traditions and customs and was much
more imitative of the outside world and open to foreign
fashions in the matter of trinkets, weapons, and even of in-
stitutions and industries, than we have been led to suppose.
It is truly surprising to find that at a certain period of antiq-
uity such a useless thing as amber was imported from its
original place of deposit on the Baltic to the extremes of
southern Europe. The similarity in the decorations of the
contemporary tombs of widely separated races is also a sur-
prising fact. " At the same very remote period," writes M.
Maury, on the subject of Euganean antiquities (Journal des
savants, 1882), "the same art, whose productions we are
now beginning to recognise, was spread through the littoral
provinces of Asia Minor, through the Archipelago, and
through Greece. The Etruscans seem to have held a
place in this school. Every nation modified its principles ac-
cording to its own genius." Finally, it is marvellous to find
that, even in the most primitive of prehistoric ages, the types
of flakes, of drawings, and of bone implements are the same
almost all over the globe.1 It seems as if every well-defined
archaeological period were distinguished by the preponderat-
ing prestige of some particular civilisation which illu-

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

Archaeology and Statistics 97

urinated and coloured all other rival or subject civilisations
somewhat as every palseontological period is the reign of
some great animal species, of some mollusk, reptile, or
pachydermus.

Archaeology can also show us that men have always been
much less original than they themselves are pleased' to be-
lieve. We come to overlook what we no longer look for,
and we no longer look for what we have always under our
eyes. For this reason, the faces of our fellow countrymen
always impress us by the dissimilarity of their distinctive
traits. Although they belong to the same race, we ignore
their common racial traits. On the other hand, the people
we see in our travels, Chinese, Arabians, negroes, all look
alike. One might say that the truth lay between these op-
posite impressions. But in this instance, as in most, the
method of averaging is erroneous. For the cause of
the illusion which partly blinds the man settled down among
his fellow citizens, the film of habit, does not dull the eye of
the traveller among strangers. Therefore, the impressions
of the latter are likely to be much more exact than those of
the former, and they testify to the fact that among indi-
viduals of the same race inherited traits of similarity always
outnumber traits of dissimilarity.

Well, for a like reason, in turning from the vital to the
social world, we are always exclusively impressed, not by
the analogies, but by the differences which are, in general,
apparent between the pictures and statues and writings of
ourcontemporary painters and sculptors and writers, and be-
tween the manners and gestures and witticisms of the friends
and acquaintances in our drawing rooms. When, however,
we glance over the works of Etruscan art in the Campana
Museum, or when we pass for the first time through gal-
leries of Dutch or Venetian or Florentine or Spanish art,
containing pictures of the same school or period, or when
we examine the mediaeval manuscripts in our archives, or
when, in a museum of historic art, we view the rifled con-
tents of Egyptian tombs, it seems to us that we are behold-
ing almost indistinguishable copies of a single model and

98 Laws of Imitation

that formerly, in the same country and at the same time,
every style of writing, painting, sculpturing, building, every
form of social life, in fact, was so much like every other
as to be taken for it. This impression cannot be mislead-
ing, and it, too, should make us realise, by analogy, that we
ourselves are infinitely more imitative than inventive. This
is no mean lesson to draw from archaeological studies. It is
certain that within a century almost all the novelists and
artists and, above all, the poets, — most of whom are the
apes or rather the lemurs of Victor Hugo, — of whose origi-
nality we so naively boast, will justly pass for the servile
copyists of one another.

In a preceding chapter I tried to prove that all or almost
all social resemblances were due to imitation just as all or
almost all vital resemblances were caused by heredity.
This simple principle has been implicitly and unanimously
accepted by modern archaeologists as the guiding thread in
the very obscure labyrinths of their immense subterraneous
excavations, and, from the services which it has already
rendered, we may predict those which it will still be called
upon to give. Suppose that an ancient Etruscan tomb is
discovered? How is its age to be determined?
What is the subject of its frescoes? We can solve
these problems by noting the slight and sometimes
elusive resemblances between its paintings and others of a
Greek origin ; and in this way we may at once infer that
Greece was already imitated by Etruria at the time when
the tomb was constructed. It does not occur to us to ex-
plain these resemblances as fortuitous coincidences. Imita-
tion is the postulate which serves as a guide in these ques-
tions, and which, under wise management, is never mis-
leading. Scholars are, to be sure, too often carried away
by the naturalistic prejudices of their times; they do not
limit themselves to deducing imitation from facts of re-
semblance, but infer kinship from them likewise. From
the fact, for example, that the vases, situlce, etc., found in
the excavations at Este, in Venetia, were curiously like
those found at Verona, Belluno, and elsewhere, M. Maury

Archaeology and Statistics 99

inclines to think that the builders of these different tombs
belonged to the same people. Nothing seems to justify this
conjecture. To be sure, M. Maury takes the trouble to add
that, " at any rate, they belonged to populations who
observed the same funeral rites and who possessed a com-
mon industry " — a somewhat different matter. At any
rate, it seems pretty certain that even if the so-called
Etruscans of the North, of Venetia, had Etruscan blood in
their veins, they mixed it very freely with Celtic blood. On
this point, M. Maury remarks elsewhere upon the influence
which a civilised nation has always exerted, even without
conquest, over its barbarous neighbours. " Etruscan works
of art were clearly imitated," he says, " by the Gauls of Cis-
alpine Gaul." And so likeness between artistic products is
no proof at all of consanguinity, it points only to a contagion
of imitation.

In order to connect the unknown with the known archae-
ologists have been obliged to seek for the secret of past
generations in the most remote and, to the lay eye, imper-
ceptible analogies in the matter of form, style, situation, lan-
guage, legend, dress, etc., thereby training themselves to
discover the unexpected everywhere. Some of these unex-
pected things are based on fact; others, on different de-
grees of likelihood according to a very extensive scale of
probability. In this way archaeologists have contributed in
a wonderful degree to deepening and widening the domain
of human imitativeness and to almost entirely reducing the
civilisation of every people, even that which at first may
seem to be the most original, into a combination of imitations
of other peoples. They know that Arabian art, in spite of
its distinctive features, is merely the fusion of Persian
with Greek art, that Greek art borrowed certain processes
from Egyptian and perhaps from other sources, and that
Egyptian art was formed from or amplified by many suc-
cessive Asiatic and even African contributions. There is
no assignable limit to this archaeological decomposition of
civilisations; there is no social molecule which their chem-
istry has not a fair hope of resolving into its constituent

loo Laws of Imitation

atoms. Meanwhile, their labours have reduced the number
of still indecomposable centres of civilisation to three or
four, in the Old World, and to one or two in the New. In
the latter, strange to say, they are all situated on plateaux
(•Mexico and Peru), and in the former, at the mouth or on
the banks of great rivers (the Nile, the Euphrates, the
Ganges, and the rivers of China), although great water
courses, as M. de Candolle justly remarks, are neither more
uncommon nor more unhealthy in America than in Europe
and Asia, and although habitable plateaux are not lacking
in these latter parts of the world. The arbitrary factor
which influences the choice of the first makers or importers
of civilisation in the pitching of their tents shows itself here.
And, perhaps, the civilisations that come from them will
bear to the end of time the ineffaceable mark of their
primordial caprice!

Thanks to the archaeologists we learn where and when a
new discovery first appeared, how far and how long it has
spread, and by what roads it has travelled from the place of
its origin to its adopted country. Although they may not
take us back to the first furnace which turned out bronze
or iron, they do take us back to the first country and
century in which the pointed arch, printing, and oil-paint-
ing, and, still much more anciently, the orders of Greek
architecture, the Phoenician alphabet, etc., displayed them-
selves to a justly marvelling world. They devote all their
curiosity1 and activity to following up a given invention
through its manifold disguises and modifications, to recog-
nising the atrium in the cloister, the praetorium of the Ro-
man magistrate in the Roman church, the Etruscan bench
in the curule-chair, or to tracing out the boundaries of the
region to which an invention has spread through gradual

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

Archaeology and Statistics 101

self-propagation and beyond which, for yet to be discovered
reasons (in my opinion they are always the competition of
rival inventions), it has been unable to pass, or to studying
the results of the intersection of different inventions which
have spread so widely that they have finally come together
in one imaginative brain.

In short, these scholars are forced, perhaps uncon-
sciously, into surveying the social life of the past from a
point of view which is continually approximating that
which I claim should be adopted knowingly and willingly by
the sociologist. I refer here to the pure sociologist, who,
through a necessary although artificial abstraction, is dis-
tinguished from the naturalist. In distinction to histo-
rians who see nothing else in history than the conflicts and
competitions of individuals, that is, of the arms and legs as
well as of the minds of individuals, and who, in regard to
the latter, do not differentiate between ideas and desires of
the most diverse origins, confusing those few that are new
and personal with a mass of those that are merely copies; in
distinction to those poor carvers-up of reality who have
been unable to perceive the true dividing line between vital
and social facts, the point where they separate without tear-
ing, archaeologists stand out as makers of pure sociology, be-
cause, as the personality of those they unearth is impene-
trable, and only the work of the dead, the vestiges of their
archaic wants and ideas, are open to their scrutiny, they
hear, in a certain way, like the Wagnerian ideal, the music
without seeing the orchestra of the past. In their own
eyes, I know, this is a cruel deprivation; but time, in de-
stroying the corpses and blotting out the memories of the
painters and writers and modellers whose inscriptions and
palimpsests they decipher and whose frescoes and torsos
and potsherds they so laboriously interpret, has, neverthe-
less, rendered them the service of setting free everything
that is properly social in human events by eliminating
everything that is vital and by casting aside as an impurity
the carnal and fragile contents of the glorious form which
is truly worthy of resurrection.

IO2 Laws of Imitation

To archaeologists, then, history becomes both simplified
and transfigured. In their eyes it consists merely of the
advent and development, of the competitions and conflicts,
of original wants and ideas, or, to use a single term,
of inventions. Inventions thus become great historic
figures and the real agents of human progress. The proof
that this idealistic point of view is the just one, lies in its
fruitfulness. Through its happy, although, I repeat, in-
voluntary, adoption, do not philologist and mythologist, the
modern archaeologist, under different names, cut all the
Gordian knots and shed light upon all the obscurities
of history and, without taking away any of its grace
and picturesqueness, bestow upon it the charm of the-
ory? If history is on the way to become a science, is
it not due to this point of view ?

Ill

Something is likewise due to the statistician. The stat-
istician, like the archaeologist, considers human affairs from
an entirely abstract and impersonal standpoint. He pays
no attention to individuals, to Peter or Paul; he concerns
himself only with their works, or, rather, with those acts of
theirs which reveal their wants and ideas, with the act of
buying or selling, of manufacturing, of voting, of commit-
ting or repressing crime, of suing for judicial separation,
and even with the acts of being born, of marrying, of pro-
creating, and of dying. All these individual acts are re-
lated on some of their sides to social life, in as much as
the spread of certain examples or prejudices seems to aid
in raising or lowering the rates of birth and marriage, and
to affect the prolificness of marriages and the mortality
of infants.

If archaeology is the collection and classification of similar
products where the highest possibledegreeof similarity is the
most important thing, Statistics is an enumeration of acts
which are as much alike as possible. Here the art is in the

Archaeology and Statistics 103

choice of units; the more alike and equal they are, the better
they are. What is the subject of Statistics unless, like that of
archaeology, it is inventions and the imitative editions of
inventions? Only, the latter study treats of inventions
which are for the most part dead, worn out by their very
activity, whereas the former treats of living inventions
which are often modern or contemporaneous and which are
in actual process of growth and expansion, of arrest or of
decay. The one is the palaeontology, the other the physi-
ology, of society. While archaeology tells us that speci-
mens of Greek pottery were transported in Phoenician ves-
sels at a certain rate of speed to certain places on the shores
of the Mediterranean and far beyond, Statistics tells us what
islands of Oceanica, how near the North or the South Pole,
the English vessels of to-day carry the cotton goods of Eng-
land and what number of yards they annually export to
foreign markets. We must admit, however, that the field
of invention seems to belong more especially to archaeology,
and that of imitation, to Statistics. While jthe former en-
deavours to follow out the thread between successive dis-
coveries, the latter excels in estimating their individual ex-
pansion. The domain of archaeology is the more philo-
sophic, that of Statistics, the more scientific.

To be sure, the methods of these two sciences are pre-
cisely opposite to each other, but this is because of the dif-
ference in the external conditions of their investigations.
Archaeology studies the scattered examples of the same art
a long time before it is able to hazard a conjecture about
the origin or date of the primary process from which it has
developed. For example, all the Indo-European languages
must be known before they can be related to a perhaps im-
aginary mother tongue, to Aryac, or to their elder sister,
Sanskrit. Archaeology laboriously travels back from imita-
tions to their source. The science of statistics, on the other
hand, almost always knows the source of the expansions
which it is measuring; it goes from causes to effects, from
discoveries to their more or less successful development ac-
cording to given years and countries. By means of its sue-

IO4 Laws of Imitation

cessive records, it will tell you that, from the time that the
invention of steam engines began to gradually spread and
strengthen the need for coal throughout France, the output
of French coal increased at a perfectly regular rate and that
from 1759 to 1869 it multiplied sixty-two and one-half
times. In the same way you may also learn that after the
discovery of beet sugar, or, rather, after the utility of the
discovery was no longer doubted, the manufacture of this
commodity was increased at an equally regular rate from
seven millions of kilograms in 1828 (until then it was al-
most stationary for the reason implied above) to one hun-
dred and fifty millions of kilograms thirty years later
(Maurice Block).

I have taken the less interesting examples, but do we not
witness by means of even these dry figures the birth and
gradual establishment and progress of a new want or fash-
ion in the community? In general, there is nothing more
instructive than the chronological tables of statisticians, in
which they show us the increasing rise or fall, year by year,
of some special kind of consumption or production, of some
particular political opinion as it is expressed in the returns
of the ballot box, or of some specific desire for security that
is embodied in fire-insurance premiums, in savings-bank ac-
counts, etc. These are all, at bottom, representations in the
life of some desire or belief that has been imported and
copied. Every one of these tables, or, rather, every one of the
graphical curves which represent them, is, in a way, an his-
torical monograph. Taken together they form the best his-
torical narrative that it is possible to have. Synchronous
tables giving comparisons between provinces or between
countries are generally much less interesting. Let us con-
trast, as data for philosophic reflection, a table of crimi-
nality in the departments of France with a curve showing
the increase of recidivists during the last fifty years; or,
let us compare the proportion of the urban to the rural
population with that of the urban population year by
year. We shall see in the latter case, for example, that the
proportion increased from 1851 to 1882 at a regular and

Archaeology and Statistics 105

uninterrupted rate from twenty-five to thirty-three per cent.,
i. e., from a fourth to a third. This fact evidences the ac-
tion of some definite social cause, whereas a comparison of
the proportions between two neighbouring departments, be-
tween twenty-eight per cent., for example, in the one, and
twenty-six per cent, in the other, is not at all instructive.
Similarly, a table giving the civil burials which had occurred
in Paris or in the provinces for the last ten years would
be significant; just as a comparison of the number of civil
burials in France, England, and Germany at any given time
would be relatively valueless. I do not mean that it would be
useless to state that in 1870 the number of private telegraphic
despatches amounted in France to fourteen millions, in Ger-
many to eleven millions, and in England to twenty-four
millions. But it is much more instructive to know that in
France, especially, there had been an increase from nine
thousand despatches in 1851 to four millions in 1859, to ten
millions in 1869, and, finally, to fourteen millions in 1879.
We cannot follow this varying rate of increase without be-
ing reminded of the growth of living things. Why is there
this difference between curves and tables? Because, as a
rule, although there are many exceptions, curves alone deal
with the spread of imitation.

Statistics evidently follows a much more natural course
than archaeology and, although it supplies the same kind of
information, it is much more accurate. Its method is pre-
eminently the sociological method, and it is only because
we cannot apply it to extinct societies that we substitute the
method of archeeology. How many trivial medals and mo-
saics, how many cinerary urns and funeral inscriptions, we
should be willing to exchange for the industrial, the com-
mercial, or even the criminal statistics of the Roman Em-
pire! But in order that Statistics may render all the ser-
vices which we expect of it and may triumph against the
ironical criticism to which it is exposed, it must, like archae-
ology, be conscious both of its true usefulness and of its
actual limitations; it must know where it is going and
where it should go, nor must it underrate the dangers of

106 Laws of Imitation

the road which will take it to its goal. In itself it is merely a
substitute. Psychological statistics which would take note
of the individual gains and losses of special beliefs and de-
sires called forth originally by some innovator, would alone,
if the thing were practically possible, give the underlying
explanation of the figures of ordinary statistics.1 Ordinarily
Statistics does not weigh; it only counts, and in its reck-
oning it includes nothing but acts, acts of manufacture
and consumption, purchases, sales, crimes, prosecutions,
etc. But it is only after it has reached a certain
degree of intensity that growing desire becomes ac-
tion, or that decreasing desire suddenly unmasks itself
and gives way to some contrary and hitherto restrained
desire. This is also true of belief. In looking over
the work of statisticians, it is most important to re-
member that the things which are under calculation are es-
sentially subjective qualities, desires and beliefs, and that
very often the acts which they enumerate, although equal
in number, give expression to very different weights among
these things. At certain times during the last century,
church attendance remained numerically the same, whereas
religious faith was on the decline. . When the prestige of a
government has been injured, the devotion of its adherents
may be half destroyed although their number may hardly
have diminished. This fact is shown by the vote on the
very eve of a sudden political downfall. It is a source of
delusion to those who are unduly reassured or discouraged
by electoral statistics.

Successful imitations are numerous indeed, but how few
they are in comparision with those which are still unreal-
ised ojects of desire! So-called popular wishes, the aspira-
tions of a small town, for example, or of a single class, are

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

Archeology and Statistics 107

composed exclusively, at a given moment, of tendencies,
which, unfortunately, cannot at the time be realised, to ape
in all particulars some richer town or some superior class.
This body of simian proclivities constitutes the potential
energy of a society. It takes only a commercial treaty, or a
new discovery, or a political revolution, events which make
certain luxuries and powers, which had before been re-
served for the privileged ones of fortune or intellect, ac-
cessible to those possessing thinner purses or fewer abilities,
to convert it into actual energy. This potential energy,
then, is of great importance, and it would be well to bear
its fluctuations in mind. And yet ordinary statistics seem
to pay no attention to this force. The labour of making an
approximate estimate of it would seem ridiculous, although
it might be done by many indirect methods and might at
times be of advantage to Statistics. In this respect, archae-
ology is superior in the information which it gives us
about buried societies; for although it may teach us less
about their activities in point of detail and precision, it
pictures their aspirations more faithfully. A Pompeiian
fresco reveals the psychological condition of a provincial
town under the Roman Empire much more clearly than all
the statistical volumes of one of the principal places of a
French department can tell us about the actual wishes of its
inhabitants.

Let me add, that Statistics is of such recent origin that it
it has not yet shot out all its branches, whereas its older col-
laborator has ramified in all directions. There is an
archaeology of language, comparative philology, which
draws up separate monographs for us of the life of every
root from its accidental origin in the mouth of some ancient
speaker through its endless reproductions and multiplica-
tions by means of the remarkable uniformity of innumer-
able generations of men. There is in archaeology of reli-
gion, comparative mythology, which deals separately with
every myth and with its endless imitative editions, just as
philology treats every word. There is an archaeology of
law, of politics, of ethnology, and, finally, of art and indus-

io8 Laws of Imitation

try. They likewise devote a separate treatise to every legal
idea or fiction, to every custom or institution, to every type
or creation of art, to every industrial process, and, in addi-
tion, to the power of reproduction by example which is
peculiar to each of these things. And we have a corre-
sponding number of distinct and flourishing sciences. But,
hitherto, in the matter of truly and exclusively sociological
statistics, we have had to be content with statistics of com-
merce and industry, and with judicial statistics, not to speak
of certain hybrid statistics which straddle both the physio-
logical and the social worlds, statistics of population, of
births, marriages, deaths, medical statistics, etc. In tables of
election figures we have merely the germ of political statis-
tics.1 As to religious statistics, which should give us a
graphic representation of the relative annual spread of dif-
ferent sects and of the thermometric variations, so to speak,
in the faith of their adherents; as to linguistic statistics,
which should figure for us not only upon the comparative
expansion of different idioms, but upon the vogue or decline,
in each one of them, of every vocable, of every form of
speech, I fear that, if I should say anything more about
these hypothetical sciences, I might bring a smile to the lips
of my readers.

However, I have amply justified the assertion that the
statistician looks at human affairs from the same point of
view as the archaeologist and that this point of view coin-
cides with mine. At the risk of distorting it, let me simplify
it in a brief summary before we continue. In the midst of
an incoherent mass of historic facts, a puzzling dream or
nightmare, reason vainly seeks for an order which it does

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

Archaeology and Statistics 109

not find because it refuses to look in the right direction.
Sometimes it imagines that this order has been found and,
in its conception of history as the fragment of a poem which
is unintelligible except in its entirety, it refers us for the
solution of the enigma to the moment when the final des-
tinies of humanity shall have been fulfilled and its most
hidden origins absolutely revealed. We may as well repeat
the famous phrase: Ignorabimus. But if we look beneath
the names and dates of history, beneath its battles and
revolutions, what do we see? We see specific desires that
have been excited or sharpened by certain inventions or
practical initiatives, each of which appears at a certain point
from which, like a luminous body, it shoots out incessant
radiations which harmoniously intersect with thousands of
analogous vibrations in whose multiplicity there is an en-
tire lack of confusion. We also see specific beliefs that
have been produced by certain discoveries or hypotheses
that also radiate at a variable rate and within variable
limits. The order in which these inventions or discoveries
appear and are developed is, in a large measure, merely
capricious and accidental; but, at length, through an evi-
table elimination of those which are contrary to one; another
(i. e., of those which more or less contradict one another
through some of their implicit propositions), the simulta-
neous group which they form becomes harmonious and
coherent. Viewed thus as an expansion of waves issuing
from distinct centres and as a logical arrangement of these
centres and of their circles of vibration, a nation, a city, the
most humble episode in the so-called poem of history, be-
comes a living and individual whole, a fine spectacle for the
contemplation of the philosopher.

IV

If this point of view is correct, if it is really the fittest
from which to elucidate social events on their regular,
numerable, and measurable sides, it follows that Statistics

no Laws of Imitation

should adopt it, not partially and unconsciously, but know-
ingly and unreservedly, and thus, like archaeology, be spared
many fruitless investigations and tribulations. 1 will enu-
merate the principal consequences that would result from
this. In the first place, sociological Statistics, having acquired
a touchstone for the knowledge of what did and what did not
belong to it, and having become convinced that the immense
field of human imitation, and only that field, was its exclu-
sive possession, would leave to naturalists the care of
tabulating statistics so purely anthropological in their
results as, for example, the statistics of exemption from
military service in the different departments of France, or
the task of constructing tables of mortality (I do not include
tables of birth rates, for, in this case, example is a powerful
factor in restraining or stimulating racial fecundity). This
is pure biology, just as much as the use of M. Marey's
graphical method, or as the observation of disease through
the myograph and sphgymograph and pneumograph,
mechanical statisticians, so to speak, of contractions and
pulsations and respiratory movements.

In the second place, the sociological statistician would
never forget that his proper task was the measurement of
specific beliefs and desires and the use of the most direct
methods to grasp these elusive quantities, and that an
enumeration of acts which resembled each other as much as
possible (a condition which is badly fulfilled by criminal
statistics among others), and, failing this, an enumeration
of like products, of articles of commerce, for example,
should always relate to the following, or, rather, to the two
following ends: (i) through the tabulation of acts or
products to trace out the curve of the successive increases,
standstills, or decreases in every new or old want and in
every new or old idea, as it spreads out and consolidates
itself or as it is crushed back and uprooted; (2) through
a skilful comparision between series that have been obtained
in this way, and through emphasising their concomitant va-
riations, to denote the various aids and hindrances which
these different imitative propagations or consolidations of

Archaeology and Statistics 1 1 1

wants and ideas lend or oppose to one another (according
to the varying degrees in which the more or less numerous
and implicit propositions of which they always consist,
more or less endorse or contradict one another). Nor
should the sociological statistician neglect the influence, in
these matters, of sex, age, temperament, climate, and
seasons, natural causes whose force is measured, at any rate
when it exists, by physical or biological statistics.

In other words, sociological statistics have: (i) to de-
termine the imitative power which inheres in every inven-
tion at any given time and place; (2) to demonstrate the
beneficial or harmful effects which result from the imitation
of given inventions and, consequently, to influence those
who are acquainted with such numerical results, in their
tendencies towards following or disregarding the examples
in question. In brief, the entire object of this kind of re-
search is the knowledge and control of imitations. Medical
statistics may be cited to show how the latter aim has been
reached. Medical statistics, as a matter of fact, are related
to social science in as much as they compare the proportion,
in the case of every disease, of sufferers who are cured by
the use of the different methods and remedies of ancient
or recent discovery. In this way it has contributed to the
spread of vaccination, of the treatment of the itch by para-
siticides, etc. Statistics which show that crime, suicide, and
mental derangements are greatly increased through residence
in cities would tend to moderate, very feebly to be sure, the
great current of imitation which carries the country popula-
tion to the cities. M. Bertillon assures us that even statistics
of marriage would encourage us to make an even greater
use than we do of that very ancient invention of our fore-
fathers,— a more original invention, let me say, parenthet-
ically, than it may seem, — in showing us the diminished
mortality of married men in comparision with bachelors of
a corresponding age. But I must not linger on this deli-
cate subject.

The second of the two problems which I have just noted
and which seem to me to impose themselves upon the statis-

H2 Laws of Imitation

tician, cannot be solved before the first. It is perhaps well to
note this fact. Are we not putting the cart before the horse
when we try to calculate, as we often do, the influence of
certain punishments, for example, or religious beliefs or of
a certain kind of education upon criminal tendencies before
we have measured the force of these tendencies in free play,
in the days of mob rule, when the populations are uncon-
trolled by police or priest or teacher, and turn to arson,
murder, and pillage, deeds which are at once imitated from
one end of a country to the other ?

The preliminary operation, then, would be the prepara-
tion of a table of our principal innate or gradually acquired
desires, beginning with the social desire to marry or have
children, and of our principal old or new beliefs; or, which
is one and the same thing, of certain families of acts, be-
longing to a single type, and expressing, with more or
less exactness, its intrinsic powers. In this connection, com-
mercial and industrial statistics, statistics that become so
interesting from the above standpoint, are of especial value.
Does not every article which is made or sold, correspond,
in fact, to some special desire or idea ? Does not the prog-
ress of its sale and manufacture at a given time and place
express its motor power, i. e., its rate of propagation, as
well as its mass, as it were, i. e., its importance? Statistics
of commerce and industry are, then, the main foundation
of all other statistics. Better still, if the thing were
practicable, would be the application, on a larger scale,
to the living, of the method of investigation which arch-
aeology uses in relation to the dead. I mean a precise
and complete house-to-house inventory of all the furniture
in a given country and the annual numerical variations in
all of its different kinds of furniture. This would give us
an excellent photograph of our social condition; it would
be somewhat analogous to the admirable pictures of extinct
civilisations which the delvers into the past have made in
their careful inventories of the contents of the tombs, the
houses of the dead, of Egypt, Italy, Asia Minor, and
America.

Archeology and Statistics 113

But in the absence of such an inquisitorial census as I
have in mind and of the glass houses which it presupposes,
complete and systematic statistics of commerce and indus-
try, and, particularly, statistics of publications showing us
the relative changes in the annual publication of different
kinds of books, suffice to give us the needed data. Theoret-
ically, judicial statistics take a second place, and it must be
admitted that, although in one way they are more pro-
foundly interesting, in another, they are inferior. Their
units lack similarity. If I am told that during the current
year a certain furnace has turned out one million steel rails
or that a given manufactory is in receipt of ten thousand
bales of cotton, I have to deal with like units representing like
wants. But it would be idle to divide thefts, for example, or
distraints into classes and sub-classes; we should never
succeed in keeping distinct acts which are quite dissimilar,
inspired as they are by different wants and ideas, proceed-
ing from different origins and belonging, in this way, to
many different classes of activity. The most one could do
would be to make a separate column for the assassinations
of women by mutilation or poisonings by strychnine or other
offences of recent contrivance which really fall into one
group and constitute certain characteristic criminal
fashions. Felonies and misdemeanours should properly be
classified according to their methods of execution. Then
the empire of imitation in such matters could be seen. It
would be necessary to descend to details. If crimes could
be classified according to the nature of the prize at stake, or
of the hardship eliminated, we should have a different and
yet a natural kind of classification which would reproduce
under a new form a classification of the industrial articles or
services whose purchase procures for honest people corre-
sponding satisfactions.

ii4 Laws of Imitation

When the field of sociological statistics has been clearly
defined, when the curves relating to the propagation, that is
to say, to the consolidation as well, of every special want
and opinion, for a certain number of years and over a certain
stretch of country, have been plainly traced, the interpreta-
tion of these hieroglyphic curves, curves that are at times as
strange and picturesque as mountain profiles, more often
as sinuous and graceful as living forms, has still to be made.
I am very much mistaken if our point of view will not
prove very helpful here. The lines in question are always
ascending or horizontal or descending, or, if they are ir-
regular, they can always be decomposed in the same way into
three kinds of linear elements, into inclines, plateaux, and
declines. According to Quetelet and his school, the pla-
teaux would belong pre-eminently to the statistician; their
discovery should be his finest triumph and the constant
object of his ambition. According to this view, the most
fitting foundation for a social physics would be the uniform
reproduction, during a considerable period, of the same num-
ber, not only of births and marriages, but also of crimes and
litigations. Hence the error (it no longer exists, to be sure,
thanks, especially, to recent official statistics concerning the
progressive criminality of the last half-century), of
thinking that the latter figures have, in reality, been
uniformly reproduced. But if the reader has taken the
trouble to follow me, he will realise that, without detract-
ing at all from the importance of the horizontal lines,
the ascending lines, indicating as they do the regular
spread of some kind of imitation, have a far higher theoret-
ical value. The reason is this: The fact that a new taste
or idea has taken root in a mind which is constituted
in a certain fashion carries with it no reason why this inno-
vation should not spread more or less rapidly through an
indefinite number of supposedly like minds in communi-

Archaeology and Statistics 115

cation with one another. It would spread instantane-
ously through all these minds if they were absolutely
alike and if their intercommunication were perfect. It is
this ideal, an ideal that is happily beyond realisation, that we
are fast approaching. The rapid diffusion of telephones in
America from the moment of their first appearance there
is one proof in point. This ideal is almost reached already
in the matter of legislative innovations. Laws or de-
crees which were once slowly and laboriously administered
in one province after another are to-day executed from
one end to the other of a state the very day of their pas-
sage or promulgation. This occurs because in this case
there is no hindrance whatsoever. Lack of communication
in social physics plays the same role as lack of elasticity in
physics. The one hinders imitation as much as the other,
vibration. But the imitative spread of certain well-known
inventions (railroads, telegraphs, etc.), tends to diminish,
to the benefit of every other invention, this insufficiency of
mental contact. As for mental dissimilarity, it likewise
tends to be effaced by the spread of wants and ideas which
have arisen from past inventions and whose work of as-
similation in this way facilitates the propagation of future
inventions. I mean of future non-contradictory inventions.
When wants or ideas are once started, they always
tend to continue to spread of themselves in a true geometric
progression.1 This is the ideal scheme to which their curve
would conform if they could spread without mutual obstruc-
tion. But as such checks are, at one time or another, inevita-
ble, and as they continue to increase, every one of these social
forces must eventually run up against a wall which for the
time being is insurmoutable and must through accident,
not at all through natural necessity, fall temporarily into
that static condition whose meaning statisticians in general

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

1 1 6 Laws of Imitation

appear to so little understand. In this case, as in all others,
a static condition means equilibrium, a joint standstill of
concurrent forces. I am far from denying the theoretic in-
terest of this state, because these equilibria are equivalent to
equations. If, for example, I see that the consumption of
coffee or chocolate has ceased to increase in a certain country
at a certain date, I know that the strength of the desire there
for coffee or chocolate is exactly equal to that of certain rival
desires which would have to remain unsatisfied, considering
the average fortune, by a more ample satisfaction of the
former. The price of every article is determined in this
way. But does not every one of the annual figures in pro-
gressive series or slopes also express an equation between
the strength, at a certain date, of the desire in question and
the strength of competing desires which hindered its further
development at the same date? Moreover, if progression
ceased at one point rather than at another, if the plateau is
neither higher nor lower than it is, is it not because of a
mere accident of history, that is to say, because of the fact
that the opposing invention, from which arose the antago-
nistic wants that barred the progress in question, appeared at
one time and place rather than at another, or because of the
fact that it actually did appear instead of not appearing at
all?

Plateaux, let me add, are always unstable equilibria. After
an approximately horizontal position has been sustained for
a more or less prolonged time, the curve begins to rise or fall,
the series begins to grow or diminish with the appearance of
new auxiliary and confirmatory or antagonistic and contra-
dictory inventions. As for diminishing series, they are
merely, as we see, the result of successful growths which
have suppressed some declining public taste or opinion which
was once in vogue; they do not deserve the attention of the
theorist except as the other side of the picture of the grow-
ing series which they presuppose.

Let me also state that whenever the statistician is able to
lay hold of the origin of an invention and to trace out year by
year its numerical career, he shows us curves which, for a

Archeology and Statitiscs 117

certain time, at least, are constantly rising, and rising, too,
although for a much shorter period, with great regularity.
If this perfect regularity fail to continue, it is for reasons
which I will shortly indicate. But when very ancient in-
ventions like monogamy or Christian marriage are under
consideration, inventions which have had time to pass
through their progressive period and which have rounded
out, so to speak, their whole sphere of imitation, we ought
not to be surprised if Statistics, in its ignorance of their be-
ginnings, represents them by horizontal lines that show
scarce a deviation. In view of this, there is nothing aston-
ishing in the fact that the proportion of the annual number
of marriages to the total population remains about constant
(except in France, I may say, where there is a gradual dim-
inution in this proportion) or even in the fact that the in-
fluence of marriage upon crime or suicide is expressed each
year by pretty much the same figures. Here we are dealing
with ancient institutions which have passed into the blood
of a people just like the natural factors of climate, seasons,
temperament, sex, and age, which influence the mass of
human acts with such striking uniformity (which has been
greatly exaggerated, however, as it is much more circum-
scribed than is generally supposed) and with a regularity
that is also remarkable, in quite a different way, again, in
connection with vital phenomena like death and disease.

And yet, what do we find at the bottom of even these uni-
form series? Let us see; the digression will be brief. Statis-
tics have shown, for example, that the death rate from one to
five years of age is always three times greater in the littoral
departments of the Mediterranean than in the rest of France,
or, at any rate, than in more favoured departments. The ex-
planation of this fact is found, it seems, in the extreme heat
of the Provencal climate during summer. This season is as
harmful to early infancy (another statistical revelation con-
trary to current opinion) as winter is to old age. At any
rate, climate intervenes in this instance, as a constant and
fixed cause. But what is climate but a nominal entity by
which a certain group of realities is expressed, to wit : the

1 1 8 Laws of Imitation

sun, a radiation of light which tends towards indefinite ex-
pansion in unbounded space and which the earth-obstacle
opposes and checks; the winds, i. e., fragments of more or
less well demarcated cyclones which are continually striving
to swell themselves out and reach over the entire globe and
which are held in check only by mountain chains or counter
whirlwinds; altitude, the effect of up-pushing subterranean
forces which hoped for an endless expansion of the happily
resistant crust of the earth; latitude, the effect of the rota-
tion of the still fluid terrestial globe in its vain efforts at
further contraction; the nature of the earth, that is, of
molecules whose but partially satisfied affinities are engaged
in fruitless activity and whose power of attraction, venting
itself over any distance, strives for impossible contacts;
finally, to a certain extent, the earth's flora, its various veg-
etal species or varieties, each of which, from discontent with
its own habitat, would cover the entire surface of the globe
except for the restraint imposed upon its avidity by the
rivalry of all the others.

I might just as well say of age, sex, and other influences
of nature what I have said of climate. In short, all external
realities, whether physical or vital, display the same infinite
unrealised and unreali sable ambitions, ambitions that re-
ciprocally stimulate and paralyse one another. The thing
in them that we call the fixity or immutability of the laws of
nature, the supreme reality, is, at bottom, only their inabil-
ity to travel further in their strictly natural course and real-
ise themselves more fully. Well, this is also true of the fixed
(the momentarily fixed) influences which Statistics discovers
or pretends to discover in the social order; for social realities,
ideas and desires, are not less ambitious than others, and it
is into them that analysis resolves those social entities which
are called customs, institutions, language, legislation, reli-
gion, science, industry, and art. The oldest of these things,
those past adolescence, have ceased to grow; but the younger
are still developing. One proof of this, among others, is
seen in the incessant swelling of our budgets. They have
enlarged, and will continue to enlarge until some final catas-

Archaeology and Statistics . 119

trophe occur which will be, in turn, the point of departure
for a renewed increase which will end in the same way, and
so on indefinitely. Without going back of 1819, from that
date to 1869 the amount of indirect taxes has arisen very reg-
ularly from 544 to 1323 millions of francs. When thirty-
three or thirty-seven millions of men, — thirty-three in 1819,
thirty-seven in 1869, — have increasing wants because they
are copying one another more and more, they must produce
and consume more and more in order to satisfy their wants,
and it is inevitable that their public expenditures should in-
crease in proportion to their private expenditures.1

If our European civilisation had long ago put forth, like
Chinese civilisation, all that it was able to in the matters of
invention and discovery, if, while living upon its old capital,
it was exclusively composed of old wants and ideas, without
the slightest new addition whatsoever, Quetelet's wish
would probably, in accordance with what has preceded, be
fulfilled.

If statistics were applied to every aspect of our social life,
they would lead in all cases to certain uniform series,
which would unroll horizontally and which would be quite
analogous to the famous " laws of nature." It is perhaps
because Nature is much older than we, and because she has
had the requisite time in which to bring to this state of in-
ventive exhaustion all her own civilisations — I mean her
living types (true cellular societies, as we know) — that we
ascribe to her the fixity and permanence that we praise so
highly. This is the reason for that fine and so much ad-
mired periodicity of the figures given by sociologico-physio>-
logical Statistics, so to speak, which obstinately insists upon
emphasising the constantly uniform influences of age or sex
upon criminality or nuptiality. We could be certain in
advance of such regularity, just as we could be sure, if

1 This increase is not peculiar to the nineteenth century. M. Dela-
hante says (Une famille de finances an XVI I Ie siecle) that under the
ancient regime " the ferme generate brought in to the government a
steadily increasing revenue of from one hundred to one hundred and
sixty millions. [I, 195, Paris, 1880. — Tr.]

1 20 Laws of Imitation

we classified criminals as nervous, bilious, lymphatic, or
sanguine, or, who knows, even as blondes or brunettes, that
the annual participation of each of these groups in the annual
perpetration of crime would be seen to be always the same.

Perhaps I had better draw attention to the fact that cer-
tain statistical regularities which seem to be of another kind
belong, at bottom, to the above-mentioned group. For ex-
ample, why for the last fifty years, at least, have the convic-
tions of police courts been appealed nearly at the rate of
forty-five per thousand, whereas, during the same period,
the public prosecutor has been steadily cutting down the
number of his appeals to one-half? This decrease in
the government's appeals is the direct effect of increas-
ing imitation in the legal profession. But how can
the numerical standstill in the matter of prisoners' appeals
be explained? Let us observe that when the man who
has been sentenced is considering whether or not he should
carry his case to a higher court he is not usually in-
fluenced by what other men like himself are doing or would
do under similar circumstances. He is generally ignorant
about such examples. He pays even less attention to the
statistics that would prove to him that courts of appeal are
becoming more and more inclined to confirm the decisions
of the lower courts. But, other things being equal (that is,
reasons for hope or fear, based upon the circumstances of
the case, having on an average the same annual weight), it
is the degree of boldness in the man's nature which influences
him either to fear failure or hope for success, thereby
making him act in one way or the other. Here, again, as
an additional weight in the balance is the definite quantity
of daring and self-confidence which goes to make up the
usual temperament of delinquents and which necessarily
finds expression as such in the uniform proportion of their
appeals.

The error made by Quetelet may be explained historically.
The first attempts of Statistics were concerned, to be sure,
with population, that is, with the birth, death, and marriage
rates that prevailed among both sexes at different ages and

Archaeology and Statistics 121

in different places, and, as these effects of climatic and
physiological or of very ancient social causes naturally gave
rise to regular repetitions of almost constant figures, the
mistake was made of generalising observations that subse-
quently proved false. And thus it was possible for statistics,
whose regularity only expresses, at bottom, the imitative
bondage of the masses to the individual fancies or concep-
tions of superior individuals, to be called upon to confirm
the current prejudice that the general facts of social life are
determined, not by human minds and wills, but by certain
myths that are called natural laws !

And yet statistics of population should have opened our
eyes by this time. The total of population never remains
stationary in any country; it increases or decreases at a rate
which is singularly variable among different peoples and in
different centuries. How can this fact be explained on the
hypothesis of social physics? How can we ourselves ex-
plain it ? Here we have a need which is certainly very old,
the need of paternity, the extent of whose rise or fall finds
an eloquent expression in the annual birth rate. Now,
statistics show that, old as it is, it is subject to enormous
oscillations, and if we consult history, the history of France,
for example, it reveals to us a succession, in the past,
of gradual and alternating depopulations and repopulations
of territory. The fact is that this attribute of age is purely
fictitious. The natural and instinctive desire for fatherhood
is one thing and the social, imitative, and rational desire,
another. The former may be constant; but the latter,
which is grafted upon the former at every great change of
customs, laws, or religions, is subject to periodic fluctuation
and renewal. Economists err in confounding the two, or,
rather, in considering the former only, whereas, it is the
latter which is alone important to the sociologist.

Now, there are as many new and distinct desires of the
latter kind for paternity as there are distinct and successive
motives because of which the social man desires to have
children. And we always find certain practical discoveries
or theoretic conceptions in explanation of the origin of each

122 Laws of Imitation

of these motives. The Spanish-American or Anglo-Saxon
is prolific because he has America to people. If Christo-
pher Columbus had made no discovery, what millions of
men would have remained unborn! The insular English-
man is prolific because he has a third of the globe to colonise,
a direct consequence of the series of fortunate explorations,
of the traits of maritime and warlike genius, and, above all,
of the personal initiatives, not to speak of other causes, that
won for him his colonies. In Ireland the introduction of the
potato raised the population from three millions in 1766, to
eight million three hundred thousand in 1845. The an-
cient Aryan desired descendants in order that his altar-flame
might never be extinguished, nor the altar ever fail to receive
its sacred libation; for he was persuaded by his religion
that its extinction would bring misfortune to his soul. The
zealous Christian dreams of being the head of a numerous
family in docile obedience to the multiplicamini of his Bible.
To the early Roman to have children meant to give warriors
to the Republic, a republic which would never have existed
but for that group of inventions, of military and political in-
stitutions of Etruscan, Sabine, and Latin origin, which
Rome exploited. To develop mines, railroads, and cotton
mills is to give new hands to the industries that are born of
modern inventions. Christopher Columbus, Watt, Fulton,
Stephenson, Ampere, Parmentier, can pass, whether celi-
bates or not, for the greatest of all the multipliers of the
human species that have ever existed.

Let me stop here; I have said enough to make myself
clear. It is possible that fathers will always regard their
actual children from the same point of view, but they will
certainly consider their potential children quite differently
according to whether, like the ancient pater familias, they
look upon them as domestic slaves without any ultimate
rights, or whether, like Europeans of to-day, they think of
them as the perhaps exacting masters and creditors to
whom they themselves may some day be enslaved. This is a
result of the difference in customs and laws which wants and
ideas have made. We see that here, as elsewhere, individual

Archaeology and Statistics 123

initiatives and their contagious imitations, have accom-
plished everything, socially, I mean. Thousands of centu-
ries ago the human species might have been reduced to a
negligible number of individuals and, like bear or bison,have
ceased to progress, had not some man of genius arrived
from tim.e to time, in the course of history, to stimulate its
reproductive power, either by opening new outlets to human
activity through industry or colonisation or, as a religious
reformer, like Luther, by reviving or, rather, by rejuvenating
in an entirely new form the religious zeal of the community
and its general belief in Providence as the protector of all the
birds of the air. Every stimulus of this kind may be said to
have aroused a fresh desire, in the social sense, for paternity,
and this desire was added to, or substituted for, preceding
desires, the former more often than the latter, and then pro-
ceeded, in its turn, along its own line of development.

Now, let us take one of these purely social desires for pro-
creation in its inception and let us follow its course. Such an
example will serve as well as another to develop the general
law which I am about to formulate. Suppose that in the
midst of a population which has been stationary for a long
time because the desire for children has been exactly coun-
terbalanced by a fear of the greater misery which their mul-
tiplication would entail, the report is suddenly spread abroad
that the discovery and conquest of a great island by a com-
patriot has secured to people a new means of enlarging their
families without impoverishing themselves, with an increase
of wealth, in fact, to themselves. As this news travels and
is confirmed, the desire for paternity redoubles, that is, the
pre-existent desire is redoubled by the addition of a new de-
sire. But the latter is not satisfied at once. It has to con-
tend with a whole tribe of rooted habits and antique
practices which have given birth to a general belief that ac-
climatisation in such a distant land is impossible and death
from famine, or fever, or homesickness, a certainty. Many
years must elapse before this pervasive opposition can be
generally overcome. Then a current of emigration sets in,
and the colonists, set free from prejudice, begin to indulge

124 Laws of Imitation

in extreme fecundity. At this time the tendency towards a
geometric progression which governs not merely the desire
to procreate, but all other desires as well, is actualised and,
to a certain extent, satisfied. But this period does not last.
The increase in the birth rate soon falls off because of the
very development of prosperity which accompanies it.
Needs of luxury, of leisure, and of a fancied independence
which it has itself created encroach upon it day by day.
When they reach a certain point the ultra-civilised man is
placed in the dilemma of choosing between the joys offered
by them and the joys of a numerous family. If he choose
the former, he renounces the latter. Hence an inevitable
arrest of the progression in question. Then, if an extreme
kind of civilisation continue, a depopulation sets in like that
which occurred in the Roman Empire, and like that
which modern Europe and even America are bound some
day to experience. But a depopulation like this never has
gone and never will go very far, because of the fact that if
it were to pass beyond a certain limit, it would bring about
a setback to civilisation and a diminution in the desire for
luxury which would again raise the level of population.
Therefore, if nothing new occur, the establishment, after
some oscillations, of a static condition will necessarily be
maintained until some new order of chance or genius takes
place.

We need not fear to generalise this observation. Since
it applies to such an apparently primitive desire as that for
paternity, how much more readily would it apply to the so-
called needs of luxury, all of which are plainly the result of
discovery, to the desire, for example, for locomotion by
steam. Although this desire was at first restrained by fear
of accidents and by the habit of sedentary life, its successful
development was not delayed until it came into contact, in
our own day, with the more redoubtable adversaries that it
had itself, in part, created and encouraged. I mean the need
for the thousand various satisfactions of civilised life but
for the satisfaction of which the pleasure of travel could not
fail to increase indefinitely. The same remark applies as

Archaeology and Statistics 125

truly, although less obviously, to desires of a higher order,
to the desire for equality, or for political liberty, or, let me
add, for truth. These desires, the third included, are of
fairly recent origin. The first arose from the humanistic
and rationalistic philosophy of the eighteenth century; the
second, from English parliamentarism. The sources and
leaders of the first movement we know, and, without going
back very far, it would not be difficult to name the successive
inventors and promotors of the second. As for the desire
for truth, this torment, if we are to believe M. Dubois-Rey-
mond, was unknown to classic antiquity, — a lack which ex-
plains the strange inferiority in science and industry of that
brilliant and otherwise eminently gifted period; it was the
peculiar fruit of Christianity, of that spiritual religion
which, in exacting faith even more than deeds, and faith
in accredited historic facts, teaches man the high value
of truth. Thus Christianity gave birth to its great rival,
to science, the modern check upon its heretofore trium-
phant propagation. Science dates barely from the sixteenth
century, when the love of truth, great as it was, was confined
to a small band of devotees. It has been widening its bound-
aries ever since then. But already there are clear signs that
the twentieth century will not be as absorbed in disinterested
curiosity as the three centuries which preceded it. And it
may be safely predicted that the day is not far distant when
the need for well-being, which industry, the child of science,
is developing without limitation, will suppress scientific zeal
and will lead coming generations to a utilitarian sacrifice of
their free and individualistic worship of hopeless truth to the
social need for some common and, perhaps, state-imposed
consoling and comforting illusion. And it is certain that
neither our already much diminished thirst for political
liberty nor our present passion for equality will escape a
similar fate.

Perhaps the same thing should be said of desire for pri-
vate property. Without adopting all the ideas of M. de
Laveleye on this subject we must recognise the facts that this
desire, one which arose from a group of agricultural inven-

126 Laws of Imitation

tions and which is a prime agent in civilisation, was pre-
ceded by a desire for common property (the North Ameri-
can pueblos, the Hindoo village-community, the Russian
mir, etc. ) ; that, as a matter of fact, it has not ceased to grow
up to the present day at the expense of the latter desire, as
is proved by the gradual division of undivided property, of
our common lands, for example; that it is no longer growing,
however, and that when it once enters into competition with
desire for superior subsistence and for more general well-
being, it will withdraw before the rival to which it itself
gave birth.

Every new belief as well as every social desire passes, as it
spreads, through the three phases that I have described, be-
fore reaching its final resting place. To sum up, then, every
desire or belief has first to toil through a network of con-
trary habits or convictions, then, after this obstacle is over-
come and victory won, it has to expand until new enemies
are raised up by its triumph to hinder its progress and
finally to oppose an insurmountable frontier to its further
spread. In the case of a desire, these new enemies will
consist mainly of habits which it has directly or indirectly
established. In the case of a belief, which we know is always
partly erroneous, they will consist of somewhat conflicting
ideas which have been derived from it or whose discovery
has been prompted by it, of heresies or of sciences proceed-
ing from and yet contrary to the given dogma whose vic-
torious and world-wide course is thereby arrested, and of
scientific theories or of industrial inventions which have
been suggested by antecedent theories whose application
is limited and whose truth or success is hemmed in by them.1

1 When a befief or desire has ceased to spread, it can nevertheless
continue to send down roots into its circumscribed field. Take, for
example, a religion, or a revolutionary doctrine, after its period of con-
quest. Besides, a gradual taking-root of this kind presents, like the
gradual expansion which it follows or accompanies, certain well-defined
and analogous phases. In the beginning, when belief is still contested,
it is conscious judgment; just as nascent desire is, for the same reason,
purpose or volition. Subsequently, thanks to an unanimity which grows
and which strengthens the convictions and volitions of each individual,

Archasology and Statistics 127

A slow advance in the beginning, followed by rapid and
uniformly accelerated progress, followed again by progress
that continues to slacken until it finally stops : these, then,
are the three ages of those real social beings which I call
inventions or discoveries. None of them is exempt from
this experience any more than a living being from an an-
alogous, or, rather, identical, necessity. A slight incline, a
relatively sharp rise, and then a fresh modification of the
slope until the plateau is reached : This is also, in abridg-
ment, the profile of every hill, its characteristic curve. This
is the law which, if taken as a guide by the statistician and,
in general, by the sociologist, would save them from many
illusions. They would no longer think, for example, that the
populations of Russia, Germany, the United States, Brazil,
will continue to grow at their present rates of increase. They
would no longer fearfully compute the hundreds of millions
of Russians or Germans that France will have to fight one
hundred years hence. Nor, would they continue to think
that the need of railroad travel, of letter-writing and tele-
graphing, of newspaper reading, and of political activity,
will develop in France in the future as rapidly as they have
done in the past. These errors may be costly.

All these needs will cease, just as, without comparing
them in any other way, the need of tattooing, cannibalism,
and tent life, which appear in remote times to have been
very quick-spreading fashions, came to an end. In more
recent periods, the passion for ascetic or monastic life is
an example. A moment arrives, to be sure, when an ac-
quired desire comes, by reason of its growth, to vie with
even innate desires, some of which are always stronger than
it. It is because of this fact that, as I have said before,
the most original civilisations, at a certain point, and in

judgment passes over into principle or dogma or almost unconscious
quasi-perception, and purpose, into pure passion or desire. Finally, dog-
matic quasi-perception, finding itself more and more jostled by the direct
perceptions of opposing and stronger senses, ceases to gain in strength,
and acquired desire, coming into greater and greater opposition with
certain innate and more energetic desires, is arrested, in its turn, in its
downward movement into the depths of the heart.

128 Laws of Imitation

spite of their free development, leave off accentuating their
differences. It might almost be thought that they subse-
quently tended to narrow them down; but this illusion is
easily explained by their frequent intercourse and by the
preponderating influence of one civilisation over the other.
A slow and inevitable assimilation through imitation and
an apparent return to nature results, because the shock of
two contending civilisations weakens in each of them the
factitious needs in which they differ and conflict and
strengthens the primordial needs in which they resemble
each other. Does it follow that, in the last analysis, organic
needs ultimately control the course of artistic and industrial
progress just as external reality ends by controlling the
course of thought? It does not, for let us observe that no
nation has ever been able to push its civilisation far ahead
and to reach its limit of divergence except on the condi-
tion of being eminently conservative and, like Egypt, China,
or Greece, attached to the particular traditions in which the
divergence is best expressed. But let us close this paren-
thesis.

Now, of the three phases of development which I have
indicated, it is the second that is of the greatest theoretical
importance; it is not the final static condition which is
merely the limit of the third and to which statisticians ap-
pear to attach so much value. Between the rounded sum-
mit of a mountain and the gentle slope of its base there is a
certain direction which marks better than any other the
exact energy of the forces which raised it up before the
denudation of its peak or the heaping up of its base. Thus
the intermediate phase in question is the one best fitted to
show the energy of the upheaval which the corresponding
innovation has stamped on the human heart. This phase
would be the only one, it would absorb the other two, if
rational and voluntary imitation could be substituted in
everything and everywhere for unreflecting and mechanical
imitation. It is evident, moreover, that it requires less time
for a new article of manufacture to find a market and that
it also requires less time for its circulation to be cut off,

Archaeology and Statistics 129

according to the measure in which this substitution is
effected.

It remains to be shown how through the application of
the preceding law the most complex and, at first sight, the
most puzzling curves can be readily deciphered and inter-
preted. There are few curves, to be sure, which plainly
conform to the ideal type which I have outlined; for there
are few inventions which, as they spread and encounter
others, do not bestow upon or receive from one of the lat-
ter some success-accelerating improvement or which are not
undermined by other inventions or checked by some physical
or physiological accident like a dearth or epidemic, not to
speak of political accidents. But, then, if our norm is not
seen in the whole it is, at least, in the details. Let us ig-
nore the disturbing influence of the natural accidents of
war or revolution. Let us overlook any rise in the curve
of thefts that may be due to the high price of wheat or
any deflection in the curve of drunkenness that may be due
to the phylloxera. After we have easily discounted the
part played by these extraneous movements, we may be
sure, upon inspecting a given curve, particularly if it has
been plotted according to the rules that were given some
pages back, that as soon as the first obstacles are overcome
and it has assumed a well-marked upward movement ac-
cording to a definite angle, every upward deviation will
reveal the insertion of some auxiliary discovery or improve-
ment at the corresponding date, and every drop towards the
horizontal will reveal, on the other hand, according to our
foregoing law, the shock of some hostile invention.1

1 Or else the drop is only apparent. Under the ancient regime, the
consumption of tobacco was continually increasing, just as it is at
present. This fact was proved by the steady increase of the taxes col-
lected under the fermes generates. From thirteen millions in 1730 there
was a rise to twenty-six millions in 1758, when there was a sudden
drop in the receipts. It seemed at first to point to a restriction of
the consumption, but it was then shown that the revenue was simply
the victim of a fraud that had been organised on an immense scale.
See on this subject M. Dehhante's book, Une famille de finance au
XVIIIe fiecle, II. 312. and the following To return to the advance in
the consumption of tobacco, it increased from thirteen millions in 1730

130 Laws of Imitation

And if we study by itself the effect produced by each
successive improvement, we shall see that it, too, has taken,
according to the law in question, a certain time in which to
make itself acceptable, that it has then spread very quickly,
then less quickly, and that it finally has ceased to spread at
all. Is it necessary to recall the gradual but prodigious ex-
tension that every improvement in the loom, in the electric
telegraph, or in the manufacture of steel has given, after
a certain period of probation, to textile industries, to
telegraphic activity, to the production of steel ? And is not
each of these improvements due to some new inventor fol-
lowing upon the steps of earlier ones? When an unex-
pected outlet has been opened up to a local industry, to the
iron industry, for example, through the suppression of in-
ternal taxation or through an international treaty which has
doubled or tripled the sale of its products, again what do
we see but the felicitous intersection of two great currents of
imitation, the one starting from Adam Smith and the other,
according to mythology, from Tubal Cain or from him,
whoever he may have been, who was the forerunner of our
metallurgists? If, at a certain date, we see that the
curve of arson or of judicial separations is suddenly rising,
we shall find, if we investigate, that the rise in the former
is explained by the introduction, at the corresponding date,
of the invention of insurance companies, and that the rise
in the latter is explained by some immediately preceding
legislative invention which permits poor people to litigate
free of charge.

When, for example, an irregular statistical curve resists
the preceding analysis and cannot be resolved into normal,
or into segments of normal, curves, it means that it is in
itself insignificant, that it is based on curious, but absolutely
non-instructive, enumerations of unlike units and of arbi-
trary groups of certain acts or objects in which, however,

to seventy-four millions in 1835, and then to one hundred and fifty-three
millions in 1855, and to two-hundred and ninety millions in 1875. And
yet this rate tends to slacken. It is remarkable that the American
Indians, who taught us the use of tobacco, have recently altogether lost
the habits of tobacco and snuff.

Archaeology and Statistics 131

order would suddenly appear if the presence of a definite
underlying desire or belief were revealed. Let us consider
the table of the annual expenditure on public works by the
French government from 1833 to tne present time. This
series of figures is exceptionally irregular, although if it be
taken as a whole it presents, in spite of its discontinuity, a
remarkable progression. I will merely draw attention to the
fact that in 1843 the figures took a sudden rise and re-
mained at the high level of about one hundred and twenty
millions until 1849, when they suddenly fell at a very rapid
rate. This sharp rise was due, as we know, to the building
of railroads at this period. This is equivalent to saying that
at this time the imitative spread of railroad invention in
France ran counter to that of the much more ancient inven-
tions which make up the sum of other public works, such as
highroads, bridges, canals, etc. Unfortunately for the
regularity of the series, the state intervened and monopo-
lised this new kind of work and so substituted for the con-
tinuous progression which unmolested private initiative
could not have failed to produce, the discontinuity which
characterises those intermittent explosions of the collective
will called laws. But, after all, a real and incontestable reg-
ularity does exist, although hidden below these numerical
gyrations which state intervention creates for the interpre-
ter of statistics. How, in fact, did the law of June u, 1842,
which provided for the establishment of our first great net-
work of railroads, come to be passed, unless it was because
of the fact that before this date the idea of railroads had
circulated abroad and that confidence, which was at first so
feeble and unsettled in the utility of the new discovery, and
desire for its realisation, which was at first a mere matter
of curiosity, had been silently growing?

Here we have the constant and regular progression which
the preceding table disguises, but by which it can alone be
explained. For is it not because of the uninterrupted
course of this twofold advance in confidence and desire,
following its normal curve, that the Chamber has adopted
the Freycinet plan in recent years, and that expenditure for

132 Laws of Imitation

public works has again risen to alarming proportions?
Now is it not evident that had we undertaken to make an
approximate numerical measurement of this progress of
public opinion the idea of the above table would undoubtedly
have been the most inappropriate of means for this end ? Of
course an estimate of the annual increase in the number of
voyages and voyagers and in the transportation of freight
by rail would be more valuable.

VI

Having given an account of the subject, the aim, and
the resources of sociological Statistics as an applied study of
the laws of imitation, I have now to discuss its probable
future. The special appetite which it has whetted rather
than satisfied, this thirst for social knowledge of mathemat-
ical precision and impersonal impartiality, is only incipient;
its development lies in the future. It is only in its first phase
and before reaching its predestined goal, it can, like every
other need, look forward with perfect propriety to immense
conquests.

Let us take any graphical curve, that, for example, of
criminal recidivists for the last fifty years. If its physiog-
nomy is unlike that of the human face, is it not, at least, like
the silhouette of hills and vales, or, since it is a question of
movement, — for in statistics we speak quite properly of the
movement of criminality, of birth or marriage rates, — like
the sinuous lines, the sharp rises and sudden falls, in the
flight of a swallow? Let me stop a moment at this com-
parison and consider if it is specious? Why should the
statistical diagrams that are gradually traced out on this
paper from accumulations of successive crimes and
misdemeanours — whose records are transmitted in official
reports to the government, from the government in an-
nual returns to the bureau of statistics at Paris and
from this bureau, in blue books, to the magistrates of
the different tribunals — why should these silhouettes, which

Archaeology and Statistics 133

likewise give visible expression to masses or series of co-
existent or successive facts, be the only ones to be taken as
symbolical, whereas the line traced on my retina by the flight
of a swallow is deemed an inherent reality in the being which
it expresses and which essentially consists, it seems to me, of
moving figures, of movements in an imaginary space?
Is there really less symbolism in one case than in
the other ? Is not my retinal image, the curve traced on my
retina by the flight of this swallow, merely the expression
of a mass of facts (the different states of the bird) which
we have not the slightest reason in the world to consider as
analogous to our visual impression?

If this is so, and philosophers will readily grant that it
is, let us continue our discussion.

The most appreciable difference, then, between statistical
curves and visual images consists in the fact that the former
are laborious to trace or even interpret, whereas the latter
record themselves on our retinae without any effort on our
part and lend themselves with the greatest ease to our in-
terpretation. The former, moreover, are traced long after
the causation and appearance of the changes and events
which they represent, and represent, too, in the most inter-
mittent and irregular as well as in the most dilatory fashion,
whereas the latter always show us regularly and uninter-
ruptedly what has just occurred or what is actually occurring.
But if each of these differences is taken by itself, they will
all be seen to be more apparent than real and to be reducible
to differences of degree. If Statistics continues to progress
as it has done for several years, if the information which
it gives us continues to gain in accuracy, in despatch, in bulk,
and in regularity, a time may come when upon the accom-
plishment of every social event a figure will at once issue
forth automatically, so to speak, to take its place on the
statistical registers that will be continuously communicated
to the public and spread abroad pictorially by the daily
press. Then, at every step, at every glance cast upon poster
or newspaper, we shall be assailed, as it were, with statis-
tical facts, with precise and condensed knowledge of all the

134 Laws of Imitation

peculiarities of actual social conditions, of commercial gains
or losses, of the rise or falling off of certain political parties,
of the progress or decay of a certain doctrine, etc., in
exactly the same way as we are assailed when we open our
eyes by the vibrations of the ether which tell us of the ap-
proach or withdrawal of such and such a so-called body and
of many other things of a similar nature. This information
is interesting from the point of view of the conservation
and development of our organs, just as the former news is
interesting from the point of view of the conservation and
development of our social being, of our reputation and
wealth, of our power, and of our honour.

Consequently, granted that statistics be extended and
completed to this extent, a statistical bureau might be com-
pared to an eye or ear. Like the eye or ear, it would save
us trouble by synthesising collections of scattered homogene-
ous units for us, and it would give us the clear, precise, and
smooth result of this elaboration. And, certainly, under
such conditions, it would be no more difficult for an edu-
cated man to keep informed of the slightest current changes
in religious or political opinion than for a man whose eye-
sight was impaired by age to recognise a friend at a dis-
tance, or to distinguish the approach of an obstacle in time
to avoid it. Let us hope that the day will come when the
representative or legislator who is called upon to reform the
justiciary or the penal code and yet who is, hypothetically,
ignorant of juridical statistics, will be as rare and inconceiv-
able a being as a blind omnibus driver or a deaf orchestral
leader would be to-day.1

I might freely say, then, that each of our senses gives us,

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

Archaeology and Statistics 135

in its own way and from its special point of view, the statis-
tics of the external world. Their characteristic sensations
are in a certain way their special graphical tables. Every
sensation — colour, sound, taste, etc., — is only a number, a
collection of innumerable like units of vibrations that are
represented collectively by this single figure. The affective
character of these different sensations is merely their dis-
tinctive mark, it is analogous to the difference which char-
acterises the figures of our system of notation. How
should we know the sounds of do, of re, of mi, except for
the fact that there is in the air about us, during a certain
consecutive period of time, a certain proportionate number
per second of so-called sonorous vibrations? What does
the colour red, blue, yellow, or green mean except that the
ether is agitated, during a certain consecutive period of time,
by a certain proportionate number of so-called luminous
vibrations ?

Touch, as a sense of temperature, is nothing more than
the statistics of the heat vibrations of the ether; as a sense
of resistance and weight, it is merely the statistics of our
muscular contractions. But the impressions of touch,
unlike those of sight and hearing, follow one another
without definite proportions; there is no tactile gamut.
Hence the inferiority of this sense. Statisticians are
lacking in the same way when they fail to give
us the relative proportions of their crudely tabulated
figures. As for the senses of smell and taste, if
they are justly ranked as altogether inferior senses, is
it not because, poor statisticians as they are, they do not
conform to our elementary rules, but are satisfied with de-
fective figures, with the expressions of faulty additions in
which the most heterogeneous units, all sorts of nervous
vibrations and chemical actions, have been thrown together
in the same kind of disorder that we see in a badly made
budget ?

The reader may have noticed that some of our news-
papers publish from day to day graphical curves, showing
the fluctuations of the different securities of the stock-ex-

136 Laws of Imitation

change, as well as other changes about which it is useful to
know. These curves are now relegated to the last page,
but they tend to encroach upon the others, and, perhaps, be-
fore long, at any rate, at some time in the future when peo-
ple have been satiated with declamation and polemic, just as
very well read minds begin to be with literature, and when
they will read the papers merely for their multifarious state-
ments of exact and ungarnished fact, they will usurp the
place of honour. The public journals, then, will become
socially what our sense organs are vitally. Every printing
office will become a mere central station for different bu-
reaus of statistics just as the ear-drum is a bundle of acous-
tic nerves, or as the retina is a bundle of special nerves each
of which registers its characteristic impression on the brain.
At present Statistics is a kind of embryonic eye, like that of
the lower animals which see just enough to recognise the ap-
proach of foe or prey. But this already is a great benefit
to have bestowed upon us, and through it we may be
kept from running serious dangers.

The analogy is plain. It is strengthened by a compar-
ison of the part taken by the senses throughout the animal
world, from the lowest to the highest rung of the mental
ladder, with the role that has been played by newspapers
during the course of civilisation. In the case of mollusk,
insect, and even of quadruped, the senses are more than the
mere scouts of the intelligence — the more imperfect they
are, the more important they become. But their functions
diminish as they become localised, and the nearer the ap-
proach to man, the more subordinate the position which
they hold. Similarly, in growing and inferior civilisations
like our own (for our descendants will look down upon us
just as we do upon our lower brethren), newspapers do
more than furnish their reader with thought-stimulating
information; they think and decide for him and he is me-
chanically moulded and guided by them. A sure sign of ad-
vance in civilisation upon the part of a certain class of read-
ers, is the fact that the newspaper which appeals to them
devotes a smaller portion of itself to phrases and a larger

Archasology and Statistics 137

portion to facts and figures and to brief and reliable infor-
mation. The ideal newspaper of this kind would be one
without political articles and full of graphical curves and
succinct editorials.

It is obvious that I am not inclined to minimise the func-
tion of statistics. And yet, although I realise its future im-
portance, I must point out, before concluding, a certain ex-
aggerated expectation which is sometimes entertained in
relation to it. When we see that these numerical results
become more and more constant and regular as they come to
refer to larger and larger numbers, we are at times inclined
to think that if the tide of population continues to advance
and great states to enlarge, a movement will come when
in the distant future all social phenomena will be reducible
to mathematical formulas. Hence the mistaken inference
is drawn that the statistician will some day be able to fore-
tell future social conditions with as much certainty as the as-
tronomist of to-day predicts the next eclipse of Venus.
In this event Statistics would be fated to plunge further
and further ahead into the future as archaeology has gone
back into the past.

But from all that which has gone before we know that
Statistics is hemmed within the field of imitation and that
the field of invention is forbidden ground. The future will
be made by as yet unknown inventors and no real law con-
cerning their successive advents can be formulated. In this
respect, the future is like the past. It does not fall to the
archaeologist to tell precisely what processes of ancient art
or industry preceded those which had been substituted for
them in the use of a given people at a certain period of its
history. Why should the statisician be more fortunate in
the opposite direction ? The empire of great men, the even-
tual disturbers of prognosticated curves, cannot fail to in-
crease, rather than diminish. The progress of population
will only extend their imitative following. The progress of
civilisation will but hasten and facilitate the imitation of
their examples, while, at the same time, it will multiply for a
certain period the number of inventive geniuses. It seems

138 Laws of Imitation

as if the further we progressed the more all kinds of new
and unforeseen things flowed out from the class that gov-
erns, from the discoveries, and that among the class that is
governed, the copyists, the things that are foreseen (which
start, however, from the unforeseen) spread themselves
out more and more uniformly and monotonously.

And yet, on closer view, progress would seem to have
spurred on the ingenuity of invention-aping imitation rather
than to have fertilised the inventive genius. True inven-
tion, invention which is worthy of the name, becomes more
difficult day by day; so that, some time in the near future,
it cannot fail to become more rare. And, finally, it must
become exhausted; for the mind of any given race is not
capable of indefinite development. It follows that, sooner
or later, every civilisation, Asiatic or European, is fated to
beat itself against its banks and begin its endless cycle over
again. Then Statistics will undoubtedly possess the prom-
ised gift of prophecy. But this goal is far distant. Mean-
while, all that can be said is that in as much as the direction
of future inventions is chiefly determined by prior inven-
tions, and in as much as the latter are becoming more and
more preponderating because of their accumulation, pre-
dictions based upon statistics may one day be hazarded with
a certain degree of probability, just as it is also quite prob-
able that archaeology may come to throw light upon the
origins of history.

VII

It is not superfluous to note, in conclusion, that as the
preceding chapter was an answer to the difficult question
"What is Society?" so this chapter is an answer to the
question " What is History ? " We have searched much and
in vain for the distinctive marks of historic facts, for the
signs by which we should recognise the natural or human
events that were worthy the notice of the historian.
According to the learned, history is a collection of

Archaeology and Statistics 139

those things that have had the greatest celebrity. I
prefer to consider it a collection of those things that
have been the most successful, that is, of those ini-
tiatives that have been the most imitated. An immensely
successful thing may have had no celebrity at all A
new word, for example, may slip into a language and
become entrenched in it without arousing any attention;
a new idea or religious rite may make its way, obscure
and unnoticed, into a community; an industrial process may
spread anonymously throughout the world. There is no
truly historic fact outside of those that can be classed in
one of the three following categories : ( i ) The progress or
decay of some kind of imitation. (2) The appearance of one
of those combinations of different imitations which I call
inventions, and which come in time to be imitated. (3)
The actions either of human beings, or of animal, vegetal,
or physical forces, which result in the imposition of new
conditions upon the spread of certain imitations whose bear-
ing and direction are thereby modified. From this latter
point of view, a volcanic eruption, the submerging of an
island or continent, even an eclipse, when it occasions the
defeat of a superstitious army, and, still more, the acciden-
tal illness or death of an important personage, can have the •
same kind and degree of historic importance as a battle or
a treaty of peace or an international alliance. The issue of
a war in which the fate of a civilisation was at stake, has
often depended upon inclement weather. The severe
winter of 1811 affected the destinies of France and Russia
as seriously as did the Napoleonic plan of campaign. From
this point of view pragmatic and even anecdotal history
regains the place which philosophers have so often refused
to grant it. Nevertheless, the career of imitations is, on
the whole, the only thing which is of interest to history.
Therein lies its true definition.

CHAPTER V.-

THE LOGICAL LAWS OF IMITATION

STATISTICS gives us a sort of empirical law or graphical
formula for the very complex causes of the particular spread
of every kind of imitation. We must now consider those
general laws, laws which are really worthy the name of sci-
ence, which govern all imitations, and to this end we must
study, one by one, the different categories of causes which
we have heretofore merged together.

Our problem is to learn why, given one hundred differ-
ent innovations conceived of at the same time — innova-
tions in the forms of words, in mythological ideas, in in-
dustrial processes, etc. — ten will spread abroad, while
ninety will be forgotten. In order to solve this question
systematically let us first divide those influences which
have favoured or hindered the diffusion of successful or non-
successful innovations into physical and social causes. But
in this book let us pass over the first order of causes, those,
for example, which make the people of southern coun-
tries prefer new words composed of voiced to those com-
posed of whispered vowels, and the people of northern
countries, the Opposite. In the same way there are in my-
thology, in artistic or industrial technique, or in govern-
ment, many peculiarities which result from a racial confor-
mation of ear or larynx, from cerebral predispositions,
from meteoric conditions or from the nature of fauna
and flora. Let us put all this to one side. I do not
mean that it has no real importance in sociology. It is
of interest, for example, to note the influence which may
be exerted upon the entire course of a civilisation by the na-
ture of a new and spontaneous production of its soil. Much

140

The Logical Laws of Imitation 141

depends upon the spot in which it springs; the conditions
of labour, and, consequently, the family groups and political
institutions of a fertile valley are different from those of a
moor more or less rich in pasture-land. We must thank
those scholars who devote themselves to researches of this
character, researches which are as useful in sociology as
studies upon the modification of species by the action of
climate or general environment are in biology. It would
be erroneous to think, however, that because we had
shown the adaptation of living or social types to external
phenomena we had thereby explained them. The expla-
nation must be sought for in the laws which express the
internal relations of cells or of minds in association. This
is the reason why, in this discussion of pure and abstract,
not of concrete and applied, sociology, I must set aside all
considerations of the above nature.

Now, social causes are of two kinds, the logical and the
non-logical. This distinction is of the greatest importance.
Logical causes operate whenever an individual "prefers a
given innovation to others because he thirif$ .ft^is more
tiSeful or more true than others, that is, mdre in accord
than they are with the aims or principles that have already
found a place in his mind (through imitation, of course).
In such instances, the old or new inventions or discoveries
are themselves the only question; they are isolated from
any prestige or discredit which may have attached to those
circulating them or to the time and place of their origin.
But logical action is very rarely untrammelled in this way.
In general, the extra-logical influences to which I have
referred interfere in the choice of the examples to be fol-
lowed, and often, as we shall see further on, the poorest
innovations, from the point of view of logic, are selected
because of their place, or even date or birth.

Unless these necessary distinctions are constantly borne
in mind, it is impossible to understand the simplest social
facts. Language is a notable example. It seems to me
that its present inextricable skein might be readily un-
ravelled by applying these ideas (if any professional philolo-

142 Laws of Imitation

gist would pay me the compliment of adopting them).
Philologists seek for those laws which should govern the for-
mation and transformation of languages. But, hitherto,
they have only been able to formulate rules which are sub-
ject to very many exceptions, in regard to both changes
in sound (phonetic laws) and changes in meaning, in re-
gard to the acquisition of new words through the combina-
tion of old roots or of new grammatical forms through the
modification of old forms, etc. Why is this? Because only
imitation and not invention is subject to law in the true
sense of the word. Now, small, successive inventions have
always had to accumulate in order to form or transform
an idiom. Besides, in the service of language a large part
must be conceded, at the outset, to the accidental and
arbitrary.

It is because of these individual factors that, among
other peculiarities, there are a certain number of
roots in a language, that one root will consist of three con-
sonants and another of a single syllable, or that one termi-
nation and not another will be adopted at the behest of a
given shade of thought. After this concession has been
made to invention and to influences of a climatic or phy-
siological order, a great field is still open to the laws of
language.

There is, of course, apart from both the irrational
and important, not to say pregnant, motives of which
I have been speaking, a host of minor linguistic inven-
tions which were suggested to their unknown authors by
way of analogy,1 i. c., through imitation of self or
others; and it is in this direction that linguistic inven-
tions are subject to law. The first man to conceive
the idea of expressing capacity for respect by adding
the suffix bills, which, according to hypothesis, was al-
ready used in the compound amabilis, to the root of
veneratio, or of creating Germanicus upon the model of
Italicus, was an unconscious inventor, but, to put it briefly,

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

The Logical Laws of Imitation 143

he imitated at the same time that he invented. Whenever
terminations, or, similarly, declensions or conjugations, have
been broadened and generalised in this way, imitation of
self and of others has taken place, and precisely to this
extent is the formation and transformation of languages
subject to formulation into rules. But these rules, which
should explain to us why one among many almost synono-
mous forms of speech which are concurrently at the service
of the tribal, or civic, or national mind has alone fought
its way into general usage, fall into very distinct
groups.

In the first place, we see that the incessant struggle be-
tween minor linguistic inventions which always ends in the
imitation of one of them, and in the abortion of the others,
finally comes to transform a language in such a way as to
adapt it, more or less rapidly and completely, according
to the spirit of the community, to external realities and
to the social purposes of language. Enlargements of vo-
cabulary correspond to increases in the number of human
beings and of their modes of life. Grammar, by means of
a more flexible conjugation of verbs or a clearer or more
logical arrangement of phrases, lends itself to the expres-
sion of more subtle relations in time and space.
The softening and differentiation of vowels (in Sanskrit
they are all sharp sounds in a or o; in Greek and Latin,
e, u, ou, and i have been added to the vocal key-board) and
the contraction and abbreviation of words render a lan-
guage more and more pliable and expressive, and dis-
tinguished philologists like M. Regnaud 1 have raised to the
dignity of a law the vowel softening and the contraction of
words of the Indo-European family. In fact, in Zend,
Greek, Latin, French, English, and German, the e appears
" in an infinite number of cases as a weakened substitute
for a," whereas, " the opposite never, or hardly ever, takes
place." If, by the way, this rule could be accepted un-
reservedly, we should have here a pretty example of lin-
guistic irreversibility.

1 See his Essais de linguistique evolutionniste, previously cited.

144 Laws of Imitation

But, on the other hand, even in the most perfect idioms,
even in that Greek of which it may be said that its con-
jugation is a " system of applied logic," * we see that
many modifications effected in the course of time are far
from being advances in utility or truth. Is the loss of / and
v (digamma) or, in many cases, of an initial sibilant of
any advantage to Greek? Is it not rather a cause of de-
terioration? In France have not certain expanded forms
succeeded contracted ones contrary to the law of word con-
traction, as portique from porche, capital from cheptal, etc. ?
In such cases certain influences, in regard to which the
need of logic and finality had no part, preponderated. We
know that in the case of the last example certain writers of
renown manufactured many words like portique and capital
in servile imitation of Latin, and that they succeeded by
means of their own prestige in putting them into circula-
tion.2

But I do not wish to dwell at greater length upon the
science of language. I am content with having indicated
in these few observations the drift of the laws which we
have still to formulate. In this chapter, the logical laws
will occupy our attention exclusively.

Invention and imitation are, as we know, the elementary
social acts. But what is the social substance or force

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

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

The Logical Laws of Imitation 145

through which this act is accomplished and of which it is
merely the form? In other words, what is invented
or imitated? The thing which is invented, the thing
which is imitated, is always an idea or a volition, a judg-
ment or a purpose, which embodies a certain amount of
belief and desire. And here we have, in fact, the very soul
of words, of religious prayers, of state administration, of
the articles of a code, of moral duties, of industrial achieve-
ments or of artistic processes. Desire and belief : they are
the substance and the force, they are the two psychological
quantities1 which are found at the bottom of all the sensa-

1 1 take the liberty of referring the reader, if he be a psychologist, to two
articles which I published in August and September, 1880, in the Revue
philosophique upon belief and desire and the possibility of measuring them.
These articles were republished unrevised in my Essais et melanges
sociologiques. Since then my ideas on this subject have been somewhat
modified. But let me state in what respects. At present I realise that
I may have somewhat exaggerated the role of belief and desire in
individual psychology, and I no longer affirm that these two aspects
of the ego are the only things in us which are susceptible of addition
and diminution. On the other hand, I now attribute to them a greater
importance in social psychology. We may admit that there are other
quantities in the soul; we may concede to the psycho-physicists, for
example, in spite of M. Bergson's remarkable study on the Donnees
immedlates de la conscience — which conforms so well in other respects
to my own point of view on this subject — that the intensity of sensa-
tions, considered apart from their relation to reason, and apart from the
amount of attention which is bestowed upon them, changes in degree
without changing In nature, and that it therefore lends itself to experi-
mental measurement. But it is nevertheless true that, from the social
standpoint, belief and desire bear a unique character that is well adapted
to distinguish them from simple sensation. This character consists in
the fact that the contagion of mutual example re-enforces beliefs and
desires that are alike, and weakens or strengthens, according to circum-
stances, beliefs and desires that are unlike, among all those individuals
who experience them at the same time and who are conscious of so
experiencing them. Whereas, although a visual or auditory sensation
may be felt in a theatre, for example, in the' midst of a crowd attentive
to the same concert or spectacle, it is in no way modified by the simul-
taneity of the analogous impressions' experienced by the surrounding
public. From certain astounding historical occurrences we may infer
how intense a man's belief or desire may become, when it is also experi-
enced by everybody else around him. For example, even in the depraved
but still credulous Italy of the Renaissance, epidemics of repentance
burst out from time to time, which, as Burckhardt says1, touched even
the most hardened consciences. These epidemics, of which the one at
Florence of 1494-98, under Savonarola, is only one among hundreds, —

146 Laws of Imitation

tional qualities with which they combine; and when inven-
tion and then imitation takes possession of them in order to
organise and use them, they also are the real social quanti-
ties. Societies are organised according to the agreement
or opposition of beliefs which reinforce or limit one an-
other. Social institutions depend entirely upon these con-
ditions. Societies function according to the competition
or co-operation of their desires or wants. Beliefs, princi-
pally religious and moral beliefs, but juristic and political
beliefs as well, and even linguistic beliefs (for how many
acts of faith are implied in the lightest talk and what an ir-
resistible although unconscious power of persuasion our
mother tongue, a true mother indeed, exerts over us), are
the plastic forces of societies. Economic or aesthetic wants
are their functional forces.

These beliefs and desires which invention and imitation
make specific and in this sense create, although they virtu-
ally exist prior to the action of the latter, originate far be-
low the social world in the world of life. In like way, the
plastic and functional forces of life that are made specific
and turned to account by generation, originate beneath the
animate in the physical world. In like way, the vibration-
ruled molecular and motor forces of the physical world
originate in turn in an inscrutable hypophysical world that
some of our physicists call the world of noumena, others,
Energy, and yet others, the Unknowable. Energy is the
most widespread name for this mystery. By this single
term a reality is designated which, as we can see, is always
twofold in its manifestations; and this eternal bifurcation,
which is reproduced under astonishing metamorphoses in
each successive stage of universal life, is not the least of the

for one occurred after every plague or disaster, — revealed the deep and
steady activity of the Christian faith. Wherever souls are possessed of
the same faith or ideal, intermittent outbursts of similar contagions are
the result. We ourselves no longer have epidemics of penitence, unless
they are in the form of contagious pilgrimages — those unique manifesta-
tions of the power of suggestion, — but we do have epidemics of luxury.
of gambling, of lotteries, of stock-sneculation, of gigantic railroad
undertakings, as well as epidemics of Hegelianism, Darwinism, etc.

The Logical Laws of Imitation 147

common characteristics to be noted between life's stages.
Under the different terms of matter and motion, of organs
and functions, of institutions and progress, this great dis-
tinction between the static and the dynamic, in which is also-
included that between Space and Time, divides the whole
universe in two.

It is important to state at the outset and firmly establish
the relation between these two terms. There is a profound
insight underlying the Spencerian formula of Evolution
which states that all evolution is gain in matter with cor-
responding loss in motion, and that all dissolution is the in-
verse. Translated into a somewhat modified and less ma-
terialistic phraseology this thought means that every de-
velopment in life or society is a growth in organisation off-
set or, rather, secured by a relative diminution in function.
As an organism grows in weight or dimension, as it unfolds
and differentiates its characteristic forms, it loses its vital-
ity,1 just because it has used it up in the process, a fact Mr.
Spencer fails to mention. As a society enlarges and ex-
pands, as it perfects and differentiaties its institutions, its
language, religion, law, government, industry, and art, it
loses its civilising and propelling vigour; for it has been
using it up in its course. In other words, if it is true
that the substance of social institutions consists in the sum
of faith and confidence, of truth and security, in a word,
in the unanimous beliefs which they embody, and that the
motor power of social progress consists in the sum of the
curiosities and ambitions and of the consistent desires
which it expresses, if all this is so, then as a society ad-
vances it becomes richer in beliefs than in desires. The
true and final object of desire, then, is belief. The only
raiscm d'etre of the impulses of the heart is the formation of
high degrees of mental certitude and assurance, and the
further a society has progressed the more is it possessed,
like a mature mind, of stability and tranquillity, of strong

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

diminished.

148 Laws of Imitation

convictions and dead passions, the former having- been
slowly formed and crystallised by the latter.1 Social
peace, a unanimous belief in the same ideal or in the same
illusion, a unanimity which presupposes a continually
widening and deepening assimilation of humanity — this
is the goal for which, irrespective of our wishes, all social
revolutions are bound. This is progress, that is to say,
social advancement along logical lines.

Now, how is progress effected? When an individual
reflects upon a given subject first one idea comes to him and
then another until from idea to idea, from elimination to eli-
mination, he finally seizes upon the guiding thread to the
solution of the problem and then, from that moment, passes
quickly out from the twilight into the light. Does not the
same thing happen in history? When a society elaborates
some great conception, which the curious public pushes for-
ward before science can correct and develop it, the me-
chanical explanation of the world, for example, or when it
dreams in its ambition of some great achievement like the
use of steam in manufacture or locomotion or navigation be-
fore it can turn its activity to exploiting it, what happens?
The problem that is raised in this way at once prompts
people to make and entertain all kinds of contradictory in-
ventions and vagaries which appear first here and then
there, only to disappear, until the advent of some clear
formula or some suitable mechanism which throws all the
others into the background and which serves thencefor-
ward as the fixed basis for future improvements and de-
velopments. Progress, then, is a kind of collective think-
ing, which lacks a brain of its own, but which is made
possible, thanks to imitation, by the soliditary of the brains

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

The Logical Laws of Imitation 149

of numerous scholars and inventors who interchange their
successive discoveries. (The fixation of discoveries
through writing, which makes possible their transmission
over long stretches of time and space, is equivalent to the
fixation of images which takes place in the individual brain
and which constitutes the cellular stereotype-plate of
memory. )

It follows that social like individual progress is effected
in two ways, through substitution and through accumula-
tion. Certain discoveries and inventions can only be used
as substitutes, others can be accumulated. Hence we have
logical combats and logical alliances. This is the general
classification which we will adopt, and in it we shall have
no difficulty in placing all historical events.

Moreover, in different societies discord between fresh de-
sires and old, between a new scientific idea and existing
religious dogmas, is not always immediately perceived nor
perceived within the same period of time. Besides, when the
discord is perceived, the desire to put an end to it is not al-
ways equally strong. The nature and intensity of the desire
vary with time and place. In fact, Reason exists in
societies as well as in individuals; and Reason in all cases
is merely a desire like any other, a specific desire which
like others is more or less developed by its own
satisfactions as well as created by the very inventions
or discoveries which have satisfied it; that is to say
that systems, programmes, catechisms, and constitu-
tions, in undertaking to render ideas and volitions co-
herent, create and stimulate the very desire for their co-
herence. This desire is a real force, located in individual
brains. Its rise and fall and its direction and object vary
according to given periods and countries. At times, it is
a passing breeze; at times, a whirlwind. To-day it at-
tacks the government of states; yesterday and the day be-
fore it attacked languages; to-morrow it may make an
attack upon our industrial organisations, and another
time upon our sciences; but it never pauses in its incessant
labour of regeneration or revolution.

150 Laws of Imitation

This desire, as I have said, has been aroused and re-
cruited by a series of initiations and imitations. But this is
equivalent to saying by a series of imitations, for an inno-
vation that is not imitated is socially non-existent. Con-
sequently all those streams and currents of belief and de-
sire which flow side by side or contrary to one another in so-
ciety, quantities whose subtractions and additions are regu-
lated by social logic, a kind of social algebra, — all, including
the very desire for this general reckoning and the belief in its
possibility, — all are derived from imitation. For nothing in
history is self-creative; not even its own ever-incomplete
unity, the secular fruit of constant and more or less suc-
cessful efforts. A drama, to be sure, a stage play, a frag-
ment in which the whole of history is mirrored, is a logical
and gradual and intricate harmony which seems to work it-
self out independently of anybody's design. But we know
that this appearance is misleading and that the harmony
transpires as surely and rapidly as it does only because it an-
swers to the imperious need for unity that is felt by the
dramatist as well as by the public to whom he has sug-
gested it.

Everything, even the desire to invent, has the same
origin. In fact, this desire completes and is part of the
logical need for unification, if it is true, as I might prove,
that logic is both a problem of a maximum and a problem
of equilibrium. The more a people invent and discover, the
more inventive and the more eager for new discoveries they
grow. It is also through imitation that this noble kind of
craving takes possession of those minds that are worthy of
it. Now, discoveries are gains in certitude, inventions, in
confidence and security. The desire to discover and invent
is, consequently, the twofold form which the tendency to-
ward achieving a maximum of public faith takes on. This
creative tendency which is peculiar to synthesising and as-
similating minds often alternates, is sometimes concomi-
tant, but in all cases always agrees with the critical tend-
ency towards an equilibrium of beliefs through the elimi-
nation of those inventions or discoveries which are contrary

The Logical Laws of Imitation 151

to the majority of their number. The desire for unanim-
ity of faith and the desire for purification of faith is each
in turn more fully satisfied, but in general their ebullitions
either coincide with, or follow closely upon each other.
For just because imitation is their common source, both of
them, the desire for stable as well as that for absolute
faith, have a degree of intensity proportionate, other things
being equal, to the degree of animation in the social life,
that is, to the multiplicity of relations between individuals.
Any fine combination of ideas must first shine out in the
mind of the individual before it can illumine the mind of a
nation; and its chance of being produced in the individual
mind depends upon the frequency of the intellectual ex-
changes between minds. A contradiction between two in-
stitutions or two principles will not harass a society until
it has been noted by some exceptionally sagacious person,
some systematic thinker, who, having been checked in his
conscious efforts to unify his own group of ideas, points out
the aforesaid difficulty. — This explains the social impor-
tance of philosophers. — And the greater the amount of
mutual intellectual stimulation and, consequently, the
greater the circulation of ideas within a nation, the more
readily will such a difficulty be perceived.

In the course of the nineteenth century, for example,
the relations of man to man having been multiplied beyond
all expectation as a result of inventions in locomotion, and
the action of imitation having become very powerful, very
rapid, and very far-reaching, we should not be surprised to
see that the passion for social reforms, for systematic and
rational social reorganisations has taken on its present pro-
portions, just as, by virtue of its previous conquests, the
passion for social, especially industrial, conquests over
nature has known no bounds. Therefore it is safe
to predict that a century of adjustment will follow upon the
past century of discovery. (Does not the nineteenth cen-
tury deserve this name?) Civilisation requires that an
afflux of discovery and an effort to harmonise discoveries
shall coincide with or follow one another.

1 52 Laws of Imitation

On the other hand, when societies are in their uninvent-
ive phases they are also uncritical, and vice versa. They
embrace the most contradictory beliefs of surrounding fash-
ions or inherited traditions; 1 and no one notes the contra-
dictions. And yet, at the same time, they carry within
themselves, as a result of the contributions of fashion and
tradition, much scattered thought and knowledge which
would reveal from a certain angle a fruitful although un-
suspected self -consistency. In the same way they borrow
out of curiosity from their different neighbours, or cherish
out of piety as a heritage from their different forefathers,
the most dissimilar arts and industries, which develop in
them ill-assorted needs and opposing currents of activity.
Nor are these practical antinomies, any more than the
aforesaid theoretical contradictions, felt or formulated by
anybody, although everybody suffers from the unrest which
they provoke. But at the same time neither do such primi-
tive peoples perceive that certain of their artistic processes
and mechanical tools are fitted to be of the greatest mutual
service and to work powerfully together for the same end,
the one serving as the efficient means of the other, just as
certain perceptions serve as intermediaries in explaining
certain hypotheses which they confirm.

The grindstone and the paddle-wheel were known about
for a long time without the idea occurring to people that by
means of a certain artifice, that is, by adding a third inven-
tion, a mill, to the other two, they might be made to co-

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

The Logical Laws of Imitation 153

operate to an extraordinary degree. Back in Babylon,
bricks were marked with the names of their maker by means
of movable characters or stamps, and books were com-
posed; but the thought of combining these two ideas, of
composing books with movable characters, was not con-
ceived of, although it was a very simple matter and one
that would have precipitated the coming of printing by
some thousands of years.

The cart and the piston likewise coexisted for a long
time without giving rise to the idea of using the latter
(through other inventions, of course) as a means of pro-
pelling the former. On the other hand, at the close of the
decadent Middle Ages, for example, how many pagan and
licentious tastes for luxury, importations or revivals from
Arabia or from the ancient world, crept through castle
loopholes and monastery windows to ingratiate themselves
within and to form bold medleys, not at all disturbing,
however, to the men of those times, with the existing
practices of Christian piety and the rude customs of the
feudal system! Even in our own days, how many op-
posite and contradictory objects our industrial or national
activity is engaged in achieving ! And yet, as the exchange
and friction of ideas and the communication and trans-
fusion of needs becomes more rapid, the elimination of
the weaker by the stronger, when opposition arises, will be
more quickly accomplished and, at the same time, and for
the same reason, mutually helpful and confirmatory aims
and ideas will be more prompt to encounter each other in
the ingenious mind. In these two ways, social life must
necessarily reach a degree of logical unity and power
hitherto unknown.1

1 Now we can see why the process of unifying the national faith by
the expulsion of religious or political heretics (the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes, every kind of religious persecution) is always far
from accomplishing its object. It keeps a population, to be sure, igno-
rant of those contradictions which might undermine their beliefs, but,
although it may maintain the latter, it also precludes additions to their
number. For the ignorance of contradictions which dulls the critical
sense also sterilises the imagination and dims the consciousness of mu-

1 54 Laws of Imitation

I have now pointed out how the social need for logic,
through which alone a social logic is formed, arises and
develops. It is at present necessary to see how it sets about
to obtain satisfaction. We already know that its two tend-
encies are distinguishable, the one creative, the other criti-
cal, the one abounding in combinations of old accumulable
inventions and discoveries, the other in struggles between
alternative inventions or discoveries. We shall study
each of these tendencies separately, beginning with the
latter.

II. The Logical1 Duel

Suppose that a discovery, an invention, has appeared.
There are straightway two facts for us to note about it;
its gains in faith, as it spreads from one person to another,
and the losses in faith to which it subjects the invention
which had the same object or satisfied the same desire when
it intervened. Such an encounter gives rise to a logical
duel. For example, cuneiform writing spread for a long
time undisturbed throughout Central Asia, while Phoeni-
cian writing had the same career in the Mediterranean
basin. But one day these two alphabets came into conflict
over the territory of the former; and cuneiform writing
slowly receded, but did not disappear until about the first
century of our era.

Studied in detail, then, the history of societies, like
psychologial evolution, is a series or a simultaneous occur-
rence of logical duels (when it is not one of logical unions).
What happened in the case of writing had already happened
in that of language. Linguistic progress is effected first
by imitation and then by rivalry between two languages or

tual confirmations. Moreover, a time comes when, as Colins says,
enquiry can no longer be repressed.

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

The Logical Law of Imitation 155

dialects which quarrel over the same country and one of
which is crowded back by the other, or between two terms or
idioms which correspond to the same idea. This struggle
is a conflict between opposite theses implicit in every word
or idiom which tends to substitute itself for another word
or grammatical form. If, at the moment I think of a horse,
the two words equus and caballus, borrowed from two dif-
ferent Latin dialects, come into my mind at the same time,
it is as if the judgment " equus is a better designation than
caballus " were contradicted in my thought by the judg-
ment " caballus is better than equus." If I have to choose
between i and .$• to express plurality, for example, this
choice is also conditioned by judgments which are intrinsi-
cally contradictory. During the formation of the Romance
tongues thousands of like contradictions came into the
brains of the Gallo-Romans, Spaniards, and Italians; and
the need of adjusting them gave birth to the modern lan-
guages. What philologists call the gradual simplification
of grammars is only the result of the work of elimination
that is prompted by a vague feeling of these implicit con-
tradictions. This is the reason, for example, that Italian
always uses i and Spanish, s, whereas Latin sometimes
made use of i and sometimes of s.

I have compared the logical struggle to a duel. In fact,
in each of these separate combats, in each of the elementary
facts of social life that pass through an edition of number-
less copies, the opposing aims or judgments are always two
in number. Have you ever seen a battle take place in an-
cient or mediaeval or modern times between three of four
parties? Never. There may be seven or eight, or ten or
twelve, armies of different nationalities, but there can be
only two hostile camps, just as in the counsel of war prior
to a battle there are never more than two opinions at the
same time, in relation to any plan of action, the one for it
and the other made up of those united against it. And,
obviously, the quarrel to be fought out upon the battlefield
may always be summed up in a yes opposed to a no. Every
casus belli is this, at bottom. Of course the adversary who

156 Laws of Imitation

gainsays the other (in religious wars principally) or who
thwarts the plan of the other (in political wars) has his
own particular thesis or plan as well; but only in as much as
his thought or will is more or less directly or indirectly, im-
plicitly or explicitly, negative or obstructive, does it render
the conflict inevitable. Hence whatever political parties or
fragments of parties there may be in a country, for example,
there are never more than two sides In relation to any ques-
tion, the government and the opposition, the fusion of
heterogeneous parties united on their negative side.

This remark applies generally. At all times and
places the apparent continuity of history may be decom-
posed into distinct and separable events, events both small
and great, which consist of questions followed by solutions.
Now, a question for societies, as for individuals, is a waver-
ing between a given affirmation and a given negation, or
between a given goal and a given impediment; and a solu-
tion, as we shall see later on, is only the suppression of one
of the two adversaries or of their inconsistency. For the
moment I shall speak of questions only. They are really
logical discourses; one says yes, the other, no. One desires
a yes, the other, a no. It makes no difference whether we
are dealing with language or religion, with jurisprudence
or government, the distinction between the affirmative and
the negative side is easily found.

In the elementary linguistic duel which we were consider-
ing above, the established term or idiom affirms and the
new term or idiom denies. In the religious duel, the ortho-
dox dogma affirms, the heterodox denies, just as, later,
when science tends to replace religion, the accepted theory
is the affirmation that is controverted by the new theory.
Juridical contests are of two kinds. The one occurs in the
bosom of a parliament or cabinet whenever it deliberates
upon a law or decree, the other, in the bosom of a court
whenever a case is tried before it. Now, the legislator must
always choose between the adoption or the rejection of the
proposed law, I. e., between its affirmation or its negation.
As for the judge, we know that in every suit that is brought

The Logical Laws of Imitation 157

before him, — a peculiarity that has been overlooked in spite
of its significance, — there is always a plaintiff who affirms
something and a defendant who denies it. If the defendant
puts in a counter claim, this means that a second suit is
added to the first. If other parties intervene, each of them
takes on the character of plaintiff or defendant and thus
multiplies the number of the separate questions between the
litigants of the action. In political contests a distinction
should be made between foreign and intestine wars. The
latter are called civil wars when they reach their highest
pitch of intensity and result in armed violence. In ordinary
times, they constitute the parliamentary or election contests
of political factions. In a foreign war is there not always
an offensive and defensive army, one in favour of a fight
and the other against it? And, above all, is not the cause
of war the advance of some claim, or, if it be a doctrinal
war, of some dogma that is noised about and pushed for-
ward by one of the belligerents and rejected by the other?
In electoral or parliamentary wars there are as many sepa-
rate combats as the number of measures or principles that are
proposed or proclaimed on the one hand and condemned or
contradicted on the other. This process between an official
plaintiff and one or more opposing defendants is renewed
under countless pretexts, from the moment that a ministry
or government is first formed; it is ended by the destruc-
tion of the opposition — as, for example, in 1594, by the de-
feat of the Catholic League — or by the downfall of the gov-
ernment or ministry. As for industrial rivalries, to conclude,
they consist, if we consider them closely, in many successive
or simultaneous duels between inventions that have spread
and been established for a shorter or longer period and one
or more new inventions that are trying to spread by satisfy-
ing more fully the same need. Thus there are always in an in-
dustrially progressive society a certain number of old prod-
ucts which defend themselves with varying fortune against
new ones. The production and consumption of the former
embody a strong affirmation or conviction, — in the case of
tallow candles, for example, we have the affirmation that

158 Laws of Imitation

this means of lighting is the best and most economical, —
that is impugned by the production and consumption of the
latter. We are surprised to find a conflict of propositions
underlying the quarrel over shop-counters. The quarrels
that are to-day past history between cane sugar and beet
sugar, between the stage-coach and the locomotive, between
the sailboat and the steamboat, etc., were once real social
discussions or even argumentations.' For not only two
propositions, but two syllogisms, were here face to face,
according to a general condition unheeded by logicians. The
one said, for example, " The horse is the fastest domestic ani-
mal. Now, locomotion is possible only by means of animals;
consequently the stage-coach is the best means of locomo-
tion." To this, the other answered : " The horse is, to be
sure, the fastest animal, but it is not true that only brute
forces can be utilised in the transportation of men and
merchandise, consequently, your conclusion is false." This
observation should be generalised, and it would be easy for
us to discover many syllogistic rebuffs of a similar kind in
the above logical duels.

I may add that, in the case of industry, the contest is not
merely one between two inventions meeting the same need or
between the manufacturers or corporations or classes which
have monopolised them separately. It is also one between
two different needs. The one, some widespread and domi-
nant desire that has been developed by a number of antece-
dent inventions, like the love of country, for example, among
the ancient Romans, is supposed to be of superior impor-
tance; the other, aroused by some recent or recently im-
ported inventions, like the taste for objects of art or for
Asiatic effeminacy, implicitly impugns the superiority of the
first, against which it contends. This kind of contest seems,
of course, to be more closely connected with morality than
with industry; but in a certain sense morality is only indus-
try viewed in its high and truly political aspect. Govern-
ment is only a special kind of industry that is able or is sup-
posed to be able to satisfy the chief need and aim that the
nature of long-prevailing systems of production and con-

The Logical Laws of Imitation 159

sumption or of long-ruling convictions has planted without
a rival in the heart of a people and to which morality insists
that all others be subordinated. One country clamours for
glory, another for territory, a third for money; it all depends
whether its people have done most of their work under arms
or at the plough or in the factory. As nations or as individ-
uals, we are ever unwittingly under the control of some
guiding desire or, rather, some persistent resolution which,
born itself of some past victory, has always fresh combats
to wage. We are also under the control of some fixed
idea or opinion which' has been adopted after some hesi-
tation and whose citadel is continually being attacked.
This is. called a state of mind in individuals, and a state
of society in nations. Every mental or social state im-
plies, then, while it lasts, an ideal. To the formation of
the ideal which morality defends and preserves, all the
military and industrial as well as all the aesthetic past of
a society has contributed. And finally art itself has its
own peculiar conflicts of theses and antitheses. In each of
its domains there is always some prevailing school that
affirms a certain type of beauty which is denied by some
other school.

But here I should linger for a moment to emphasise the
preceding points. We are considering social facts mainly
from the logical point of view, that is, from the point of
view of the corroborative or contradictory beliefs which they
imply, rather than from that of the auxiliary or contrary
desires which they likewise imply. It is difficult to under-
stand how inventions and their aggregates, institutions, ca-n
either endorse or disavow one another, and this point I
must make clear once for all. Invention only satisfies or
provokes desire; desire expresses itself as purpose; and
purpose, besides being a pseud o- judgment in its affirmative
or negative form (I desire, I do not desire), includes some
hope or fear, generally hope, that is, it always includes a true
judgment. Hope or fear means affirmation or negation
accompanied by a greater or less degree of belief that the
thing desired will come to pass. Suppose that I wish to be

160 Laws of Imitation

a Deputy, — a desire which has been developed in me
through the invention of universal suffrage and representa-
tion,— it means that I hope to become a Deputy by means of
certain well-known methods. And if my opponents hinder
me (because they believe that another will aid them more in
obtaining the places which they desire, a desire which has
been provoked in them by the old or new invention of the
functions in question), it is because they have some
quite contradictory hopes. I affirm that thanks to my
good management I shall probably be elected; they deny it.
If they should absolutely cease denying and lose all hope,
they would no longer oppose me, and the teleological duel
would end, as it always does end, in the logical duel — a
proof of the capital importance of the latter.

What is social life but a continual turmoil of vague hopes
and fears intermittently excited by fresh ideas which stir
up fresh desires? When we dwell upon the conflict or
competition of desires we get a social teleology, when upon
that of hopes, a social logic. When two inventions satisfy
the same desire, they clash together, as I have shown, be-
cause each implies on the part of its respective producer or
consumer the hope or conviction that it is the better adapted
to the end in view, and, consequently, that the other is the
inferior of the two. But, even when two inventions satisfy
two different desires, they may contradict each other, either
because the desires are dissimilar expressions of a higher
desire which each thinks itself the fitter to express, or be-
cause the satisfaction of either requires that the other shall
remain unsatisfied and because each hopes that this will be
the outcome.

We have an example of the first case in the invention of
oil painting in the fifteenth century. This invention gain-
said the ancient invention of painting on wax in the sense
that the growing passion for the former contested with the
existing taste for the latter the right of considering itself
the best form of the love of pictures. As an example of
the second case we have the invention of gunpowder in the
fourteenth century. In developing among sovereigns an ever-

The Logical Laws of Imitation 161

growing craving for conquest and centralisation, a craving
which required the subjection of the feudal lords for its
satisfaction, it found itself in opposition with the inventions
of fortified castles and elaborate armour, inventions which
had developed the need for feudal independence among the
nobility; and if the latter persisted in their resistance to
their king, it was because they continued to have as much
confidence in their castles and cuirasses as the king in his
cannon.

But in history the chief contradiction between two inven-
tions arises from their satisfying the same desire. The
Christian invention of the diaconate and the episcopacy cer-
tainly contradicted the pagan invention of the praetorship
and consulship and patriciate, for both Christian and pagan
thought that their desire for grandeur was satisfied by their
respective dignities and denied that it could be satisfied by
the dignities of the other. Consequently a social state
which tolerated all of these opposite institutions at the same
time contained a hidden evil; and, as a matter of fact, many
contradictions of this kind contributed, after the advent of
Christianity, to the break-up of the Roman Empire and to
that absorption of Roman civilisation which at the Renas-
cence forced the civilisation of Christendom to give way in
its turn. In a way, too, the invention of the monastic rule
of the first religious orders also gainsaid the ancient inven-
tion of the Roman phalanx, since each of these inventions,
in the eyes of those who made use of it, satisfied, to the
exclusion of the other, the desire for true security.

In like manner the Doric and Corinthian orders were
gainsaid by the pointed style, and the hexameter and pen-
tameter by the rhymed verse of ten syllables. The hexame-
ter and the Corinthian order satisfied the Roman's desire
for literary and architectural beauty; they failed to do this
for the twelfth-century Frenchman, whom the ten-syllabled
verse, dear to the trouveres, and the style of Notre Dame de
Paris alone satisfied. The irreconciliable elements in such
conceptions, then, are the judgments which accompany them.
This is so true that when in modern times a more liberal

1 62 Laws of Imitation

taste attributes grandeur to both the patriciate and the
episcopacy and beauty to both the hexameter and the heroic
measure, formerly antagonistic elements are reconciled,
just as long before this monasticism and militarism came
into perfect harmony when it was seen that in the one lay
security for the life to come and in the other, for life from
day to day.

It is quite certain, therefore, that all social advances by
means of elimination consist, at first, of duels between an-
tagonistic affirmatives and negatives. But it is well to note
that the negative is not entirely self-sustaining, that it
must depend upon some new thesis which is itself gain-
said by the thesis of the affirmative. In times of progress,
then, the elimination must always be a substitution; and
I have merged these two ideas into the latter one. This
necessity explains the weakness of certain political opposi-
tions which have no programmes of their own, and whose
impotent criticism controverts everything and affirms noth-
ing. For the same reason no great religious heretic or re-
former ever confined himself wholly to the negative side in
any effective opposition to dogma. The cutting dialectic of a
Lucian did less to shatter the statue of Jupiter than the lisp-
ing by slaves of the least of the Christian dogmas. It has
been justly observed, too, that an established system of
philosophy resists all attack until the day when its enemies
have become its rivals in the establishment of another
original philosophic system.

However ridiculous a school of art may be, it continues
vigorous until replaced. It took the pointed style to kill
the Roman style of architecture, and the art of the Re-
nascence to kill the Gothic. Classic tragedy would
have survived its critics but for the appearance of the
romantic drama, hybrid though it was. A commercial
article disappears from consumption only because another
article satisfying the same want takes its place, or^because
the want that it satisfies has been suppressed by a change of
fashion or custom, and this change can be accounted for
not alone by the spread of some new distaste or objection,

The Logical Laws of Imitation 163

but by that of some new taste or principle as well.1 In the
same way a new legal principle or procedure must be
formulated or adopted before inconvenient or antiquated
principles or procedures can disappear. In Rome archaic
civil processes would have persisted indefinitely but for
the ingenious invention of the Formulary system.
Quiritian law gave way only to the happy fictions and
liberal inspirations of Praetorian law. In our own days
the French penal code, as well as many other foreign crim-
inal codes, is clearly old-fashioned and contrary to public
opinion, but it will be maintained until criminologists agree
upon some new theory of penal responsibility that will be
generally adopted.

Finally, if a people retain the same number of ideas to
be verbally expressed (if it loses some of its ideas without
acquiring at least an equal number, its civilisation is de-
clining instead of progressing), the words and gram-
matical forms of its language can be eliminated only through
the spread of equivalent terms or idioms. When one word
dies another is born, and, consequently, or analogously, when
one language perishes, it means that another has been born
within it or outside of it. Latin would still be spoken, in
spite of the barbarian invasions/providing certain important
linguistic inventions, the derivation of articles from pro-
nouns, for example, or the characterisation of the future
tense by the infinitive followed by the verb to have (avoir)
(aimer-ai), had not come to group themselves together
somewhere or other to form a rallying point for the Romance
languages. Here were new theses without which the
antithesis, which consisted in opposition to the cases and
tenses of the Latin declensions and conjugations, would
never have succeeded.

Thus every logical duel is in reality twofold, consisting
of two sets of diametrically opposite affirmations and nega-

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

164 Laws of Imitation

tions. Still, although, at every moment of social life, one
of the two hostile theses gainsays the other, yet it presents
itself as pre-eminently self -affirmative; whereas the second
thesis, although it likewise affirms itself, owes its promi-
nence only to its contradiction of the first. It is essential
both for the politician and the historian to distinguish in
every case whether the affirmative or the negative side
preponderates and to note the moment when the roles are
reversed. This moment almost always arrives. There
is a certain time when a growing philosophy or religious
or political sect owes all its popularity to the support which
it lends to the controvertists of the accepted thesis or
dogma or to the detractors of government; later, when
this philosophy or sect has enlarged, we see that all the
forces of the still resistant national church or orthodox phi-
losophy or established government are called upon to serve
as a protection against the objections, the doubts, and the
alarms that have been aroused by the ideas and preten-
sions of the innovators, ideas and pretensions that have by
this time become attractive in themselves. In the case of
industry and fine arts, it is for the pleasure of change, of
not doing the usual thing, that that part of the public
which is influenced by fashion adopts a new product to the
neglect of some old one; then when the novelty has be-
come acclimated and appreciated for its own sake the older
product seeks a refuge in the cherished habits of the other
part of the public which is partial to custom and which
wishes to show in that way that it also does not do the
same thing as the rest of the world. In the struggle of a
new form of speech with some old expression, the new form
at first relies upon its chiefly negative charm for neologists-
who wish to talk out of the ordinary; and when the new
form in turn becomes time-worn, the older expression finds
support in its turn, but upon its negative side merely,
among the lovers of archaisms who do not wish to talk
like all the rest of the world. The same somersaults are
turned in a duel between a new principle of justice and a
traditional one.

The Logical Laws of Imitation 165

It is now essential to distinguish between the cases in
which the logical duel of theses and antitheses is individual
and those in which it is social. The distinction could not
be more clear-cut. The social duel commences only after
the individual one has ceased. Every act of imitation is
preceded by hesitation on the part of the individual, for
every discovery or invention that seeks to spread abroad
always finds some obstacle to overcome in some of the
ideas or practices that have already been adopted by every
member of the public. And then in the heart or mind of
every such person some kind of a conflict sets in. It may
be between two candidates, that is, between two policies
which solicit his vote, or, if he be a statesman, between two
perplexing lines of action. It may be between two theories
which sway his scientific belief; or between religion and irre-
ligion, or between two sects which contend for his religious
adherence. It may be between two objects of art or com-
merce which hold his taste and his purchase price in sus-
pense. If he be a legislator, it may be between two con-
trary bills1 or principles that seem equally important; or,
if he be a lawyer, between two solutions of a legal ques-
tion over which he is reflecting, or between two expres-
sions which suggest themselves at the same time to his
hesitating tongue. Now, as long as a man hesitates in this
way, he refrains from imitation, whereas it is only as an
imitator that he is a part of society. When he finally imi-
tates, it means that he has come to a decision.

Let us suppose, although it is an hypothesis that could
never be realised, that all the members of a nation were
simultaneously and indefinitely in a state of indecision like
that which I have described. Then war would be at an
end, for an ultimatum or a declaration of war presup-
poses the making of individual decisions by cabinet of-
ficers. For war to exist, the clearest type of the logical
duel in society, peace must first have been established in the

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

1 66 Laws of Imitation

minds of the ministers or rulers who before that hesitated
to formulate the thesis and antithesis embodied in the two
opposing armies. For the same reason there would be no
more election contests. There would be an end to re-
ligious quarrels and to scientific schisms and disputes, be-
cause this division of society into separate churches or
theories presupposes that some single doctrine has finally
prevailed in the previously divided thought or conscience of
each of their respective followers. Parliamentary discus-
sions would cease. There would be an end to litigation. A
lawsuit, the presentation of a social difficulty for settlement,
shows that each party has already settled in his own mind
the mental difficulty that was presented to him. Industrial
competition between rival establishments would cease be-
cause their rivalry depended upon each having its separate
group of patrons, and now their products would no longer
vie against one another in their patrons' hearts. There
would be an end to the struggles and encroachments of dif-
ferent kinds of law, such as those between the Custom and
the Roman law of mediaeval France, for such national per-
plexity means that individuals have chosen one or the other
of the two bodies of law. There would be an end to con-
tests for pre-eminence between distinct dialects, between the
Langue d'Oc and the Langue d'O'il, for example, for a lin-
guistic hesitation of this kind in a nation is due to the
linguistic steadfastness of the individuals who compose it.
In brief, to reiterate, social irresolution begins when in-
dividual irresolution ends. Nowhere else can be seen to
greater advantage the striking similarity and dissimilar-
ity of the logic and psychology of society to the logic and
psychology of the individual. I hasten to add that al-
though the hesitation which precedes an act of imitation is
merely an individual fact, yet it is caused by social facts,
that is, by other accomplished acts of imitation. The re-
sistance which a man always puts up against the influence,
whether rational or prestigeful, of another man whom he
is about to copy is always the outcome of some prior in-
fluence which he has already experienced. His delay in

The Logical Laws of Imitation 167

imitating is due to the intersection in his mind of a given
current of imitation with an inclination towards a different
imitation. It is well to note here that even the spread of an
imitation involves it in an encounter and struggle with
another imitation.

At the same time it may be seen that the necessity of
there being only two adversaries in social oppositions is ex-
plained by the universality of imitation, the essential fact
of social life. In fact, only two theses or judgments can
be in opposition wherever this elementary fact occurs : the
thesis or purpose of the individual-model and the thesis
or purpose of the individual-copy. If we wish to look
abroad over masses of human beings, the duel may be seen
to be reproduced, magnified, and socialised under thousands
of forms; but the more narrow and complete the order of
the phenomena of human association in question, the more
clearly will it be reflected in the total group of facts. It
is very clear in military affairs as armies become disciplined
and centralised and as it comes about that only one great
combat is waged at the same time on the same battlefield
instead of the multiplied single combats of the Homeric
period. It is very distinct, too, in religions, as they grow
more united and more hierarchical. The duel between
Catholicism and Protestantism, or between Catholicism
and free thought, implies an advance in the organisation
of these cults and of that of free thought as well. The duel
is less clear in politics, but it becomes more clear as parties
advance in organisation. It is even less clear in industry;
but if industry ever comes to be organised on a socialistic
basis, the case will change. In language it is very
vague, for language has become less conscious of national-
ity than any other human product. However, I mentioned
above the struggle of the Langue d'Oc and -the Langue
d'O'il, and there are many other analogous examples. The
duel became vague, too, in jurisprudence when the study of
law ceased to be a passion, and law schools were no longer re-
cruited by the trained and enthusiastic followers of famous
professors, and ceased to witness anything comparable to the

1 68 Laws of Imitation

great contentions of the Sabiniani and Proculiani at Rome,
of the Romanists and Feudists at the close of the Middle
lAges, etc.

When social irresolution has been produced and accentu-
ated it must be transformed in its turn into resolution.
How? Through a fresh series of individual states of ir-
resolution followed by acts of imitation. If several
political programmes are splitting a nation up, one of them
will spread, through means of propaganda or terror, until
it has won over almost everybody one by one. The same is
true of one among many rival churches or philosophies.
It is useless to multiply examples. Finally, when a certain
degree of the unanimity which is never absolute comes to
be realised, all irresolution, whether individual or social,
is very nearly over. This is the inevitable finish. Every-
thing which we see anchored and rooted in our customs
and beliefs of to-day began by being the object of ardent
discussion. There is no peaceful institution which has not
been mothered by discord. Grammars, codes, catechisms,
written and unwritten constitutions, ruling industries,
sovereign systems of versification, all these things which
are in themselves the categorical basis of society, have been
the slow and gradual work of social dialetic. Every gram-
matical rule expresses the triumph of some habit of speech
which has spread at the expense of other partially con-
tradictory habits. Every article of the French Code is a bar-
gain or treaty made after bloody street broils, after stirring
journalistic polemics, and after rhetorical parliamentary tem-
pests. No constitutional principle has ever been accepted
except in the wake of revolutions, etc.1

The categories of the individual mind originated in the

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

The Logical Laws of Imitation 169

same way.1 Our slightly developed notions of time, space,
matter, and force are, according to the well-grounded con-
clusion of the new psychology, the result of the inhibi-
tions, inductions, and acquisitions that take place in the
individual during the first period of life. But, just as the
little child in the cradle possesses at an age which defies
analysis the germ of vague ideas on space and time, if
not on matter and force, so every primitive society pre-
sents to us a confused body of grammatical rules, of cus-
toms, of religious ideas, and of political forces about whose
formation we are absolutely ignorant.

The conclusion of society's logical duel occurs in three
different ways. (i) It quite often happens that one of
the two adversaries is suppressed merely by the natural
prolongation of the other's progress. For example,
the Phoenician writing had only to continue to spread
to annihilate the cuneiform. The petroleum lamp had
only to be known to cause the brazier of nut oil, a slight
modification of the Roman lamp, to fall into disuse in
the shanties of Southern France. Sometimes, however,
a moment arrives when the progress of even the favoured
rival is checked by some increasing difficulty in dis-
lodging the enemy beyond a certain point. Then, (2)
if the need of settling the contradiction is felt strongly
enough, arms are resorted to, and victory results in the
violent suppression of one of the two duellists. Here
may be easily classed the case in which an authorita-
tive, although non-military, force intervenes, as hap-
pened in the vote of the Council of Nice in favour of
the Athanasian creed, or in the conversion of Con-
stantine to Christianity, or as happens in any impor-
tant decision following upon the deliberations of a dictator
or assembly. In this case, the vote or decree, like the
victory in the other case, is a new external condition which

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

170 Laws of Imitation

favours one of the two rival theses or volitions at the ex-
pense of the other and disturbs the natural play of spread-
ing and competing imitations somewhat as a sudden climatic
change resulting from a geological accident in a given lo-
cality disturbs the propagation of life by preventing
the multiplication of some naturally fertile animal or
vegetal species and by facilitating that of others which
otherwise had been less prolific. Finally, (3) the an-
tagonists are often seen to be reconciled, or one of them is
seen to be wisely and voluntarily expelled through the in-
tervention of some new discovery or invention.

Let us consider for a while this last and, as it seems to
me, most important case, for here the intervening condition
comes from within rather than from without. Besides,
the successful discovery or invention plays the same part
here as that played in the preceding case by the happy in-
spiration of the general on the battlefield whose flash of
military genius ensured the victory of his side. It took
the discovery, for example, of the circulation of the blood,
to put an end to the interminable discussions of the anat-
omists of the sixteenth century. It took the astronom-
ical discoveries due to the invention of the telescope, at
the beginning of the seventeenth century, to settle the
question in favour of the Pythagorean hypothesis and con-
trary to those of the Aristotelians whether the sun re-
volved around the earth or the earth around the sun, as
well as many other questions which divided the astrono-
mists into two camps. Turn to any library and see how
many sometime burning questions, how many belching
volcanoes of argument and abuse, are now cold and ex-
tinct! And the cooling down has almost always been
started, as if by a miracle, by some scholarly, or apparently,
by some even erudite or imaginary, discovery. There is
not a page of the catechism which is at present unchallenged
by believers but whose every line embodies the outcome of
violent polemics between the founders of its dogma, between
the Church Fathers or the Councils.

What was needed to end these at times bloody combats?

The Logical Laws of Imitation 171

The discovery of some more or less authentic and sacred
text, or of some new theological conception — unless some
supposedly infallible authority cut short the controversy by
force. In the same way, how many conflicts between
men's wills and desires have been settled or singularly,
calmed down by some industrial or even by some political
invention! Before the invention of wind-mills or water-
mills, desire for bread and aversion to the enervating labour
of grinding by hand were openly antagonistic in the hearts
of the master and his slaves. To wish to eat bread was
to wish this atrocious fatigue for one's self or for others,
and not to wish this fatigue for one's self, if one were a
slave, was to wish that nobody should eat bread. When
the water-mill was invented, it was an immense relief to
slave-labour, and the aforesaid desires ceased to impede each
other. Before the invention of the cart, one of the most
wonderful inventions of antiquity, the need to transport
heavy weights and the wish not to exhaust one's strength
by carrying them on one's shoulder and not to prostrate
beasts of burden with them fought together and blocked
each other's way in people's feelings. In short, slavery
was but a necessary evil for the accomplishment of pain-
ful and obligatory work the necessity of which was recog-
nised by the slave as well as by his master. The master
threw the burden of it upon the slave in order that, as far
as he himself was concerned, at any rate, the conflict of
contradictory desires might be settled; otherwise it would
have been settled for nobody. This chronic antagonism
of desires and interests gave way but gradually to com-
parative harmony through a series of capital inventions
which provided for the utilisation of the inanimate forces
of nature, of steam, of the winds and streams, etc., to the
great and equal advantage of both master and slave.

Here each intervening invention did better than merely
to suppress one of the terms of the difficulty; it suppressed
their contrariety. This is what happens in the unravelling
of a comedy (for an invention is a denouement, and
vice versa), when the contradiction in the wills of a father

172 Laws of Imitation

and son, for example, comes to a point that seems to be in-
surmountable, some unexplained disclosure shows that it is
entirely fictitious and groundless.1 Industrial inventions
may be compared, then, to the unravelling of a comedy, in
other words, they are pleasing and satisfactory to all the
world, whereas military inventions, with their perfected
armaments and cunning strategy and eagle-eyed perception
at critical moments, plainly suggest the unravelling of a
tragedy where the triumph of one rival is the death of the
other, where so much passion and prejudice is embodied
in the actors, where the contradiction between their de-
sires and their convictions is so serious that harmony be-
comes impossible and the final sacrifice inevitable. Every
victory is in this way the suppression, if not of the van-
quished, at least of his national and resisting will, by the
national will of the victor. It is this rather than a mutual
agreement, in spite of the treaty which follows and which
is an involuntary compact. In short, history is a tissue, an
interlacing of tragedies and comedies, of horrible tragedies
and cheerless comedies. If we look closely, we can

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

The Logical Laws of Imitation 173

easily distinguish them. This is perhaps the reason, I
may say in passing, why, in our much more industrial than
military age, it is not surprising to find that, on the stage,
where real life is reflected, tragedy is becoming more neg-
lected day by day and is yielding to comedy, which grows
and flourishes, but which becomes sombre and gloomy at
the same time.

III. The Logical Union

Now that we have discussed the inventions and dis-
coveries which fight and replace each other, I have to
deal with those which aid and add to each other. It must
not be inferred from the order I have followed that progress
through substitution originally preceded progress through
accumulation. In reality, the latter necessarily preceded,
just as it plainly follows, the former. The latter is both
the alpha and the omega; the former is but a middle term.
For example, the formation of languages certainly began
in a successive acquisition of words, of verbal forms, which,
as they expressed ideas hitherto unexpressed, found no ri-
vals to contest their establishment; and this circumstance
undoubtedly facilitated their first steps. In the beginnings
of primordial religion the legends and myths with which it
was enriched found in their character of answers to en-
tirely fresh questions no prior solutions to contradict them,
and it was easy for them not to contradict each other,
since they gave separate answers to differerffquestions. It
was probably difficult for primitive customs to graft them-
selves upon the waywardness peculiar to a state of nature;
but as they answered to problems of justice which had
until then been unpropounded and as they regulated in-
dividual relations which had until then been unregulated,
they had the good fortune to have no pre-existing customs
to combat, and it was an easy matter for them not to become
embroiled with one another.

174 Laws of Imitation

Finally, primitive political organisations must have been
free to develop up to a certain point without any inward
disturbance or military or industrial struggle. The very
first form of government was in answer to a demand for
security which had until then received no satisfaction, and
this circumstance was favourable to its establishment.
When the art of war first arose, every new weapon or
drill or tactic could be added to those already in existence,
whereas, in our own day it is seldom that a new engine of
war or a new military regulation does not have to battle
for some time with others which its introduction has
rendered useless. In the beginnings of industry, in its pas-
toral and agricultural forms, every newly cultivated plant
and every newly domesticated animal were added to the
feeble resources of field and barn, of garden and stable,
and did not, like to-day, replace other domestic plants and
animals of almost equal worth. At that time, likewise,
every new astronomical or physical observation which lit
up some hitherto obscure point in the human mind took
an undisputed place side by side with anterior observa-
tions which it in no way contradicted. It was a question
of scattering shadows, not of overcoming falsehoods. It
was a question of exploiting unbounded and uncultivated
lands, not of improving lands that had already been worked
by other possessors.

But we should not overlook the fact that the kind of ac-
cumulation which precedes substitution by means of
logical duels is different from that which follows it. The
first kind consists of a weak aggregation of elements whose
principal bond lies in not contradicting one another; the
second, in a vigorous group of elements which not only do
not contradict one another, but, for the most part, confirm
one another. And this should be so, because of the con-
tinually growing need of strong and comprehensive belief.
From what has preceded we can already see the truth of this
remark; it will presently become still more apparent. I
will show that along all lines there are two distinct kinds
of inventions or discoveries, those that are capable of in-

The Logical Laws of Imitation 175

definite accumulation (although they may also be replaced)
and those that, after a certain degree of accumulation has
been reached, must, if progress is to continue, be replaced.
Now, the distribution of both kinds takes place quite natur-
ally in the course of progress. The first both precede and
follow the second, but in the latter instance, after the exhaus-
tion of the second, they present a systematic character which
they previously lacked.

A language may grow without limit through the ad-
dition of new words corresponding to new ideas;
but although nothing may check the increasing bulk
of its vocabulary, the additions to its grammar are re-
stricted. Outside of a small number of grammatical rules
and forms which are alike in character and which meet,
more or less satisfactorily, all the needs of the lan-
guage, no new rule or form can arise without entering into
opposition with others and without tending to recast the
idiom in a different mould. If the idea of expressing case
by means of a preposition followed by an article comes into
a language which is already possessed of declensions, either
the article and the preposition must eventually eliminate the
declensions, or the declensions must repel them. Now,
let me observe, after the grammar of a language has be-
come fixed, its vocabulary does not cease to grow richer;
on the contrary, it increases still more rapidly; besides,
from this time on, as every new term takes on the same
grammatical livery, it not only does not contradict the
others, but even indirectly confirms their implicit prop-
ositions. For example, every new word which came
into Latin with the termination us or a seemed in its de-
clension to reiterate and confirm that which was said by
all the other words similarly terminated and declined,
namely, the following general propositions: us and a are
signs of Latinity, i, u, a, um are signs of the genitive, the
dative, the accusative, etc.

Religions have also, like languages, two aspects. They
have their dictionary of narrative and legend, their start-
ing point, and their religious grammar of dogma and

176 Laws of Imitation

ritual. The former is composed of Biblical or mythological
tales, of histories of gods and demi-gods, of heroes and
saints, and it can develop without stop; but the latter
cannot be extended in the same way. After all the main
conscience-tormenting problems have been solved accord-
ing to the peculiar principle of the given religion, a moment
comes when no new dogma can be introduced which does
not partly contradict established dogma; similarly, no new
rite, in as much as it is an expression of dogma, can be freely
introduced when all the dogmas have already been ex-
pressed in ritual. Now, after the creed and ritual of a re-
ligion have been defined, its martyrology, hagiography, and
ecclesiastical history never fail to grow richer, and this even
more rapidly than before. Moreover, the saints and mar-
tyrs and devotees of a mature religion, not only do not con-
tradict one another in the conventionality and orthodoxy of
all their acts, thoughts, and even miracles, but mutually re-
flect and endorse one another. In this respect they differ
from the divine or heroic persons, from the gods and demi-
gods, from the patriarchs and apostles, as well as from the
legends and prodigies, that succeeded one another before
the making of dogma and ritual.

Here I must open a parenthesis for quite an important
observation. If a religion is primarily narrative, it is
highly variable and plastic; if it is primarily dogmatic, it
is essentially unchangeable. In Greco-Latin paganism
there is almost no dogma, and since ritual has, therefore,
almost no dogmatic significance its symbolism is of the
more distinctly narrative kind. It may represent, for ex-
ample, an episode in the life of Ceres or Bacchus. Under-
stood in this way there may be no end to the ac-
cumulation of different rites. If dogma amounted to al-
most nothing, narrative was almost everything, in ancient
polytheism. Therefore it had an incredible facility for
enrichment. This is analogous to the inflation of a modern
idiom, like English, which, although it is grammatically
very poor, incorporates all manner of foreign words by
merely making a slight change in their termination, a kind

The Logical Laws of Imitation 1 77

of linguistic baptism. But although this capacity for un-
limited enlargement is a cause of viability in a narrative
religion, this does not mean that it is particularly well
fortified against the attacks of criticism. It is quite a dif-
ferent thing from the solid theological system or body of
self-consistent or apparently self-consistent dogma and
dogmatic ritual that can rise up in a mass to confront any
outside controversialist that may oppose them.

But to return. What is true of religion is also true of
that which seeks to replace it, of science. As long as sci-
ence merely enumerates and describes facts, sense-given
data, it is susceptible of indefinite extension. And science
begins in this way by being a collection of non-related as
well as non-contradictory phenomena. But as soon as it
becomes dogmatic and law-making, in turn, as soon as it
conceives of theories that are able to give to facts the air
of mutual confirmation instead of merely mutual non-con-
tradiction, as soon, indeed, as it unwittingly synthesises
the data of sensation under intuitive mental forms which
are implicit general propositions called time, space,
matter, and force, then science becomes, perhaps, the
most incapable of extension of all human achieve-
ments. Scientific theories undoubtedly become more com-
plete, but this happens through mutual substitution and
through periodically fresh starts, whereas observations and
experiments go on accumulating. Certain leading hy-
potheses that reappear from one age to another — atomism,
dynamism (modern evolutionism), monadology, idealism
(Platonic or Hegelian) — are the inflexible frames of the
swelling and overflowing mass of facts. Only, among
these master thoughts, these hypotheses or inventions of
science, there are certain ones which receive increasing1
confirmation from one another and from the continual ac-
cumulation of newly discovered facts which, in consequence,
no longer merely restrict themselves to not contradicting
one another, but reciprocally repeat and confirm one another,
as if bearing witness together to the same law or to the
same collective proposition. Before Newton, successive as-

178 Laws of Imitation

tronomical discoveries did not contradict one another; since
Newton, they confirm one another. Ideally, every distinct
science should be reducible, like modern astronomy, to a
single formula, and these different formulas should be
bound together by some higher formula. In a word, there
should be no longer sciences, but Science, just as in a
polytheistic religion which has become monotheistic by
means of selection there are no longer gods, but God.

And so in a tribe which passes from a pastoral to an ag-
ricultural and then to a manufacturing state, adding wheat
fields and rice fields to its pasture lands, enriching its
orchards and gardens, elaborating its textile fabrics, inter-
ests do not fail to multiply nor corresponding laws and cus-
toms to accumulate. But the general principles of law
which finally shine out from such a medley are always lim-
ited in number, and for them progress means substitution.
Now, after the formation of a legal grammar, the dictionary
of law, in France called the Bulletin des lots, can, of course,
visibly enlarge and redouble its activity as well; but from
this time on, succeeding laws are garbed in the same uniform
of theory, a uniform which adapts them to codification, to
a rural code, to a commercial code, to a maritime code, etc.
This systematisation would have been impossible before.

Finally, from the point of view of government (I use the
word in its large sense to mean the directed activity of a
nation in all its forms) analogous distinctions are ex-
hibited. We may say that the directed national activity
is either militant or industrial and that the former type of
activity is divisible into military and politcal forces, ac-
cording as it consists of the short and bloody warfare of
armies or of the long and stormy warfare of parties, of the
oppression of a conquered and tributary foreigner or of that
of a home foe who has been crushed down by taxation. Now,
it is remarkable that in both these subdivisions, the adminis-
trative side is continually unfolding and improving as its
functions multiply, whereas the arts of war and statesman-
ship are always moving in a narrow circle of strategies and
constitutions which may be gathered up into a small num-

The Logical Laws of Imitation 179

her of different and mutually exclusive types. But it is
only after civil or military functions have been taken and
multiplied by some constitutional or strategic plan, that
they converge, instead of merely refraining from over-
diverging, and that they form a true state or army, instead of
a horde or federation of barbarians.

As for the industrial division of directed national ac-
tivity, the same remarks are applicable, modified by certain
observations. Industry, as I have already said, can be
separated only in thought from the dominant ethics and
aesthetics of any given period. If we hold to this idea as
we should, we shall perceive that only a certain number of
new industrial ideas or inventions are, as I have so often
repeated, susceptible of indefinite progress, that is to say, of
an almost endless amount of accumulation. The industrial
machinery of course increases; but the ends of the service to
which all these means are eventually put, follow one another
•only through mutual elimination. At first sight and taking
the means and ends of industry collectively without dis-
tinguishing between them, it would seem as if the in-
dustrial systems of different periods had wholly replaced
each other. Nothing is less like the industry of Greece or
Rome than the industry of Assyria; the industry of the
seventeenth century is quite unlike that of the Middle Ages
and modern manufacture unlike the hand labour of our
forefathers. In fact, each of these great groups of human
actions is held together and inspired by some great domi-
nant desire which completely changes from one age to an-
other. It may be the desire to prepare for the life after
death or the desire to propitiate one's gods or to honour
and embellish one's city, or the desire to give expression
to religious faith or kingly pride or the desire to equalise
society. The change in this highest aim of all explains the
sequence of those striking works in which a whole period
is epitomised, works like the Egyptian tomb, the Greek
temple, the Roman circus and triumphal arch, the mediaeval
cathedral, the palace of the seventeenth century, the railroad
stations or city structures of to-day.

180 Laws of Imitation

But, as a matter of fact, it is the civilisation and not the
industry which has disappeared forever in this way, if by
civilisation we mean the sum of a period's moral and
aesthetic aims and industrial means. The junction of the
former with the latter is always partially accidental. For
the given ends exploited the, given means because they
happened to run across them, but they might have made
use of others, and although the given means did serve the
given ends, they stood ready to serve different ones as well.
Now, the ends pass away; but the means, or what is essen-
tial in them, remain. An imperfect machine survives, by
a sort of metempsychosis, in the more perfect and com-
plex one which was in whole or in part the cause of its
annihilation; and every primitive mechanism such as the
rod, the lever, or the wheel reappears in our most modern
implements. The long bow survives in the cross bow, the
cross bow in the arquebuse and gun. The primitive cart
survives in the carriage on springs and the latter in the
locomotive. The stage-coach was not routed, but absorbed,
by the locomotive, which added something to it, namely,
steam and the capacity for a higher rate of speed. On the
other hand, the Christian's desire for mystical salvation did
not absorb, but actually routed the Roman's desire for civic
glory, just as the Copernican theory banished the Ptolemaic
system.

In short, the industrial inventions which have followed
one another for thousands of years may be compared to
the vocabulary of a language or to the facts of science.
As I have said above, many tools and products are, in truth,
dethroned by others, just as many inexact pieces of in-
formation have been driven out by more accurate knowl-
edge, but, in the long run, the number of tools and prod-
ucts, like the sum of knowledge, has increased. Science
properly called, a collection of facts that can be drawn
upon to prove a given theory, is comparable to industry
properly called, a store of processes and mechanisms that
can serve to actualise a given system of morals or aesthetics.
Industry, in this sense, is the content whose form is sup-

The Logical Laws of Imitation 181

plied by prevailing ideas of justice and beauty, by ideas
concerning the criterion of conduct. And by industry
I also mean art, in as much as it is distinct from the
changing ideal which uplifts it and which lends to its
manifold secrets and facilities their profound inspiration.
Now, the resources of industry, including the artifices of
artists and even of poets, go on multiplying both before
and after the formation of well-defined moral and aesthetic
systems, that is, of a hierarchy of wants consecrated by
unanimous judgment, but, before this is formed, they are
scattered, whereas, after it is formed, they are concentrated ;
and it is only then, when a single thought is implicitly af-
firmed in all the branches of national industry, that they
present the spectacle of that mutual confirmation, of that
unique orientation and of that admirable internal harmony
which was known in Greece and in the twelfth century of
our era and which our grandchildren may, perhaps, live to
see.

For the time being, we must confess, and this remark
leads us to new considerations, our modern contemporary
epoch is in search of its pole. Its character has been
rightly described as chiefly scientific and industrial. By
that we must understand that theoretically a successful
search for facts has predominated over preoccupation with
philosophic ideas and that, practically, a search for the
means has predominated over regard for the ends of ac-
tivity. That means that our modern world has at all
times and places instinctively precipitated itself in the di-
rection of discoveries or inventions that can be accumulated
without questioning whether the neglected discoveries or
inventions that can be substituted for one another did not
alone justify and give value to the others. But let us, at
any rate, put this question to ourselves : Is it true that the
sides of social thought and conduct that cannot be indefi-
nitely extended (grammars, dogma, and theories, principles
of justice, political policy and strategy, morals and aesthetics)
are less worth cultivating than the sides that can be in-
definitely extended (vocabularies, mythologies and descrip-

1 82 Laws of Imitation

tive sciences, customs, collections of laws, industries, sys-
tems of civil and military administration) ?

Indeed, on the contrary, the side open to substitution,
that which after a certain point cannot be extended, is al-
ways the essential side. Grammar is the whole of lan-
guage. Theory is the whole of science, and dogma, of
religion. Principles constitute justice. Strategy, war.
Government is but a political idea. Morality is the sum of
industry, for industry amounts to neither more nor less
than its end. The ideal is surely the all of art. What
are words good for but for building sentences, or facts,
but for making theories? What are laws good for but to
unfold or consecrate higher principles of justice? For
what use are the arms, the tactics, and the different divi-
sions of an army but to form part of the strategical plan
of the general in command ? Of what use are the multiple
services, functions, and administrative departments of a
state but to aid in the constitutional schemes of the states-
man who represents the victorious political party? Of
what use are the different crafts and products of a coun-
try but to co-operate in achieving the objects of its pre-
vailing morality? Of what use are schools and works of
art and literature to a society but to formulate and
strengthen its characteristic ideal?

Only it is much easier to move forward in the direction
of possible acquisitions and endowments than in that of
necessary substitutions and sacrifices. It is much easier
to pile up neologism upon neologism than to master one's
own tongue and, thereby, gradually improve its grammar;
to bring together scientific observations and experiments,
than to supply science with theories of a more general and
demonstrated order; to multiply miracles and pious prac-
tices than to substitute rational for outworn religious
dogma; to manufacture laws by the dozen than to con-
ceive of a new principle of justice fitted to conciliate all
interests; to increase the complexity of armaments and
tactics, of offices and functions, and to have excellent civil
or military administrators than to have eminent generals

The Logical Laws of Imitation 183

or statesmen able to conceive of the proper plan at the
desired moment and to contribute by their example to re-
modelling and improving military art or statecraft; to mul-
tiply wants by virtue of an ever richer and more varied
consumption and production than to substitute for some
dominant want a superior and preferable want, one
more conducive to order and peace; finally, to artistic-
ally unroll an inexhaustible series of tricks and ingenuities
than to obtain the slightest insight into some fine new thing
that was more worthy of exciting love and enthusiasm.

But modern Europe has been somewhat carried away by
the deceptive charm of doing things easily. This is the
reason of the especially striking contrast between the
wealth of its legislation and the feebleness of its juridical
system (compare it, in this particular, with Trajan's
Rome or even with Justinian's Constantinople), or between
its industrial exuberance and its aesthetic poverty (compare
it, in this respect, to the great days of the French Middle
Ages or of the Italian Renaissance). I might also bring
forward to a certain extent the contrast between
modern Europe's sciences and its philosophy of science.
But I hasten to recognise the fact that although the philo-
sophic side of its knowledge is comparatively neglected,
it has been the object of a much more profound and ex-
tensive cultivation than the moral side of its activity. In-
dustry, from this point of view, is notably behind science.
It has aroused, on all sides, factitious wants which it
satisfies indiscriminately without bothering itself about
their arrangement or harmony. In this it resembles the
ill-digested science of the sixteenth century which gave
birth to a crop of incoherent and pedantic guesses and
vagaries each of which was fostered by a certain number of
facts. Contemporary activity, contemporary civilisation
must straighten out this chaos of heterogeneous wants,
just as the science of the sixteenth century had to bridle
the imagination of its scholars, and prune away the ma-
jority of their conceptions in order to give others a chance
to be transformed into theories. What are the simple

184 Laws of Imitation

and fruitful wants which the future will develop, and what
are the sterile and smothered wants that it will cast
aside? This is the secret. It is hard to find out, but we
must make the attempt. All these wrangling or ill-adjusted
wants which flourish at every point on the industrial field,,
and which have their passionate devotees, constitute a sort
of moral fetichism or polytheism which seeks to branch
out into a comprehensive and authoritative moral monothe-
ism, into a great new and potent system of aesthetics.

Besides, it is industry far more than civilisation that has
progressed in recent times. As a proof of this I might
point to my embarrassment a while ago in trying to find
some characteristic monument of our modern industry.
It is a strange fact and one that has been lost sight of that,
at present, the grandest works of industry are not indus-
trial products, but industrial implements, namely, great
factories, prodigious machines, immense railroad stations.
How trivial are the things, even the most important things,
which come out of our great foundries or factories; how
trivial the fine houses and theatres and city halls compared
with the giant laboratories themselves! How the petty
magnificence of our private or public luxury fades away
before our industrial expositions, where the sole useful-
ness of the products is self-display! Once the opposite
was true, when the miserable huts of Pharaoh's fellahs, or
the obscure stalls of mediaeval artisans surrounded the gi-
gantic pyramid or cathedral that was reared on high
through the sum of their combined efforts. It seems in
these days as if industry existed for the sake of industry,
just as science exists for the sake of science.

Additional Considerations

We have seen that social^ progress is accomplished
through a series of substitutions and accumulations. It
is certainly necessary to distinguish between these two proc-
esses; and yet evolutionists have made the mistake, here

The Logical Laws of Imitation 185

as elsewhere, of merging them together Perhaps
the term evolution is badly chosen. We may call it social
evolution, however, when an invention quietly spreads
through imitation — the elementary fact in society; or even
when a new invention that has already been imitated grafts
itself upon a prior one which it fosters and completes. And
yet why should we not use, in this second instance, the
more precise term of insertion? A philosophy of universal
Insertion would be a happy contribution to the correction
of the theory of universal Evolution. Finally, when a new,
invention, an invisible microbe at first, later on a fatal
disease, brings with it a germ which will eventually destroy,
the old invention to which it attaches itself, how can the
latter be said to evolve? Did the Roman Empire evolve
when Christianity inoculated it with the virus of radical
negations of its fundamental principles? No, this was
counter-evolution, revolution perhaps, but certainly not
evolution. At bottom, of course, in this case as in the pre-
ceding, there is nothing, elementarily, but evolution, be-
cause everything is imitation; but, since these evolutions
and imitations struggle against each other, it is a great
mistake to consider the sum formed by these conflicting
elements as a single evolution. I thought it important
to note this fact in passing.

Let us note another more important fact. Whatever
method may be used to suppress conflict between beliefs or
between interests and to bring about their agreement, it al-
most always happens (does it not always happen?) that the
resulting harmony creates a new kind of antagonism. For
contradictions and contrarieties of details, some massive con-
tradiction or contrariety has been substituted, and this also
seeks a solution for itself only to raise up still greater op-
positions, and so on until the final solution is reached. In-
stead of quarrelling together over cattle or game, over
utilitarian objects, a million of men will organise them-
selves into an army and work together for the subjection
of a neighbouring people. This is the rallying point of
all their avarice and activity. And, in fact, before com-

1 86 Laws of Imitation

merce and exchange existed, militarism must have been for
a long time the only logical outcome of the problem raised
up by rival interests. But militarism gives birth to war,
and war between two peoples is a substitute for thousands
of individual struggles.

In the same way a group of some hundred men will
cease from individual fights and plots and counterplots and
will set to labour together in one workshop. Their acts
are no longer antagonistic, but from this very fact an un-
expected contrariety arises, namely, the rivalry of their
workshop with others that turn out the same kind of goods.
This is not all. The workmen in every factory are col-
lectively interested in its prosperity; in any case their desires
in production, thanks to the division of organised labour,
converge towards the same end. The soldiers of an army
have likewise a common interest in victory. But, at the
same time, the struggle between so-called Capital and so-
called Labour, that is, between the total number of employers
and the total number of workmen,1 as well as rivalry be-
tween different ranks in an army or between different
classes in a nation, is aroused by this imperfect agreement.
These teleological problems are inherent in the very prog-
ress of industrial or military organisation, just as scientific
progress raises problems of logic and uncloaks soluble and
insoluble antinomies of reason which an earlier state of
ignorance had concealed.

The feudal system on one hand and the ecclesiastical
hierarchy on the other were powerful in allaying the pas-
sions and consolidating the interests of the Middle Ages.
But the great and bloody conflict between the Papacy and
the Empire, between the Guelphs, the partisans of the Pope,
and the Ghibellines, the partisans of the Emperor (at first
a logical, later, a teleological, i. e., political, duel), arose

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

The Logical Laws of Imitation 187

from the chock of these two harmonious systems which
could not be mutually harmonised without the downfall of
one of them. The question is whether or not the displace-
ment of such contradictions or contrarieties is advantageous
and whether the harmony of interests or of minds can ever
be complete without being offset by discord. In other
words, whether or not a certain amount of error and false-
hood, of deception and sacrifice, will not always be neces-
sary for the maintenance of social peace?

When the displacement of contradictions or contrarie-
ties consists in their centralisation, an advantage is cer-
tainly gained. Although the organisation of standing
armies may provoke cruel wars, that is better than in-
numerable combats of small feudal bands or of primitive
families. Although the progress of the sciences may have
disclosed profound mysteries, and although great chasms
may divide different schools of philosophy because of
the new questions over which they contend in arguments
drawn from the same scientific arsenal, we are not able to re-
gret the times of ignorance that were free from these prob-
lems. In short, science has done more to satisfy poignant
curiosity than to arouse it, civilisation has done more to
satisfy needs than to engender passions. Inventions and
discoveries act as cures through the method of substitution.
By stilling natural wants and arousing those of luxury, in-
ventions substitute less urgent for more urgent desires.
Discoveries replace the first very anxious states of igno-
rance by perhaps as many, but, at any rate, by less disquiet-
ing, states of not-knowing. And, then, can we not see the
goal to which this protean transformation of contradiction
and contrariety leads us? Competition ends inevitably in
monopoly. Free trade and laisser-aller tends towards the
legal organisation of labour. War tends to the hyper-
trophy of states; — it will go on producing enormous ag-
glomerations until the political unity of the civilised world is
finally consummated and universal peace is assured. The
more the conflict between masses that is caused by the sup-
pression of minor conflicts increases in emphasis and scale

1 88 Laws of Imitation

(until a point is even reached which makes us regret the lat-
ter), the more inevitable this peaceful outcome of it all be-
comes. When a royal army was substituted for provincial or
feudal militia, it began by containing a much smaller num-
ber of soldiers than the effective total of the former militia,
and consequently the amount of disaster involved in the
conflicts of royal armies was far from equalling that which
would have existed in the conflicts which they precluded.
But this advantage has, as we know, been decreasing in
proportion to the irresistible necessity that has forced each
state to enlarge its military contingent to such a point that,
at present, the great nations have drafted all their able-
bodied men into their armies. Therefore, all the gain of
civilisation in this respect would vanish, did not the very
enormity of these armies betoken the imminence of some
decisive upheaval followed by some colossal unity-and-
peace-bringing conquest — unless our soldiers' weapons
should become rusty from lack of service and end by drop-
ping out of their hands.

CHAPTER VI

EXTRA-LOGICAL INFLUENCES

WE have now to study the non-logical causes of prefer-
ence or aversion which are back of different kinds of rival
imitations and which determine their victory or defeat.

Before entering upon these considerations, however, let
me say a few words about certain modes which an imitation
may assume. The modes, namely, of exactness or inexact-
ness, of consciousness or unconsciousness.

i. In the first place, imitation may be either vague or
precise. Let us enquire whether, as the acts or ideas to be
imitated increase in number and complexity in the course
of civilisation, imitation becomes more exact or more con-
fused. We might think that every forward step in com-
plexity brought with it additional inaccuracy. Just the
opposite, however, may be observed. Imitation is to such
an extent the primal soul of social life, that among civilised
men skill and facility in imitating increases even faster
than the number and complexity of inventions. Besides, it
establishes resemblances that become more and more com-
plete. In doing this, it bears out its analogy to reproduc-
tion and vibration. Vibrations of light are much more
numerous and delicate than vibrations of sound, and yet
the light of the stars is transmitted to us with a marvellous
accuracy that is never reached by the latter. The equally
numerous and complex vibrations of electricity are trans-
mitted with incomparable and what would be incredible
fidelity, but for the striking proofs given to us by the
telegraph and telephone and phonograph. A noise is a
series of unlike waves, whereas a sound is a series of waves

189

190 Laws of Imitation

that are very much alike; nevertheless the latter with their
linked harmonies are more complex than the former. Is
it true that when heredity has to reproduce highly differ-
entiated organisms it produces less exact resemblances than
when it has to reproduce beings of a lower order ? On the
contrary, the type of a cat or orchid is at least as well con-
served as that of a zoophyte or mushroom. The faintest va-
rieties in human races can, if they have the time in which to
become fixed, be perpetuated with the utmost perfection by
heredity.

From any point of view social life is bound to lead, in its
prolongation, to the formation of etiquette, that is, to the
complete triumph of conventionality over individual fancy.
Language, religion, politics, war, law, architecture, music,
painting, poetry, polite manners, etc., give rise to a con-
ventionality that is the more complete, to an etiquette that
is the more exacting and tyrannical, the longer it has lasted
and the more undisturbed it has been in its development.
Orthography or linguistic purism, the etiquette of language,
and ritual, the etiquette of religion, possess about an equal
degree of arbitrary precision, when their respective lan-
guage and religion are alike very old and very original.1

1 Nothing equals the strangeness of certain cults unless it be their
persistence. But the same thing may be said of language. It is a fixed
caprice, an established, everlasting disorder, like that of the starry
heavens. What is stranger or more irrational than the use of the word
cabinet to designate a group of ministers, or of the word Porte as a
name for the Ottoman government ? What logical relation exists between
the wor.ds horse, equus, '/TTTTOJ, and the animal they represent? And yet
no law, however sensible and useful it may be, is followed with the
same degree of readiness, constancy, and respect as the custom of using
accepted words, however outlandish they may appear. In the same way,
what resemblance is there, at bottom, between that chain of sacramental
ceremonies which is called the Mass, and the sentiment of high morality
and refined spirituality of which it is a means of expression among
Catholic populations? Mass is another word in point; and we know
the tenacity of this old word. The difficulty for a whole people to agree
at the same time upon the choice of a better term, or to renounce their
needs of expression, sacred or secular, is really insurmountable ; for
such an agreement would be possible only through the spread of imita-
tion, and not through contact. For this reason, although religious per-
secutions which are directed towards the suppression or replacement of
some cult appear to be highly rational, they are, in reality, most absurd;

Extra-Logical Influences 191

Although Christianity has grown more complex, from
century to century, it has shown itself from its very begin-
ning more and more exacting in point of regularity, uni-
formity, and orthodoxy. Although savage languages are
very meagre, they are, according to Sayce and Whitney,
as variable and as carelessly transmitted as civilised lan-
guages, in spite of their richness, are uniform and persist-
ent. Procedure, the etiquette of justice, is also very for-
mal when the law is very old, however complicated it may
have become. Ceremonial, the etiquette of worldly rela-
tions, is less strict among nations whose polite society is
of later origin than their law or religion. The contrary is
true in Chinese society for the opposite reason. Prosody,
the etiquette of poetry, becomes more and more despotic
as versification increases and, strange to say, as the poetic
imagination expands. Red tape and administrative routine,
the etiquette of government, increase day by day with
differentiation in government. Architecture requires its
followers to become more and more servile in the repetition
of the consecrated types that are for the time being in
favour. This is true also of music. Painting also requires
its servants to reproduce with more and more photo-
graphic exactness the models of nature or tradition. Under
the ancient regime, the military uniform was less general
and less respected than it is to-day, and the farther back
we go the greater individual variety do we find in the dress
of military ranks. According to Burckhardt, at Florence,
in the Middle Ages, everyone dressed to suit his fancy as if
at a mask-ball. How we should be scandalised to-day by
such license!

This need for conventionality is so natural to social man
that after it has reached a certain degree of strength it
becomes conscious of itself and adopts violent and ex-
peditious means for its satisfaction. All old civilisations

about as absurd as linguistic persecutions. The latter never succeed in
their aim to substitute one language for another, except, at times,
through the spontaneous imitation of a superior, of a conqueror by the
conquered.

192 Laws of Imitation

have had their masters of ceremony, high functionaries who
are charged with the perpetuation of traditional rites.4
,We find these chamberlains under different names not
only in monarchical states, in Egypt, China, in the Roman
Empire, in the Lower Empire, in the Escurial of Philip II
and his successor, in the Versailles of Louis XIV, but in
republics as well, in Rome, where the censor kept a strict
oversight over old usages, and even in Athens, where
religious life was subject to the most absolute formal-
ism. We ridicule all of this, overlooking the fact that our
smart tailors and dressmakers, our big manufacturers, and
even our journalists, bear exactly the same relation to
fashion-imitation as these masters of civil or religious cere-
mony bore to custom-imitation and that they are likely to
take on the same comic importance that the latter did. The
former cut out our clothes, our conversations, our information,
our tastes, and our various wants according to one uniform
pattern from which it is improper to depart. Its sameness
from one end of the continent to the other passes for the
most obvious sign of civilisation, just as the perpetuation
for century upon century of certain legends, traditions, and
customs was once taken, and much more wisely, for the
foundation of a people's grandeur.2

2. In the second place, imitation may be conscious or
unconscious, deliberate or spontaneous, voluntary or in-
voluntary. But I do not attach great importance to this
classification. Is it true that as a people becomes civilised
its manner of imitating becomes more and more voluntary,
conscious, and deliberate? I think the opposite is true.
Just as with the individual unconscious habits were origi-

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

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

Extra-Logical Influences 193

nally conscious and self-determined acts, so in the nation
everything that is done or said by tradition or custom
began by being a difficult and much-questioned importa-
tion. I should add, to be sure, that many imitations are
from the very beginning unconscious and involuntary.
This is so of the imitation of the accents, manners, and
more often of the ideals and sentiments peculiar to the en-
vironment in which we live. It is also plain that imita-
tion of the will of others — I know no other way of defining
spontaneous obedience — is necessarily involuntary. But
let us observe that the involuntary and unconscious forms
of imitation never become voluntary and conscious, where-
as the voluntary and conscious forms are likely to take on
the opposite characteristics. Let us distinguish, moreover,
between the consciousness of imitating or the will to imi-
tate someone in thinking or doing a certain thing and the
consciousness of conceiving the thought or the will to
perform the act. Consciousness or volition, in this latter
sense, is the constant and universal fact which the progress
of civilisation neither augments nor diminishes. In the
former sense, there is nothing more variable, and civilisation
does not seem to encourage consciousness or will under-
stood in this way. Certainly the savage in whose eyes the
ancient custom or religion of his tribe is justice or truth
incarnate is no less conscious of imitating his ancestors
and is no less desirous of imitating them in practising his
juridical or religious rites, than is the modern labourer or
even the modern bourgeois of imitating his neighbor, or
employer, or editor, in repeating what he has read in his
newspaper or in buying the piece of furniture which he has
seen in the parlour of his employer or neighbour. But, in fact,
in both cases, man is wrong in thinking that he imitates
because he wishes to. For this very will to imitate has
been handed down through imitation. Before imitating
the act of another we begin by feeling the need from which
this act proceeds, and we feel it precisely as we do only
because it has been suggested to us.

After these remarks on the intrinsic characteristics of

194 Laws of Imitation

imitations, let us turn our attention to the inequalities that
they present in their career by reason of their content
(according as the content is the sign or the thing signified,
an inward or an outward model), or by reason of the alleged
superiority or inferiority of the persons or classes or even
places from which they issue or of the past or present epochs
in which they originate. In this chapter I propose to show
that, the logical or teleological values being by hypothesis
equal, (i) the subjective model will be imitated before the
objective,1 and (2) the example of persons or classes as well
as of localities that are thought superior will prevail over
the example of inferior persons or classes or localities. In
the following chapters I shall show that a like presumption
of superiority attaches (3) at times to the present, at times
to the past, and is a potent factor and one of considerable
historic significance in favour either of the examples of our
fathers, or of those of our contemporaries.

I. Imitation from Within to Without

This would be the moment, if I did not shrink from so
difficult a task, to exploit an entirely unexplored field and
compare the different functions of organic or psychological
life from the point of view of their more or less pronounced
tendencies, in the average case, to transmit themselves
through imitation. This relative transmissibility varies
greatly from one period or nation to another. It will be
impossible to measure it with any precision until the day
when Statistics shall have redeemed all its promises. A
few words, then, on this subject must suffice.

Is not thirst more contagious through imitation than
hunger? I think it is. This may explain the rapid strides
of alcoholism. Although gourmandism has also increased,
as we may infer from the more varied and abundant diet of

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

Extra-Logical Influences 195

the middle classes, of the labourer, and of the peasant, its
advance has certainly been slower. The same drinks
may be in vogue over a great stretch of country (tea in one
place, wine in another, beer here, mate there, etc. ) , whereas
the greatest diversity may still prevail in local viands.
Is thirst more or less contagious than sexual desires? I
think less so. Debauchery is the first vice to develop, even
before alcoholism, in large gatherings of men and. women
or in newly populated cities. Movements of the leg, and
especially movements of the upper part of the body, are still
more easily communicated. The impetus of marching to-
gether is one of the great military forces. The soldier's
tendency to keep step and march with his fellows is innate
before it is obligatory. It has been proved through careful
tests that everybody in the same village walks on an average
at the same rate of speed. As for characteristic manners
and gestures, they are much more readily transmitted than
peculiarities of gait among people who are accustomed to
live together. This is partly the reason why in modern
hospitals hysterical convulsions readily take on the character
of an epidemic, like the diabolical possessions in the con-
vents of the past. The vocal function, like all functions of
intercourse, is eminently imitative, particularly on its intel-
lectual side, in diction and pronuncation, not in the timbre
of the voice.1 Accent is also transmitted. But this hap-
pens gradually and during youth. Every city retains a
characteristic accent long after its food and dress have
become like those of other cities. Yawning, I mean the
yawn of boredom, whch has a mental cause, is much more
contagious than sneezing or coughing.

The functions of the higher senses are more transmis-
sible through imitation than those of the lower. We are
much more likely to copy someone who is looking at or
listening to something than someone who is smelling a
flower or tasting a dish. This is the reason why in large

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

196 Laws of Imitation

cities a gathering is so soon formed around a lounging-
place. We plunge into the waiting line behind the doors
of a theatre much more eagerly than into the restaurant
behind whose window panes we see its patrons enjoying
their dinner.

All passions and needs for luxury are more contagious
than simple appetites and primitive needs. But shall we
say, as to passions, that admiration, confidence, love, and
resignation are superior in this respect to contempt, dis-
trust, hatred, and envy? In general, yes, otherwise society
would not endure.1 For the same reason, and in spite of
frequent epidemics of panic, hope is certainly more catch-
ing than terror. Indolence is likewise more so than am-
bition and avarice, the spirit of saving than avidity. And
this is very fortunate for the peace of society. Is courage
more catching than cowardice? I am much less certain of
this. Here curiosity deserves a special, if not the chief,
place of honour. All those throngs of people which end in
bringing on revolutions in religion, government; art, and
industry begin to collect under the sway of this sentiment.
iWhen a person is seen to be curious about what once may
have appeared to be the merest trifle, we immediately
desire to know about it. This movement spreads very
quickly, and the intensity of everybody's desire increases
in proportion to its spread, through the effect of mutual
reaction. Whenever any novelty whatsoever, a sermon, a
political platform, a philosophic idea, a commercial article,
a poem, a novel, a drama, or an opera, appears in some
notable place, i. c., in a capital city, it is only necessary for
the attention of ten persons to become ostensibly fixed
upon this thing in order that one hundred, one thousand, or
ten thousand persons may quickly take an interest in it
and enthuse about it. At times, this phenomenon takes on
the character of hysteria. In the fifteenth century when
Bohm, the German piper, began to preach his evangel of

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

Extra-Logical Influences 197

fraternal equality and community of goods, an epidem-
ical exodus set in. " The journeymen hastened from
their workshops, the farm maids ran with their sickles in
their hands," reports a chronicler, cited by Jansenn, and in
a few hours more than thirty thousand men had assembled
in a foodless desert. Once general curiosity has been ex-
cited, the mob is irresistibly predisposed tQ be carried
away by all the different kinds of ideas and desires which
the preacher, the orator, the dramatist, and the novelist of
the hour may seek to popularise.

M. Ribot has pointed out that the memory of senti-
ments is much more persistent than that of ideas. I should
say the like of the imitation of sentiments compared with
the imitation (i. e., the spread) of ideas. Certainly morals
and religious and moral sentiments which consist of recip-
rocal impregnations of affective states have a greater tenac-
ity than opinions or even principles.

But now I have sufficiently glanced over a group of ideas
that I do not wish to analyse more closely. Let us turn to
a truth of more general import.

All imitations in which logic has no place fall into two
great categories, namely, credulity and docility, imitation
of belief and imitation of desires. It may see strange to call
passive adherence to the idea of another, imitation; but if,
as I have said, it matters little whether the reflection of one
brain upon another be active or passive in character, the
extension which I give to the usual meaning of this word is
highly legitimate. If we say that the scholar imitates his
master when he repeats his spoken words, why should we
not say that the former has already imitated the latter as
soon as he has adopted in thought the idea which he after-
wards expresses in speech? It may also surprise the reader
to find that I consider obedience a kind of imitation; but
this assimilation, which can, at any rate, be easily justified,
is necessary, and it alone permits the full significance of the
phenomenon of imitation to be recognised. When one
person copies another, when one class begins to pattern
its dress, its furniture, and its amusements after those of

198 Laws of Imitation

another, it means that it has already borrowed from, the
latter the wants and sentiments of which these methods
of life are the outward manifestations. Consequently it
can and must have borrowed the latter's volitions, that is,
have willed in accordance with its will.1

Is it possible to deny that volition, together with emotion
and conviction, is the most contagious of psychological
states? An energetic and authoritive man wields an ir-
resistible power over feeble natures. He gives them the
direction which they lack. Obedience to him is not a duty,
but a need. That is the way every social tie begins. Obe-
dience, in short, is the sister of faith. People obey for the
same reason that they believe; and just as their faith is the
radiation of that of some apostle, so their activity is merely
the outgoing of some master will. Whatever the master
wills or has willed, they will; whatever the apostle believes
or has believed, they believe. And it is because of this
that whatever the master or apostle subsequently does or
says, they, in turn, do or say or are inclined to do or say.
Those, persons and classes, in fact, whom one is most
inclined to imitate, are those whom one is most docile in
obeying. The common people have always been inclined
to copy kings and courts and upper classes according to
the measure in which they have submitted to their rule.
During the years preceding the French Revolution, Paris
no longer copied court fashions, and no longer applauded
the plays in favour at Versailles, because the spirit of insub-
ordination had already made rapid strides. In all periods,

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

Extra-Logical Influences 199

the ruling classes have been or have begun by being the
model classes. In the cradle of society, in the family, this
close correlation between imitation, strictly speaking, and
obedience and credulity is clearly shown. The father is,
especially at first, the infallible oracle and sovereign ruler
of his child; and for this reason he is his child's highest
model.1

Imitation, then, contrary to what we might infer from cer-
tain appearances, proceeds from the inner to the outer man.
It seems at first sight as if a people or a class began to imitate
another by copying its luxury and its fine arts before it be-
came possessed of its tastes and literature, of its aims and
ideas, in a word, of its spirit. Precisely the contrary, how-
ever, occurs. In the sixteenth century fashions in dress
came into France from Spain.2 This was because Spanish
literature had already been imposed upon us at the time
of Spain's pre-eminence. In the seventeenth century,
when the preponderance of France was established, French
literature ruled over Europe, and subsequently French arts
and French fashions made the tour of the world. When
Italy, overcome and downtrodden as she was, invaded us
in the fifteenth century, with her arts and fashions, but, first
of all, with her marvellous poetry, it was because the prestige
of her higher civilisation and of the Roman Empire that
she had unearthed and transfigured had subjugated her
conquerors. Besides, the consciences of Frenchmen were
Italianised long before their houses or dress or furniture

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

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

2oo Laws of Imitation

through their habit of submission to the transalpine
Papacy.

Did these very Italians who fell to aping their own Greco-
Roman restorations begin by reflecting the externals of
the ancient world, its statues, its frescoes, its Ciceronian
periods, in order to become gradually filled by its spirit?
On the contrary, it was to their hearts that their tran-
splendent model made its first appeal. This neo-paganism
was the conversion of a whole community, first its scholars
and then its artists (this order is irreversible), to a dead
religion; and whenever a new religion, it matters not
whether it be living or dead, that is made fascinating by
some compelling apostle, takes hold of a man, it is first
believed in and then practised. It does not begin with
mummeries. Mummeries do not lead to virtues and con-
victions. Far from that, it is the neophyte, above all, who
is impressed by the soul of a religion independent of its
external form, and formalism of worship does not become
empty and meaningless until much later, when religion has
lost its place in people's hearts although it may still survive
in their usages. Thus the neophyte of the early Renais-
sance continues in his feudal or Christian habits of life, but
in faith he is already pagan, as his excess of sensuality and
his overruling passion for glory go to prove. It is only at
a later period that he becomes a pagan in morals and man-
ners, first in morals and then in manners. The same thing
happened, if we go farther back, in the case of the bar-
barians of the fifth or sixth century, in the case of a
Clovis for example, or a Chilperic. They forced them-
selves to bow down to the customs of Rome and decorated
themselves with the consular insignia. But before becoming
Latinised in that clumsy, superficial sense they had experi-
enced a much more profound Latinisation in being con-
verted to Christianity, for at that date the Roman civilisa-
tion which fascinated them survived only in Christianity.

Let us suppose that two peoples of different religions
come into contact, pagans with Christians, Christians with
Moslems, Buddhists with Confucians, etc. Each bor-

Extra-Logical Influences 201

rows from the other certain new rites to illustrate its own
peculiar dogmas, and, at the same time, while each con-
tinues to practise its ancient rites it receives new dogmas
which are more or less contradictory to the old. Now do
rites spread more or less quickly than dogmas? The per-
sistence of old rites in new religions shows that they spread
less quickly. In the same way two peoples may borrow
both each other's ideas and forms of speech, but they will
borrow the former before the latter. If they borrow each
other's legal procedure and ceremonial together with each
other's principles of justice, the exchange of the latter will
be much more rapid than that of the former. And so we
have at Rome, in England, in France, etc., the persistence of
legal form long after legal reform.

In this way imitation passes on from one people to an-
other, as well as from one class to another within the same
people. Do we ever see one class which is in contact with,
but which has never, hypothetically, been subject to the
control of, another determine to copy its accent, its
dress, its furniture, and its buildings, and end by em-
bracing its principles and beliefs? This would invert the
universal and necessary order of things. The strongest
proof, indeed, that imitation spreads from within to without
is to be found in the fact that in the relations between dif-
ferent classes, envy never precedes obedience and trust,
but is always, on the contrary, the sign and the result of a
previous state of obedience and trust. Blind and docile
devotion to the Roman patricians, to the Athenian eupatri-
des, or to the French nobility of the old regime preceded
the envy. i. e., the desire to imitate them externally, which
they came to inspire. Envy is the symptom of a social
transformation which, in bringing classes together and
in lessening the inequality of their resources, renders)
possible not only the transmission, as before, of their
thoughts and aims, not only patriotic or religious com-
munion and participation in the same worship, but the
radiation of their luxury and well-being as well. Obedi-
ence, the cause, engenders envy, the effect. Consequently,

2O2 Laws of Imitation

when, for example, the ancient plebeians or the middle class
Guelphs in the Italian cities of the Middle Ages, came into
power, their manner of using it was an evidence and a con-
tinuation of their preceding bondage, since the oppressive
laws which they enacted against the sometime reigning
aristocracies were suggested by the need which they felt
to copy their ancient masters.

It will be observed that obedience and trust, the subjec-
tive imitation of a recognised superior, is prompted by a
devotion and, so to speak, loving admiration, just as the ob-
jective imitation of a questioned or disowned superior results
from envious disparagement; and it is clear that com-
munities pass from love to covert envy or from admiration
to open contempt in respect to their old masters, but that
they never pass back, as far as the latter are concerned, at
any rate, from envy to love or from contempt to admira-
tion. To satisfy their persistent need of loving and admir-
ing, they must continue to raise up new idols for themselves,
from time to time, only to shatter them later on.1

It is a great mistake to say that populations are controlled
by fear alone. On the contrary, everything points to the fact
that in the beginnings of all great civilisations or, rather, of
all religious or political institutions whatsoever, modern
ones included, there have been unheard-of expenditures of
love and of unsatisfied love at that. This fact explains every-
thing; without it, nothing is explained. If the king-god
whom Spencer has so strongly portrayed had not been
loved as well as feared, he w6uld have been straightway
killed. And, to go back to the cradle of societies, are we

1 After a certain point, the more superficial social inequalities become,
the harder they are for inferiors to endure. The cause of this is
that after they have been softened down beyond a certain point, they
fail to produce either admiration or credulity or obedience, all of which
dispositions make for social strength, and they, therefore, lose their
raison d'etre. Then they inspire envy, and envy helps to make them
disappear. The demands of utility are analogous, in this case, to those
of beauty. The beautiful rules out any compromise between an ellipse
and a circle or between a parallelogram and a square. As soon as the
disproportion between the two axes of the ellipse or between the length
and breadth of the parallelogram ceases to be sufficiently pronounced,

Extra-Logical Influences 203

to believe that the patriarch of antiquity, the first of the
king-gods, owed his absolute authority over his children
and his slaves exclusively to their terror? His children,
if not his slaves, certainly loved him. They probably loved
him much more than he himself loved them; for here, as
elsewhere, the unilateral seems to have preceded the re-
ciprocal tie. Ancient documents lead us to think that
there was far less paternal tenderness on the part of the
fathers of antiquity than on the part of those of the present
day. I am not speaking of mothers, for the causes of their
affection are vital much more than social, and it is to this
fact that it owes its relative depth and steadfastness.
Filial love itself, then, must have begun as an almost one-
sided unsatisfied affection. We may picture the head of
the primitive family as king, judge, priest, and teacher all
in one. Like a little Louis XIV, he failed to recognise
that his subjects had any claims upon him and in perfect
egotism offered himself to their adoration. In view of his
own glorification he acknowledged, to be sure, the duty of
protecting them. And they were as grateful to him, in
return, as if he had bestowed a favour upon them. Hence
his apotheosis. It was necessary for the family-cult and
for the perpetuation of the family, the basis of city and
civilisation.

The Bible and all ancient legislation testify to the extent
to which the patriarch was believed in and obeyed. His
thought was divined and his will willed almost without a
word, and it was because of this that his children had so
keen an inclination to follow his example in all things, to
reproduce his accent, his language, his gestures, and his
manners. They would never have been led to believe in

our aesthetic sense desires its suppression altogether, and the smaller the
disproportion, the stronger our wish or desire. Now as soon as an ap-
proximate equality is effected between the different classes of a society,
envy itself, having accomplished its work of assimilation, tends to dis-
appear ; and then its work is endangered by this very extreme. The
need of individual divergence, of dissimilation, or, as we say, of liberty,
grows out of the equality which is born of resemblance ; and society
would return to the disintegration of savagery, providing new causes of
inequality did not arise. But arise they always do.

204 Laws of Imitation

and obey him by futilely mimicking the outside man had
they not first understood him by means of their faith and
docility. The formation of a social tie by the first method
was impossible. But let us go back still further, to that pre-
historic dawn when the art of speech was unknown. At that
time how was the secret content of the mind, its desires and
ideas, transfused from one brain to another? That it was,
in fact, effected we may infer from what happens in the
societies of animals who seem to understand one another
almost without signs, as if through a kind of psychological
electrisation by suggestion. It must be admitted that in
that age inter-cerebral action at a distance may have taken
place with perhaps remarkable intensity, with an intensity
which has diminished from that time on. Hypnotic sugges-
tion can give us some vague idea of this in so far as a morbid
phenomenon can resemble a normal one. This action is
the elementary and fundamental problem which sociological
psychology (which begins where physiological psychology
leaves off) should undertake to solve.

The invention of language wonderfully facilitated, but
did not originate, the inoculation of ideas and desires of
one mind by another and consequently the progress of imi-
tation ab interioribus ad exteriora. For had not this prog-
'ress already existed, the birth of language would be in-
conceivable. It is not difficult to understand how the first
inventor of speech set to associating in his own mind a
given thought and a given sound (perfected by gesture),
but it is difficult to understand how he was able to suggest
this relation to another by merely making him hear the
given sound. If the listener merely repeated this sound
like a parrot, without attaching to it the required meaning,
it is impossible to see how this superficial and mechanical
re-echoing could have led him to understand the meaning
of the strange speaker or carried him over from the sound
to the word. It must then be admitted that the sense was
transmitted with the sound, that it reflected the sound.
And whoever is acquainted with the feats of hypnotism,
with the miracles of suggestion, that have been popularised

Extra-Logical Influences 205

to so great an extent of late, should certainly not be reluc-
tant to admit this postulate.

Moreover, observation of two- or three-year-old children
who are beginning to talk adds great weight to this hy-
pothesis. It is easily seen that they understand what is
said to them long before they are themselves able to say
the same things. How could this be possible unless they
had already imitated older persons ab interioribus ad ex-
terior a? Now, this point admitted, the establishment of
language, marvellous as it seems, presents no further dif-
ficulties. Speech was not, in the beginning of history,
what it has since become, namely, an interchange of knowl-
edge and opinion. In accordance with the law which I
have frequently formulated that the unilateral precedes the
reciprocal in and for everything, speech must have been at
first a purely one-sided lesson or command of a father to
his children, a prayer to an unresponsive deity, i. e., a kind
of sacerdotal and monarchical function, eminently authori-
tative and accompanied by some suggested hallucination
or action, a sacrament, an august monopoly. The ruler,
like the modern schoolmaster, alone had the right to
speak aloud in his domain. Besides, only a chosen few,
objects of admiration and, then, of envy, knew how to
speak.

Later the right of writing was also monopolised by the
upper classes, and this fact explains the prestige that writing,
according to Sacred Scripture, still held, in the past, in the
eyes of the unlettered. If speech has wholly lost this same
prestige, it is undoubtedly because it is much more ancient.
That it once possessed it is proved by the virtue that attached .
to so-called sacramental expressions in old legal procedures,
as well as by the magical power attributed to Prayer in
its apotheosis in the Vedas of the Aryans and to the Word,
the Logos, by the Byzantines and Christians. In another
chapter I will show that the needs of consumption have
in every order of facts preceded the needs of production
and that this important phenomenon is related to the prog-
ress of imitation from within to without. If this is so,

206 Laws of Imitation

the need of listening must have preceded that of speak-
ing.

When the action at a distance of a dominant mind over
one that is dominated has once been facilitated and regulated
by the habit of verbal communication it acquires an irresist-
ible force. We can get some idea of what language was
originally as an instrument of government from the power
that it exerts to-day in its most recent form, the daily press,
in spite of the fact that the latter has lost part of its power
through its expansion and self-combativeness. It is due to
speech that imitation in the human world has accentuated
its leading characteristic of first attaching itself to the most
intrinsic thing in its living model and of reproducing with
incredible precision the hidden side, the thoughts and aims,
before it seizes upon and reflects with less exactness the
outward gestures, attitudes, and movements of its model.
The opposite occurs among animals, where imitation is ef-
fected in a pretty inexact manner, and only in the reproduc-
tion of songs and cries and muscular acts and where the
transmission of nervous phenomena, of ideas and desires,
is always vague. Because of this animal societies stand
still; for although some ingenious idea might gleam
through the brain of a crow or bison, it would, according to
hypothesis, die with him and be necessarily lost to the com-
munity. With animals, it is primarily and pre-eminently
muscle which imitates muscle; with us, it is primarily and
pre-eminently nerve which imitates nerve and brain which
imitates brain. This is the chief contrast through which
we may explain the superiority of human societies. In
them no good idea is lost, and every exceptional thinker
lives on in the posterity which he raises up to his own level.
Good ideas may have been for a long time only the visions
of a madman or the caprices of a despot. It matters not,
for in passing from the leader to the multitude they at least
produce the immense and fundamental benefit of that re-
ligious or political unanimity which alone makes collective
discipline and military action possible, just as, in the fu-
ture, when true ideas and useful applications shall have

Extra-Logical Influences 207

come to light, general participation in the same science and
in the same morality will be an indispensable factor in any
great florescence of art or industry.

Let us note in relation to the arts that their evolution
does not proceed, as Spencer contends, from the more ob-
jective to the more subjective, from architecture through
sculpture and drawing to music and poetry. On the con-
trary, it always opens with some great book or epic or
poetical work of very remarkable relative perfection. The
Iliad, the Bible, Dante, etc., are the high sources from which
all the fine arts are fated to flow.

This progress from within to without, if we try to ex-
press it more precisely, means two things: (i) That imi-
tation of ideas precedes the imitation of their expression.
(2) That imitation of ends precedes imitation of means.
Ends or ideas are the inner things, means or expressions,
the outer. Of course, we are led to copy from others
everything which seems to us a new means for attaining
our old ends, or satisfying our old wants, or a new ex-
pression for our old ideas; and we do this at the same time
that we begin to adopt innovations which awaken new
ideas and new ends in us. Only these new ends, these
needs for novel kinds of consumption, take hold of us and
propagate themselves in us much more readily and rapidly
than the aforesaid means or expressions.1

A nation which is becoming civilised and whose wants are
multiplying consumes much more than it is able or than it
desires to produce. That amounts to saying, in the lan-
guage of aesthetics, that the diffusion of sentiments antici-
pates that of talents. Sentiments are habits of judgment
and desire which have become very alert and almost un-

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

20 8 Laws of Imitation

conscious through repetition. Talents are habits of activity
which have also gained a mechanical facility by repetition.
Both sentiments and talents, then, are habits; the only dif-
ference between them is that the former are subjective, and
the latter, objective facts. Now, is it not true that aes-
thetic sentiments form and spread long before the talents
which are fitted to satisfy them ? And have we not a proof
of this in the commonplace observation that the virtuosity
of periods of decadence survives the exhaustion of their
inspiration ?

No art makes its own religion; style does not create the
thought back of it; but a religion or an idea ultimately
makes the art or style which expresses and illustrates it.
Can we imagine the painting of Cimabue or Giotto being
prior to the spread of Christianity? Our law explains
why the fusion of beliefs is always and everywhere accom-
plished long before that of arts or that of morals and why,
consequently, even in the periods of small and hostile neigh-
bouring states, a common religion can spread over a vast
territory. We know that the Greek games and oracles,
particularly the Delphic Oracle and the Olympic games,
at first created and then continued to strengthen the senti-
ment of Hellenic nationality in spite of the small states into
which Greece was broken up. But long before the games
became a common centre, long before they gave people an
opportunity to see and imitate each other from the point
of view of the outward things of life, the authority of the
oracles was recognised by all. Their origin is lost in a
fabulous antiquity. And so in the Middle Ages, also, a
common faith dominated Europe long before the great
monarchies with their brilliant courts and their exchanges
of contagious luxury began to assimilate the outsides of
their respective peoples. There is not a single example of
the contrary.

We know that if juridical or legislative changes are viable,
they never precede, but follow at some distance the intel-
lectual or economic changes to which they correspond.
Our thesis requires this. It also requires, as a corollary,

Extra-Logical Influences 209

that laws, which are the outer framework of society, should
survive for some time their inner reason for existence, the
wants and ideas which they embody. Coming' later or pro-
ceeding less quickly, they must or may persist afterwards.
This is also true of certain customs, as observation shows
us, and this general phenomenon is alone able to explain the
particular case to which I have referred. The survivals
of custom, to use Lubbock's excellent term, have had so
much light thrown upon them, that it is useless to cite
many examples. Nevertheless, let us call to mind that
after the matriarchal system was abolished and even for-
gotten, a simulation of it was perpetuated in the couvade,
the attribution of a fictitious maternity to the father, and
that after marriage by capture had fallen into disuse, mar-
riage ceremonies preserved the fiction of it. Up to the
marriage of Louis XVI, the custom of paying down thir-
teen deniers upon the conclusion of a marriage prevailed
in France, in certain provinces at least, as a relic from the
time of wife-purchase. Sects who rejected the dogma of
the Eucharist have simulated the communion service and
free-thinkers who opposed infant baptism have celebrated
a civic quasi-baptism of their children. Moreover, what
living religion has not borrowed its external observances,
its rites and processions, from some dead religion? Is not
the conservation of a linguistic root whose meaning has
changed a survival of the same kind that is complicated,
as in the preceding case, by the introduction of a new mean-
ing which adapts an old organ to a fresh function ? I have
just spoken of juridical survivals. Our codes are full of
them. Although feudal law has been dead for centuries,
I defy a jurist to do without it in explaining the famous
distinction between a possessory and a petitory action, the
nightmare of our justices of the peace. Finally, in the
sphere of art and poetry, there is nothing more usual than
to see the cloak of a certain school whose soul is extinct
pass on to some new genius.

What does this prove? In the first place it proves the
tenacity, the energy, of the inclination which leads man to

2i o Laws of Imitation

imitate the past. But, besides these aesthetic or ritualistic
or purely mechanical simulations of vanished wants and
beliefs, we also see the survival of the outward parts of
imitation after the inward parts — a natural fact, if the lat-
ter are older or have evolved more rapidly than the former.

The survivals in question give us the counter-proof of
our law. The following observation will remove any re-
maining doubt. As they spread abroad, honorary titles
(sieur instead of seigneur), salutations (a slight inclination
of the head instead of the bent knee of feudal times), com-
pliments, and manners become abbreviated, diluted, and
simplified. Spencer has shown this in a masterly way.
This fact demands that others of a like kind be
brought into relation with it. Words are contracted from
being constantly used and vulgarised. They lose their
edge and wear themselves out like a rolling stone. Re-
ligious beliefs lose their intensity, arts degenerate, etc.
These facts seem to prove that imitation is the necessary
weakening of that which is imitated and that new inven-
tions or entirely fresh sources for imitation are therefore
necessary for the timely reanimation of expiring social
energy. And there is much truth in this, as we shall see
later on. But is it always so? No; these resemblances
occur only between the final periods of those different
evolutions which we have been comparing. Before a word
contracts, it must be formed and fostered and magnified by
a series of ascendent and not yet decadent imitations. Be-
fore an etiquette is shaken, it must have established itself
through the reinforcement of every imitation of which it
has been the object. Before a dogma or a rite declines,
it must have asserted and spread itself throughout the youth
of its religion.

Whence comes this contrast? Does it not result from
the fact that in the first period imitation was essentially
from within and had to do with the spread of beliefs or de-
sires, of beliefs and desires whose outward forms were
merely their expression, were merely secondary objects,
of beliefs and desires which gradually flared up by virtue

Extra-Logical Influences 211

of their own law through their very propagation and mutual
reflection; whereas, in the second period, the outward
forms continued to spread in spite of the gradual drying up
of their inward source and had, consequently, to lose in
strength? And so the phenomenon is explained on the
ground that imitation passes from within to without, from
the thing signified to its sign. Now, why does a moment
come when it is not the inward side of the model, the faith
or desire implicit in the act or speech in question, but the
outward side which is reproduced? It is because another
faith or desire which is entirely or partly irreconcilable with!
the former appears on the very scene where the other has
already spread itself. Then, although the model continues
to live on the surface, it is stricken to the heart. It goes on
living in a state of self-mutilation and suicide until the
moment when some new spirit succeeds it.1 We know;
from the writings of Tertullian and the discoveries of
archaeology that in spite of the religious fervour and inward
sincerity of the early Christians they continued, both men
and women, to live externally, to dress, to coiffe, and even
to amuse themselves like pagans, without regard to the anti-
Christian indecency of the garments and amusements in
question.

I cannot conclude this discussion of imitation ab inte-
rioribus ad exteriora without briefly calling attention to the
analogy which imitation presents in this relation as well as
in so many others to the other forms of Repetition.

It is obvious, from the very obscurity that is inherent in
the study of life, that all the developments of life, from
fecundation to death, proceed from some wholly internal
and absolutely hidden action, from some vital faith or in-«
spiration, so to speak, which is breathed into the germ by

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

212 Laws of Imitation

its progenitors and which is anterior to its manifestations.
The evolution of the individual is the drawing out of this
germ. At the moment of conception the parents repeat
themselves in the child in their most essential vital char-
acteristics before they repeat themselves, thanks to the
former transmission, in their more visible and external
traits; for in the fecundated germ the whole future growth
is potential. Similarly, at the moment when a catechumen
is converted, some apostle is repeating himself on his deep-
est social side, the side which is soon to be the source of
the religious prayers and observances of the catechumen,
where the apostle's own prayers and observances will be no
less faithfully reproduced. The analogy to physical phe-
nomena of a like order is more conjectural. And yet we
know the fruitlessness of efforts to explain, for example,
the transmission or repetition of movements, either through
contact or at a distance, without presupposing the existence
of some preliminary communication of a hidden force or
attraction; and the attempts to explain chemical changes
and combinations as combinations of atoms without parts
or dimensions have been equally unsuccessful. Let us con-
clude that in nature, as in society, Repetition, i. e., Action,
proceeds, I cannot repeat it too often, ab interioribus ad ex-
teriora.

Will the reader perchance argue, among other objec-
tions which could be raised against this thesis, that women
are much more prompt to adopt foreign fashions in
clothes than foreign ideas? But in this instance the in-
trinsic thing, the thing signified, is either a woman's vain
affirmation of self, — when in order to raise herself a peg she
imitates the dress of a higher class whose pride and vices
and pretensions have already taken hold of her, — or the sex-
ual desire to please, — when she imitates her fellows or equals
because she has first been persuaded, so often mistakenly,
that she will be beautified by the adoption of some new
style of dress or headgear. Moreover, the example of
womankind is an illustration not only of the law of the
spread of imitation from above to below, which I am about

Extra-Logical Influences 2 1 3

to discuss, but likewise of the law which we are considering
at present. Every woman we know imitates the man whom
she loves or admires or to whose ascendency she submits.
But we may also notice that the man's sentiments and ideas
are communicated to her long before she has copied his
mannerisms or literary knack, or adopted his forms of
speech or accent. When a woman passes into a family or
community which she considers superior to her own, she be-
comes at once impregnated with the ideas, the passions, the
prejudices, the vices or the virtues which prevail in her new
society, and she becomes saturated with them much sooner
than a man under similar circumstances. If, at the beginning,
woman is, in many respects, notably in matters of religious
belief, unimpressionable to outside examples, it is because
the principle of imitation from within to without is abso-
lutely applicable in her case. As a corollary of this principle,
the external manifestations of an ancient belief persist in the
speech, gestures, habits, and manners of woman, much more
than in the case of man, long after it has itself disappeared
and been secretly replaced by another. The new cult must
have won a stronghold in the soul of a woman long before
she decides to adopt its outward garb. This has always
been so, and it is still so. In the sixteenth century Mar-
guerite de Valois and her feminine following were at heart
converted to Calvinism, — in fact it was through them that
the doctrine of Calvin, in spite of its being a doctrine so
little suited to please them, began to spread through France,
—but they continued to practice the Catholic religion, in part,
undoubtedly, from fear of being butchered, but, primarily,
because of the logical necessity which rules that the things
signified should precede their signs.

II. Imitation of the Superior by the Inferior

The profoundly subjective character that is taken on from
the earliest times by human imitation, the privilege which
it has of binding souls together from their very centres,

214 Laws of Imitation

involves, as may be seen from what has preceded, the
growth of human inequality and the formation of a social
hierarchy. This was inevitable, since the relation of model
to copy developed into that of apostle to neophyte, of master
to subject. Consequently, from the very fact that imita-
tion proceeded from the inside to the outside of the model,
it had to consist in a descent of example, in a descent from
the superior to the inferior. This is a second law that is
partly implied in the first, but it needs separate examination.

Moreover, let us be sure that we understand the exact
bearing of the considerations in hand as well as of those
that have preceded. In the first place, we know that they
are based on the hypothesis that the influence of prestige,
of alleged superiority, is neither partly nor wholly neutral-
ised by the action of logical laws. However lowly or even
despised may be the author or introducer of a new idea of
relatively striking truth or utility, it always ends by spread-
ing through the public. Thus the evangel of slaves and
Jews spread throughout the aristocratic Roman world be-
cause it was more adapted than polytheism to answer the
main problems of the Roman conscience. Thus at a cer-
tain period in ancient Egypt the use of the horse was intro-
duced from Asia in spite of the Egyptians' contempt for
Asiatics, because for many kinds of work the horse was
obviously preferable to the mule, which had been in use up
to that time. There are innumerable examples of this kind.
Similarly, the most objective of examples, a word detached
from its meaning, a religious rite from its dogma, a pecul-
iarity of custom from the want which it expresses, a work
or art from the social ideal which it embodies, may readily
spread in a strange environment whose ruling needs and
principles find it to their advantage to replace their usual
methods of expression by this new one which is perhaps
more picturesque, or more clear, or more forcible.

In the second place, even when the action of logical laws
does not intervene, it is not only the superior who causes
himself to be copied by the inferior, the patrician by the
plebeian, the nobleman by the commoner, the cleric by the

Extra-Logical Influences 215

layman, and, at a later period, the Parisian by the pro-
vincial, the townsman by the peasant, etc., it is also the in-
ferior who, in a certain measure, much less, to be sure, is
copied, or is likely to be copied, by the superior. When
two men are together for a long time, whatever may be
their difference in station, they end by imitating each other
reciprocally, although, of the two, the one imitates much the
more, the other much the less. The colder body imparts
its heat to the warmer. The haughtiest country gentleman
cannot keep his accent, his manners, and his point of view
from being a little like those of his servants and tenants.
For the same reason many provincialisms and countrified
expressions creep into the language of cities, and even capi-
tals, and slang phrases penetrate at times into drawing
rooms. This influence from the bottom to the top of a
scale characterises all classes of facts. Nevertheless, on
the whole, it is the generous radiation of the warm body
towards the cold, not the insignificant radiation of the cold
body towards the warm, that is the main fact in physics
and the one which explains the final tendency of the uni-
verse towards an everlasting equilibrium of temperature.
Similarly, in sociology, the radiation of examples from
above to below is the only fact worth consideration because
of the general levelling which it tends to produce in the
human world.

i. Now let me endeavour to elucidate the truth which we
are discussing. There is nothing more natural than that
those who love each other should copy each other, or,
rather, as this phenomenon always begins by being one-
sided, that the lover should copy the beloved. But in proof
of the depth which is reached by the action of imitation in
man's heart we see people aping one another everywhere,
even in their fights. The conquered never fail to copy
their conquerors if only to prepare for their revenge. When
they borrow the military organisation of their conquerors
they are careful to say and they sincerely think that their
sole motive is a utilitarian calculation. But we shall find
this explanation inadequate, if we compare this fact with

2 1 6 Laws of Imitation

a considerable number of correlated facts in which the sen-
timent of utility plays no part whatsoever.

For example, the conquered do not merely borrow the
superior weapons, the longer range guns, and the more ad-
mirable methods of their conqueror; they also take from
him many of his insignificant military peculiarities and
habits, whose acclimatisation, granted that it were possible,
would raise difficulties wholly out of proportion to its feeble
advantages. During the thirteenth century Florence and
Sienna, who were always at war with each other, arrayed
troops against each other that were not only organised in
the same way, but that were also preceded by that strange
cart (carroccio) and singular bell (martinella) which were
at first peculiar to Lombardy, that is, to what was for a
long time the most powerful part of Italy (so much so that
Lombard and Italian had the same meaning), and which
were then imported with certain modifications to Florence,
whence, thanks to the prestige of that flourishing city, they
spread to its hostile neighbours. And yet the cart was an
encumbrance and the bell a real danger. Why, then, should
both Florence and Sienna have copied those peculiarities
instead of keeping to their own customs? For the same
reason that the lower classes of society, that is, the defeated,
or the sons of the defeated, in civil wars, copy the dress,
the manners, the speech, the vices, etc., of the upper classes.
It will not be said, in this instance, that the imitation is a
military operation in view of revenge. It is simply the satis-
faction of a special fundamental need in social life the final
consequence of which is the preparation through many con-
flicts of conditions of future peace.1

Whatever may be the organisation of a society, aristo-
cratic or democratic, we may be sure, if we see imitation
making rapid strides in it, that the inequality between its

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

Extra-Logical Influences 217

different levels is very great, besides being more or less ap-
parent. And we have only to learn the set of its main cur-
rent of examples, overlooking the unimportant back eddies,
to discover the real social power. If the nation is on an
aristocratic basis the thing is very simple. Given the op-
portunity, a nobility will always and everywhere imitate its
leaders, its kings or suzerains, and the people, likewise, given
the opportunity, its nobility. Baudrillart writes in his
Histoire de luxe that at Constantinople under the Byzantine
emperors, " the court looks up to the prince, the city looks
to the court for its model, and the poor man gazes upon
the rich man and wishes to share in his luxury." * The
same was true in France under Louis XIV. Saint-Simon
writes on the same subject of luxury: "It is a sore that
once introduced becomes an internal, all-devouring cancer,
for it quickly communicates itself from the court at
Paris to the provinces and the armies." M. de Barante
writes that in the fifteenth century " it was purposed to
strictly forbid all those games, dice, cards, or rackets, which
had found a way to the people in imitation of the court."
The innumerable card players that we see in the inns and
taverns of to-day are, then, unwitting copyists of our old
royal courts. Forms and rules of politeness have spread
through the same channel. Courtesy comes from the
court, as civility comes from the city. The accent of the
court and, later on, that of the capital spread little by little
to all classes and to all provinces of the nation. We
may be sure that in times past there were a Babylonian ac-
cent, a Ninevite accent, a Memphite accent, just as there
are to-day a Parisian accent, a Florentine accent, and a Ber-
lin accent. This transmission of accent, precisely because it
is one of the most unconscious, irresistible, and inexplicable
forms of imitation, very properly illustrates the depth of
that force and the truth of that law which I am expounding.
When we see that the influence of the upper classes upon
the lower, of townsmen upon rustics, of colonial whites
upon native blacks, of adults upon children, of upper
1 [II, 340.-7Y.]

2i 8 Laws of Imitation

classmen upon lower, is felt even in the matter of
accent, we can no longer doubt that it is felt a fortiori
in matters of writing, gesture, facial expression, dress, and
custom.

The tendency to ape the hierarchical superior and the
rapidity with which this inclination has at all times satis-
fied itself, at the slightest touch of public prosperity, de-
serve to be indicated.1 The frequency of the sumptu-
ary edicts during the entire period of the old regime is a
proof of this, just as the multiplicity of a river's dykes
bears witness to the impetuosity of its currents. The
first French Court dates from Charles VIII; but we must
not think that the imitative contagion of court manners
and luxury took several centuries to reach down to the
common people of France. From the time of Louis XII
its influence was felt everywhere. The disasters of the
religious wars arrested its development in the sixteenth
century, but, in the following century, it started up again
very rapidly. Then the miseries brought on by the last
war of the Grand Monarch occasioned another setback.
During the eighteenth century there was a fresh start;
under the Revolution, another reaction. In the time of
the First Empire the advance began again on a great
scale; but from that time on it took a democratic form
about which we need not trouble ourselves for the moment.
Under Francis I and Henry II the spread of the luxury
begun under Louis XII continued. At this period a
sumptuary law forbade " all peasants, labourers, and valets,
unless attached to princes, to wear silken doublets or hose
overladen or puffed out with silk." From 1543 to the time
of the League there were eight important ordinances
against luxury. " Some of them," says Baudrillart, " apply
to every French subject; they interdict the use of cloth of
gold, of silver, or of silk." 2 Such was the general elegance

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

2 [Histoire de luxe, III, 440.— TV.]

Extra-Logical Influences 219

that prevailed on the eve of the religious wars.1 To justify
laws in restraint of trade " one of the reasons most fre-
quently cited was the fact that France was ruining itself in
the purchase of objects of luxury." Besides, the same fact
is revealed in the prosperity of the industries of luxury
which presuppose an extensive patronage.2

If we go still farther back to classical antiquity, the same
law will be verified. We learn from a text of Sidonius
Apollinaris that the speaking of Latin was begun in Gaul
by the Gallic nobility and spread from them, together with
Roman morals and ideas, into the bosom of the people.

Here is another example. Let us picture to ourselves

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

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

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

If the Gallic nobility began to adopt the speech and customs of Rome,
after the conquest, it was because then, for the first time, they felt
the superiority of Rome. Why did the American Indians never adopt
European civilisation ? Because their immense pride kept them from
considering themselves inferior to Anglo-Americans. On the other
hand, the negroes of America, who have been accustomed to recognise

22O Laws of Imitation

the basin of the Mediterranean in the eighth century before
Christ; at the moment of the great Tyrian or Sidonian pros-
perity, when the Phoenicians, the European carriers of the
arts of Egypt and Assyria, were arousing among the Greeks
and other peoples a taste for luxurious and beautiful things.
These merchants were not like modern English traders in
cheap and common fabrics; like the mediaeval Venetians,
they were wont to display along the seaboard fine products
that appealed to the rich people of all countries, purple gar-
ments, perfumes, golden cups, figurines, costly armour, ex-
voto offerings, graceful and charming ornaments. Thus
all over, in Sardinia, in Etruria, in Greece, in the Archi-
pelago, in Asia Minor, and in Gaul, the highest classes, the
chosen few, might be seen wearing helmets, swords, brace-
lets, and tunics which were more or less alike from one end
to the other of this vast region, while beneath them the ple-
beian population continued to be differentiated from one
another by their characteristic dress and weapons. And yet,
although these plebeians differed so much from their leaders
on the outside, they closely resembled them in their ideas
and passions, in their religious superstitions and ethical prin-
ciples.

In the fourteenth or fifteenth century of our era, exactly
the same spectacle would have struck the Arthur Young
of that time in travelling through France and Europe. At
this epoch the same Venetian products had spread every-
where and were inundating and assimilating palaces and
chateaux and city mansions, whereas, although the same
religion and morality prevailed in huts and cottages as in
noble and sumptuous dwellings, the former still retained
their distinct and original characteristics. Now, little by
little, from above to below, assimilation has so advanced
both in antiquity and in modern times, that finally a great
carrying trade, not for the use of the few, but for that
of the entire mass of a vast people, has become possible,

the supremacy of the whites, even after the abolition of slavery, have
had a very strong and noticeable tendency to copy their masters, or
their sometime masters, in everything.

Extra-Logical Influences 221

— to the great advantage of the England of to-day, of the
America of to-morrow.1

Therefore the apologists for aristocracy have, in my opin-
ion, passed over its best justification. The principal role of a
nobility, its distinguishing mark, is its initiative, if not in-
ventive, character. Invention can start from the lowest ranks
of the people, but its extension depends upon the existence
of some lofty social elevation, a kind of social water-tower,
whence a continuous water-fall of imitation may descend.
At every period and in every country the aristocratic body
has been open to foreign novelties and has been quick to im-
port them,3 just as the staff of an army is the best-informed
part of the army on the subject of foreign military innova-
tions, and the most apt in adopting them intelligently, there-
by rendering as much service as by the discipline which it
inspires. As long as its vitality endures, a nobility may
be recognised by this characteristic. When, on the other
hand, it throws itself back upon traditions, jealously at-
taches itself to them and defends them against the attacks of
a people whom it had previously accustomed to changes,
it is safe to say that its great work is done, however useful it
may be in this complementary role of moderator, and that
its decline has set in.*

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

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

* It sometimes, or, even, often, happens that the conquerors pattern
themselves after the conquered, borrowing their habits, their laws, and
their language. The Franks in Gaul became Latinised and spoke a
"Romance tongue. The same thing happened to the Normans in
England, to the Varangians in Russia, etc. But in these cases it was

222 Laws of Imitation

2. In this respect, in spite of appearances to the contrary,
the ecclesiastical resembles the civil hierarchy. Certainly,
had it not been for the strongly aristocratic constitution of
the Christian clergy, the spread of the same dogmas and,
later on, of the same rites, could never have covered such an
immense space as it did, and produced, in spite of the disin-
tegration of feudal society, that great unity of spirit and
ritual called Christianity. It was because of the lack of such
a pyramidal organisation that, although Protestanism ap-
peared at an epoch of great national centralisation instead of
disintegration, at an epoch, therefore, which was highly fa-
vourable for the diffusion of one uniform doctrine or cult, it
was, nevertheless, split up into an endless number of sects.
Now, as long as the pontifical court and the episcopal body
of the Catholic clergy continued to be an active aristocracy,
their special characteristic was their monopoly of religious
initiatives; and the singular complexity of the dogmas and
cult which were enriched and expanded at each council and
synod testified to their initiating propensity. Through
these numerous and frequently reform reunions, the bishops
and abbots kept in touch with new fashions in theology, in
casuistry, and in liturgy, and enabled these fashions to reach
downwards.1 Their taste for innovation went even farther;
it was not confined to the religious sphere. The higher clergy
became depraved at the end of the Middle Ages for the same
reason for which, later on, the French nobility became ener-
vated. It was because, at that epoch, it was the pre-eminently
superior and controlling class, the first to be touched by the
dawn of a new civilisation. If the ecclesiastical pinnacles of

because the conqueror felt the social superiority of the conquered, and
the more real and appreciated this superiority the more faithfully was
the latter reflected by the former. As the Anglo-Saxon was only
slightly superior to the Norman of William the Conqueror, there was
a fusion of two civilisations and, especially, of two languages, into one
civilisation and into one new language, rather than a triumph of the
Saxon element. Besides, we know that the Gallo-Roman nobility sur-
vived the invasion and continued to take the lead.

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

Extra-Logical Influences 223

the Europe of that day had withstood the influence of new in-
ventions and discoveries, and, consequently, of new manners
and morals, the arrival of modern civilisation would have
certainly been retarded for several centuries if not indefinitely
postponed.

In a period of theocratic aristocracy, if the hovel copies
the chateau, the chateau copies some church or temple, first
in its style of architecture and then in the different forms
of art and luxury which develop in it before spreading
down to lower circles. In the Middle Ages the cathedral
goldsmith and cabinet-maker set the standard for the sec-
ular artisans who filled the dwellings of the nobles with
Gothic jewelry and furniture. Sculpture, painting, poetry,
and music were secularised in the same way. Just as the
royal courts created, under the form of flattery and of nar-
row and one-sided courtesy, the habit of reciprocal and gen-
eral amiability and politeness, and just as the example of the
command of one chief or of the privileges of a chosen few
had only to spread to give birth to law, the command of each
to all and of all to each, so we find in the beginning of every
literature some sacred book, the Book of all others, the book
of which all later secular books are merely sanctuary-stolen
reflections, in the beginning of all writing some historic
writing, in the beginning of all music some religious dirge
or lyric, at the beginning of all sculpture some idol, at the
beginning of all painting some tomb or temple fresco or;
some monachal illumination of the sacred book. . . . Tem-
ples, then, antedate palaces, in the right of being considered
the secular, and, for a long time, the indispensable centres of
the spread of civilisation in the extrinsic and superficial
meaning of the word as well as in its intrinsic and deeper
meaning, in matters of art and elegance as well as in those
of maxim and conviction.1

1 The instructive traveller, Abbe Pelitot, says that among the Esqui-
maux the men, but not the women, pray in the morning and evening.
With us the opposite is the more frequent occurrence. In this connec-
tion the Revue scientifique (November 21, 1888) justly remarks that
" among all primitive peoples, religion, like war and hunting, is the

224 Laws of Imitation

3. It is during the periods when the sacerdotal rule is
declining and when ecclesiastical teaching is becoming less
and less the source of beliefs that the art and luxury of
priestly examples come to be more and more closely fol-
lowed, and that there is no fear of profaning the decorative
sides of worship in secularising them. In the same way when
aristocratic rule begins to weaken, and wherTless obedience
is paid to privileged classes, people are emboldened to copy
them in external things. We know that this conforms to
advance ab exterior'ibus ad exteriora, but it is also in part
explained by the application of another very general law,
which should be combined with that concerning the imita-
tion of superiors. If the latter were unconditional, the most
superior thing would be the one to be most imitated ; but, in
reality, the thing that is most imitated is the most superior
one of those that arc nearest. In fact, the influence of the
model's example is efficacious inversely to its distance as well
as directly to its superiority. Distance is understood here
in its sociological meaning. However distant in space a
stranger may be, he is close by, from this point of view, if we
have numerous and daily relations with him and if we have
every facility to satisfy our desire to imitate him. This law
of the imitation of the nearest, of the least distant, explains
the gradual and consecutive character of the spread of an
example that has been set by the highest social ranks. We
may infer, as its corollary, when we see a lower class setting
itself to imitating for the first time a much higher class,
that the distance between the two had diminished.1

function of the men." From this fact, we may properly infer that if
religion survives longer in the hearts and in the habits of women, it is
because they originally adopted it from the example of their lords
and masters. Another confirmation of our law.

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

Extra-Logical Influences 225

4. A period is called democratic as soon as the distance
between all classes has lessened enough, through various
causes, to allow of the external imitation of the highest by
the lowest. In every democracy, then, like our own, where the
fever of subjective and objective assimilation is intense, we
may be sure of the existence of an established or incipient
social hierarchy of recognised superiors, of superiors
through heredity or selection. In our own case it is not dif-
ficult to perceive by whom the ancient aristocracy was re-
placed after the sceptre of the refinements of life had in large
part slipped from its grasp. In the first place the admin-
istrative hierarchy has been growing more complicated,
adding to its height by increasing the number of its grades
and to its breadth by increasing the number of its function-
aries. The same thing is true in the case of our military
hierarchy because of the reasons which have forced modern
European States to become military nations. Prelates and
princes of the blood, monks and cavaliers, monasteries and
chateaux have been suppressed to give place to publicists1
and financiers, to artists and politicians, to theatres, banks,
bazaars, barracks, government buildings, and to the other
monuments that are grouped within the circumference of a
capital. Here celebrities of every kind congregate. Now
what are all the different kinds and degrees of glory or
notoriety that are known to society, but a brilliant hierarchy
of either filled or vacant places which the public alone is
free, or thinks it is free, to dispose of ?

Now, instead of becoming more simple and more humble,
this aristocracy of place, this platform of brilliant stations,
grows more and more impressive through the very effect of
democratic transformations which lower national and class
walls and give a more and more universal and international
suffrage to the candidates for fame. The amount of glory
that may be divided among the actors increases in propor-
tion to the number of the spectators who are clapping or

1 Tocqueville shows in a masterly way (Democratic en Amerique)
that " the sway of journalism must extend as men grow more and
more equal."

226 Laws of Imitation

hissing in the pit, and the distance between the most obscure
onlooker and the most applauded player enlarges accord-
ingly. The apotheosis of Victor Hugo, an impossible oc-
currence thirty years ago, revealed the existence of a high
mountain of literary glory which has been recently raised up,
like the Pyrenees in the past, from out of a vast and un-
broken plain, and which, with its train of minor peaks, piled
up at its base, offers itself henceforward to the ambition of
future poets. Invisible mountains of this kind are ever
springing up through the pavements of big cities, where they
crowd upon each other like the roofs of houses. In the
prodigious growth, in the hypertrophy of great cities and, es-
pecially, of capitals, where oppressive privileges take root and
ramify, while the last traces of the privileges of the past are
jealously effaced, is to be found the kind of inequality which!
modern life creates and which it finds indispensable, in fact,
in managing and promoting the great currents of its indus-
trial production and consumption, i. e., of imitation on an
immense scale. The course of a Ganges like this necessi^
tated a Himalayas. Paris is the Himalayas of France.
Paris unquestionably rules more royally and more orientally;
over the provinces than the court ever ruled over the city.
Every day the telegraph or the railroad distributes its ready-«
made ideas, wishes, conversations, revolutions, its ready-
made dresses and furniture, throughout the whole of France.
The suggestive and imperious fascination which it instan-i
taneously exerts over this vast territory is so profound, so
complete, and so sustained, that it no longer surprises any-
one. This kind of magnetisation has become chronic. It is
called liberty and equality. It is futile for the city labourer
to consider himself a democrat in working for the destruc-
tion of the middle classes (engaged as he is in rising into the
middle class himself) ; he is none the less an aristocrat him-
self, the much admired and the much envied aristocrat of the
peasant. The peasant is to the labourer what the labourer
is to his employer. This is the cause of the emigration out
of the rural districts.

Although the sivorn communes of the Middle Ages grew

Extra-Logical Influences 227

out of a spirit of hostility against the local over-lord and
against feudalism in general, nevertheless, as M. Luchaire
informs us, their effect and their aim was to raise the city
in which they were established to the rank of a collective
seigniory, the vassal or suzerain of other seigniories, receiv-
ing or contributing feudal dues and having its own rank in
the feudal hierarchy. The seals of the communes generally
represented military emblems, a foot soldier, or an armed
knight on a galloping horse, like the seals of the nobility.
The same writer, in his exhaustive historical work on the
subject, has proved that the emancipating movement of the
communes of the twelfth century was not confined to the
cities but that, following their example, the mere villages
on their outskirts or beyond freed themselves in the same
way, by confederation. The historians have hitherto ignored
this fact, but it is nevertheless incontestable that, in the Mid-
dle Ages, there were first urban communes and then rural
communes. It is a remarkable thing that the same order is
followed even in the case of agricultural innovations.
Roscher says, for example, that " it was in the town that
the modern system of rent, of ground rent, was first sub-
stituted for feudal dues, as may be seen from the Charter:
of Ghent of 1259 in the Warnkoenig." Let me add that
contrary to the opinion of Augustin Thierry the emancipar
tion of the communes was not caused by popular insurrec-
tion, by a spontaneous uprising of lowly artisan corpora-
tions, but, as recent historical research has shown,1 by an
originally very exclusive league of rich merchants who were
already associated in guilds or religious brotherhoods and
who formed the aristocracy of the city. " They were trans-
formed into real leagues and ranged behind themselves the .
rest of the inhabitants, so that the commune started, in
general, from a league of all the inhabitants grouped to-
gether under the oath of the middle-class aristocracy."

A capital, a great modern city, is the first choice, the
cream, so to speak, of the population. While the numerical

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

228 Laws of Imitation

importance of the two sexes is about equal in a nation taken
as a whole, the number of men in great centres is notably
larger than that of women. Besides, the proportion of adults
is far greater in the cities than it is in the rest of the country.
Finally, and above all, the cities attract to themselves from
all directions the most active brains and the most nervous
organisms, the fittest to utilise modern inventions. This
is the way in which they form the modern aristocracy, a
select, non-hereditary, but liberally recruited body; and yet
this does not keep it in the least from being as scornful of
the lower rural population as were ever the nobles of the
old regime of the common people.1 This new aristoc-
racy is as selfish, as rapacious, and as destructive as
the ancient aristocracy, and if, like all aristocracies, it did
not speedily renew itself by the incoming of new ele-
ments, it also would quickly perish from the vices which
«at into it, from tuberculosis and syphilis, its characteristic
diseases, from poverty, its curse, from alcoholism, from all
those causes which render its death rate unusually high in
spite of its exceptionally distinguished constituency.

Modern capitals not only help to suppress and equalise all
the subordinate parts of their nation, they also aid in the as-
similation of the different communities lying between them,
and from this point of view they again play the role of the
ancient royal courts. Under the Plantagenets, the luxuries of
France and England were, in spite of the infrequency of
travel and international relations, strikingly alike. This
similarity can be explained only as an outcome of the influ-

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

Extra-Logical Influences 229

ence of the constant communication between the French and
English courts. The courts were, therefore, mutual centres
of light and colour. Through the constant interplay of their
rays over national frontiers, they supplied people with
their first examples of a certain kind of uniformity. To-day
the capitals, the daughters of the courts, take their place.
In them all eventually successful initiatives are concentrated,
towards them all eyes turn, and as they are in constantly
reciprocal relations, universal uniformity, offset by a per-
petual variability, must be the result of their prolonged pre-
ponderance. Let me add that, in their reciprocal relations,
the movement of imitation from above to below is also
observed. There is always one capital after which the
others are likely to pattern themselves both at heart and on
the surface, just as formerly there was always one court
which was the general model. It is the capital of the pre-
ponderating people, or of the people that had preponderated
up to the time in question, just as formerly it was the court
of the victorious king or of the king who had been long
accustomed to victory in spite of recent defeats.1

In democratic countries, as Tocqueville remarks, majori-
ties, as well as capitals, have prestige. " As citizens become
more equal and more alike the tendency of each to blindly
believe in a given man or class diminishes. The disposition

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

230 Laws of Imitation

to believe the masses increases and public opinion guides
society more and more." Since the majority becomes the
real political power, the universally recognised superior, its
prestige is submitted to for the same reason that that of a
monarch or nobility was formerly bowed down to. But
there is still another reason. " In times of equality men have
no faith in one another because of their mutual likeness;
but this very resemblance inspires them with an almost un-
limited confidence in the judgement of the public; for it
seems improbable to them that when all have the same
amount of light, the truth should not be found on the side
of the greatest number." This appears logical and mathe-
matical; if men are like units, then it is the greatest sum of
these units which must be in the right. But in reality this is
an illusion are based upon a constant oversight of the role
played here by imitation. When an idea arises in triumph
from the ballot-box we should be infinitely less inclined to bow
down before it if we realised that nine hundred and ninety-
nine thousandths of the votes that it polled were but echoes.
Even the most careful historians are constantly misled by
this and are inclined to enthuse with the crowd over the
unanimity of certain popular wishes which the people's
leaders have inspired, as if it were something marvellous.
Unanimities should be greatly distrusted. Nothing is a bet-
ter indication of the intensity of the imitative impulse.

Everything, even progress towards equality, is effected
by imitation and by the imitation of superior classes. Be-
fore political and social equality between all classes of so-
ciety was possible or even conceivable, it had to be estab-
lished on a small scale in one of them. Now, it was
first seen to occur on top. From Louis XI to Louis XVI
the different grades of nobility which had formerly, in the
time of great vassals and of pure feudalism, been separated
by such impassable distances were steadily levelled, and,
thanks to the crushing prestige of royalty and to the com-
parative multiplicity of the points of contact between all men
of gentle birth, fusion was brought about even between
the nobility of the sword and the nobility of the gown.

Extra-Logical Influences 231

Now, strange to say, while this levelling was being ac-
complished on top, the innumerable sections of the middle
classes and the common people continued to hold aloof
from one another with even intensified class vanity until
the eve of '89. Read Tocqueville for an enumeration, for
example, of the different grades of upper, middle, and lower
middle classes in a town of the ancient regime at this date.
There was certainly more antagonism between the consuls
and the petty merchants of the eighteenth century than be-
tween those of the Middle Ages. The apparent paradox
may therefore be safely advanced that the real preparatory
work in behalf of modern equality was carried on in the
past, not by the middle classes, but by the nobility. In this
respect, as well as in the diffusion of philosophic ideas and
in the impetus that was given to industry through a taste
for exotic fashions, aristocracy was the unconscious
mother of modern times. Moreover, these causes are
linked together. If the royal courts had not levelled the
ranks of the nobility, the literary and, consequently, the
philosophic, radiations of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries would not have darted forth, and fashion-imitation,
the love of foreign-bred innovations, would never have
prevailed over ancestor-imitation in the bosom of the rul-
ing and influential caste. Consequently, the original centre
of all these centres is the king.1

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

232 Laws of Imitation

Thus, whether the social organisation be theocratic, aris-
tocratic, or democratic, the course of imitation always fol-
lows the same law. It proceeds, given equal distances,
from superior to inferior, and, in the latter, from
within to without. One essential point of difference,
however, must be noted. When the standard-setting points
of superiority are transmitted by heredity, as in the case
of the ancient nobility and in the priesthood of a caste
system, or communicated by consecration (a kind of ficti-
tious heredity or adoption), as in the case of acquired
nobility and of the Buddhist and Christian priesthood, they
are inherent in the person himself considered under all
his aspects. The supposedly superior individual is copied
in all respects. He appears to copy no one below himself,
and this is approximately true. The relation of the model
to the copy is, consequently, almost one-sided. But when
for this aristocracy based on the vital tie of real or fictitious
affiliation an aristocracy of purely social factors, recruited
by spontaneous choice, is substituted, prestige attaches
only to the special aspect in which the individual is prom-
inent. He is imitated in this respect only, all others are
overlooked.

The man no longer exists who is imitated in
every thing, and he who is most imitated himself imi-

one of the explanations of the religiosity of the masses of the people,
that in very remote antiquity religion began by being the exclusive
luxury of a few patricians before it became a general and vulgarised
need of the plebeians. j'

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

Extra-Logical Influences 233

tates, in some particulars, some one of his imitators. Thus
imitation, in becoming generalised, has also become mutual-
ised and specialised.

5. It is not enough, however, to say that imitation
spreads from above to below; I must be more definite
about the concept of the superiority in question. Shall
we say that it is always the higher political or economic
classes who set the standard? It is not. At those times,
for example, when power, and with power enhanced facility
for acquiring wealth, is in the hands of the people's repre-
sentatives, the latter are desired to be rather than estimated
to be superior by those who elect and elevate them. Now,,
the privilege of having one's self reflected on all sides be-
longs to the kind of superiority which is believed in, not
to that which is merely desired. In fact, to desire a man's
promotion is to realise that he is not already high up, and
that fact alone often keeps him from having prestige. This
is the reason why so many successful candidates have so
little weight with their electors. But, in this case, the
classes or persons who have real prestige are those classes
that have had power and wealth up to a still recent period,
even if they have actually been despoiled of them, or those
persons who, through their eminent and timely talents, are
on the road to fame and fortune. Again, when a man has
been powerful or rich for a long time, he inevitably wins
consideration through the conviction that gradually comes
to people that he really deserves his advantages. So, in
spite of everything, the two ideas of power and wealth are
sure to be connected with that of social superiority.

They are connected, however, as effect to cause. It be-
hooves us to go back to the cause, to learn what are the
qualities which lead or have led men, or groups of men, to
power and wealth and which make them the objects of
the admiration, envy, and imitation of their neighbours.
In primitive times they were physical vigour and skill,
physical bravery; later, skill in war and eloquence in
council; still later, aesthetic imagination, industrial inge-
nuity, scientific genius. In brief, the superiority which

234 Laws of Imitation

is imitated is the superiority which is understood; 1 and
that which is understood is what is believed, or seen, to
be conducive to benefits which are appreciated because they
satisfy certain wants. I may say, parenthetically, that these
wants are derived, to be sure, from organic life, but that
their social mould and channel are made by the example of
others. Sometimes these benefits are vast domains, great
herds of cattle, numerous leuds or vassals seated around
the immense tables of their over-lords, sometimes they are
capital cities and a constituency of devoted electors. Again
they may be men's hopes of heaven and the credit they
are supposed to have with great personages beyond the
grave.

If I am asked, What is the series of social superiorities
which takes place in the course of civilisation? I shall an-
swer that it depends upon that series of social goods which
are successively pursued under so many changing forms
by the majority of men of a given epoch and country.
Now, what impels and directs this latter series? It is
the sequence of both mutually helpful and mutually hin-
dering inventions and discoveries which present themselves

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

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

Extra-Logical Influences 235

one after the other to the human mind, in the irreversible,
to a certain extent, and inevitable order that is indicated
by social logic. The discovery of the advantage of cave
dwellings, the invention of stone weapons, of bows and ar-
rows, of bone needles, of fire from the friction of wood, etc.
kindled for the first troglodytes their ideal of happiness, —
a lucky hunt, fur garments, game (human, at times!)
eaten in the recesses of a smoke-filled cave. Later on,
the discovery of certain ideas of natural history and the im-
portant and immensely fruitful invention of domesticating
animals brought a change of ideal; great herds of cattle
under patriarchal supervision was the new dream. Then
the discovery of the first elements of astronomy, the inven-
tion of domesticating plants, i. e., of agriculture, the dis-
covery of metals and the invention of architecture made
possible a dream of great domains peopled by slaves and
dominated over by a palace, the model of houses to come.
Finally, the discovery of the sciences, from the nascent
physics of the Greeks and the babbling chemistry of the
Egyptians up to our own learned treatises, and the inven-
tion of arts and industries, from the hymn to the drama
or from the grindstone to the steam mill, made possible
the gradual building up of the happiness of our millionaires,
the piling up of their bank accounts or of their government
or real-estate securities. So much for wealth. As for
power, the same considerations apply in the succession of
its historic forms.

In view of these facts, a definite answer shapes itself to
the question we are concerned with. The qualities which
make a man superior in any country and at any period are
those which enable him to understand the group of dis-
coveries and to make use of the group of inventions which
have already appeared. Sometimes, quite often, in fact,
it is some accidental or objective condition rather than per-
sonal qualities which enable an individual to make use of,
or, for a time, monopolise the leading inventions of his
day; and, in general, these two factors are in combination.
Although the tribe or city where a progressive idea or a

236 Laws of Imitation

superior industrial process or a more powerful military
engine happens to appear, may be inferior in race and
culture, yet it will retain a monopoly of the novelty for a
long time. It may have been due to such a change as this
that the Turanians had the advantage throughout remote
antiquity of being almost the only people to practise metal-
lurgy. The prosperity of the Phoenicians is partly ex-
plained through the discovery on their shores of the little
purple-producing shell-fish. From this a great maritime
export-trade arose which was most timely in encouraging
the natural bent of these Semitic peoples towards naviga-
tion. The first people to domesticate the elephant or horse
must have derived immense advantage from them in war.
Formerly, the mere fact of being the son of a father who
was possessed of the natural qualities demanded by the
civilisation of his day was an advantageous condition which
stood in lieu of those qualities. The idea of hereditary
nobility came about in this way.1 Finally, when a given
locality has long held the privilege of attracting to itself
those individuals who are the best endowed from the point
of view of contemporary ambition, a presumption of supe-
riority attaches, as I have said before, to residence in that
place, and this is one of the most favourable circumstances
for the happy employment of the resources furnished by the
civilisation of the time. In our own day, when science
and industry are the great bodies of discoveries and inven-
tions which we must appropriate in order to grow rich, it
is advantageous to live in .the great cities where scholars,
inventors, and capitalists are concentrated. This is so
much the case that it is often enough for a woman who is
a newcomer in a provincial town, to be a Parisian, to set
the style in the place. During the feudal period, when

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

Extra-Logical Influences 237

the art of war, which was then the unique source of terri-
torial wealth, was the customary privilege of the lord of
the castle, the castle inmate, however lowly his station,
far outranked the citizen. This was not so in Italy, how-
ever. There the cities learned how to organise bodies of
militia to keep the neighbouring castles under control.
When the royal court came to be formed, the courtiers
of Versailles totally eclipsed, for like reasons, the Notables
of Paris, the royal favour having become the supreme prize.

We must see that social superiority always and every-
where cpnsis.t_s_of_Qbjective circumstances-ar .o£ subjective
traits which aid in_the exploitation of existing. discoveries
and inventions. Now let us remove to one side the first
of these two sources of superiority and turn our attention
to the matter of subjective traits. Here, undoubtedly, the
qualities which make a man, or a group of men, superior,
are always bodily characteristics or personal qualities;
nevertheless, the character of their superiority is wholly
social, since it consists in their pre-eminent aptitude to carry
out the objects of social thought. From the very begin-
nings of humanity, when physical force is supposed to have
ruled superior, the successful savage was not the most vig-
orous one; he was the most agile one, the one most skil-
ful in handling bow and club and sling, in cutting stone.
Nowadays it is useless for a man to be muscular and well-
proportioned ; unless he also possesses that cerebral hy-
pertrophy which was once abnormal and disastrous, but
which is now normally exacted by the exigencies of our
civilisation, he is condemned to defeat. Between these
two extremes there is, perhaps, no peculiarity of race or
temperament, no morbid or monstrous trait which has not
had its day of glory and expansion. Were we not surprised
by the bestial although royal and authoritative type of the
recently unearthed Rameses the Great? How many of
our instinctive criminals would have been heroes in other
days! How many madmen would have had statues and
altars erected to them !

But through this oscillating multiformity, which explains

Laws of Imitation

0. fc* the partly fortuitous character of inventions and discoveries,
it is easy to remark, on the whole, the gradual decline
of aptitudes that are muscular rather than nervous and the
concomitant progress of aptitudes that are nervous rather
than muscular. The countryman is muscular; the citizen
is nervous; the same distinction exists between the civilised
and the uncivilised man. Why is this? There are two
reasons. In the first place, social logic eliminates a smaller
number of contradictory discoveries and inventions than
the number of the consistent ones which it accumulates;
and the resulting excess of complexity necessitates a more
highly developed cerebral capacity and a more perfect cere-
bral organisation. In the second place, the accumulation of
mechanical inventions puts an increasing number of animal,
chemical, and physical forces at the disposition of man and
frees him day by day from having to reinforce them with
muscular labour.1

Racial or individual differentiation is, we see, like a
musical instrument upon which inventive genius is free to
play under the general guidance of social logic. This has
an important corollary for historians. If you are seeking
the cause of a people's prosperity or decay you must look
for it in the peculiarities of its organism which rendered
it particularly fit to make use of contemporaneous knowl-
edge, or in the appearance of new knowledge which it was
not physically able to utilise as it had its old knowledge.
If the elements of a civilisation are given and you wish to
describe with accuracy its parent race, on its mental side,
at any rate, the same principle will serve as a guide. In
this way we have been able, instinctively, to describe the
psychology of the primitive Etruscan or Babylonian. A

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

Extra-Logical Influences 239

people who were marvellously gifted for the chase and whose
very agility and more brilliant parts unfitted them for pas-
toral occupations, had inevitably, in spite of their vigour, to
succumb in a pastoral period, just as nowadays, in our in-
dustrial cities the old-fashioned poetic or artistic tempera-
ment succumbs. In general, the advent of some new race
corresponds to every fresh influx of important, civilisation-
shaping inventions. It may be because the established race
was born without the traits required in the exploitation of
the rising ideas, or, because, although it may once have
have had these traits, it has come to lose them while it was
controlled by its old ideas. Every established civilisation
ends by creating its own race. Our own civilisation, for
example, is engaged in shaping for itself the American of
the future.

Let me conclude with the observation that the social
peaks, the classes or nations which are most imitated by
others, are those within which the greatest amount of re-
ciprocal imitation goes on. Great modern cities are char-
acterised by the intensity of their imitation of internal
things; it is proportionate to the density of their population
and to the multiform multiplicity of the relations of their
inhabitants. This, as M. Bordier justly remarks, accounts
for the " epidemic and contagious " nature of their fashions
and vices, as well as of their maladies and of all the striking
phenomena which occur in them. Formerly, the aristo-
cratic classes, especially the royal courts, were distinguished
by this same characteristic.1

6. The law which I have been developing is certainly
very simple; but I think that if we do not lose it from
view certain points of history which have hitherto been ob-
scure may be cleared up. To cite one only, what is more
shadowy than the formation of the feudal system during the
Merovingian and Carolingian period? In spite of the ser-
vice of Fustel de Coulanges in throwing light upon this
subject by revealing the Roman origins of many alleged
German institutions, many sides of the question are still

1 See Vie des societes, p. 159.

240 Laws of Imitation

obscure, and I certainly do not pretend to scatter all theil'
shadows. But I take the liberty of pointing out to his-
torians who are throwing light upon these dark places
that among other things they may have failed to suffi-
ciently reckon with the examples set by the Merovingian
king and the inevitable radiations of these examples. The
majority of historians have not taken the trouble to notice
that the feudal tie of the lord to his vassal as it was con-
stituted and generalised in the ninth and tenth centuries
is strangely like the relation between the king and his an-
trustions as it existed in some of the royal palaces during
the fifth and sixth centuries. If historians have noted
this fact, they have not classified it properly. The antrus-
tion is devoted body and soul to his king, like a vassal
to his lord, in return for the protection which shields him.
In the beginning, to be sure, the antrustionship is tempo-
rary, but it soon becomes hereditary and proprietary as well.
M. Glasson writes that " land grants were at an early time
attached to the antrustionship, and this dignity was trans-
mitted from father to son long before the capitulary of
Kiersy recognised the hereditary character of benefices and
offices." Thus, the two main features of feudalism, in-
heritance and land-tenure, existed in the case of the an-
trustion before existing in the case of the beneficiary. Is it
not natural to see in the latter a manifolded copyist of the
former, and for the same reason to consider the beneficiaries
of beneficiaries, the petty vassals of a great vassal, as new
imitative editions of the same model ? 1 It is a con-
troverted question," as M. Glasson puts it, " whether the
king alone had antrustions or whether the great nobles were

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

Extra-Logical Influences 241

also entitled to have them. In my opinion no decisive
reason can be given on one side or the other." But how
can we admit that the nobles could have withstood the de-
sire to have the same kind of body-guards as those of their
monarch ? Call to mind La Fontaine's line : " Every petty
prince has his ambassadors." The oath of homage and al-
legiance is another characteristic of the feudal tie; and is
it not a multiplied copy of the oath of fidelity pledged to
the Merovingian kings by their subjects? There is nothing
analogous to this oath under the Roman Empire. It would
have been very surprising if this peculiar custom had not
made an impression, and if, later on, when suzerains had
come to exact the same kind of an oath from their followers,
it had not been the thing to suggest this idea to them.
Finally, is not the origin of most of the feudal rights ex-
plained quite naturally by certain of the imposts or rents
that were the dues of the Merovingian monarch? M.
Glasson says, for example, that " the custom of making
gifts to the king under certain circumstances, notably on
the occasion of fetes or marriages, already existed under
the Merovingians. . . . The first Carolingians regulated
this custom and changed these gifts into a direct tax." *
Now, later on " under feudalism, the nobles exacted similar
gifts from their vassals'' z on precisely the same kind of
occasions. Is not this significant? Why should not these
royal examples have been imitated when it is known that so
many others were imitated, especially those which help to
explain to us the characteristics taken on by mediaeval serf-
dom? It has been asked how it was that the serf of the
Merovingian period, from whom his master could exact
almost arbitrarily any service whatsoever, came to evolve
into the serf of the eleventh century from whom only a
fixed quit-rent could be demanded? The answer has been
made in drawing attention to the fact that this substitution
of a fixed for an arbitrary arrangement began by being an

1 [Histoire du droit et des institutions de la France, II, 482. E.
Glasson, Paris, 1888.— Tr.]
»[/&»</., II, 483-— Tr.]

242 Laws of Imitation

innovation in the royal and ecclesiastical domains. To
quote again from the learned author I have already cited,
" the nobles imitated the Church, the abbeys, and the king
in all their acts, and the quit-rent tended to become a fixed
charge everywhere."

Fustel de Coulanges is too clear-sighted to have altogether
misinterpreted the importance of the antrustions. In his
Origines du systeme feodal, where he studies minutely the
Roman, Gothic, and German sources of feudalism, he dedi-
cates a few pages, but only a few, to the king's trust in
the midst of long chapters upon the Roman precarium, upon
benefices, patronage, etc. It is a pity, in my humble opin-
ion, that he puts the first of these subjects in the same or,
in fact, in a considerably lower rank than the others, and I
think that he would have escaped this error had he reckoned
upon the universal tendency of men to copy one another,
and, above all, had he considered the particularly contagious
nature of royal example in all periods of history. To be
sure, the Roman precarium and even the various kinds of
benefice and patronage, Germanic, Roman, or Gallic, are
merely modes of land appropriation and of personal sub-
jection; they are without any military character and, in
general, they lack the religious sanction of the oath. Those
customs are undoubtedly the conditions and even the very
roots of the feudal tie, but they do not constitute it. They
are too trivial and too widespread among the most diverse
nations to explain adequately one of the most original
forms of society that the world has ever seen. Only when
these different sources met in a single current in the court
of the Merovingian king, in a military and sacramental
setting, did the germ of feudalism really expand. Our
eminent historian seems to almost recognise this in the fol-
lowing remarkable passage (p. 332) : " We already find
here," he says, in concluding his over-short chapter on the
royal trust, " certain features which will persist in feudalism.
In the first place we find as essentials, the oath and the con-
tract; we also find that the oath is taken in its characteristic
form, upon the hand of the chief, sword at side. Finally,

Extra-Logical Influences 243

we find certain terms which are also characteristic, the
terms trusty man [fidele], friend, peer, and, in particular,
the Germanic term which corresponds to the term man
[homme]." The italics are mine. Truly, I cannot conceive
why the author did not attach more importance later on to
such striking analogies. We shall reread his book in vain
to find anything in all his careful analyses of other institu-
tions which is anywhere near as closely suggestive of feud-
alism.

Only one feature, I repeat, is lacking in this picture of
perfect resemblance. The title of antrustion is purely in-
dividual, it is not inherited. A man becomes a king's an-
trustion by spontaneous agreement. The title of vassal in
the tenth century is, on the contrary, hereditary, and al-
though the necessity of new investiture with every genera-
tion, through the plighting of a new oath of homage
and allegiance, is recognised, as a matter of fact it merely
testifies to the original voluntary and contractual nature
of a tie which has eventually come to be innate and heredi-
tary. This difference is explained by another law of imita-
tion which we are about to discuss, the law by which fashion
entrenches itself as custom, i. e., the hereditary consolida-
tion of what began by spreading itself contagiously from
contemporary to contemporary.

After all, the preceding historical hypothesis is only
offered as a specimen of the services which, in more skilful
and scholarly hands, might be rendered by the application
of the general ideas which we have been developing.

CHAPTER VII

EXTRA-LOGICAL INFLUENCES (CONTINUED)

Custom and Fashion

THE presumption of superiority which recommends one
among a thousand examples of equal logical value, attaches
not only to the persons, classes, and localities from which
the example emanates, but to the time of its origin as well.
I intend to devote this chapter to a consideration of this last-
named order of influences. It is, we see, only a consequence
of the law of the imitation of the superior, looked at under a
fresh aspect. Let us begin by laying down the principle that
even in societies which are, like our own, the most over-run
with foreign and contemporary (thus doubly accredited)
literature, institutions, ideas, and turns of speech, ancestral
prestige still immensely outweighs the prestige of these
recent innovations. Let us compare some of the few
English, German, and Russian words that have recently
been popularised, with the foundations of our old French
vocabulary; some of the fashionable theories on evolution
or pessimism with the mass of our ancient traditional con-
victions; our present-day reform legislation with the bulk
of our codes, whose fundamental points are as ancient as
Roman law; and so on. Imitation, then, that is engaged in
the currents of fashion is but a very feeble stream compared
with the great torrent of custom. And this must necessarily
be so.1 But, however slender this stream may be, its

1 Just as from the social point of view, or, at least, from the point
of view of temporary, if not lasting, social peace, it is much more
important that beliefs should be held in common than that they should
be true, — hence the supreme importance of religions ; — so, from the

244

Extra-Logical Influences 245

work of inundation or irrigation is considerable, and it
behoves us to study its periodic rises and falls in the very
irregular kind of rhythm in which they occur.

In all countries a certain kind of revolution is gradually
effected in people's minds. The habit of taking on faith
one's priests and one's ancestors is superseded by the habit
of repeating the words of contemporary innovators. This
is called substituting the spirit of investigation for cre-
dulity. Actually, it is merely a welcoming of foreign and
persuasive ideas following upon a blind acceptance of tra-
ditional and authoritative affirmations. By persuasion is
meant the apparent agreement of these foreign ideas with
those that are already established in dogmatic minds, that is,
with dogmatic ideas. The difference, we see, does not lie in
the voluntary or non- voluntary nature of the acceptance. If
traditional affirmations are accepted, I will not say more
freely, but more quickly and vigorously, by the mind of the
child, and are imposed upon it through authority, not
through persuasion, it means that the mind of the child was
a tabula rasa when the dogmas came into it, and that to be
received they had neither to confirm nor contradict any

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

246 Laws of Imitation

idea that was already established there. They had only to
arouse fresh curiosity, and to give it indifferent satisfaction.
This is the whole difference. It follows that the authorita-
tive form of impression must have necessarily preceded the
persuasive form, and that the latter is an outcome of the
former.

Similarly, in every country, a like revolution occurs in the
case of people's volitions. Passive obedience to ancestral
orders, customs, and influence, comes to be not replaced, but
neutralised in part, by submission to the pressure, advice,
and suggestions of contemporaries. In acting according
to these last-named motives, the modern man flatters himself
that he is making a free choice of the propositions that are
made to him, whereas, in reality, the one that he welcomes
and follows is the one that meets his pre-existent wants and
desires, wants and desires which are the outcome of his
habits and customs, of his whole past of obedience.

The epochs, and societies in which the prestige of an-
tiquity rules exclusively are those where, as in ancient Rome,
antiquity means, in addition to its proper sense, some be-
loved object. Nihil mihi antiquius est, nothing is dearer to
me, said Cicero. In China and Siberia1 you tell the passer-
by, to please him, that he looks aged, and your interlocutor
is deferentially addressed as elder brother. The epochs and
the societies which are, on the contrary, controlled by the
prestige of novelty are those where it is proverbial to say
that everything new is admirable. And yet the traditional
and customary element is always, I repeat, preponderant in
social life, and this preponderance is forcibly revealed in the
way in which the most radical and revolutionary innova-
tions spread abroad; for their supporters can further them
only through oratorical or literary talent, through superior
handling of language, not of scientific, or philosophic, or
technical language, all bristling with new terms, but of the
old and antique language of the people, so well known to

1 See Dostoiesky's Maison des marts. And so in Siberia, in speaking
of a man twenty years old, they say : " My respects to old man so-
and-so."

Extra-Logical Influences 247

Luther and Voltaire and Rousseau. The old ground is
always the vantage-point from which to tumble down old
edifices and to rear up new ones. The established morality
is always the basis for the introduction of new political
ideas.

It seems as if I ought to cross-classify the foregoing
distinctions between imitation of a native and ancient model
and imitation of a new and foreign model. Is it not pos-
sible for both the ancient and the novel models to have
prestige, although the former is neither native, nor the
latter foreign to either family or city? This may be so, of
course, but it is such a rare occurrence that it is not worth
the trouble of making the distinction. Those epochs whose
byword is " everything new is admirable " are essentially
externalised — on the surface, at least, for we know that in
reality they are more deeply penetrated than they think for
by ancestral religion; and those epochs whose unique
maxim is " everything antique is good," live a life wholly
from within. When we no longer venerate the past of
our family or city we cease, a fortiori, to venerate every
other past, and the present alone seems to inspire us with
respect. Inversely, when it is only necessary to be blood-
kindred or compatriots, to be considered equals, the stranger
alone seems to produce as a rule that impression of respect
which leads to imitation. Remoteness in space acts here
like the remoteness in time in the former case. In periods
when custom is in the ascendant, men are more infatuated
about their country than about their time; for it is the past
which is pre-eminently praised. In ages when fashion
rules, men are prouder, on the contrary, of their time than
of their country.

Is the revolution to which I have referred universal and
necessary? It is, for the reason that independently of any
contact with alien civilisation, a given people within a given
territory must inevitably continue to grow in numbers, and
must no less inevitably progress in consequence towards
urban life. Now, this progress causes the nervous excita-
bility which develops aptitude for imitation. Primitive

248 Laws of Imitation

rural communities can only imitate their fathers, and so
they acquire the habit of ever turning towards the past, be-
cause the only period of their life in which they are open to
the impressions of a model is their infancy, the age that is
characterised by nervous susceptibility, and because, as chil-
dren, they are under paternal rule. On the other hand, the
nervous plasticity and openness to impressions of adults in
cities is in general well enough preserved to permit them to
continue to model themselves upon new types brought in
from outside.

In contradiction to this view may be cited the example
of nomadic peoples like the Tartars, Arabs, etc., who appear
for many centuries past to have been irrevocably tradition-
bound. But perhaps, or, rather, undoubtedly, their present
state of immobility is the end of the historic cycle which
they had to traverse, the equilibrium which they have
reached at the close of the anterior stages in which their
semi-civilisation was formed by means of successive impor-
tations. In fact, the corresponding involution of the revolu-
tion we have discussed is no less necessary. Man escapes,
and then but partly, from the yoke of custom, only to fall
under it again, that is, to fix and consolidate, in falling
under it again, the conquests due to his temporary emanci-
pation. If he is full of genius and vitality, he escapes again
and makes new conquests, only to pause for the second time,
and so on. These are the historic somersaults of the great
peoples of civilisation. There is a notable proof of this in
the fact that the progress of urban life is not continuous;
after accesses of fever like that which is now raging
through Europe, it suffers intermittent setbacks and lets
rural life develop again at its expense. This development
takes place in all manner of ways, not only in the numerical
increase of scattered rural and village communities, but,
likewise, in the increase of wealth and welfare and en-
lightment outside of the great centres. A mature civili-
sation like China, for example, or ancient Egypt, or the Peru
of the Incas ( ?), or feudal Europe in the twelfth century,.
is always essentially rural in the sense that the general level

Extra-Logical Influences 249

of its cities remains static, while that of its country districts
continues to rise. Our own Europe, according to all proba-
bilities, and in spite of the apparent unlikelihood of this
hypothesis, is bound towards a like goal.

But this final return from the spirit of fashion to that of
custom is in no sense a retrogression. In order to thor-
oughly understand it, it is necessary to throw some light on
the analogies presented by animate nature. Let us note that
each of the three great forms of universal repetition, vibra-
tion, reproduction, and imitation, is at first tied Up with and
subservient to the form from which it sprang, but that it
soon tends to escape and, then, to subordinate the latter to
itself. Among the vegetal and the lowest animal species we
see that reproduction is the slave of vibration. Their vital-
ity, in its alternating periods of torpor and revival, follows
closely upon changes of season, upon solar light and!
heat, whose ethereal vibrations stimulate the vibrating mole-
cules of organic substances. But as life evolves, it consents
less docilely to turn like a top under the whip of the sun's
rays; and, although it can never escape from the enforced
flagellation, it gradually transforms it into a regulative
thing. Thanks to various processes which permit it to store
up the products of solar radiation, it succeeds in holding in
reserve certain internal explosives and combustibles which
are always ready for the nervous system to use. Life sets
them off and burns them up at its own pleasure, not at that
of the seasons, in order to give itself the vibratory stimulus
that is indispensable to muscular effort, to flying, to jump-
ing, to fighting. A moment comes when life not only does
not depend upon physical forces, i. e., the great currents of
ethereal or molecular vibrations and the combustions which -
generate them, but, in large measure, controls them. Man,
who even in the most extreme types of civilisation, remains
a simple living being, changes night into day, winter into
summer, the north into the south, with his street lights, his
furnaces, and his locomotives, and renders subject to him-
self, one after the other, all the vibratory energies of nature,
heat, electricity, and even the light of the sun.

250 Laws of Imitation

Generation seems to me to hold analogous relations to
imitation. In the beginning, it is likewise fitting that the
latter should timidly attach itself to the former, like a child
to its parent. And we see that in all very primitive societies
the privileges of being believed in and obeyed, and of set-
ting the example, are connected with the function of
procreation. The father is imitated because he is the
procreator. If an invention is to be imitated, it must be
adopted by the pater familias, and the domain in which it
can spread terminates with the limits of the family. The
family must multiply for it to continue to spread. Because
?af the same principle or the same connection of ideas, the
transmission of sacerdotal or monarchical power is con-
ceived of, at a less remote period, as possible only by way of
inheritance, and the vital principle regulates the course of
the social principle. Then every race has its own language,
its own religion, its own legislation, and its own nationality.
Parenthetically, I may say that the desire in our own day
to give an exorbitant historical importance to the idea of
race is a sort of anachronism — a naturalistic point of view
which can only be explained by the remarkable progress of
the natural sciences.

But, from the very beginning, every discovery or inven-
tion feels itself cramped within the limits of the family
or tribe, or even within those of the race, and seeks expan-
sion by a less lengthy method than the procreation of chil-
dren; and, from time to time, some invention will burst its
bounds and cause itself to be imitated outside, thereby
making a road for others. This tendency of imitation to
free itself from reproduction hides, at first, under the in-
genious mask of the latter, under the fiction of adoption,
for example, or naturalisation of foreigners, adoption by
the nation. It manifests itself more boldly in the admission
of aliens to national worship (the admission of the Gentiles,
for example, to the Jewish and Christian rites after the time
of St. Paul), in the appearance of so-called proselyting
religions, in the substitution of an elective or consecrated
priesthood for an hereditary priesthood or of an elective

Extra-Logical Influences 251

presidency for hereditary rulership, in the power accorded
to the lower classes to participate in the honours of the
upper classes (the honour accorded to the plebeians, for
example, of becoming praetors or consuls like the patri-
cians), in people's growing eagerness to learn foreign lan-
guages or to learn the ruling dialect of their own country
to the neglect of the local patois, and to copy every striking
peculiarity in the customs, arts, and institutions of
foreigners.

Finally, the social principle becomes despotic in turn, and
dominates, in its emancipation, the vital principle. At first
a feeble body of inventions, an embryonic civilisation, de-
pended upon the pleasure of the race in which it had
appeared for a chance to spread. It could hope to spread
only as its race spread. Later on, on the contrary, after a
conquering civilisation has made the tour of the world, no
race can survive or propagate itself unless it be apt, and only
in the measure that it is apt, in developing that potent body
of discoveries and inventions that is organised in sciences
and industries. Then, too, practical Malthusianism is in-
troduced into the habits of society. This may be taken as a
negative form of the subjection of reproduction to imita-
tion, since it consists in restraining the power of the former
within the estimated limits of production, i. e., of labour,
an essentially imitative thing.1 We have the positive form
not only, as I have said, in the choice of the fittest race to
further the civilising idea, but also in the gradual forma-
tion of new races for this purpose, races born of age-long
habits and of chance or deliberate intercrossings. The
day may already be foreseen when civilised man, after hav-
ing created so many vegetal and animal varieties to satisfy
his own wants or whims, and after having kneaded at
will the lower forms of life, as if to train himself for
some higher purpose, will dare to approach the problem of
directing his own development, of scientifically and delib-

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

252 Laws of Imitation

erately transforming his own physical nature in the direc-
tion most consistent with the ultimate intent of his civilisa-
tion.

But, while we wait for this living masterpiece of human
art, for this artificial and superior human race which is
destined to supplant all known races, we can say that each
of the national types that has been formed since the dawn of
history is a fixed variety of the human type, due to the
long-continued action of some particular civilisation which
has unwittingly created it for its mirror. In less than
two centuries we have seen the birth and establish-
ment in the United States of an Anglo-American type.
This original product serves many sides of our European
civilisation as an admirable means for their propagation
and progress. The same thing has always happened in the
past. English, Spanish, French, Roman, Greek, Phoeni-
cian, Persian, Hindoo, Egyptian, and other living or
dead products of social domestication are merely modi-
fied offshoots of the ancient Aryan or Semitic trunk.

I have purposely omitted the Chinese type, although it
probably realises the most complete adaptation of a given
race to a given civilisation in the fact that each has become
inseparable from the other. In this case, the civilisation
seems to have been moulded by the race as much as the race
by the civilisation, to infer from the essentially familial
character which this people has retained in spite of its
prodigious expansion. The complete harmony of these two
elements without any very apparent subordination of either
of them to the other, is not the least peculiarity of this
unique empire. It has known how to make much out of
little in all things; in it the national is only the domestic
on an immense scale. This is true, too, of its civilisation
taken as a whole. Like its other features, it has remained
rudimentary in spite of its refinement and even high at-
tainments. Its language has grown rich and cultivated
without ceasing to be monosyllabic. Its government is
both patriarchal and imperialistic. In its religion
animism and ancestor-worship persist under the purest

Extra-Logical Influences 253

form of spiritualism. Its art is as awkward and childish
as it is subtle. Its agricultural system is simple and yet
finished. Its industry is backward, and yet it thrives. In
a word, China has been able to stop, all along the line, in
the first of the three stages which I have indicated, and
its example proves to us that, although the order of their
succession is irreversible, a people is not obliged to pass
through all of them to the end.

Now, what happens when a certain original form of civ-
ilisation has arisen and spread within a tribe for centuries
through custom, and has then passed beyond and spread in
neighbouring related or unrelated tribes through fashion, de-
veloping itself all the while, what happens when it ends
by welding together all the tribes in which it has
spread into a new human variety which is called a na-
tion? When this physical type is once fixed, the civ-
ilisation attaches itself to it; it seems to have created
it only to settle down in it. Ceasing to look beyond
its own frontiers, it thinks only of its own posterity,
and forgets the foreigner — as long, at least, as he does not
force it to pay attention to him by some rude external
shake-up. At this time everything in it takes on a national
garb. It is to be observed that sooner or later every civ-
ilisation tends towards this period of drawing in upon and
consolidating itself. Although our own European civilisa-
tion is following in all directions and through all varieties
of races its own line of expansion, yet even it already shows
plain signs of an inclination to choose out or fashion for
itself some universally invading and exterminating race.
Which will be this chosen and privileged race? Will it be
Germanic or neo-Latin ? And what part, alas ! will be
played by French blood in its definite formation? An
anxious question for a patriotic heart ! But " the future
is no man's," says the poet. However this may be, imita-
tion which was at first custom-imitation and then fashion-
imitation, turns back again to custom, but under a form that
is singularly enlarged and precisely opposite to its first
form. In fact, primitive custom obeys, whereas custom in

254 Laws of Imitation

its final stage commands, generation. The one is the ex-
ploitation of a social by a living form; the other, the
exploitation of a living by a social form.

This is the general formula which sums up the whole de-
velopment of every civilisation, at least of all those which
have been able to go the length of their course without
sudden annihilation. But this formula applies even better
to each of the partial developments of a society, to the little
secondary waves which fringe, as it were, and constitute
its full onward sweep, that is to say, to the evolution, as
we shall show in the following sections of this chapter, of
each of its separate elements, to language, religion, govern-
ment, law, industry, art, and morality.

If the distinction between custom epochs and fashion
epochs is not clearly defined in history, if it does not seem
salient to historians, it is because epidemics of foreign imi-
tation and sheeplike innovation very rarely flourish in all, or
almost all, the regions of social activity at the same time.
To-day they may make a revolutionary attack upon re-
ligion, to-morrow, upon politics or literature; another day,
upon language, etc. Communities are like individuals;
they are often revolutionary in politics and at the same
time set and orthodox in religion, or innovators in politics
and conservative purists and classicists in literature.

And the periods of these crises vary greatly in length in
different cases. When by exception many of them do occur
together, as, for example, in the Greek world in the sixth
and fifth centuries before Christ, or as in Europe in the six-
teenth or eighteenth centuries of our era, or as in contem-
poraneous Japan,1 it is then impossible to misunderstand
the eminently revolutionary character of the times or not
to note their contrast to the ages which immediately pre-
ceded or followed them. But such synchronisms are rare.

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

Extra-Logical Influences 255

With the benefit of this observation, let us apply our three-
fold division to the different aspects of social life and
examine the facts which it explains.

I. Language

Different families or clans originally speak each its own
separate tongue,1 until the day comes when they begin to
form a tribe; then the advantage of speaking a common
idiom is appreciated, and, during a more or less prolonged
period, one of the idioms, that generally of the ruling fam-
ily, suppresses all the others.

The members of ruling families who have known and
who have wished to know only the language of their fath-
ers, come to learn, as a matter of fashion or taste, that of
their foreign masters. Then, when the fusion of blood is
completely effected, the tongue of the tribe, the great new
family, first spreads and then takes root. It is a language
that, after having begun by being foreign to the greater
number of those who speak it, has, in turn, become a native

1 1 agree entirely with those philologists who assert that language
did not appear spontaneously in an infinite number of places and
families at the same time. However natural the desire of com-
municating one's thoughts to one's fellows may have become, it was
certainly not able to bring the invention of speech into existence
everywhere at the same time. Besides, let me remark that this desire
was developed through the very speech which satisfied it, and did not
exist before it, so to speak. It is extremely likely that it was ex-
perienced exceptionally violently by some savage of genius, and that
through him the first manifestations of language took place in a
single family. From this family, as from a centre, the example of
this fruitful innovation spread very rapidly, and straightway brought
to speaking families so great an advantage over non-speaking families,
that the latter speedily disappeared ; so that from that time on the
faculty of speech became the characteristic of the human species. Only,
— and on this point we must uphold M. Sayce and other eminent philolo-
gists who oppose the monogenists, — it was not so much the first
crude products of linguistic invention which were imitated as this new
direction of the inventor's spirit. All ingenious members of primitive
families were more inspired when they heard spoken words for the
first time to invent articulations like those, or pretty much like those,
which they had heard, than to reproduce the very same articulations.

256 Laws of Imitation

tongue, and one exclusively dear to all its speakers, who
despise and reject all other foreign idioms. This is not
all. It is well to observe that from now on the family, I
mean the artificial as well as natural, patriarchal family of
kinsfolk, slaves, and adopted strangers, is not the only
primitive social group. By the side of it must be con-
sidered as the yeast of all ulterior progress, the inevitable
reunion of the unclassed, of all the family outcasts, who
are forced to organise into hordes for conquest or self-
protection. The number of these outcasts increases with
the increasing despotism of domestic law under patriarchal
rule. If imitation is the true social life, these physiolog-
ically heterogenous elements will have no difficulty, even in
the most primitive times, in merging together socially.
From a linguistic point of view, this fusion will result in
the creation of a composite language like the hybrid idioms
of certain seaport towns. There has been, then, not only
in periods of decay, but from the very beginning, a kind of
philological as well as a kind of religious syncretism.
But let us continue. Later on, when tribes themselves

This must have been the great occupation of the nascent imagination.
Sayce also says very truly : " It is perfectly plain that at a certain period
of social life the tendency to express one's self inarticulate language must
have been irresistible. Man must have rejoiced, like the savage or like
the child of to-day in exploiting his newly acquired power. The
child never tires of repeating the words which it has learned; the
savage and the primary scholar of imitating new ones." Hence the
originally infinite multiplicity of tongues. That unity of language which
is imagined by the partisans of monogenism cannot be attributed to
the beginning, but only to the end, of philological evolution. " Modern
races are only the chosen remainder of an innumerable variety of
vanished species. As much can certainly be said of languages. . . .
Here and there certain languages have been stereotyped and spared by
some happy selection; here and there the fragments of certain others
may be found ; but the largest number have perished as utterly as the
animals of geological antiquity. . . . Pliny tells us that in Cocylium
there were more than three hundred dialects. Sagard reckoned in
1631 that among the Hurons of North America the same language
was rarely found in two villages or even in two families within the
same village." And this is not surprising, if we call to mind the
permanent hostility which separates all families in primitive times.
The following statement is still stranger : " In the island of Tas-
mania, a population of fifty persons had no less than four dialects."

Extra-Logical Influences 257

seek to mingle together and form a confederation, the
same phases are repeated on a larger scale. From the dif-
fusion of one of the characteristic tribal languages and the
suppression of the others, we pass on to the first foreign
and, then, in turn, maternal, language of the city. Later
on there is a new series in the same rhythm. The languages
of cities and provinces which have concentrated into states
vanish before the fatuous adoption1 of one among them, and
the resulting triumphant language finally becomes a national
tongue which is as jealous and exclusive, as custom-bound
and traditional, as those which preceded it. We ourselves
are at this stage. But do we in Europe, where the need of
international alliance and confederation is so manifest, do
we not feel the anticipatory signs of the opening of a new
period ? Our mania for borrowing from the vocabularies of
neighbouring peoples and our craze for teaching our chil-
dren foreign languages are clear indications of this. Neol-
ogism flourishes everywhere, just as archaism once flour-
ished. A certain language which is spreading with gigantic
strides — I do not mean Volapuk, I mean English — is tend-
ing to become universal. The day may come when this
language, or some other, a language which will be the uni-
versal mother-tongue and which will be as familiar, as fixed,
and as lasting as it is cultivated and widespread, will merge
the whole human species into a single social family.

Within every separate nation, large or small, we may
observe analagous effects. Tocqueville has very justly re-
marked that in aristocratic societies — where, as we know,
everything is hereditary or customary — each class has not
only its own habits, but its own tongue, a tongue which it has
carved out of the common idiom for itself. It " adopts by
choice certain words and certain terms which afterwards

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

258 Laws of Imitation

pass from generation to generation like their estates. The
same idiom then comprises a language of the poor and a
language of the rich, a language of the plebeian and a lan-
guage of the nobility, a learned language and a vulgar one."
and, let me add, a sacred language and a secular language,
the language of ceremonial and the language of everyday
speech. On the contrary, when " men, being no longer re-
strained by ranks, meet on terms of constant intercourse,"
that is to say, when fashion-imitation begins to act openly,
" all the words of a language are mingled and patois dis-
appear. There is no patois in the New World."1

A language can spread in two ways by means of fashion.
Thanks to conquest or to its own recognised literary su-
periority, it may be studied voluntarily by the aristocracies
of neighbouring nations; they will be the first to renounce
their own barbarous tongues and, later on, to inspire the
lower classes with either a vain or a utilitarian desire to
renounce them also. In the second place, it may exert a
very sensible influence over those nations which it has not
succeeded in subjugating in this way. Although the former
may preserve their own maternal idiom, yet they copy the
latter in their literature, they borrow from it the construc-
tion of its phrases, the harmony of its periods, its refinements,
its prosody. This second kind of external imitation, this
so-called literary cultivation of a language, frequently occurs
in history and often coincides with the first kind. Thus at
Rome, in the time of the Scipios, the young nobles not only
studied Greek, they Hellenised the style of their own tongue.
In France, in the sixteenth century, the nobility first learned
to speak Spanish and Italian and then adapted French to
Spanish and Italian phraseology. To go farther back into
the past, it is probable that the Persian Persianised in this
way neighbouring tongues, that the Arab Arabianised them,
etc.

Now, in the one form or other, linguistic fashion

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

Extra-Logical Influences 259

leads to custom. The foreign tongue that is studied and
substituted for the maternal idiom, becomes, as I have said,
the mother-tongue; the foreign' culture which is introduced
into a national language becomes national itself before long.
In less than a century the Greek periods, the Greek metres,
and the Greek constructions that were borrowed by Latin
incorporated themselves in the genius of the Latin language
and came to be transmitted as national products.

But throughout the above remarks I have attributed to
imitation of foreigner and contemporary many changes
which are due in large part to imitation of superior. It is,
in fact, very difficult to distinguish between these two kinds
of contagion. The former, however, does sometimes ap-
pear to be experienced by itself, notably in that badly
demarcated period where, in the night, in the vast forest of
the early Middle Ages, the Romance languages were born,
like so many philological cryptogams, with such rapidity
and in such obscurity. The linguists, like the old-time
naturalists, have been in great haste to explain this ap-
parently miraculous phenomenon on the hypothesis of true
spontaneous generation. I confess that I am not satisfied;
by their explanation, and I think I can affirm that the sup-
posed miracle will continue to be mysterious until we come
to take another idea as our starting point, the idea, namely,
that towards the ninth century of our era, the spirit of in-
vention, having turned a little capriciously in the direction
of language, perhaps because every other outlet was closed
to it by circumstances, the breath of fashion, so to speak,
began to blow, and for a long time drove and scattered to
the four corners of Latin Europe and even beyond the
new germs that had appeared somewhere or other, it mat-
ters little just where. If, as we are assured, the Romance
idioms were born on the spot from the spontaneous decom-
position of Latin in consequence of the breaking off of all
pre-existing communication between the disintegrated pop-
ulations of the Empire, it would be astonishing to find that
Latin had been corrupted everywhere at the same time and
in equal degree, and that nowhere, in no little isolated

26 o Laws of Imitation

region, had the old Latin tongue survived with its declen-
sions, its conjugations, and its syntax.

Such simultaneousness, such universality of corruption,
in a time of such distraction and in the case of such a
tenacious and such a live thing as language, may well as-
tonish us. Moreover, if this were so, what should we think
of the uniformity of structure which is to be observed be-
tween all the dialects and languages which germinated to-
gether from the rotten trunk of Latin? Certain "close
and profound analogies exist " between the Langue d'Oc, the
Langue d'Oil, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Walloon, and
between their provincial variations, analogies which Littre
justly admires, but about which he errs when he sees in
them the effect of some general necessity. Was it a neces-
sary and predetermined thing that everywhere, at all points
at the same time, the article should spring up and be derived
from the pronoun ille, or that the perfect indefinite should
be added to the Latin preterite to form with the aid of the
verb avoir placed in front of the past particle j'ai aimai,
ai amat, ho amato, he amado, or that the word meus should
be arbitrarily taken as a new suffix to constitute the new
adverb, chere-ment, cara-men, caramente. ... ? It
is clear that each of these ingenious ideas sprang up in some
place or other from which it radiated everywhere. But the
sweep1 and rapidity of this radiation would be inexplicable
unless we admitted the existence of some special current of
fashion in relation to the facts in question.

It would be inexplicable just because of that very ter-
ritorial disintegration, and of that very rupture of ancient
communications which has falsely appeared to furnish an

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

Extra-Logical Influences 261

explanation of the phenomenon in question. Contrariwise,
there is no better proof than this example of the reality and
intensity of those special, intermittent currents which I
feel compelled to hypothecate. Thus, in the sixteenth cen-
tury, the teaching of Luther spread across the many bris-
tling frontiers of those times with an unheard-of speed that
was due to a similar hurricane, a religious one this time.
It vent itself throughout the whole of Europe; only, as the
force of its blasts diminished, it assumed in each province
or region a special physiognomy, comparable to the diver-
sity of the Romance dialects in the eleventh century, after
each province had reassumed its linguistic isolation. It
must not be said, then, that in the ninth and tenth centuries
Latin decomposed of itself. It no more decomposed of it-
self than did Catholicism at the time of Luther's sermons.
In both cases the introduction of unexpected and really fresh
microbes was necessary to bring about the decomposition
that has been advanced as the cause itself. This decom-
position followed, but did not precede, the grammatical or
theological innovations which transformed the language or
religion in question. To spread these seeds far and wide,
a kind of an epidemic disposition to welcome foreign novel-
ties was necessary.

Ordinarily, every community brings this hospitable open-
ing out of itself to an end by shutting itself up into its cus-
toms. Compare the extreme slowness with which even a
conquering language spreads beyond its habitual area with
the above-cited linguistic conversion of the masses of the
Romance populations! Or compare the usual amount of
time it takes to snatch a few catechumens away from their
native religion, with the extraordinary success of the Cath-
olic apostolate throughout the Greek and Roman worlds,
and throughout Germany and Ireland during the first cen-
turies of our era, or with the amazing triumphs of Luther
at the time of the Reformation!

These great revolutions cannot be credited, or can be
credited only in part, to the prestige of a superior. The
Romance revolution in language, like the Christian revo-

262 Laws of Imitation

lution in religion, in its first centuries, at least, arose and
spread in the bosom of the common people and of con-
quered nations. Nor could intrinsic superiority, in the
birth of Romance speech, at any rate, account for its tri-
umph over Latin, although the logical laws of imitation do
apply here. When the embryo of Romance speech was
once substituted for the Latin language, it was undoubtedly
by means of logical substitution and accumulation, as I said
above, that this embryo grew and matured. But the pref-
erence which led in the beginning to the adoption of this
still rudimentary language had certainly nothing rational
about it, and if in the innumerable logical duels which oc-
curred at that time between the Latin and the Romance
forms the latter had always the advantage, it was pre-
cisely because they had the wind of fashion behind them.
And yet an attempt has been made to justify this fact by
observing that because the article, the conditional, and the
perfect indefinite were lacking in Latin, Romance stepped
in to fill up the gap. And so the admirable instrument
which served the great writers of Rome was inadequate for
the barbarian colonists! Besides, if the innovation to
which I refer had been favoured merely on the ground of
improvements, Latin, whose genius was in no way contra-
dicted by them, would only have been enriched by them.
But, as a matter of fact, it was destroyed by them, for the
same spirit which prompted them also prompted certain
substitutions, substitutions which I cannot think of as pro-
gressive, that of the preposition for the case of the declen-
sion, for example. Let no one say that the delicate feeling
of the inflections of the declension was necessarily lost as a
result of intellectual coarsening. Nothing penetrates gross
minds better than the subtleties of language. The popula-
tions of this period were far from having a dulled philolog-
ical sense; it was so acute that they put themselves use-
lessly to the effort of invention for the mere pleasure of
invention, it seems to me, and because the human imagina-
tion must take some direction or other. And let us admire
the imaginative luxury of these primitive people! Littre,

Extra-Logical Influence 263

•who accuses them of having lost the key to Latin through
rusticity, does not perceive that he refutes himself in the fol-
lowing lines : " Every student of language will realise how
much delicacy and grammatical discrimination was devel-
oped at the beginning of our language, how lacking modern
French is in these particulars, and how false the opinion,
as I shall not cease to reiterate, which makes grammatical
barbarity our starting point."

No philologist will have difficulty in upholding this as-
sertion. It applies to the formation of the Aryan languages
as well. The preceding considerations make a fitting intro-
duction, I think, to certain insights into the social conditions
which presided over their prehistoric appearance, into the
debauch of invention and the zeal of imitation from which
they proceeded. This need of irrational linguistic revolu-
tion is one of the first epidemics of fashion which rages
among the adolescent, as we may see in our colleges. And
it affects the adolescence of nations as well.

The effects produced in the domain of language by the
alternate transition from custom to fashion, and from fash-
ion to custom, are both many and plain. In the first place,
when imitation of the foreigner is combined with that of
the superior, a great progress is always to be seen, because
of a gradual enlargement of the territory that belongs to
the triumphant languages, and because of a reduction in the
total number of the languages that are spoken. But even
when fashion works alone, it is effective in the same direc-
tion; for the linguistic disintegration of feudal Europe,
compared with the Roman Empire, must not be attributed
to fashion. It was the fault of the custom which was forced
to grow up after it; and it is very likely that if fashion had
not helped to spread the budding Romance tongues, Latin,
left to itself in each distinct canton, would have evolved
without revolution in a thousand different directions, and
given rise to a still more lamentable disentegration.

Now, in view of the fact that language is the most potent
and indispensable means of human communication, it is safe
to affirm that the social transformations which are brought

264 Laws of Imitation

about on a given territory in the direction of a levelling as-
similation of all classes and localities by the introduction
of locomotives as substitutes for wagons are as nothing
compared with the same kind of social changes that are due
to the overflow of one great dialect over several petty ones,
of one language over several dialects. Linguistic similar-
ity is the sine qua non of all other social similarities, and,
consequently, of all those noble and glorious forms of
human activity which presuppose the establishment of those
similarities and which work on them as on a canvas. The
transient period, in particular, in which a language spreads
on the surface through fashion alone, makes possible the
advent of what is called (for everything is relative) great
national literature. The maximum of value, or, what
amounts to the same thing, fame, to which literary works
can attain, is limited to the number of those who can under-
stand them. Consequently, in order that they may raise
themselves to a far greater height of value or glory than
what has ever been reached before, their language must
flow out far beyond its old-time banks — irrespective of the
fact that the perspective of a more brilliant prize will stimu-
late genius. And yet this is not enough. Although a
given language might be unified if it were visibly trans-
formed from generation to generation by a series of fashion-
spread grammatical vagaries without any strict fidelity to
usages or rules, yet its people would favour the blossoming
of ephemeral shows, the masterpieces of a day, applauded
to-day, forgotten to-morrow; they would refuse to conse-
crate those august and enduring reputations, whose majesty
grows in the course of ages because every new genera-
tion enlarges their public. Brilliant literature, there might
be, but there would be no classic literature. A classic writer
is an ancient literary innovator who is imitated and ad-
mired by his contemporaries, and then by following gener-
ations, because his language has remained unchanged.
Living, he owes his incomparable celebrity to the recent
diffusion of his language; dead, he owes his lasting author-
ity to the fixation of his language by custom.

Extra-Logical Influences 265

Successive crises of fashion also tend, other things being
equal, to make prominent, those linguistic innovations which
are the fittest to direct language into a certain channel which
it is difficult to define, but which is characterised, -notably
in English, by the simplification of grammar and by the
enlargement of vocabulary, and by a utilitarian advance
towards clearness and regularity, which is not without in-
jury to poetic qualities.1 Let us bear in mind these charac-
teristics; they will soon repeat themselves under other
names. .

II. Religion

Religions have often been divided into two great classes :
those that proselyte and those that do not. But the truth
is that at first even the most hospitable religions began by
being jealously closed to the foreigner. We shall find this
so, at least, if we go back to their true origins. Buddhism,
to be sure, appealed from its very birth to men of every
race; but Buddhism is only a detached branch of Brahmin-
ism, and Brahminism admits of no means of propagation, in
principle at least, but transmission through blood.2 As
for Christianity, it did not spread before the time of St.
Paul beyond the Jewish race. Besides, it sprang out of the
Mosaism which had always repulsed the Gentiles. It is
only a Jewish heresy, as a child of Israel once proudly said.
Before Islamism conquered so many nations, it remained
for a long time an exclusively Arabian thing, and its armed
pontificate was hereditary among the descendants of Ma-
homet. Before the advent of Apollo, in Greece, every tribe

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

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

266 Laws of Imitation

had its own gods. The rapidly propagated cult of Apollo
was the first bond of union between the Hellenic cities. Ex-
clusive religions always precede non-exclusive religions, for
the same reason that castes always precede classes, monop-
olies, commercial freedom, and privileges, equality before
the law. In brief, this famous distinction between proselyt-
ing and non-proselyting religions merely means that the
need of expansion that is common to all alike is satisfied
in the one case by the transmission of useful maxims of
piety to the posterity of the same race, a posterity that is
always becoming more and more numerous, — this is the
cause of the ardent desire of the Hebrew and Aryan of
antiquity for a numerous offspring,1 — whereas in the other
case, the same need seeks an easier and a quicker satisfaction
in the transmission of its rites and dogmas to contempo-
raries of other race and blood. In the first case the propa-
gating agent is custom; in the second, that which I call
fashion. And the passage from the first to the second is
only an extraordinary advance of imitation; it has passed
from pedestrianism to flight.

But the most expansive and hospitable worships end early
or late by reaching their natural limits, and in spite of their
vain efforts to pass beyond them, and in spite, even, of the
accidental breaks which they sometimes effect in them (just
as Mahometanism has been proselyting again of late on
an immense scale in the heart of Africa), they resign them-
selves to confessing that a given nationality or group of

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

Extra-Logical Influences 267

kindred nationalities is their unique and, henceforward,
impassable domain. Here they draw back and implant
themselves, and here they generally break up into frag-
ments. From now on, their chief care is not to spread
themselves among distant peoples by means of conquest and
conversion, but to prolong and perpetuate themselves for
future generations through the education of childhood. All
the great religions of our own days have reached this stage
of withdrawal, a stage which is at first, before the decline
which follows it, not lacking in fruitfulness.

But the three periods which I have pointed out as exist-
ing in each of the great religions had already been traversed
by the lower types of religion on which they were based;
and so on until we come to the lowest rung of the religious
ladder, where we find ancestor or fetich worship, purely
familial cults.1 In the most ancient times, then, proselytism
must have been known and practised, since a common wor-
ship, the worship of the god of the city, succeeded in establish-
ing itself and in slowly crushing out the different domestic
cults of different families. But it must also have always hap-
jpened that the vogue of an exotic god, of a god outside of
the household, was followed by a static period, when the
exotic god became established as a patriotic god, because
we find that these city gods became as hostile to, and as ex-
clusive of, one another, as the household gods of a more re-
mote age. Thus the historic rhythm of religions is an alter-
nating transition from proselytism to exclusivism and vice
versa, indefinitely. The statement that exclusivism was the
first link in the chain could not be made without some
hesitation.

The opposite view could be maintained. In India, where
in the depths of Hindooism the birth of some very low form
of religion is actually an everyday occurrence, Lyall in-
forms us that their starting point lies in the preaching of
some exalted reformer, of some ascetic or celibate, who

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

268 Laws of Imitation

has completely broken with his family and caste. He gains
adherents on all sides, and then, from his followers' habits
of eating and marrying among themselves, the sect be-
comes a caste in its turn, and ends by localising itself as a
family. But we should be exaggerating the bearing of this
contemporaneous fact if we saw in it a complete representa-
tion of what must have occurred at the origin of religions.
It is valuable, however, as confirming the hypothesis ac-
cording to which the family is not the unique source of
societies. A band, or horde, or group of those who are
called indifferently family exiles or emigrants, would be the
first term of a social evolution differing very much from the
preceding, although interwoven with it and modelled upon it.
Besides, everything is a witness to the fact that all religions
began in animism, that belief in deity was originally fear of
spirits; and it is very probable that one of the first and
principal manifestations of animism was the deification of
dead ancestors, and that the souls of dead kinsmen were
the first spirits that were feared. As for spirits of a
different origin, the personified forces of nature in an-
thropomorphism, or, rather, at first, as we shall see, in
spontaneous zoomorphism, was it not necessary to get the
authority of the head of the family, of the chief, to have
them adopted unanimously? The really primitive religion,
then, could only be transmitted through blood.

In this connection let us note the strange character of
ancestor apotheosis, and, especially, of its universality. For
it seems very difficult to understand this worship and vener-
ation of the dead, this obedience to the dead, in those crude
times when one is accustomed to think of the adoration of
power as ruling alone. I think that this phenomenon, to
be understood, must be brought into relation with another
equally general and primitive fact, the fact of gerontocracy.
All primitive societies, however unendowed and unprogress-
ive they may be, have veneration and fetich worship for
old age. But how can this fresh fact be reconciled with
the rule of brute force? How does it happen that in a
young world, in the midst of perpetual conflicts, old men

Extra-Logical Influences 269

are not relegated to the rear ? The likeliest explanation, in
my opinion, is the following: In the primitive family,
which is very self-centred and very hostile to even neigh-
bouring families, the examples of the father must have a
potent and irresistible influence over his children, his wives,
and his slaves. In fact, the need of direction which they
experience in view of their utter ignorance and lack of ex-
ternal stimulus, can be satisfied only through imitation
of some one man, and he must be the man whom they have
been in the habit of imitating from their cradles. The
prestige of the example of the father, the king-priest of his
small state, equals the sum of all that prestige to which our
modern civilised Europe is subject, for the most part un-
consciously, but whose influence is dispersed by a thousand
different channels of docility and credulity, under the in-
fluence of teachers, comrades, friends, or strangers, instead
of being concentrated in a single basin of paternal cus-
toms and traditions. Given this fact and the fact that the
paternal magnetisation, as it were, is the more complete in
the beginning the greater the age of the father, it having
had more time to act in, the fact which Buckle has
brought forward may be very well explained, the fact,
namely, that the more prodigious the size and strength and
intelligence that are attributed by primitive peoples to their
superhuman giants, and heroes, and geniuses, the more re-
mote is the past to which they tend to assign them. This
is an optical effect, an orientation of admiration, which
parental prestige is able to account for. The children know
that their own father trembles before the shadow of his an-
cestor. The idol, then, of their idol must seem a superior
kind of god to them.

But Buckle might also have observed that even in the
most remote period of antiquity the worship of the for-
eigner appears alongside that of the ancestor. The distant
in space is no less prestigious to barbarians and savages
than the distant in time. And the wonders of the world
they dream of, their Edens and Hells, in particular, and the
beings they endow with supernatural power are localised by

270 Laws of Imitation

their legends on the borders of the known universe. The
Aztecs thought that they were fated to be conquered by a
divine race hailing from the shores of the far East. The
Peruvians held an analogous belief. It is impossible not to
recognise, moreover, that several of their gods were the
alien reformers or conquerors who had charmed or sub-
jugated their forefathers. The same fact may be observed
in all old religions. The reason of it is that, from the most
remote period of antiquity, parental prestige must have
often been arrested by the sudden appearance of some ex-
ternal and superior prestige. From time to time some un-
known chief of invincible fame rises up out of the distant
horizon; all are prostrate before him, and the Penates are
for the moment forgotten. A newcomer, a bringer of se-
cret and admirable knowledge, is conceived of as an all-
powerful sorcerer before whom the whole world trembles.
The multiplication of such apparitions is all that is needed
to turn men towards a new form of adoration, to substitute
the fascination of the distant for that of the past.1 More-
over, it is likely that the despotic authority of foreign mas-
ters and civilisers was copied from that of the pater familias,
and the apotheosis of these epochs, whether filial or servile,
displays itself to us as the highest degree of reverential fear.
It is, therefore, not astonishing that the most despotic
gods are also the most revered. To-day, families which are
ruled by authority show us the same state of things. The
terrifying character of ancient deities and the humiliating
nature of ancient cults are not due to a source for which
man need blush. And we can understand the persistence
of such beliefs in ancient societies from the fact of their

1 Hence the apotheosis of inventors which is such an important
source of mythologies. " Among the Phoenicians, as among the
Iranians, the invention of fire and the beginning of a divine worship
seem to be closely related. In reading the Biblical, Phoenician,
Babylonian, and Iranian cosmogonies, side by side, we recognise in
them the intention to represent in the succession of generic, instead
of individual personages, the succession of the inventions and develop-
ments which had guided the human race up to the time when the
cosmogones were written" (Littre. Fragments de philosophic posi-
tive) [p. 311. Paris, 1876.— TV.].

Extra-Logical Influences 271

dependence upon the social principle without which the so-
cieties themselves could not have been possible. For this
reason, although atheism would certainly have been a great
relief to the hearts of devout people as an emancipation
from their chronic state of terror, atheism could not spread
at a time when it would have been social suicide.

Nevertheless, in the beginnings of mankind, the isolation
of human families that were scattered in a growling wilder-
ness of animal life must have been great enough to have
prevented them from encountering or fighting one another
very often. The cause, then, to which I have referred
could not have gained its full importance until later. On
the other hand, another class of strange charmers must
have played, it seems to me, a preponderating, although
overlooked or inadequately appreciated, role in the forma-
tion of very ancient mythologies. These were, at first, wild
beasts and venomous serpents; and then domestic animals.
And I lay stress upon this side of mythologies, because here
we have, in the most remote ages, the isolated action of fash-
ion, independent of any such imitation of superiority as we
had in the kind of progress which we have already dis-
cussed.

To-day we hunt wild beasts, but our first ancestors fought
them. It was with wild beasts, primarily, that they
were forced to be constantly at war, either for food or
self-defence. " As often pursued as pursuer." Primitive
man was undoubtedly far from feeling the contempt which
we feel for the hare and quail of our plains, or even for the
wolves and boars of our lingering forests, for the lions,
the cave bears, the rhinoceros, and the mammoths against
which he fought day after day with thrilling turns of for-
tune. The end of the tertiary period and the beginning of
the quartenary period, that is, of the age when man began
to count for something, is characterised by a formidable
" emission of flesh eaters." Such a deadly and such a cun-
ning fauna had never before appeared on the earth. Ele-
phants, rhinoceroses, tigers twelve feet long, lions, hyenas,
etc., all belonged to extinct species of which extant ones are

272 Laws of Imitation

but pale reflections, and all habitually preyed upon man.
Before these terrible belligerents, much more than before
the great men of prey of neighbouring tribes, he trembled
with that sacred fear which is the beginning of all devotion.
And afterwards, when he found himself in the presence of
any great phenomenon, a tempest, the phases of the moon,
the rise or setting of the sun, etc., and when he animated the
phenomenon in order to understand it, his spontaneous per-
sonification of it was more animal-like than human. For
him to personify was to animalise, rather than to humanise.
If all primitive gods, from the Scandinavan Pantheon to the
Aztec Olympia, are saturated with blood and are unmerci-
ful in exacting a periodic tribute of human lives, a" tribute
which comes to be rendered to them later on in an equiva-
lent of animal lives, until only its shadow and mere vege-
table symbol survives in the Christian host, if all these
archaic divinities are cannibals, is it not because man con-
ceived of them, not precisely in his own image, but in the
type of those great superhuman monsters, reptiles or
carnivora, which often devoured him?

This hypothesis allows us to rate primitive man as superior
to his deities, since it explains their ferocity, not on the
ground of his alleged wickedness, but on that of the hard
conditions of his precarious and anxious and perilous ex-
istence. Now, nothing supports the ordinary hypothesis
according to which man has modelled his gods after himself.
The resemblance is so slight! They are immortal and in-
vulnerable, he so ephemeral! They are caprice incarnate,
he is routine itself. They command surrounding nature as
its masters; he falls prostrate before the pettiest meteor.
My conjecture, on the contrary, is based, as we have seen,
on serious considerations. I may add that the universality
of sanguinary deities is naturally explained by the universal-
ity of ferocious beasts; and the fact that all races have the
same starting point explains, in turn, the similarity of the
phases traversed by religious evolution: human sacrifices,
animal sacrifices, fruit offerings, spiritual symbolism.

Moreover, if our point of view is true, it follows that

Extra-Logical Influences 273

when, in a subsequent age, the ebb tide of animality and the
rising tide of humanity enhanced the importance of war
between man and man, and diminished that of the war be-
tween man and beasts, the gods of human form must have
decidedly prevailed over the beast-like gods. This is just
what happened; this gradual humanising of deities is one
of our most substantiated facts. The Egyptian deities,
with a man's face on an animal's body, or with an animal's
face on a man's body, show us the most ancient transition
that is known from the prehistoric zoomorphic gods to the
purely anthropomorphic gods which the Greeks gradually
elaborated. It was a profound transformation, whose ac-
complishment could not fail to revolutionise the divine idea.
Originally, deity was pre-eminently destructive; whereas
with us it is primarily creative. Warlike gods were neces-
sarily triumphant, and in war to triumph was to destroy.
Incidentally, it seems to me that the habitual or ritualis-
tic anthropophagy of primitive peoples is explained by the
foregoing considerations. When man was overcome, and
this frequently happened, in his combats with monsters, he
was always devoured. Consequently, when he happened
to overthrow them, he took it as his duty to kill and eat
them, however unedible they might be, not only for food,
but, following the everlasting custom of military retaliation,
for the sake of reprisal as well.1 On this supposition, what
should happen when two tribes made war against each
other? Such chance combats wedged themselves in be-
tween the familiar combats with the great carnivora, and
bore the same relation to them as species to genus. And
so it naturally came to be a rule for captives, and even for
the corpses of the conquered, to be treated like animals that
had been trapped or beaten; they were sacrificed and sol-
emnly eaten at a triumphant feast. The first triumph must
have been a banquet. Thus cannibalism must have arisen,
originally, from imitation of the primitive chase, although

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

274 Laws of Imitation

it might have been maintained later on for motives of a
mystical or utilitarian nature.1

It may be seen how proper the preceding considerations
are to explain a fact which greatly astonishes mythologists
and which has called forth the most contradictory hypoth-
eses from them, the fact, namely, that everywhere in the
world the most ancient gods of mythology have been
animals, savage and often ferocious beasts, and that if in
the progress of the ages their zoomorphic, their theriomor-
phic character has gradually changed into anthropomorph-

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

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

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

Extra-Logical Influences 275

ism, it is never impossible to discern the deified beast under
the humanised god.1 The animal companion of a god has
begun by being the god himself. This was true of the
goose of Priapus, of the cuckoo of Hera, of the mouse of
Apollo, of the owl of Pallas, as well as of the humming-
bird of the Aztec god Huitzilopochtli. It has been proved
that, prior to the invasion of the Shepherd Kings, " when-
ever the gods [Egyptian] appeared on monuments they
were represented by animals." Shall we explain with
Lang this universal deification of the surrounding fauna
(and, at times, of the flora), as the result of totemism, of
the universal custom among savages and primitive peoples
of recognising some animal as their first tribal ancestor?
And then shall we proceed to connect animal worship with
ancestor worship? On the contrary, I think that, in this
case, the effect is taken for the cause. Totemism does not
explain the deification of animals; this deification can
alone give a reasonable explanation of totemism.2 The ani-
mal is not reputed to be an ancestor until after it has been
deified. Now, why has it been deified ? Because the sight
of it inspired terror or admiration, or merely because it
once chanced to create a lively feeling of surprise as the
result, undoubtedly, of a mistaken observation on the part
of some ignorant observer. The first animal, the first
natural being which appealed to the savage's curiosity,
opened out a new world to him, a world outside of his
family, or, rather, made a new opening for him into that
world which the never-ending growling of savage creatures
had never allowed him wholly to ignore. Seen through his
dreams or fears, either the commonplace or the terrible

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

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

276 Laws of Imitation

animal revealed to him something outside of himself or his
people that was worthy of his interest. This animal, then,
this stranger, whose prestige he feels and yields to, tears
him away from the exclusive prestige of his divine ances-
tors and despotic masters. And if the deified animal
comes to take higher rank than that of the latter, it is none
the less true that, far from this new cult being derived from
the family cult, it must have been in opposition to it. In
the beginnings of mankind, when animality dominated, the
stranger after whom man must have sought to model him-
self, and to whose fascination he must have yielded after he
had escaped from that of his forefathers, must have been,
ordinarily, an animal, although, from time to time, and
later on more frequently, encounters with other tribes al-
lowed the human stranger to play a like part. It is certain
that two prominent kinds of myths are to be found side by
side in all old mythologies, myths about animal-gods and
myths about divine or heroic civilisers. This curious
juxtaposition would be most incomprehensible unless my
point of view were accepted. According to it, these two
classes of myths are merely varieties of one genus. Both
witness from the most remote periods to the action of ex-
ternal and contemporaneous prestige, the source of fashion,
as contrasted with paternal prestige, the source of custom.
Let us continue. I have not yet finished my enumera-
tion of the principal sources of primordial religions. To
conclude this conjectural and somewhat digressive investi-
gation, I may say that after the deification of fierce beasts,
domestic animals should have been and were deified. Thus
good gods came to take a place next to bad gods, forming
in this way a transitory phase that it is well to notice be-
tween theriomorphism and anthropomorphism, in addition
to the transitions already referred to. Conceive, indeed, of
the immense and beneficent change which was wrought
when, in the midst of some small human colony, which
lacked all forms of industry or agriculture and all means of
supply but the bow and harpoon, some savage genius
dreamed of domesticating a dog, a sheep, a reindeer, a cow.

Extra-Logical Influences 277

an ass, or a horse.1 What do all our modern inventions
amount to in comparison \vith this capital invention of
domestication? This was the first decisive victory over
animality. Now, of all historic events, the greatest and
the most surprising is, unquestionably, the one which alone
made history possible, the triumph of man over surround-
ing fauna. Moreover, the farther back one travels into
the past, the greater the value of cattle appears to be. Cat-
tle were the most precious part of spoil, the most coveted
kind of treasure, and the first form of money. Hence, the
deification of bulls, oxen, and cows in the Old World and of
llamas in America. This was a great advance upon the
apotheosis of carnivorous animals. Egypt is a witness to
this fact in the pre-eminence which she accorded to her
Apis over the tiger, lion, and cat-like deities of her more
ancient mythology. Archaic Greece gave a great impetus
to the development of this already civilised form of animal
worship. We have the proof of this, among other facts,
in the myth of the centaurs, half men, half horses, which
undoubtedly expresses the gradual humanisation of a primi-
tive horse-worship, and to correspond in this new phase of
the divine idea to the human-faced tiger-gods of Egypt.
In his excavations in Argolis, Schliemann discovered
thousands of very ancient idols in which a similar meta-
morphosis from a cow-goddess to a woman-goddess2 could
be traced through its many phases up to the point when two
almost invisible little horns was the last sign of the origi-
nally bovine nature of the divinity. This explains the lit-
tle-understood Homeric epithet of boopis. It is unnecessary
to remind the reader of the cow-worship of India.

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

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

278 Laws of Imitation

But man celebrated the wonders of domestication not
merely by his worship of different kinds of cattle; he also
celebrated it in the nature of the cult which he paid to gods
of various origins. After he had domesticated animals and
had appreciated the immense advantage of their exploita-
tion, he must have asked himself whether he could not also
domesticate some of those gods, of those great spirits which
he had already conceived of as the hidden springs of the
great mechanisms of nature, of sun and moon, of rain and
tempest, and which he had pictured under the lineaments
of men and animals. Once these conceptions had been
taken and developed into an innumerable divine fauna, the
domestication of divinities must have been the great pre-
occupation of men of ability. It was a question of having
one's own spirits attached to one's dwelling, like sheep, or
dogs, or reindeer. These were the Lares; and they were
not always, as a matter of fact, the souls of ancestors. But
how were these wild deities to be overcome and humanised?
By methods strangely like those which had served in the
subjection of tame animals, namely, by caresses and flattery,
by offering them the advantage, rare in those times, of a
regular and abundant nourishment which would entirely
relieve them of the effort of searching for an uncertain and
intermittent one. Here we have the origin of sacrifices.
This view will cease to appear odd if we try to conceive
of what domestication must originally have been. To us
the trained horse that is docile under its bit is merely a
certain muscular force under our control. But to the sav-
age of bygone ages, just as, to a certain extent, to the
Arab of to-day, the horse possessed a hidden power which
could not be managed without a certain superstitious fear
of, or respect for, its latent mystery. Therefore, it is less
surprising for worship to have been an attempt at domestica-
tion, if domestication was really a kind of worship.

In support of these speculations, I will add another which
completes them and which seems to me to be equally prob-
able. The idea of reducing men to slavery, instead of kill-
ing and eating them, must have arisen after the idea of

Extra-Logical Influences 279

training animals instead of feeding- on them, for the same
reason that war against wild beasts must have preceded
that against alien tribes. When man enslaved and domes-
ticated his kind, he substituted the idea of human beasts of
burden for that of human prey.

But the preceding speculations on the probable origin of
the earliest religions is, to be frank, a digression for which
I crave the reader's indulgence. Let us return to our spe-
cial subject and let us seek out, as we have already done in
the case of language, the consequences which are involved
in the transition, in questions of religion, from custom to
fashion, and from fashion to custom, that is to say, in the
development of a worship following upon its establishment
in an enlarged domain. In the second place, let us ask
ourselves what are the inner characteristics which the ex-
pansion of a cult presupposes and which enable it to be
successful ? I answer, in a word, to the first point of view,
that a widespread religion is a prerequisite of every great
civilisation, and that a stable religion is the no less neces-
sary condition of every strong and original civilisation. As
its cult, so its culture. To the second point of view I an-
swer that the most spiritual and philanthropic religion has
the greatest chance of expansion, and that, on the other
hand, a religion which spreads beyond its source tends to
become spiritualised and humanised.

This tendency of religions to become spiritualised in their
onward movement is well known. The worship of Apollo,
for example, which is so pure and noble a worship in com-
parison with the gross cults which it succeeded, Hebrew
prophecy, which is spiritual, compared with the Mosaism
which preceded it, Christianity, which is still more spiritual,
and the particularly refined forms of Christian spirituality,
Protestantism and Janseism, all these are so many success-
ive steps in religious evolution. But now we know the
reason of this progress. The idea of deity, which was at
first bestial or physical in the times when the relations of
men with beasts and nature were more frequent and im-
portant than their relations with their non-related fellows,

280 Laws of Imitation

becomes gradually spiritualised, or, to put it better, human-
ised, in the social sense of the word, as man comes into
closer touch with both related and non-related man and as
his direct contact with nature diminishes. And we have
seen how the animal character of ancient gods came to be
effaced and replaced by human traits, which have them-
selves ended by vanishing, transfigured, into a sublime
dream of infinite Wisdom and Power. This change was
wrought in the divine idea at the same time that religion, of
which it is the soul, passed beyond the limits of its cradle
in the family. These two transformations must have been
parallel, for they emanated from the same cause: the pre-
ponderance that was acquired by the social and, conse-
quently, by the spiritual side of human things over their
natural and material side. Imitation was emancipated
from heredity for the same reason that mind was disen-
gaged from matter.1 On the other hand, the latter progress
facilitated the former. The god who is the least corporeal
and the most spiritual is the one who has the most chance
of subjugating foreign peoples; for men of different races
differ less from one another intellectually than physically,

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

Extra-Logical Influences 281

or, at any rate, their physical differences are less rigid and
unmalleable and more easily effaced through gradual as-
similation than their physical differences. For the same
reason the most systematic mythology is the one that is
fated to win territory.

The springing up of a religion beyond its native race in-
volves, we may suppose, another important progress. Is it
because its founder has proclaimed the brotherhood of men
of all races that a religion is apt to overflow, or does its
founder profess this regenerating dogma to create in it this
aptitude? It matters not. It is clear that the proclama-
tion of such a truth greatly favours the propagation of the
beliefs which are united to it. Christianity and Buddhism
are proofs of this. When the spirit of Custom is in full
sway, religious sentiment is directed towards the past or
the future, man's great preoccupation is centred about his
ancestors and his posthumous life, as in China or Egypt,
or about his posterity, as in Israel. In a word, the devout
spirit is supported by the thought of the infinite in time. On
the contrary, where the spirit of Fashion is fully triumphant,
religious sentiment receives its liveliest inspirations and its
most spontaneous impulses from the thought of the im-
mensity of the earth and heavens, from the conception
of a universe whose boundaries are forever receding and
of a great omnipresent God, the common father of all!
beings scattered throughout the infinity of space. Are not
the sympathy, the pity, and the love which are engendered in
the hearts of the devout by this belief the very source of
moral life? It follows that the most moral religions are
necessarily the most contagious. And, as I fail to see how
any high standard of morality can arise and spread by any
other means than an all-conquering religion, I think I am
justified in accepting the conclusion of history that no great
civilisation could ever have existed without religious
proselytism.

I may add that without a stable religious institution, one
resting on its conquests, a strong and original civilisation is
impossible. By this I mean a profoundly logical social

282 Laws of Imitation

state, from which, by means of a long and painful elabora-
tion, all important contradictions have been banished, a state
where the majority of elements are in agreement, and where
almost everything proceeds from the same principles and
converges towards the same ends. It takes a long time for
a religious faith to recast in this way, in its own image, the
small or large society which it has been invading.

We do not know, to be sure, how long it took the religion
of Egypt, before the old empire, after the indigenous gods
of Memphis, or of some other city, had spread the entire
length of the Nile Valley, to give birth to Egyptian civilisa-
tion. We are also ignorant of the duration of the incuba-
tion of Babylonian civilisation by the primitive religion
of Chaldea, once its gods had radiated throughout the sweep
of that once thickly peopled and highly fertile valley. But we
do know that the cult of the Delphic Apollo, the first religion
that was common to all the Doric and Ionic branches of
Greece, dates from the tenth century, B. c., and that " the
climax of maturity and beauty " in the art and poetry and
philosophy and statecraft of Greece was reached about the
sixth century. We also know that the literature, archi-
tecture, philosophy, and governmental system of the Chris-
tian Middle Ages had just begun to flourish and grow
into harmony with the law of Christ in the eleventh century
of our era, four or five hundred years after the spread of
Christianity through Europe. Arabian civilisation, born of
Mahomet, required a shorter period of gestation, but we
know how long it lasted.

It is not true, then, that the progress of civilisation re-
sults in the side-tracking of religion. It is the essence of
religion to be everything or nothing. If an established
religion falls behind, it is because another religion has
slipped silently and unperceived into its place, and has lent
itself to the setting up of a new civilisation which will end
by being just as religious as the prior civilisation in its best
days. If, in the beginning of societies, everything in the
most trivial thoughts and acts of man, from the cradle to
the tomb, is ritualistic and superstitious, mature and consum-

Extra-Logical Influences 283

mate civilisations present the same conditions. It has been
said that the peculiarity of Christianity has been its aloof-
ness from statecraft, in contrast to the intimate alliance of
the cults of antiquity with the power of the state. But this
feature is only apparent. In the spiritual and missionary
religions of modern days, as well as in the gross and exclu-
sive religions of antiquity, morals and dogma are in-
separable; there is a higher law for conduct as well as for
thought. Only, in consequence of the external expansion
which results, as we know, from its internal developments,
a religion ceases to be able to regulate of itself all the small
details of practical thought and will. Like a ruler whose
kingdom has grown more extensive, and whose administra-
tion has become more complicated, it delegates to its
subalterns a part of its twofold authority of teacher and
ruler, leaving a certain amount of independence to its dele-
gates, who are pretty badly supervised by it because they are
so far below it.

On one side, then, religion abandons to kings and states-
men, to whose personality it is quite indifferent, providing
they are true believers, the care of commanding armies, of
levying taxes, and of making laws, on the condition that they
attempt nothing contrary to the general precepts of its cate-
chism, a sort of supreme constitution. Thus religion be-
comes the sovereign ruler of souls and the final court of
appeal for anyone who has been abused by secular power.
On another side, it also allows inquisitive and enquiring
minds to discover and formulate certain theories and natural
laws, but it allows this, of course, on the condition of teach-
ing nothing which openly contradicts the verses of its sacred
books or the conclusions drawn from its texts.

In short, the god of the Christian or Moslem was,
during the whole of the Middle Ages, at least, the sole
teacher and master of Christianity or Islamism, occupying,
in this particular, the same position as the divine Lars of the
primitive family ; and the pope or caliph, the organ of deity,
taught and commanded as a sovereign. The only difference
between the omnipotence of savage or barbaric religions

284 Laws of Imitation

and that of civilised religions lies in the fact that the former
expresses itself through ritual, the formal equivalent of that
period of morality; and the second, through morality, the
spiritual equivalent of ritual. Ritual becomes more pro-
found as it disguises itself. Was it not primitively the
supreme statecraft of the ancients, the pre-eminent military
and civil art of diplomacy? The armies of antiquity went
into action only after they had been stimulated by the cere-
monies of the war heralds, by sacrifices, and by the sacra-
mental observations and experiments of the augurs. It is
no exaggeration to say that the thrusts of lance and sword
that followed seemed to the men of those times to continue
as accessories the rites which had preceded them, a sort of
sanguinary sacrament. Nor, for the same reason, did any
deliberative assembly in these same epochs enter into any
debate without the sacrifice of some victim or the offering
up of some prayer or the performance of some rite of purifi-
cation. Voting, as well as fighting, was only one way of
worshipping and praying to one's gods, of placating and
glorifying them.

Later on, when different cities and peoples come into
communication with one another and endeavour to im-
pose their rites, become more simple in their expansion, upon
one another, a moment arrives when a purely spiritual cult,
i. e., morality as it is understood by Christians, Moslems,
and Buddhists, seems to be the only cult worth the name.
Then people say that morality should dominate politics and
even soar over war. They also say, and with no less reason,
that it should rule over art and industry. As a matter of fact,
religion has always been implicitly conceived of in the
bosom of every religious people, not only as a higher form
of statecraft and diplomacy, but as the first of all arts and
the most important of all industries. Architecture, sculp-
ture, painting, poetry, music, metal-working, and cabinet-
making, all forms of art, arise from the temple and issue
from it, like a procession, to continue outside the solemni-
ties occurring within. To the citizens of the Greek cities the
great hecatombs were undoubtedly great productions of

Extra-Logical Influences 285

wealth and value, of security and power. This was in part
imaginary, but not wholly so, for it is certain that faith is
power. What was the petty labour of a slave or an
artisan in comparison with those mystical works ? And, be-
sides, there was no important act in the life of a husbandman,
or even of an artisan, which did not begin with the offering
up of a prayer to the gods, or with a procession of the
Arval Brethren, or with the sacrifice of a lamb, so that every
industrial or agricultural task was merely a prolonged
prayer or sacrifice. In a more advanced and spiritual civili-
sation the same thing is expressed, at bottom, in saying that
work is a form of duty, and that the economic side of
societies, like their political and artistic sides, is merely a
development of their moral side.

Moreover, on the day when a scholar, like Galileo, under-
takes to formulate the simplest scientific law or fact that
is contrary to the shortest verse of Sacred Scripture; or on
the day when a ruler publishes the pettiest decree that is
contrary to the most subordinate precept of an established
religion, an authorisation, for example, to sell meat during
a fast or to work on Sunday, or on the day, finally, when
a branch of industry or art begins to flourish in a given
country, although it is deemed immoral and impious by the
local religion, a profane theatre, for example, or a free-
thinking journal — on this very day, a germ of dissolution
has entered into the social body, and there is the most
urgent need either for this germ to be expelled, notably by
an inquisition, or for it to grow through philosophic or
revolutionary or reform propagandism, and extend itself
to the point of reconstructing the social order upon new
foundations. This is the point we are at in Europe. It is
a problem in social logic that is set before us by this redoubt-
able dilemma.1 We do not know how it will be solved.
But we may be certain that when the order of the future is
once consummated, unanimous belief in an indisputable
truth, in an incontestable Good and Right will become again

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

286 Laws of Imitation

what it once was, intense and intolerant. And science, trans-
figured by a vast synthesis and supplemented by a highly
aesthetic morality, will be the religion of the future, before
which all professors and statesmen, all minds and wills,
will humbly bow.

The omnipotence and omnipresence of religion in all
functions of society justify the exceptional place which reli-
gion has been accorded in this chapter. But this considera-
tion must not prevent us at present from examining rapidly
and separately the fragmentary and secondary governments
that rule with the consent of religion, — although not with-
out a threatening kind of independence, — namely, the phi-
losophy of certain periods on the one side and, on the
other, the government, in the usual sense of the word,
and the legislation and custom of all periods. When
an accredited philosophic system arises in a serious-
minded nation, it stands in the same relation towards
religious dogma as a form of government, a body
of law, or the sum of people's wants stands in any
country towards its religious morality. The one is the
foundation-stone of thought, the other of conduct. But this
does not prevent the frequent occurrence of conflicts be-
tween the suzerain, or so-called suzerain authority, and
those authorities that are vassal to it. Struggles between
philosophies and theologies correspond to those between
empires and priesthoods. Besides, if it is true that religion
controls civilisation in its entirety and moulds it after itself,
it is no less certain that the temporarily prevailing • philos-
ophy directs and develops its own science, or that the
established government directs and develops its own politics
and war, or that legislation and custom determine the course
and character of industry. Let us see whether the transition
from custom to fashion and vice versa occurs here as above,
and whether it produces like effects. In any case, let us
refrain, for lack of space, from touching upon the philo-
sophic and scientific sides of societies, an undertaking that
would require a separate volume. Let us pass on to the
practical side.

Extra-Logical Influences 287

III. Government

All the foregoing remarks amount to saying that in the
beginning the family, or the pseudo- family that grew up by
the side of it, was the only social group, and that every
subsequent change resulted in lessening its importance in
this respect by constituting new and more ample groups
which were formed artificially, at the expense of the social
side of families, and which reduced them to mere physio-
logical expressions; but that, finally, such dismembered
families tended to aggregate into a kind of enlarged family
that was both natural and social like the original family,
except that the physiological characteristics, which were
transmitted through heredity, existed mainly to facilitate
the transmission through imitation of the elements of civili-
sation, and not vice versa. In fact, we have already seen
from the linguistic point of view that in very remote pre-
historic times every family must have had its own language,
and that later on a single language embraced thousands of
families who finally, because of the greater facility for
connubittm between speakers of the same tongue, gave birth
to one race. Thus every tongue eventually had its own race,
i. e., its own great family, whereas, primitively, every
family, as I have said, possessed its own tongue. We have
also seen how, in the question of religion, every family had
originally its own cult and was a church in itself, but who,
later on, the same cult united thousands of families who,
finally, through the more or less strict interdiction of mar-
riage with infidels and the exclusive practice of connubium,
combined into one race that was expressly created for its
religion.

We can now see from the point of view of government an
analogous series of transformations. In the beginning every
family formed a distinct state; then followed a state which
contained thousands of families, welded together by a purely
artificial tie, and, finally, every state made its own nation,
*. e., its particular race or sub-race, its own family.

288 Laws of Imitation

On this point, I might repeat what Fustel de Coulanges
and Sumner Maine have said so well about the gradual
transformation of the patria potestas into the imperium of
the Roman magistracy, about the primordial union and the
progressive separation of the power to procreate and the
power to command. But I will not bore the reader with
this. I prefer to observe that it is proper to round off
this point of view by admitting that from the com-
mencement of history, or even pre-history, artificial states
were formed through a general infatuation for some re-
nowned chief or brigand, and enlarged by those who had
broken loose from surrounding families. Cities of refuge,
like early Rome and the free cities of the Middle Ages, can
give us some idea of these primitive aggregates. They
were, perhaps, or rather undoubtedly, the first cities, prop-
erly speaking. And, as a matter of fact, the urban element,
which has co-existed from the earliest time with the rural
element, has always been distinguished by its predominant
and widespread spirit of innovation, compared with the con-
servative spirit of the latter. We may infer that these orig-
inal collections of undisciplined people have been the most
active centres for war and conquests and that, consequently,
although all the scourges born of war may be imputed to
them, yet theirs is the honour of having created great na-
tional agglomerations, the eventual guarantee of wealth
and peace.

In addition, we may see that custom and fashion are
everywhere embodied politically in two great parties whose
alternating strife and triumph explain all political advances.
In fact, there are never more than two opposing parties,
however subdivided they may be. Their names differ in
different countries and at different times, but the one may
be called, without impropriety, the party of conservatism,
and the other the party of innovation. Among seaboard
populations, their rivalry is usually expressed through that
between agricultural interests, such as Aristides, the con-
servative, personified at Athens, and maritime interests
such as were embodied in the innovator, Themistocles.

Extra-Logical Influences 289

Among continental populations, the rivalry is between com-
merce and agriculture, between towns and country districts,
between artisans and peasants. Now, it is fairly clear that
the strife between conservatives and liberals, which is as
ancient as history and which had already begun in the
bosom of the primitive family or tribe, always leads back to
that between custom and fashion. The progressive party
welcomes with its whole heart the new ideas, the new rights,
and the new products that are imported over land or sea
and imitated as foreign models, whereas the party of tradi-
tion resists them with all the weight of the ideas and
customs and industries which it has inherited from its fore-
fathers. More specifically, the party of innovators desires
to modify the political constitution of its country, in con-
formity with tHe theories which have been suggested to it
by the sight of outside governments and which, in spite of,
or by reason of, this very suggestion, a more or less uncon-
scious one, seem applicable, through imitation, to all the
peoples of the earth. The Tory party, on the contrary, de-
sires people to respect and maintain unaltered the form of
government which prevailed in the past.1 We know that

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

In other words, we enthuse over ideas which are capable of spread-
ing through free and external imitation, since we have generally re-
ceived them ourselves through this kind of imitation ; whereas, our
neighbours care only for those ideas which are and which can only
be transmitted through an exclusive and hereditary form of imitation.

290 Laws of Imitation

whenever and wherever a conflict arises between these two
parties, it is because a liberal party that has been stimulated
or awakened by contact with an outer and a more brilliant
world has reappeared in the midst of a people who have
been unwittingly traditional, and has aroused the conserva-
tive party, i. e., the immense majority, to self-consciousness.
This means that at first custom held sway here alone, or
almost alone, but that at this point fashion has begun to
replace it.

Meanwhile fashion grows, and the party which represents
it and which was at first defeated ends by getting the inno-
vations which it extols, accepted. The result of this is that
the world makes a step in advance towards international
political assimilation. This assimilation goes on even when
political agglomeration, which is a different thing, is static
or retrogressive. Indeed, even during antiquity and the
Middle Ages, the uniformity of government which accom-
panies or heralds governmental unity was always brought
about on any given territory — the territory being at one
time very small and then becoming more and more exten-
sive— by the triumph of some innovating party. Dating

But, it may be said in passing, that English parliamentarism is not
precluded by its original character from communicating itself from
one people to another, travelling by means of the freest and most
general kind of contagion that has ever been seen. Then, we know
that in the seventeenth century, England personified the spirit of
revolution in comparison with monarchical France; and, now, after a
rest of two centuries, do we not feel that the revolutionary yeast is
working on British soil, thanks to the germs of radical or socialistic
ideas that have been introduced from the Continent? It may easily
happen that when this crisis is raging among the islanders across
the Channel, the foundation of a national government will be finally
laid in France.

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

Extra-Logical Influences 291

from the heroic period of Greece we can find certain traces
of the breath of fashion blowing from time to time across
communities who were supposed to be among those most
custom-bound. It is very surprising, for example, to find
the Dorians, who are such a tradition-bound race at the
moment when history throws her light upon them, governed
by certain institutions which were imported from Crete by
the foreigner Lycurgus, and subject, moreover, to non-
Dorian royal families. Can these facts be otherwise ex-
plained than by presupposing some anterior age in which
foreign prestige swayed this nation, a nation which subse-
quently succumbed again to the prestige of its forefathers ?

The second fact referred to is in no sense exceptional; on
the contrary, it frequently occurs. The Greek historian'
Curtius cites, in this connection, the government of the
Molossians by the Oacidae, of the Macedonians by the Te-
menidae, of the Lyncestae by the Bacchiadse, of the loniana
by the Lycians, etc., just as the Swedes are governed in our
own day by the successors of Bernadotte. This prestige of
the foreigner, therefore, has been general at times from the
most remote periods. It must have gone very deep if we
admit, with the learned author whom I have cited, that
belief in the divine extraction of kings is explained by their
foreign origin. Since their home vanishes into a distant
unknown region, " they might be accounted sons of the
gods, an honour which natives could scarcely have received
from their countrymen." Besides, wherever we see primi-
tive families loyal subjects to one of their own number, or
even to one of their own race, we must infer that this privi-
leged family owes its supremacy to a more or less ephemeral
infatuation by which admiration of ancestors has been
momentarily eclipsed. But, although family sentiment may
be broken for a time by the advent of some dynasty in this
way, it is subsequently awakened and magnified under the
name of civic spirit or patriotism.

If we find that in the tenth century Europe was covered
with thousands of little states, called seigniories, that were
i [Ward's translation, I, 147.— Tr.]

292 Laws of Imitation

all pretty much alike in their feudal constitution, whose
originality was as striking as their resemblance in the midst
of their diversity, we cannot doubt that the typical fief,
wherever it originated, was copied by the intelligent liberals
of the time and imposed by them upon recalcitrant reaction-
aries like the Gallo-Roman senators or others. The fief
was at that time the great fruitful novelty, the model to
which the royal power itself came to conform after, as we
have seen already it had likewise suggested it. Before that
the king had vaguely associated his authority with that of
the ancient Roman emporors, the traditional type of sover-
eign power in the popular mind. It seemed as if the very
essence of this supremacy lay in universal dominion or in
the dream of it. But Hugues Capet was inspired with
what might be called an idea of genius, a very simple idea
withal. Instead of looking behind him in the Roman Em-
pire for his ideal, he took it from his own neighbourhood.
According to Sumner Maine, he is the prototype and the
initiator of strictly feudal, non-imperial royalty. " Hugues
Capet and his descendants were kings of France in an
entirely new sense; they had the same relations to the soil
of France as the baron held towards his fief and the vassal
towards his land." The invention, in short, consisted
merely in modelling sovereignty upon suzerainty and in ex-
tending over the entire territory of a great nation the feudal
relations which had hitherto been confined to the petty
limits of a canton. Witness, nevertheless, its success. " All
subsequent sovereignty was based on this new model. The
sovereignty of the Norman kings, copied from that of the
kings of France, was positively territorial. Territorial
rulers were established in Spain, in Naples, and in all the
Italian principalities which were founded upon the ruins of
municipal liberties."1

In modern times the contagion of another master-
thought, of one which was in contradiction to the preceding,
and which was forced to dethrone it in order to propagate

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

Extra-Logical Influences 293

itself, has spread still more rapidly, namely, the idea of the
state as we understand it to-day. Where was modern state-
craft born? In the petty Italian republics, and, first of all,
in Florence, whence the modern type of political activity
spread to France and Spain and Germany and even to
England. Spain and France, in particular, who disputed
for such a long time over Italy, " began," says Burckhardt,
" to resemble the centralised Italian states, and, indeed, to
copy them, only on a gigantic scale." * Upon this fashion
is grafted in the eighteenth century 2 a fashion which does
not contradict it in any way, but which completes it. Anglo-
mania becomes the rage. The parliamentary constitution
of England began to be copied before its general diffusion
in the nineteenth century, under two original forms, first
by the United States, which made a simple republican trans-
lation of it, as Sumner Maine has shown in his Popular
Government, and then by revolutionary France, which
hastened to drive parliamentarism into Rousseau-inspired
radicalism. This last transformation, whose dawn was
greeted as a marvellous creation, called forth I do not know
how many ephemeral republics in South America, over-
whelmed the Old World and reacted even upon British soil.
One of the most remarkable traits of the liberal party
and, consequently, of those times in which that party rules,
is the cosmopolitan character of its aspirations. Cosmopol-
itanism, indeed, is not the exclusive privilege of our own
time. It flourished in all those periods of antiquity and
medievalism in which fashion-imitation held sway. " Cos-
mopolitanism," says Burckhardt, " is ... a sign of an

1 [Middlemorers translation, I, 128. — Tr.]

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

294 Laws of Imitation

epoch in which new worlds are discovered and men feel no
longer at home in the old. We see it among the Greeks
after the Peloponnesian War ; * Plato, as Niebuhr says, was
not a good citizen. . . . Diogenes went so far as to pro-
claim homelessness a pleasure and calls himself, . . .
anokiS. * The Italians of the Renascence were cosmo-
politan even before the fifteenth century, not merely because
they had become habituated to their exile, but because their
epoch and their country abounded in innovations of every
kind and because people's minds were turned towards
foreign and contemporary things even more than towards
the domestic and patriotic things of their past. The weaken-
ing of French patriotism in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries is notorious. Let us call to mind the monstrous
foreign alliances that were made by the different parties
during the religious wars and the compliments of Voltaire
to the King of Prussia after Rosbach. Even Herder and
Fichte, who became such ardent patriots under the heel of
the conqueror, began by holding the idea of fatherland in
contempt. In contemporary Germany and France it has
taken the evident necessity of armed defence to restore to
national sentiment some part of its old-time vigour.

But does everything terminate in the victory of fashion
over routine? Not at all. This victory is itself incom-
plete until the conservative party, resigned to its defeat
and to taking a subordinate place, transforms itself into
a national party and set itself to making the sap of tra-
dition circulate in the new graft of progress. This na-
tionalisation of foreign elements is the completion of the
historical drama which contact with different or superior
neighbouring civilisations unfolds. Thus the feudal king-
doms which were founded by fashion on the model of the
Capetian monarchy became national and traditional in the
highest degree.

The stream of custom returns, then, to its channel — sin-
gularly enlarged, to be sure — and a new cycle begins. It

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

2 [Ibid., 187, footnote 3.— Tr.]

Extra-Logical Influences 295

spins itself out and ends like its predecessors. And this
will undoubtedly continue until the political uniformity and
unity of the whole human genus are achieved. The innovat-
ing party plays, then, in all of this, only a transitory, al-
though an indispensable, part. It serves as a mediator be-
tween the spirit of comparatively narrow conservatism
which precedes it and the spirit of comparatively liberal
conservatism which follows it. (Consequently, traditional-
ism should no longer be opposed to liberalism. From our
point of view the two are inseparable.^ Without hereditary
imitation, without conservative tradition, any invention or
novelty that was introduced by a liberal party would perish
still-born, for the latter is related to the former like shadow
to substance, or, rather, like a light to its lamp. The most
radical revolutions seek to be traditionalised, so to speak,
and, reciprocally, at the source of the most rigid tradi-
tions we find some revolutionary condition. The object of
every historic transformation seems to be to debouch in an
immense and potent and final custom, where free and vig-
orous imitation will finally unite the greatest possible in-
tensiveness to the greatest possible extensiveness.

Let me continue this subject in order to remark that the
pursuit of this ideal is accomplished along the line of a
rhythmical repetition of the same phases upon a scale of in-
creasing size. In the transition from the primitive govern-
ment of the family to tribal government, societies must have
passed through exactly the same periods as contemporary
societies are painfully traversing in order to pass from their
systems of national government to the continental govern-
ment of the future. Meanwhile, the foundations of munici-
pal government and, then, of the government of small states
or provinces, and, last of all, of the government of nations,
all required the same series of efforts. To understand how
each of these successive and intermittent enlargements of
the political aggregates of the past took place, we should
observe the manner in which modern political aggrandise-
ments are effected. The little American republics which
were to become the United States, lived separate and inde-

296 Law of Imitation

pendent. One day a common danger brought them to-
gether and their union was proclaimed. The war which
was the occasion of this great event was merely an historic
accident, like the wars for conquest or independence
which, during the course of history, have occasioned, have
hastened, or retarded, but in no sense caused, the really
stable extensions of the state from the family-state to
the nation-state. The American Union, then, was de-
creed; but what made it possible and lasting? What was
the cause that not only necessitated this federal tie, but
that still works to make it closer, day by day, a cause that
will eventually bring forth unity out of union ? Tocqueville
will tell us. " In the English colonies of the North, more
generally known as the States of New England, the two or
three main ideas which now constitute the basis of the
social theory of the United States were first combined.
The principles of New England spread at first to the
neighbouring states; they then passed successively to
the more distant ones; and, at last, if I may so speak,
they interpenetrated the whole confederation. They
now extend their influence beyond their limits, over the
whole American world. The civilisation of New Eng-
land1 has been like a beacon lit upon a hill, which, after
it has diffused its warmth immediately around it, also tinges
the distant horizon with its glow." 2 It is cer-
tain that if each of the United States had remained
faithful to the constitution of its fathers, if it had not
welcomed the two or three foreign ideas which were
formulated by a small group of neighbouring states, the po-
litical similarity of all these states, which alone made possi-
ble their political fusion, would never have existed. Fash-
ion-imitation was, then, the cause of this progress. I may
add that the ideas which were imported in this way into a
majority of the United States were so fully acclimatised

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

* [Reeve's translation, I, 37. — TV.]

Extra-Logical Influences 297

in them as to become part and parcel of their primitive cus-
toms. The final result was a collective patriotism which was
not less intense or less traditional or self-assertive than their
original forms of patriotism.

If the great American federation has just originated
in this way. under our very eyes, we ought to believe that
the origin of the little Greek federation was not very differ-
ent. The innumerable municipal republics scattered
through Greece and the Archipelago were almost exact
copies of the two principal types, the Dorian and the
Ionian. Evidently the resemblance which prompted them
to unite on all occasions, could not be explained by the mere
fact of colonisation by common mother-cities ; such a propa-
gation through heredity must have been followed by a pro-
pagation through imitation, and it was this that inaugurated
a new era of Greek civilisation. Then Sparta and Athens,
like fires lit up in lofty places, as Tocqueville says, radiated
abroad. Here was fashion-imitation; and when fashion
became settled and imbedded, it represented to all the cities
a common national custom which inspired the liveliest and
most hereditary patriotic sentiment that had ever been seen.
But, if we consider each of these little cities apart in its
deep attachment to its original institutions, before the as-
similation of which I am speaking, and question how the
different tribes of which it was composed came themselves
to federate and form a city, we shall find no other reason
but that of their pre-existing similarity, a similarity which
had been effected by the radiant brilliancy of one of
their number, voluntarily or coercively copied by the
others.

These periods of brilliancy towards which the eyes of the
historians turn of their own accord, the age of Pericles, the
age of Augustus, the age of Louis XIV, are characterised,
in common, by the introduction, after an era of sudden
innovations and rapid annexations and assimilations, of a
new form of society and the inauguration of a new tra-
dition. After language has been subject to change for a
long time, it becomes fixed in a mould which is hencefor-

298 Laws of Imitation

ward respected. After many changes have been produced
in religion by an over-hospitable welcoming of alien ideas,
it is re-established and reorganised. After great upheav-
als, political institutions, remodelled and reorganised, take
root anew. After innumerable gropings in the dark, art, in
all its branches, finds its classical direction, and hencefor-
ward maintains itself in it. After a chaos of ordinances,
decrees, and laws, legislation codifies and ossifies itself, so to
speak. In this respect, Pericles, although he was the head
of a democratic state and of the most stirring one of an-
cient peoples, resembles Augustus and Louis XIV. Under
him, all those elements of Athenian civilisation, which were
disorganised in consequence of the great current of fashion-
imitation which had preceded him, and which, more-
ever, was never interrupted for long in the Greek world,
given over, as it was, to an intermixture of commercial and
maritime civilisations, came into logical agreement like that
of the elements of Latin and of French civilisation,
under the two great emulators of Periclean glory, subse-
quently to the troublous times which had disorganised
the Roman Republic, before the advent of the one, and
French society before that of the other. Then the Attic
dialect began to spread everywhere, and to impose its co-
lonial empire upon every one; and in its spread and con-
solidation it became fixed as the immortal language of the
whole of subsequent antiquity. Then, too, sculpture and
dramatic poetry attained their apogee, their exemplary per-
fection. And then, finally, government and finance took a
truly permanent and conservative stand. For, although
Pericles inclined towards intellectual novelties and wel-
comed foreign writers and thinkers, he was as conserva-
tive as Augustus and Louis XIV, each of whom was the
patron and abettor of the intellectual and artistic life which
he welcomed in order to appropriate it to himself.

Now, it is clear that if a return is made to tradition dur-
ing these epochs of great men, or of great reigns, it is to
an enlarged tradition, to a tradition that has been enlarged
in two ways, by the extension of the territory over which

Extra-Logical Influences 299

it rules, and by the elaboration of the elements of which it
is composed. Before Pericles, Athens was merely a greater
and more illustrious city than the other Greek cities. Dur-
ing his time it became the capital of a fairly vast empire,
whose life depended upon its life, and the intensity and
complexity of this life was quite a different thing from
that of the early centuries of Athens.

We have seen how the great centuries of which I am
speaking may be considered under two aspects; in the first
place, as the time when a new logical equilibrium is reached
through what I have called the grammar in contrast to the
dictionary of the elements of civilisation; in the second place,
as the point of departure for a new era of traditional life.
But these two aspects are bound together, for it is because
innovations, introduced by the breath of fashion, have be-
come harmonised, that they have subsequently become im-
bedded as customs. The proof that they have been harmo-
nised is visible in the symmetrical and even artificial air
which all the creations of such memorable epochs take on.
In them, political administrations are uniform and central-
ised. In them, the streets and squares of cities are trans-
formed into geometric symmetry. For example, when
Pericles rebuilt Sybaris under the name of Thurii, Curtius
tells us that the city " was laid out on the plan of the
Piraeaus," that " four principal roads ran from end to end
and three from side to side." We can read in Babeau,
La Ville sous I'ancien regime, of the transformations a la
Haussmann, which were effected in all the cities of France
under Louis XIV, and we can compare all of this with what
Roman archaeology teaches us about post-Augustan cities.
Besides, although the austere and autocratic Pericles, the
descendant of an illustrious family, a kind of republican
Pitt, desired maritime grandeur and imperial expansion for
Athens, he jealously opposed the introduction of the alien
into the city as a member of the civic body. On this point,
he reverted, Curtius tells us, " to antique, severe, and archaic
legislation." He governed democratically, but he sup-
pressed all democratic principles, i. e., " rotation in office,

300 Laws of Imitation

division of authority, and even responsibility in public of-
fice." Like Augustus, he concentrated in his own person
all the functions of the Republic, and out of them he made
himself a sovereign power.

However, he had nothing in common with the ancient
tyrants but appearances. The tyrant was far from repre-
senting or favouring the conservatism of custom; in spite
of his despotism, he favoured those currents of foreign fash-
ion which dissolved national traditions, his great stum-
bling block. Pericles, on the contrary, inaugurated a
return to the life of tradition, because it was to his in-
terest.

I do not mean to say that Pericles, in imposing his au-
thority and in stamping his seal upon the institutions of his
country, created that desire of a more national and tradi-
tional life by which he profited for the time being — too
short a time, unfortunately. The Persian wars, like all
warlike crises, had revived the sentiment of nationality (but
of an aggrandised nationality) which had, in the preceding
centuries, notably in the sixth century, been weakened by
the drain upon it of cosmopolitan life. " Whereas, in the
time of Solon," says Curtius (II, 476), "the facile
life of the lonians (of Asia) flourished at Athens, whose
wealthy citizens took pleasure in displaying their pur-
ple and gold and perfumes, their horses, their hounds, their
favourites, and their banquets, it is incontestable that with!
the Persian wars a more serious view of life penetrated the
nation." There was a return to the customs of the Athe-
nian forefathers. " The victory of Marathon brought back
into honour the old Attic race of the cultivators of the soil;
and the more the core of the Athenian people came to con-
sider themselves superior to the maritime populations of
Ionia [a form of pride, let us note, which is always depend-
ent upon custom-imitation], the more they desired inde-
pendence in language, customs, and dress." Dress became
simpler in a return to primitive austerity. " Here was a
purely objective difference between the Asiatic lonians and
the Athenians; but their customs and habits of life had al-

Extra-Logical Influences 301

ready varied for a long time" This is a proof of the priority
of subjective over objective imitation.

There are many signs to show that the time immediately
preceding Pericles, the beginning of the fifth century, and,
especially, the sixth century, were periods in which the wind
of foreign imitation blew throughout the Archipelago, in all
the civilised or to-be-civilised basins of the Mediterranean.
This was the epoch of Polycrates and the other Greek ty-
rants, all of whom were opposed to the ancient morality, all
of whom were propagators of foreign customs and pre-
cursors of modern administrative government. More-
over, tyranny plainly showed by its rapid spread from
island to island, at this epoch, the impressionability of the
period to extraneous examples. A still better indication of
this was the unheard-of spectacle that could be seen in
Egypt, under the Psammetichi and under Amasis, in their
imitation of the life of Greece and in their efforts to intro-
duce it into the classical land of tradition ! Amasis " was
married to a woman of Cyrene; his boon companions were
Greeks, and Greek princes were his friends and guests; like
Croesus [the innovator of Lydia], he honoured the gods of
the Greeks." It was in this way, in the eighteenth century
of our era, that Frederick the Great attempted to Gallicise
his kingdom. Darius may be considered to have shared in
this movement of Hellenisation, but under more hidden and
general forms. At any rate, he opened the way to the great
administrative empires which followed him. Persia was
" utterly transformed by him. A new spirit of administra-
tion took the place of its ancient customs."

Hence the individualism which appeared at this time.
" An entirely new sentiment of personality was awakened."
People dared to think for themselves; from this audacity
philosophy was born. The Sophists were the agents of the
intellectual freedom of the individual. Hence, too, the cos-
mopolitanism of this epoch.

Have I said enough to show the leading role which is
played in political history by the alternation in the levels of
the two great currents between which imitation unequally

302

Laws of Imitation

divides itself? Undoubtedly not, but I will conclude this ex-
position by studying more closely the political consequences
which result from the occurrence of this simple rhythmi-
cal change in the direction of a single force and the charac-
teristics which must be taken on by any form of govern-
ment to fit itself to expand or to implant itself in the way
that I have described.

The consequences are, in brief, as we already know, the
progressive enlargement and consolidation of the political
agglomeration, and, then, as we shall see, a continually
growing administrative and military centralisation, the in-
creasing opportunity given to a personal government to
make itself universal and later on to perpetuate itself
through becoming traditional. The characteristics are a
relatively rational and democratic air in the case of consti-
tutions that are expanding and an air of relative originality
and authority in the case of constitutions that have already
spread and that are already established. All this will be-
come clearer through a comparison of our antithesis with
two different but kindred antitheses, upon which two emi-
nent although unequal thinkers are agreed.

Both Tocqueville and Spencer have had a lively appre-
ciation of the great social transformation which is the slow
and irresistible movement of our age. They have both en-
deavoured to formulate it in terms in which they thought
they saw a general law of history. Spencer was especially
impressed by the industrial development of our time. In
this he saw the dominant trait which explained all the other
traits of our societies, notably, the emancipation of the indi-
vidual, the substitution of constitutional rights for natural
rights, of the regime of contract for the regime of status, of
justice for privilege, and of free and voluntary association
for hereditary and state-imposed corporations. In general-
ising this view he considered the directing of activity
towards depredation or production, towards war or peace,
a major fact which sufficed to characterise two ever-con-
flicting types of civilisation: the militant type, which is ap-
proaching extinction, and the industrial type, which is

Extra-Logical Influences 303

destined to an idyllic and grandiose future of peace, liberty,
morality, and love.1

Tocqueville was profoundly and religiously impressed,
as he tells us, by that levelling of conditions which is precip-
itating the peoples of Europe and America towards the in-
evitable slope of democracy. In hisxeyes, desire for equal-
ity is the highest motor power of our times, just as desire
for privilege was the highest motor power of the past, and
upon the opposition of those two forces he bases the con-
trast between aristocratic and democratic societies which
have at all times differed in everything, in language, in re-
ligion, in industry, in literature, and in art, as well as in
politics. Without alarm — on the contrary, with evident
sympathy, but without superfluous illusions or, at least,
without any dose of optimism that could be compared with
that of Spencer's — he foresees the results of the equalisation
that is to be consummated in the future of democracy, and
he depicts them in a way which is at times prophetic.

On many points the antitheses of Spencer and Tocqueville
agree, for it seems as if Spencer's militant societies were pre-
cisely, in many respects, the aristocracies of Tocqueville,
and as if the industrial societies of the former tended to
identify themselves with the democracies of the latter.
Spencer tells us, however, that militancy engenders obliga-
tory co-operation and the oppression of the individual under
administrative centralisation, and that industrialism makes
for voluntary co-operation, individual independence, and de-

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

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

304 Laws of Imitation

centralisation. Tocqueville, on the contrary, in pages where
the most solid erudition is joined to the most thoughtful
and sincere insight, is forced to conclude, at the last and
against his wish, that democratic equality, born of general
uniformity, leads us almost inevitably to oppressive centrali-
sation and excessive paternalism, and that local franchises
and personal guarantees were far more surely protected
in times of aristocratic differentiation and inequality. This
avowal must have cost him dear, and I do not see how he
reconciles his passionate love for liberty, a love which far
outweighs his love for equality, with his sympathy for the
conventional and intolerant state, in a word, for the socialis-
tic state, which he so clearly foresees. And yet his liberal-
ism is not more inconsistent than that of the great English
evolutionist. At any rate, which of the two is in the
right? Must we agree with Tocqueville in holding that an
aristocratic rule is decentralising, differentiating, and, in
a sense, liberal, and that a democratic rule is centralising,
levelling, and authoritative; or must we accept Spencer's ap-
parently inverse proposition?

I think that Tocqueville's thesis contains a greater
amount of truth, but that he was wrong in not bringing out
more clearly a certain side of his thought which has re-
mained in the shade. At bottom, he generally means by
aristocratic rule the dominance of custom, and by demo-
cratic rule, the dominance of fashion, and, if he had ex-
pressed his thought in these terms, he would have been in-
contestably in the right. But his expression was inexact,
for it is not essential to aristocracy to be bound to the spirit
of tradition, and every democracy is not hospitable to nov-
elties. Nevertheless, his merit consists in his having dis-
criminated between the hereditary and non-hereditary origin
of powers and rights, of sentiments and ideas, and of not
having misconstrued the capital importance of this distinc-
tion, a distinction which is wholly neglected or barely
touched upon by Spencer. Spencer does not distinguish
between the hereditary and customary, i. e., feudal, form of
militancy, and its voluntary, legislative, and outwardly imi-

Extra-Logical Influences 305

tative form, a form which is peculiar to our contemporaries.
To him the important fact is whether the nature of ordinary
activity is bellicose or industrial. But to say that obliga-
tory co-operation is peculiar to every nation under the domi-
nation of an army, under the pretext that military organisa-
tion is essentially coercive, is to forget the fact that a great
workshop is.governed just as authoritatively as a barbarous
horde, or as a modern fleet or regiment. Was not the Peru
of the Incas a great phalanstery rather than a great bar-
racks ? At any rate, no military despotism was ever more
dictatorial than this agricultural despotism. This was be-
cause obedience to custom was never more rigorously en-
forced, except, perhaps, in China. China is the least war-
like and the most laborious country in the world; but in
spite of this, co-operation there is as obligatory as it can
possibly be, intolerance is absolute, and administrative cen-
tralisation is carried as far as the absence of railroads and
telegraphs allows of in such an extensive stretch of territory.
For there the yoke of custom and ancestral domination
weighs everybody down, beginning with the Emperor.1

Spencer attributes to the militancy of France, whose de-
velopment, as he says, surpasses that of England, because

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

306 Laws of Imitation

of the more frequent wars of the former, the dictatorial and
centralising character of the old French regime (completed,
in this respect, as we know, by the Revolution). But let
us observe that this character was accentuated in proportion
to the encroachment of the royal power, which, in its de-
pendence upon the communes, that is, upon the industrial
classes of the nation, extended itself to the detriment of the
, warrior caste of feudal lords. If it did not result in pre-
venting foreign and intermittent wars, it did, at least, pre-
vent steady and intestine warfare, much to the advantage
of labour. The King of France was essentially a peace
bringer. England remained in a state of comparative de-
centralisation, because she continued to be an aristocratic
country. Her industrial wealth, which, up to the end of the
eighteenth century, was not superior to that of France,
counted for nothing in this result. As for the entirely re-
cent tendency of contemporary nations towards state social-
ism,— so strong an argument against the liberalising in-
fluence that is attributed by Spencer to industrial develop-
ment, and such a formal refutation of his views upon the
political future, — is it permissible to interpret it as an ac-
cidental and momentary effect of the exaggerated arma-
ments which the Franco-Prussian war imposed upon
Europe? And would it not be more exact to attribute to
this profound and invincible and, to all appearances, lasting
movement, an internal and permanent, instead of a for-
tuitous and external, cause, one which would closely connect
the progress of the modern state with the progress of modern
industry and democracy ? *

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

Extra-Logical Influences 307

This cause lies in the habit, which is becoming daily more
general, of taking examples that are near at hand, in the
present, instead of those that belong exclusively to the past.
It is remarkable that from the time this habit began to
prevail, nations have been urged, either by war or peace,
in the direction of extreme centralisation and unification,
and of the broadening and deepening of democracy, just as
when the opposite habit prevailed, war and peace, chateaux
and guilds, contributed to the maintenance of feudal dis-
integration. Why is this ? ^ Because external imitation
produces that great uniformity of ideas and tastes, of
usages and wants, which makes possible and then neces-
sary, not only the fusion of the assimilated peoples, but the
equalising of their rights and conditions, i. e., juridical sim-
ilarity between members of communities who have become
alike in so many other respects. Because, in addition, this
uniformity makes possible for the first time, and then neces-
sary, both wholesale industry, machine production, and whole-
sale war, machine destruction. And, finally, because this same
uniformity, which makes one man equal to another, neces-
sarily leads to the treatment of men as like units, to the me-
chanical consideration and calculation of their desires by
means of universal suffrage and of their actions by means of
statistics, and to the restraining of them all under a uniform
system of discipline by means of those other mechanisms
that are called administrative bureaus or departments. Here
the truly essential and causal thing is the multiplication of
external relations among classes and peoples. This is so
true that the social transformation in question set in imme-
diately after the comparatively modern inventions in print-
ing, in locomotion, and in communication, that it develops
parallelly with the propagation of these inventions and that,
in those places where it has not yet begun, the laying of rail-
roads and the setting up of telegraph poles suffice to in-
augurate it. If American democracy shows in a remark-
able degree the features which M. de Tocqueville has at-
tributed to democracies in general, and, notably, to Euro-
pean democracies, whose portrait he has drawn for them in

308 Laws of Imitation

advance, it is because North America has anticipated Europe
in its bold and extensive use of new methods of transporta-
tion, in its steamboats and railroads, it is because nowhere
else has there been so much or such rapid travelling, nor so
great an interchange of letters and telegrams.

Moreover, may we not suppose that in the future, when
our democracies are firmly established, they will differ
in many points from the picture that Tocqueville makes of
them? Is it true that a democratic rule essentially implies
the empire of what I call fashion? Must its opinions and
practices be in consequence unstable, as well as chaotic and
domineering? Must the short-sightedness and capricious-
ness of its majorities equal their omnipotence? I see no
reason to think this. The social being, after all, however
social he may be, is a living being, born through the power
of generation and born for it. He wishes to perpeutate his
social body, and he knows no better way of doing this than
to attach it to his physical body, and transmit it with his
blood. Every civilisation which has run its course, Egypt,
China, the Roman Empire, has presented the spectacle of a
more or less extensive society, drawing back through the
promptings of filial piety, after its conversion through a kind
of beneficent epidemic to a given body of ideas and institu-
tions, and shutting itself up in these ideas and institutions for
ages at a time. I have already referred to China. In the
last centuries of the Roman Empire we find a society which
is not democratic, which is, on the contrary, pretty aristo-
cratic, but which is very uniform, and at the same time very
stable and mechanical, and which is ruled over by a highly
centralised administration. Ancient Egypt, which was to
a certain extent democratic, was no less striking in its uni-
formity from one end to the other of the Nile basin, in its
administrative centralisation, and in its prodigious immuta-
bility as well. All these examples and arguments suggest
the thought that our own contemporaneous society may be
unwittingly gravitating, in spite of its transient mobility
and momentary bias for individual liberty (just as the
fluctuations of the sea give a free air to a vessel), towards

Extra-Logical Influences 309

an age of fixed custom in which the present work of render-
ing all things uniform will be completed. Towards the end
of his work Tocqueville had a presentiment of this. Once
a democratic state is established, he says, far from favouring
revolutions, it is antagonistic to them ; and, he adds : " I
can easily discern a state of polity which, when combined
with the principle of equality, would render society more
stationary than it has ever been in our western part of the
world." x

1 [Reeve's translation, II, 315-6— TV.]

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

" In democratic centuries," Tocqueville says again, " men's extreme
mobility and their impatient desires cause them to move continually
from one locality to another, and cause the inhabitants of different
countries to intermingle, to see and hear each other and borrow from
each other. And so it is not only the members of one nation who
grow alike; nations themselves are assimilated." Under the term of
democratic revolution, the effects of a preponderance of fashion-imi-
tation could not be better described. He offers an ingenious and, I
think, valid reason for that tendency of democracies towards general
and abstract ideas which makes them lose sight of living realities;
namely, that as men grow more alike, they find less difficulty in look-
ing at themselves collectively, in summing themselves up, and they
thereby acquire the habit of seeing everything in this way. This is
another effect of imitation. I have taken these examples among a

310

Laws of Imitation

IV. Legislation

The above consideration concerning government may be
applied to legislation.1 Legislation, like political and mil-
itary systems, is only a particular development of religion.
And, as a matter of fact, law was originally as sacred a
thing as kingship. The most ancient collection of laws,
Deuteronomy, the Irish codes of the ancient Brehons, the
code of Manu, are inextricably mingled with legendary
lore and cosmogonic explanations. This fact shows that
the prophet who dogmatises and is deified after death is
one with the legislator who commands and the king who
governs. In the beginnings of history the father of the
family, as well as the leader of the social group, is all that in
one. His essential quality is that of pontiff, and, as such, he
is, in consequence, both chief and judge. He is chief, in as
much as he directs the collective action of the group for the
common interest of all its members. He is judge when he
interposes his authority between these members to settle
their differences. If his method of settling them is con-
tinuous and self-consistent, if he possesses a system of juris-
prudence, as our jurists would say, he comes to prevent their
occurrence. And from that time on law exists in his little
society; the memory of his past decisions implies the
prevision of his future judgments. Then legislation is in the
beginning and always, at bottom, nothing more than ac-
cumulated, generalised and capitalised justice, just as a con-
stitution is merely accumulated, generalized, and system-
atised politics. Legislation is to justice, a constitution is
to politics, what the Lake of Geneva is to the Rhone.

In general, there is between common law which is passed
down by tradition and statute law which is born of some
current of reform opinion the same difference as between

thousand similar ones. Again he writes : " It is not so much the
rational desire to remain united which keeps a great number of citizens
under one government, as the instinctive aad, in a way, involuntary
agreement which results from a similarity of sentiments and opinions."
1 For the role of imitation and of social logic in the formation of
law, see my Transformations du droit.

Extra-Logical Influences 311

natural and rationalistic constitutions, or between exclusive
and proselyting religions, or even between dialects and cul-
tivated languages. Dialects, local cults, original systems of
government, and customs, seek to transmit themselves from
generation to generation; cultivated languages, open-armed
religions, ready-made constitutions, and new codes, seek
to spread themselves from man to man, either within the
circumference of a single country or beyond it. This does
not prevent the most widespread language from having
been originally like any other dialect; or the most penetrat-
ing kind of religion from having germinated in some nar-
row sect; or the most triumphant and ambitious constitu-
tion from having been suggested by some petty, local gov-
ernment, like that of Lacedaemon, with which our conven-
tions were so much taken, or, at any rate, by some tradi-
tional government, like that of England, over which our
parliamentarians are still so enthusiastic; or, finally, the
most contagious kinds of legislations like Roman law, or
its hybrid derivative, modern French law, from having their
source or sources in such humble customs as the primitive
jus quiritium or the Prankish laws. Nor does this prevent
the most widespread language, religion, constitution, or
piece of legislation from contracting after its expansion,
from becoming localised after its diffusion, and from tend-
ing to become in its turn a dialect, a local cult, a peculiar
constitution or custom, but all this upon a much greater
scale and with a higher degree of complexity. There are,
then, I reiterate, three phases to be considered; and from
the legislative point of view, just as in all other aspects,
their characteristics are well marked. In the first, Law is
extremely multiform and extremely stable, very different in
different countries, and immutable from age to age. In the
second, it is, on the contrary, very uniform and very change-
able, as is the case in modern Europe. In the third, it en-
deavours to combine its acquired uniformity with its refound
stability. A cursory glance will show us that this is the
rhythm in which the whole history of Law is played.
There was a time when every family or pseudo-family

312 Laws of Imitation

possessed its own peculiar law, — then every clan and tribe,
— then every city, — then every province. " In order to un-
derstand how each of these successive steps towards the
prospective unity of the legislative domain was accom-
plished, let us study the transitions from provincial to na-
tional law. For a long time every province of France pos-
sessed its own distinct customs, but gradually a body of
royal ordinances came to be superposed upon these customs.
Moreover, it should be noted that every parliament and tri-
bunal interpreted new laws in its own way, and created its
own separate system of jurisprudence. This juristic
habit reduced legislation to the original provinciality
whence it seemed unable to escape in a time that was still
dominated by hereditary imitation. But, finally, contagious
imitation, the tendency to copy the legislative and juristic
innovations of Paris, having definitely prevailed, the edicts
of the Parisian legislators of the Revolution and of the Em-
pire were readily obeyed throughout the France whose prov-
inces had ceased to bow down before the authority of
their own ancestors and of native jurists. What is more,
the jurisprudence of every court or tribunal was modelled
(by compulsion, someone may say, but why, unless the need
of territorial conformity had become imperative?) upon the
jurisprudence of the court of cassation at Paris. Let me
add that already our national jurisprudence, established in
this way by fashion, is tending to become transfixed by tra-
dition and to carry legislation with it into its own state of
immobility. The law of the Twelve Tables, which ended by
being the venerable tradition and sacred custom of Rome,
began by being a foreign importation that a fine outburst of
fashion-imitation caused to be adopted.

While this movement is transpiring, a still more majestic
change is inaugurated. The same cause which rendered
necessary first the superposition and then the substitution
of national law upon or in place of provincial laws, compels
the different national laws to reflect one of their own number,
and to prepare for the legislative unification of the future. It
was in the sixteenth century, unsettled period though it was,

Extra-Logical Influences 313

a time of contagious innovations, that Roman Law arose
from its scattered ashes and spread throughout every state,
while in each one of them the progress of the royal power
was making their legislation uniform. Yesterday it was
the Napoleonic Code that crossed the frontiers of the
French Empire. (To-day, unfortunately, no prestigious
authority is arising potent enough to construct a new mon-
ument of law to dazzle the eyes from afar; but everything
leads us to think that if it did appear somewhere or other,
it would be copied with unheard-of rapidity everywhere —
witness the comparative success of the Torrens act. In the
absence of really new juristic solutions, the new problems
of law which occur, in connection, for example, with indus-
trial accidents and labour legislation, are barely formulated'
in any corner of the world before they violently rebound to
every other corner.

Well, if it is true that the disposition of the modern pub-
lic towards free imitation of outside things has alone
made possible the diffusion of the French Code, for ex-
ample, is it not likely that in past ages, when the same pro-
vincial law came to prevail over a certain number of cities,
and the same municipal law over a certain number of
tribes, etc., a like disposition characterised the public of
those times, and that without it none of these gradual ex-
tensions of the juristic sphere would have occurred ? When
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries we see in France and
Germany a certain number of cities which had been pre-
viously governed by very distinct customs, presenting a com-
parative similarity of legislation, we know that in France
this uniformity was established through the imitative spread
of the first charter granted to a commune, a document
which fascinated the eye of the public of the period, and we
know that the idea of mutual imitation in this respect came
to cities which already had multiple relations with each
other by way of commerce or treaty, or through language
or kinship. The customs of Lorris, for example, spread
with great rapidity in the royal domain and in Champagne.
The same thing happened in Germany. " Almost all the

314 Laws of Imitation

municipal laws of the Rhine towns are like those of
Cologne," writes M. Schulte, in his classical work upon the
history of German law.1 The Rhine towns lived a com-
mon life through that continuous stream of mutual imita-
tion which was sustained and symbolised by the current of
their river. " The law of Liibeck," says the same author,
" was the model for that of Holstein and Schleswig, and
the majority of the cities on the Baltic Sea." The law of
Magdeburg was parallelled and developed, too, by Halle,
Leipsic, Breslau, and other "sister cities," and from Bres-
lau it " spread to Silesia, Bohemia, Poland, and Moravia,
so that it was pretty closely followed through the entire
East." 2 Nevertheless, after any municipal law or charter
has spread in this way through fashion, after it has been
somewhat modified, it soon becomes one of the most cher-
ished of customs in the hearts of its administrators.

In letting this thought sink into our minds, we shall save
ourselves from the error of differentiating between an-
cient and modern law, of digging a factitious abyss be-
tween them, and of supposing that the bridging-over from
one to the other, in so far as it is genuine, has only been ef-
fected once in the world's history. That eminent thinker
who has penetrated so profoundly into the law of the past,
Sir Henry Sumner Maine, is not free from illusion of this
kind. According to him, the great, the capital revolution
which has been accomplished in law is that which took
place, as he supposes, when the idea of common territory
was substituted for that of consanguinity as a basis for
poitical and juridical union. There is much truth in this
view, but if we endeavour to particularise it, we shall see
that it ought to be expressed in other terms, and that it
would gain by such a translation. It is certain that the
family was for a long time the narrow domain to which
moral obligations were confined, and that all the rest of the

1 [Histoire du droit et des institutions de I'Allemagne, p. 159.
Frederic de Schulte. French translation by Marcel Fournier. Paris,
1882.— Tr.}

2 [Ibid., p. 162.— Tr.]

Extra-Logical Influences 3 1 5

universe was field for prey. Consequently, the ancient
pater familias had power over life and death in his house-
hold; he could condemn to death his wife, his children, and
his slaves. But what was this hermetically sealed family
life but a profession of complete disdain on the part of its
members for all external examples? It is obviously diffi-
cult to maintain such exclusi veness ; little by little domestic
barriers are broken down and foreign influences are added
to paternal traditions. It is then, when different families
have begun to lend and borrow to and from one another,
that relations of neighbourhood combine with those of kin-
ship in the creation of legal ties. But as the only recog-
nised type of solidarity was habitually the tie of blood, ties
of friendship were at first fictitiously classed under this
tie by adoption or otherwise. Later, in Christian countries,
spiritual fatherhood, the relation of godfather to godchild,
with the rights and duties which accompany it, must be
classed with paternity by adoption, just as the relation of
spiritual nurse, that is, of spiritual preceptor, to disciple
must be classed with that of foster-father to foster-child
(the fosterage of Ireland). In Ireland, for example, the
preceptor had the right to succeed to the fortune of his dis-
ciple. In this same country, I am still citing Sumner Maine,
the very ecclesiastical organisation, the bulk of the monas-
teries and bishoprics, simulated a true tribe. It is perhaps
because of a like fiction that the names of father, brother,
mother, and sister are given to the inmates of convents and
monasteries, in spite of their obligatory celibacy.

But, little by little, as non-related individuals came to inter-
mingle and to assimilate with one another more and more,
the impossibility of extending similar fictions to their new
relations insured the rejection of these fictions, and the
simple fact of living together in the same country sufficed
to bind men legally to one another. Why was this? Be-
cause in the great majority of cases compatriots had
become very much alike through their habit of reciprocal
imitation. When, as an exception, a particular group was
different from the others, like the Jews in the Middle Ages,

31 6 Laws of Imitation

or the American negroes, or the Spanish Moors under
Philip II, or like the Catholics in Protestant countries, or
the Protestants in Catholic countries, during the sixteenth
century, participation in the law of the land was refused, or
with great difficulty conceded to them, in spite of their
common territory. So true is it that the real foundation
and first condition of law is the existence of a certain kind
of preliminary similarity between the men that it is to
unite. When blood relationship was a requisite, it was
because it alone presupposed this degree of resemblance,
whereas, at present, the possession of a common territory
suffices to give birth to this presumption. Besides, the
tie of a common territory aspires to strengthen itself
through the addition of the tie of kinship. In modern na-
tions, where distinct races have had time to fuse together
through their prolonged submission to the same laws, the
national party are convinced that they have common an-
cestors, although the apparently territorial character of their
law disguises their faith in their common kinship. Seeley
justly places foremost among the conditions of national
unification, " community of race, or, rather, belief in such
community." In the most modern as well as in the most
ancient times, then, the important thing is not so much real
consanguinity as fictitious or reputed consanguinity. Thus
we see that the action of fashion-imitation has produced,
not once, but very often, the important juridical revolution
to which Sumner Maine refers. But from the expression
of this author it would seem as if physiological or physical
causes, generation, or climate, or soil, were the factors of
this transformation, whereas an essentially sociological
force, imitation, has done it all.

In the preceding remarks it is true that imitation of su-
periors appears to be confused with imitation of contem-
poraneous innovators. But there are cases in the domain
of jurisprudence, as well as elsewhere, in which it is dif-
ferentiated. The history of penal law furnishes us with
many striking examples of this. I will merely indicate
them here, as I have already spoken of them at some length

Extra-Logical Influences 317

in another work.1 It is stupifying to find with what ra-
pidity certain odious and absurd criminal procedures, like
torture or certain inadequate and unintelligent ones like the
jury system, have, at certain epochs, been propagated. Tor-
ture was in fashion in Europe from the time of the unearthing
of Roman law at Bologna, and up to the sixteenth century
it spread like an inundation of blood. In the eighteenth
century people fell in love with the jury system, without
understanding it, upon the word of a few anglomaniacs; so
much so that in 1789 all the official instructions of the elec-
tors to the deputies at the States-General were unanimous
on this, as on so many other points. And we know how far
prepossession for this lame and blind kind of justice has
spread in our century of equality and enlightenment. Are
we not forced to surmise from these two examples that the
method which preceded torture, judicial combat, was itself
propagated by means of some similar infatuation?

At any rate, it is notable that these foreign fashions were
not slow to plant themselves as cherished customs in the
hearts of the people. At present, the jury is a national and
inviolable institution in France. But in the seventeenth
century torture was honoured in the same way. Several
times the States-General of the sixteenth century, and even
those of 1614, declared themselves in favour not only of the
maintenance, but even of the extension, of this method of
proof, thereby bearing witness to the far-reaching extent
of its popularity.

Let me hasten to add that the fevers of fashion here, as
elsewhere, rarely produce such bad effects, and that since
they are in general merely auxiliary to imitation of su-
periority and to social logic, they ordinarily favour the
progress of legislation. As much could be said of the new
customs which follow upon these crises. Let us enquire,
then, into the characteristics which are apt to be taken on
by a legislation which seeks first to extend itself and then
to implant itself upon the vaster territory, and into the

1 See my Philosophic penale (edited by Storck, 1890).

318 Laws of Imitation

consequences of both this extension and this entrench-
ment.

These characteristics are, in general, greater richness of
content and greater simplicity of form. In expanding law,
greater weight is attached to contracts, to reciprocal en-
gagements, to equity, to humanity, and to individual reason ;
and in law which is being fixed and codified, in addition to
these qualities, an air of learned casuistry and despotic regu-
lation. Roman law, as it was spontaneously formed under
the influence of the jus gentium and the praetorian modifica-
tions and as it was codified and transfixed during the
Empire, is a remarkable example of this twofold type.
Wherever it was propagated by the jurists, it was received
for justice and logic incarnate, and this fact partly accounts
for the annihilation under it of all the other original legisla-
tions of antiquity or the Middle Ages. Wherever it was
established it became the potent instrument of despots. Let
us note at this point that although we oppose equity to
privilege and justice to custom, equity and privilege, justice
and custom, have the same origin. Custom appears just to
primitive men because, whether it favour or sacrifice the
individual, it treats him in the same manner as it does the
'only persons to whom he is wont to compare himself,
namely, his ancestors and the members of his caste. His
desire to be treated like others is satisfied in this way in
spite of the juridical disparities and dissimilarities which
custom establishes between those who are already dissimilar
in every respect. But when the individual begins to care
more for this juristic likeness to his fellow-countrymen and
to his contemporaries in general than for his likeness to his
ancestors and kinsfolk, because his resemblance to the
former has become marked in other respects, the equality
of treatment to which he makes claim is what we call justice
or equity. It matters little to him, then, if he is treated
quite differently from his forefathers, provided he is treated
like his neighbour.

To a certain extent the distinction between real and
personal property, the social preponderance of which seems

Extra-Logical Influences 319

to alternate, is connected with that between custom-imita-
tion and fashion-imitation. In times of custom and tradi-
tion ancestral heritages, lands, houses, offices, business
houses, etc., are considered, and justly so at this time, much
the most important part of a fortune. What the individual
can acquire in the course of his ephemeral life through his
particular little industry, through his commerce or through
his spontaneous initiative or through the initiative that he
has imitated from his contemporaries, does not in general
add much to this hereditary fund, the fruit of accumulated
savings produced by the exploitation of ancient inventions,
of inventions in agriculture, in finance, in industry, in art,
etc.

It is natural in these epochs to consider the patrimony
as the most sacred piece of property, worthy of being safe-
guarded in its integrity by tutelary, laws, by successoral or
feudal repurchase, by substitution or by religious respect
for testamentary disposition. The habit of imitating one's
forefathers first of all, of turning to the past for the choice of
one's models, leads to the habit of obeying one's ancestors and
of respecting their wishes above everything else. On the con-
trary, when imitation of contemporaries rages, that is to say,
when the latter are remarkably inventiveand when their inven-
tions throw ancestral ones for the time being into the shade,
the facility for growing rich in exploiting contemporaneous
innovations is so great, that a patrimony is likely to be con-
sidered more and more as a mere outfit, initial capital to be
either promptly dispersed or increased tenfold through bold
speculation or labour or enterprise. Consequently, a patri-
mony loses its prestige and acquired property takes on a
nobler character. At such times no property seems more
respectable than that which is gained through personal
effort, through the intelligent use of new industrial or agri-
cultural ideas, etc. This is where we stand to-day in France
and everywhere else. Consequently, it is not astonishing
that there is some little talk everywhere, mistaken talk, I
think, of making an attack upon the old laws of succession,
of suppressing or limiting the right of bequest and the capac-

320 Laws of Imitation

ity to inherit and of basing the right of holding property
exclusively upon personal labour.

Obviously, here as everywhere else the influence of
fashion-imitation is exerted in an individualistic sense.
Parenthetically, I may observe that this opposition between
real and personal property is at the bottom of the opposition
between the juristic and the economic points of view. It is
notable that political economy was born in Greece, in
Florence, and, in the eighteenth century, in England, during
their ages of fashion.

The consequences which are involved by the progress of
Law, first in extension and then in stability, are of several
kinds; for legislation is concerned with all the directions
which individual activity can take, and these directions far
outnumber those of collective activity which are controlled
by the constitution of the government. All that a national
party can do collectively consists of military or diplomatic ac-
tion in relation to other states or of internal political reform,
the production of power or glory, or of national liberty, a
more highly rated occupation. Moreover, a political reform is
only the manipulating by legislation of matters which bear
upon the acts and interests of private life, upon individual
rights and duties. But the acts which individuals may per-
form separately are innumerable: they relate to rural or
urban occupations of every nature, to all kinds of agricul-
tural and industrial work, to all kinds of crime, to all forms
of adjusted or conflicting interests. We must distinguish
here between activity that is contrary to and activity that is
in accordance with the laws. Activity which is contrary to
law and which must be anticipated by law in order to be
suppressed, is the sum of those occurrences which lead to
civil or criminal actions; since the former, no less than the
latter, presuppose a violation of justice by one of the con-
testants, only it is a violation that is supposed to have been
committed by mistake and not by bad will. Activity in
accordance with law is primarily the sum of all the works
of civil or criminal justice, the production of peace and secur-
ity, a special kind of industry, as well as the peaceful and

Extra-Logical Influences 321

legal exercise of all callings, the production of multiform
wealth, industry strictly speaking. Now, in matters of
justice, the uniformity of legislation which follows upon a
diversity of legislation results in centralising and regulating,
I was about to say in making mechanical, the administration
of justice and in enlarging systems of jurisprudence; and
stability of legislation results in consecrating and consoli-
dating such enlarged systems of jurisprudence. This is
particularly true of civil justice, although the penal system
is subject to analagous changes. To a customary and me-
chanical penal system, one abounding in strange and
atrocious as well as in absurd forms of torture, a method-
ical and rational system succeeded. This was undoubtedly
too slow in coming, but it has already led to a singular con-
trast between the penitentiaries of to-day and the jails of
the past. Indeed, every revolutionary access of fashion, in
any order of facts whatsoever, introduces a higher degree
of rationality into our society, just as every reversion to
custom introduces a higher degree of wisdom.

In relation to any industry whatsoever, the substitu-
tion of uniform legislation for legislative disintegration is
a sine qua non of all production on a large scale, of all pro-
duction requiring machinery or concentration of capital, in
questions of railroads, of manufacturies, or of extensive
farming. Thus uniform legislation is indispensable if we
care to have brilliant prosperity; and stable legislation is
indispensable if our prosperity is to be lasting. At any rate,
as industrial development is still more directly dependent
iipon variations in such fundamental and implicit laws
as the laws of want and habit than it is upon law technically
speaking, it is proper to relegate considerations of this kind
to the following section. But among industries, there is
one, namely, agriculture, which is more immediately de-
pendent upon legislation. We know, indeed, how much the
progress of agriculture, which is carried on by machines
and which has extensive markets at its command, can be
hindered by a multiplicity of customs having the force of
law, in questions of apprenticeship, of usufruct, of different

322 Laws of Imitation

kinds of ownership, of mortgages, of successions, of sales,
of rent, of prescribing for title, etc. When these barriers
are cast aside by the optional or obligatory, but in either
case contagious, adoption of a single body of laws that has
emanated from some prestigious court or capital or from
some contemporaneous celebrity, the impetus is finally given
to agriculture on a great scale.

V. Usages and Wants. — Political Economy

Usage is the most despotic and the most circumstantial
of governments, the most rigorous and the best-obeyed kind
of legislation. By usage I mean those thousand and one
traditional or recently established habits which regulate
private conduct, not abstractly and from a distance, like law,
but close at hand and in every detail, and which include all
the artificial wants, all the tastes and distastes, and all the
peculiarities of morals and manners which characterise a
given country or a given period. It is for the satisfaction of
this group of special desires in the special forms which are
determined by them and in conformity to the more or less
badly formulated laws of political economy that industry
exerts itself. In this sense, usage, like government and law,
is connected with religion. It is an offshoot of ritual. Who
would guess, for example, that our habit of writing from
left to right has a sacerdotal origin ? And yet this is abso-
lutely so. The Greeks originally followed the example of
the Phoenicians and wrote from right to left; but later on,
following the example of their priests, who wrote down the
oracles in the opposite direction because the direction
towards the right was of good augury, the east lying to the
right of the sacrificer who watches the sky with his face
towards the north, they made an entire reform in this
particular in their old habits. " Because people turned
towards the right to pray," says Curtius, " the sacri-
ficial cup, the casque which held the lots, the harp that was
to celebrate the gods, were all passed on from left to right."

Extra-Logical Influences 323

In view of this explanation of the direction in which we
write, it is curious to find anthropologists explaining it on
physiological grounds. Moreover, even in supposedly irre-
ligious societies, usage never fails to express the true and
deep cult, the chivalric or materialistic, the aristocratic or
democratic, ideal which dominates and directs them. The
mere form of the seats and chests of the twelfth and eigh-
teenth centuries is enough to reveal the mysticism of the
first period and the epicurism of the second.

To-day, the same kind of comfort in food, in dwellings,
and in clothing, the same kind of luxury, the same forms of
politeness, bid fair to win their way through the whole of
Europe, America, and the rest of the world. We no longer
wonder at this uniformity, a condition which would have
appeared so amazing to Herodotus. It is, nevertheless, a
capital fact, and although it was itself developed through
the progress of industry, without it our immense industrial
wealth would be impossible. A traveller through Europe
in the twelfth century would not have failed to observe that
at every step, from one canton to another, communities who
were possessed of the same religion and, often, of the same
language and law and form of government, differed
strangely from one another in their methods of nourishment,
lodging, clothing, personal adornment, and amusement.1 But
had the traveller passed through the same places one hun-
dred years later, he would not have perceived any marked
difference in these same particulars between the different
generations of a given canton. On the contrary, the modern
continental tourist will find, particularly in large cities and
among the upper classes, a persistent sameness in hotel fare
and service, in household furniture, in clothes and jewelry,
in theatrical notices, and in the volumes in shop windows.
But let him return ten or fifteen years later and he will find
many changes in all these things. New dishes will figure

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

324 Laws of Imitation

on the bill of fare; an entirely different style and perhaps
a new kind of utility will characterise the furniture; new-
fashioned costumes will have sprung from the imagination
of the fashionable dressmakers, and new forms of jewelry
from the phantasy of the jeweller's brain; new comedies and
operas and novels will be in vogue. This contrast, one which
I have referred to before, is more striking in this case than
in any other.

Does this mean that the gradual and general or regular
substitution of diversity in space for diversity in time and
of similarity in time for similarity in space which is due to
the progress of our civilisations must be considered as an
inevitable law of history, and as an entirely irreversible
order of things ? No. Only the normal transition from geo-
graphical diversity to geographical similarity is really irre-
versible; for we cannot imagine, unless as a consequence of
some social cataclysm, the return of usages to a state of dis-
integration once their unity was established. But we can
well conceive, without any mental somersault, of a chrono-
logical reversal of the transition from identity to differen-
tiation; we can well conceive that after a period of capricious
changes or rather of hasty experiments, usages might be-
come fixed. Steadfastness in the case of habits is far from
contradicting in any respect their universality; it completes
it. Europe, which is still so stormy, but which was not
always so, is unconsciously making for this peace-bringing
port. The fever of civilisation which torments it is not an
entirely new and unheard-of thing in history; and we know
how it ends. We may be sure that the entire basin of the
Nile or Euphrates, or the whole of the Middle Empire, or
all India, was not made partially uniform in more or less
remote or obscure epochs without feverish agitation, seeing
that this involved the destruction of a great number of local
peculiarities. These were blotted out by a current of conta-
gion whose transitory violence is evidenced to by this very ef-
fect. But this current, having done its work, has disap-
peared. And behind it, upon the great Asiatic territories over
which it must have flowed, we are surprised to find not only

Extra-Logical Influences 325

an amazing resemblance in dress, in furniture, etc., but an
immutable fidelity to ancient usages as well. This is so
marked that the type of dwelling, for example, and of in-
terior arrangements that is still made use of in Oriental
palaces, enables us to reconstruct the plan of the ancient
palaces of Assyria in spite of the shapeless character of their
ruins.

It is infinitely likely that the alternating play of the two
kinds of imitation was alone able to transform the world to
the point of gradually effacing all traces of the primitive
checker-board of local usages. But I must anticipate an
objection. Because archaeologists of prehistoric times find
in every cave-dwelling about the same types of flakes, of
knives, of very simple utensils, they hastily conclude that
their savage possessors did not differ at all from one another
in their clothes or morals or methods of life, and that this
resemblance was due to the spontaneous appearance of the
same ideas and wants among primitive men. But this con-
clusion is absolutely arbitrary, and the only one that is
authorised by logic is that the production or consumption
of flint arms or tools, of pottery, etc., was propagated by
fashion-imitation over vast regions at those remote periods
during which we are often led to think that tribal imitation
played an insignificant part. When I call to mind that the
Incas, in spite of their high degree of civilisation, nevef had
any notion of a wagon or wheel, nor of illumination by
means of a lamp or candle, thereby utilising the oleaginous
substances which were right under their hands, I cannot
doubt but that the majority of savage peoples would have
always been ignorant of the art of pottery if they had not
been taught it from outside. Consequently, it seems a fal-
lacy to me to see in the almost universal diffusion of this art
proof of the necessity of the innateness of certain dis-
coveries.

I realise, however, that the life of savages on the lowest
rung of the human ladder is almost as much lacking in
originality as in variety, and that they resemble each other
in many particulars without having imitated each other the

326 Laws of Imitation

least in the world. But their similarity in this respect is in
no way social. It is entirely vital, for the only wants which
they know are natural wants with a very slight impression
of the special characteristics of the family.1 Let us pass on
to the point when the family has become more artificial than
natural and begins to be and to wish to be a society, not
solely a physiological group. Then true usages, fictitious
wants which overlie or swell out physical wants, begin.
They arise as distinct things in the several groups, and as
they become more precise and more numerous in each group
they become differentiated in them. But their internal pre-
cision and richness continues without let, whereas their
external differentiation is soon checked by the inmate tend-
ency to copy the foreigner famous for invention or con-
quest. Now and then this tendency has free scope and,
thanks to this intermittent spirit of introducing foreign
wants and to its combination with the steady spirit of
conserving traditional wants, every tribe, and then every
city, and then every province, and then every large nation,
and finally almost the whole of the civilised globe, presents
the spectacle, in respect to usages, as in so many other re-
spects, of advances in similarity joined with increasing
degrees of complexity.

If one wished to explain the architectural style and
fashion of a given locality merely on the ground of the ex-
igencies of its climate, one would be greatly handicapped.
In Asia Minor, for example, all the houses on the slope of
the Black Sea are roofed with tiles, whereas on the slope
towards Cyprus their roofs are terraced, " whatever may
be," says M. £lisee Reclus, " the difference of climate." It

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

Extra-Logical Influences 327

is a question of fashion or custom, or, rather, of an ancient
fashion that has become a custom. From one end to the
other of the United States, from top to bottom, throughout
all classes, even among good-looking women (and there is
certainly no more striking example of the power of imitation
than this) we find the repugnant habit of tobacco chewing,
— a fact that explains the universal presence of the spittoon,
the most indispensable piece of furniture in America.1 Is
this a habit that is made necessary by the exigencies of race
and climate? Not at all; it is another case of fashion and
custom.

Let me dwell a little upon this point, if only to emphasise
a distinction which might have been expressly indicated in
the preceding sections, but which finds a more natural place
here, the distinction between production and consumption.
In that beginning of society of which I have been speaking,
every family or every horde began by being a workshop
and a storehouse of all kinds of useful things, besides
being both church and state. In other words, it pro-
duced all that it consumed and consumed all that it pro-
duced either in the matter of private and individual utilities
or in that of beliefs or in that of collective utilities. This
means that exchange, economic solidarity, did not exist be-
tween families any more than political or religious solidarity.
Certain families did not produce wheat or rice, linen or
cloth, for the consumption of other families in exchange
for the different products or services, political or military
services, for example, of the latter, any more than certain
families taught or ruled over others, furnishing them with
an intellectual or volitional direction which the latter be-
lieved in and followed, in return for the latter's services
or products. Now I must show how production became
differentiated from consumption all along this line, and
it is incumbent upon me to prove that the law of the

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

328 Laws of Imitation

alternation of the two kinds of imitation applies both to
the spread of productive acts and to that of the desires of
consumption.

When the family is an exclusive and self-sufficient work-
shop, the secrets and processes of fabrication, of domestica-
tion, and of cultivation are transmitted from father to son,
and imitation functions only through heredity. At the same
time the wants which this embryonic industry satisfies are
transmitted in the same manner. But when the family
learns of better processes in use elsewhere, and copies them,
forsaking its old mistakes, then the new products, which
are always a little different from the old, must be desired
and called for simultaneously on the part of consumers.
Consequently, new needs of consumption must have them-
selves been transmitted by fashion. Finally, it always hap-
pens that after an influx of industrial innovations has been
freely welcomed on the part of an inheritance- and custom-
bound imitation, the desire to fix them as customs on a
larger scale appears. In this way corporations are born.
Parallelly, corresponding desires of consumption end by
taking root and becoming national habits.1 Then this proc-
ess begins anew. On the other hand, an era of free competi-
tion, that is, of free external imitation, succeeds to the close
corporations of the old regime, and this new era invariably
winds up with a return to the ancient monopoly on a vaster

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

Voltaire writes, for example, in his Siecle de Louis XIV: " Formerly
all the different conditions of life could be recognised by their charac-
teristic defects. Military people and young men who were about to
enter upon the profession of war had an exaggerated vivacity, and
members of the legal profession, a forbidding gravity, to which the
habit of always wearing their robes, even in the royal court, con-
tributed not a little. This was also the case in the medical profession
and in the universities. Merchants still wore mean attire when they
met together, and when they called upon ministers of state. In those
days the greatest merchants were but common men. But as soon as

Extra -Logical Influences 329

scale, under the name of great companies or professional
syndicates. On the other hand, a rule of general caprice
and all-pervasive fashion succeeds to the old usages of past
times until the appointed hour comes for the quiescence of
people's souls in wants that are alike stable and uniform.

Here we must take note of an apparently simple fact, but
one, however, which has had great consequences in history.
[Desires of consumption are in general much more rapidly
and much more readily communicated than the desires of
production which correspond to them. The first time that a
primitive tribe sees any objects of war or adornment in
bronze, it straightway desires to possess similar articles. But
it is not until much later that it desires to make such objects
for itself. Meanwhile, and the wait may be a long one, it
appeals to the fabricators of some foreign tribe, and thus
commerce arises. It has been noted with surprise that among
the Semites, the Cushites, and the Aryans (not among the
Chinese) the composition of prehistoric bronze was always
the same, in spite of the possibly arbitrary proportion of its
elements. M. Lenormand says this is " an important fact
and one which proves that the same invention was passed
on from one to another over a region whose geographical
limits have been accurately determined by M. de Rouge-
mont." This means that at a certain prehistoric period the
desire to acquire this newly discovered metal spread from

citizens began to meet together in public buildings, at public spectacles
and promenades, in order to enjoy the amenities of life, the outward
appearance of them all became little by little almost identical. Now-
adays, we perceive that polite manners have made their way through
all conditions of life. All these changes gradually reacted upon the
provinces."

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

330 Laws of Imitation

people to people like a powder train, and that the majority
of tribes or peoples bought it long before they knew how to
make it. Otherwise, its composition would have varied very
materially in different places. Many other facts confirm this
point of view, notably the spread of amber, in prehistoric
ages, to very great distances from the place in which it was
discovered. Thus the same condition held in the past as in
the present. To-day, the nations which are entering upon
civilisation are the markets for the old nations of Europe,
because they have caught the contagion of new wants with-
out being as yet stung to emulation by the sight of new
industry. England's worldwide commercial conquests, so
fruitful of immense consequences, result from this.1

Although this phenomenon is or appears to be very sim-
ple, the contrary phenomenon would be, a priori, much more
conceivable. Desires of production have to spread only in a
small group of men in order to be realised, whereas, if
desires of consumption are to be viable, they must propa-
gate themselves through a large mass of people. It is conse-
quently surprising to find that when a whole people are
charmed into wearing certain stuffs and jewels, and into
living in houses which are built on certain plans, no
member of the community is inspired with a lively desire
to produce these stuffs and jewels and houses. So imitative
is man, in general, and so passive besides, in his manner
of imitating. However this may be, the fact that we have
noticed may be observed in every order of social facts. The
taste for reading poetry, for looking at pictures, for listen-
ing to music or plays, comes to all peoples through the imi-
tation of some neighbour long before the taste to versify or
to paint, or to compose operas or tragedies. Hence the
universal radiation and the international character of certain

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

Extra-Logical Influences 331

great literary and artistic reputations.1 In the same way,
the need to be governed by intelligent and adequate legisla-
tion comes to a people long before the desire or the capacity
to elaborate a judicial system. Hence the spread of Roman
law among the Visigoths and other barbarians and, after
the Renascence, in almost all of feudal Europe. In this
same way, too, the need of religious sentiment precedes that
of religious as well as that of philosophic genius, i. e., theo-
retic invention. Hence the very rapid conversion of young
or aged peoples to a new religion. Similarly, communities
love military and patriotic glory through imitation before
they possess the genius for war or statecraft which makes
for a glorious army or fatherland. This circumstance fa-
vours the annexation of large territories by illustrious
conquerors; it favours the formation, for example, of
.the Roman Empire. Finally, communities experience,
through contact with foreign peoples, the desire to speak a
rich and cultivated language before they are either capable
or desirous of that cultivation which alone enriches and per-
fects an idiom. I may say the same thing of the lower
classes, who in their contact with the educated classes are
eager to copy the polite language of the court or drawing
room before they make any pretence of reproducing fash-
ionable life. Hence the rapid progress that is made by cer-
tain languages or dialects throughout a continent or coun-
try. The spread of Greek throughout the Eastern Empire,
of the dialect of the Isle-de-France throughout France, and
.of English throughout North America and the world in
general, are examples in point.2

This priority along all lines of the needs for consumption

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

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

332 Laws of Imitation

over those for production may be deduced as an important
corollary from the course of imitation ab interioribus ad
exteriora, i. e., from the thing signified to the sign. Here
the sign is the productive act which actualises the idea and
aim of the thing which is to be consumed. This idea and
this aim are the hidden content of which the consumed prod-
uct is the form. Now, in periods of change, the form,
as we know, always lags behind the content. Guyau re-
marks very justly, for example, that " the political revo-
lution of the first half of this century [in France] was ac-
complished in thought before it took shape in action : philo-
sophic, religious, and social ideas which had been previously
unknown to the poets burst forth in the beautiful setting
of the tranquil alexandrines of Delille." The change to
romanticism in verse was the making of the literary prod-
uct appropriate to meet the demand of the new soul of
poetry. Does not this inability of innovators to find at
once suitable metres and processes and symbols of art for
their ideas and sentiments suggest the impossibility on the
part of countries which have been but just initiated into
new desires for luxury and comfort to create industries
adapted to the satisfaction of these desires ?

No social phenomenon has had greater consequences than
the one in question. It has been a potent factor, as we
have seen, in breaking down the barriers of nationalities
before the torrent of civilising examples which escaped from
it or which entered into it. International exchange arose
in that way. Suppose that the need to reproduce, in every
order of things, the new object that had been seen abroad
had preceded or accompanied the need to consume this
article, what would have happened? Primitive families
would have copied one another without uniting together;
they would have remained as much aloof from, if not as
hostile to, one another after every act of borrowing as they
were before it, like the monads of Liebnitz, which reflect
but do not influence one another. It is true that this
heterogeneity combined with this similarity, this disin-
tegration in this uniformity, implies a kind of contradiction

Extra-Logical Influences 333

which cannot be indefinitely prolonged. And so the imi-
tative passivity of mankind has had the happy result of mul-
tiplying the commercial and political and intellectual ties
of human groups and of effecting or preparing their fusion.
When, after it has been passive for a long time, imitation
finally becomes active, when a people who have for a long
time imported from abroad the books and paintings, the
articles of luxury and the statesmen and legislators which
it needs, undertakes to supply its own literature and art,
its own luxuries, its own diplomacy, the greater part of
its attempts fail. Or, if they do succeed by means of a
high tariff, or by means of other methods of protection
which tend to re-establish the community's previous state of
isolation, its acquired habits are too strong to be entirely
broken off, and they will regain their hold some day or other,
to the advantage of all concerned.

In reality, when new desires for production break forth
in a people, long after the establishment of new desires
for consumption, they do not consist in simply and solely
copying the literature, the arts, the industries, and the
strategy of the nation whose products have heretofore inun-
dated the aforesaid people. But an original system of pro-
duction appears, which in its turn endeavours, and usually
with success, to open up a market for itself among the origi-
nal foreign producers. Moreover, in the preceding sec-
tions I concluded that the widespread propagation of a
single language, of a single religion, of a single govern-
mental authority, or of a single body of laws, was the first
and preliminary condition of a great literature or civilisation
or statecraft or system of security. And now I shall have
no difficulty in showing that the widespread propagation
of the same number of wants and tastes, or, in a word,
of the same individual usages, is the first and preliminary
condition of great wealth and of a great industrial system
as well as of a great art (to anticipate the following sec-
tion on this latter point).

Here, as before, we must distinguish the influence which
the transition from custom to fashion in matters of usages

334 Laws of Imitation

and, later on, the return from fashion to a more extensive
custom, exercises upon the characteristics of industry.

It is clear that in an age when custom imposed different
kinds of food and clothing and furniture and houses in
different localities, in localities where they remained fixed
for several generations, machine production on a large scale
would be, even if it were known, without a market. The
artisan of such an epoch is bent upon making only a small
number of very solid and durable articles,1 whereas, later
on, in periods when the same fashion holds sway over
more than one country, although it changes from year to
year, the quantity and not the stability of the product is
the aim of industry. A builder of American trading ves-
sels told Tocqueville that on account of the frequent change
there in naval fashions it was to his interest to construct ves-
sels of little durability. In ages of custom, the producer
seeks the narrow and long-drawn-out market of the future,
in ages of fashion he seeks the vast ephemeral market of
the outside world. As far as products whose essential
quality is permanency are concerned, such as buildings,
jewelry of gold or precious stones, furniture, bookbindings,
statues, etc., the insufficiency of contemporaneous patron-
age in times of custom may be compensated for up to a cer-
tain point by the prospect of the future patronage to which
each generation will contribute. And so, the Middle Ages,
in spite of the disintegration of their 2 local usages, possessed

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

2 This does not mean that the Middle Ages were unacquainted with
the charms of fashion. From the time of the thirteenth century, accord-
ing to Cibrario, the nobility delighted " to dress in germents borrowed
from the most distant nations, like the Saracens and Sclavonians."
Florentine women wore the " crude green " of Cambria. Changes of
fashion in everything bearing upon dress were pretty frequent among
the nobility and the wealthy middle classes. They were much less
frequent, however, than they are to-day in all articles whatsoever, and
among all classes. " The dress of the common people," says M.
Rambaud, " changed very little during the Middle Ages." This is
because it remained a matter of tradition. " On the other hand," he
adds, " the wealthy classes had a capricious variety of fashions." This is

Extra-Logical Influences 33$

its great architects and goldsmiths, its remarkable cabinet-
makers and binders and sculptors. But for products destined
to more or less immediate destruction, for those whose con-
sumption is speedy, this compensation does not exist. Con-
sequently, we must not be surprised to find that horticulture
and even agriculture, that ordinary glass work and pottery
and cloth-making, prospered or progressed so little during
the feudal period. Inversely, if the fickleness of taste in
times of fashion hinders the development of such arts
and industries as architecture and statuary, things that
must look to the future, a uniformity of taste over a vast
territory highly favours, in spite of their instability, the
progress of all manufacture which is essentially ephemeral,
such as paper-making, journalism, weaving, landscape-gar-
dening, etc. Nevertheless, if renewed stability were ever
added to the .acquired uniformity of usages, a third period
of incomparable prosperity would open out to industry.
Already such a period may be foreseen. China arrived
centuries ago at this happy goal. We know how surpris-
ing her industrial wealth is in view of the slender treasury of
inventions that she exploits.

Have I in any of this been exaggerating the role of imita-
tion? I think not, for it is remarkable that when a great
system of industry is introduced into a country it at first
applies itself to objects of luxury, to tapestry, jewels, etc.,
and it is only later that it includes objects of secondary and
then of prime necessity. Why is this ? Because usages are
assimilated in the upper classes, the consumers of objects of
luxury, before this assimilation is accomplished among the
common people. Therefore Colbert was very unjustly
blamed for having encouraged the manufacturer of silks and
other aristocratic industries. In his time, this was the only

because they experienced the influence of fashion. At all periods, in
antiquity as well as in the Middle Ages, it is notable that the rule of
fashion accompanies the brilliant and ascendant phases of civilisations.
" The Persians," says Herodotus, " are most curious concerning foreign
usages. In fact, they have copied the dress of the Medes . . . and in
war they use Egyptian cuirasses. They have borrowed pederasty from
the Greeks."

336 Laws of Imitation

course open to him. And yet Roscher, in pointing out the
apparently fantastic order of the successive forms of in-
dustry, does not seem to me to have perceived its reason.
" In ancient times," he says, " the greatly inferior means of
transportation, the manners and customs of different coun-
tries, and, finally, lack of machinery, resulted necessarily
in a much greater dispersion of industry." Here the cause
which I have pointed out as unique is not even mentioned.
Those which have been substituted for it are merely, in my
opinion, its consequences. Was not inadequacy of transpor-
tation, for example, as well as difference of character, of
customs, and manners, the result of putting a too feeble
emphasis on foreign imitations on the part of consumers?
If different localities had desired to buy the same articles,
the need of common routes would have been experienced
and, before long, satisfied. But roads 1 which were opened
out by the bridge-building friars (a religious body which
was expressly created in the Middle Ages for the construction
of roads and bridges, a kind of clerical administration for
bridges and highways) went to ruin for lack of use. Under
the Roman Empire, too, excellent roads existed; but, in spite
of the impetus given to universal assimilation by the pres-
tige of Rome,2 as the particular usages of the different
provinces remained pretty dissimilar, industry on a large
scale was little known at this period.3

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

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

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

Extra-Logical Influences 337

As for the lack of machinery, the same explanation ap-
plies. For, as a matter of fact, the germ of machinery that
was fit to start or develop a great system of industry was
latent in antiquity in all the branches of production that
were scattered through Egypt and Phoenicia and Greece
and Babylonia. If it had been propagated by fashion-imi-
tation among producers, it could not have failed to suggest
rapid improvements. The great lack, then, was the lack
of a tendency to imitate the foreigner. Thus everything
comes back to this. The first condition for the viability
of paper-making on a large scale is, undoubtedly, a suffici-
ently general habit of writing. Besides, machinery, strictly
speaking, is not indispensable to industry on a large scale.
There is manufacture as well as machine- facture. In
Rome, before the days of the printing press, there were
great workshops of copyists who manufactured editions of
Virgil and Horace and other classics. Here was an excep-
tionally extensive industry, because it appealed to the schol-
ars of the whole Empire, scholars who were possessed of
the same education, who spoke the same language, and who
were inspired by the same literary tastes.1

We must not overlook the following fact. The mere
existence of a similarity of wants and usages is not suf-
ficient to make industry on a large scale possible. Recogni-
tion of the similarity is also necessary. In the Middle Ages,
according to Jusserand, none but kings and their suites,
none but great nobles, pilgrims, fugitive criminals, a few

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

"338 Laws of Imitation

wandering workmen, minstrels, preaching and begging
friars, and hawkers of relics and indulgences, passed over
the bad roads of the periods. From this enumeration it
appears that the sole or principal industry of exportation
that was popular at this epoch was the sale of relics and
indulgences. As for the minstrels, they worked only for
a few castles and for one or two royal courts. Does this
mean that the people had only one desire in common,
namely, that of buying relics and indulgences ? * No, but
this similarity, derived, as it was, from a common religion,
was known to all, whereas the other resemblances, in gen-
eral, were not. Nevertheless, pilgrims and other wander-
ers helped to spread, little by little, the originally vague con-
sciousness of these resemblances. They even helped to in-
crease the number of the already numerous points of re-
semblance. In this respect, they paved the way for the in-
dustry of the future. The preaching friars unconsciously
contributed to the same end in assimilating people's minds,
in spreading democratic ideas under an evangelical guise,
or evangelical ideas under a democratic guise. In this way
they moved souls, and this is always the right road, even
to material well-being. The ardent homilies of innumer-
able Savonarolas, the preaching of Luther and his follow-
ers, the passionate theories of our Encyclopedists, were all
necessary factors in causing almost all classes and nations
to consciously and openly dress and live in approximately
the same way. It is this condition which permits industry
to unfold its wings.

Among the usages whose similarity is essential to exten-
sive industry there is one which it is important to consider
above all, because the assimilation of all the others would
amount to very little, unless it, too, were assimilated. I
mean that which is concerned with the regulation of price.
I freely admit that some logical rule, although not that,

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

Extra-Logical Influences 339

to be sure, of supply and demand, as applied by dogmatic
economists, but one more precise and more complete, pre-
sides over the formation of price when for the first time
any specific price is formed. But when a price has once
been established as a result of an openly discussed calcula-
tion or contract, it spreads through fashion far beyond the
places where those special conditions which rationally de-
termine it prevail; or else, it persists in a place through
custom long after the first conditions of its establishment
there have disappeared. But although this persistence
through custom or diffusion by fashion be or ought to be
considered by classical economists as an abuse or trans-
gression of their laws, it is certain that without this persist-
ance or diffusion, according to the period, industry would
have been hindered from its very start. Would our great
commercial houses be possible if each of the towns to
which they express their innumerable stores wished to pay
for them according to its traditional price and refused to
conform to their uniform price? And could our great fac-
tories carry on their business for long if each one of them
insisted upon always paying the same customary wages to
its work-people in disregard of the rise or fall of wages in
the general market? Formerly, on the other hand, when
every artisan worked with a view to the future, when every
perspective in the narrow circumference of contemporaneous
time was closed,1 when he could not count for his livelihood
or fortune upon the extension of his patronage and his re-
turns, when he could count only upon their permanency,
when rigid ties bound him for years at a stretch to his
patron, and when the patrons themselves were bound to-
gether in a perpetual association, what security could there

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

340 Laws of Imitation

have been for either consumers or producers if future prices
had not been fixed and assured in advance? Thus the cus-
tomary fixation of prices in the past compensated for their
local variation, just as in the present their uniformity com-
pensates for their changeability. Some day, perhaps,
they will end by being both fixed and uniform, and by fur-
nishing a scope and steadiness of outlet to production which
will increase its audacity tenfold.

In fact every new fashion endeavours to become rooted in
custom; but only a iew are successful for the same reason
that many germs are abortive. However, the introduc-
tion of only a few foreign wants, or of novel means of
satisfying them, suffices to complicate the consumption of a
given country; for pre-existent wants and luxuries do not
give way or disappear without prolonged resistance. In
Europe the habit of eating bread was not encroached upon
by the importation of Asiatic rice, any more than in Asia
the habit of eating rice suffered to any serious extent from
the introduction of European bread. But the dietary in
both places became complicated by a new element. " The
mistake was made in France,1 at the time of the signing
of the commercial treaty of 1860, of thinking that French
wines were going to replace beer in the United Kingdom.
We fancied that we could make our wines reach a class
of consumers that was supposed to have abstained from them
because of their high tariff and consequent high price.
This forecast was ill-founded. If French wine has made
some progress in British markets, it is only among a
very limited circle of patrons, of which neither the working
classes nor even the majority of the middle classes 2 form
a part. Although our alcoholic products are better appre-
ciated to-day, this has in no way come about at the cost of
beer. The consumption of beer has always increased in
very different proportions from that of foreign wines."

1 Journal des economistes, February, 1882.

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

Extra-Logical Influences 341

Thus wine has been added to beer in England, but it has
in no respect replaced it.

The characteristics which the rule of fashion in the matter
of usages inspires in industry are easy to guess. In
order to spread through a kind of conquering epidemic,
language must become more regular and more prosaic, it
must take on a more logical and a less animated air, re-
ligion must become more spiritual, more rational and less
original, a government must become more administrative,
less prestigious, legislation must shine through the reason
and equity rather than through the originality of its forms,
finally, an industrial system must develop its mechanical
and scientific side at the expense of its spontaneous and
artistic side./ In a word, the apparently singular fact
is that the rule of fashion is tied to that of reason. I
may add, to that of individualism and to that of naturalism.
This is explained when we consider that imitation of con-
temporaries has to do with models individually considered,
detached from any parent stock, whereas imitation of ances-
tors emphasises the tie of hereditary solidarity between the
individual and his forebears. And we may also readily per-
ceive that all epochs of fashion-imitation — Athens under
Solon, Rome under the Scipios, Florence in the fifteenth
century, Paris in the sixteenth and, later on, in the eighteenth
century — are characterised by the more or less trium-
phant invasion of so-called natural law (as well read in-
dividual law) against civil law, of so-called natural
against traditional religion, of art which I shall also call
natural, that is to say, of art which is faithfully observant
and reflective of individual reality, against hieratic and cus-
tomary art, of natural morality, as we shall soon see, against
national morality. The Italian humanists and Rabelais,
Montaigne, Voltaire, personify this naturalistic and indi-
vidualistic character under divers aspects. Since nothing
is more natural to the individual human being than reason,
since nothing is better able to satisfy individual reason than
the substitution of a symmetrical and logical order for the
mysterious complications of life, we must not be surprised

342 Laws of Imitation

to find rationalism, individualism, and naturalism hand in
hand. The rule of fashion is distinguished in every order
of things by the blossoming of certain great and free in-
dividualities. It is at such times that, in language, gram-
marians, like Vaugelas, have free play; even the wholesale
makers of idioms, of Volapiik, for example, can hope for
some success, providing, of course, their reforms have the
stamp of regularity and symmetry. In religion, it is the
era of great reformers, of great heretics and philosophers,
who succeed, providing they simplify and rationalise re-
ligion. In statecraft, in legislation, it is the epoch of illus-
trious legislators and founders of empire, of men who per-
fect codification and administration. Economically, it is
the period of the great industrial inventors who perfect
machinery. vEsthetically, I may add, it is the time of glo-
rious creators of art who carry to the highest point of me-
chanical perfection the tricks t and devices of composition.
Besides, wherever we see that great reputations have been
made, we may affirm that there the contagion of fashion
has raged, although each of these glories may have been
the point of departure of some traditional fetichism that is
as exclusive and tenacious as the preceding forms of fetich
worship which it destroyed. The Molierites, for example,
with their prior attachment to the petty traditions of the
theatre frangais, must not make us forget that their idol,
Moliere, was, in his innovating century of art, the most
open-minded man to innovations, the worst enemy to fe-
tiches. These followers of Moliere can make us understand
the followers of Homer. We may be sure that Homer, like
Moliere, appeared in an age of imitative expansion, when
all the Archipelago and the whole of Asia Minor were be-
ginning to open out to the radiations of Ionia.

To sum up, the role played by custom and fashion in the
economic sphere closely corresponds to the action exerted
in the other spheres of the social world by these two always
co-existent, but alternately increasing and decreasing, forms
of imitation. It falls without any difficulty into the general
law which I have formulated. But, in addition, the reason

Extra-Logical Influences 343

of this law, of this vacillating struggle between custom and
fashion which lasts until the ultimate triumph of the former,
is at present suggested to us. Since every invention is the
centre of some particular imitation which emanates from it,
the desire to imitate must always be directed, by preference,
towards the side where the richest galaxy of inventions is
shining, that is to say, sometimes, exclusively towards the
past, if one's ancestors were inventive or if they were
more inventive than one's contemporaries, and sometimes,
and this more and more frequently, towards the contempo-
raneous and the foreign, if one's contemporaries are more
inventive than one's own ancestors. Now, these two situa-
tions will inevitably alternate for a long time, for, as soon
as some mine of discoveries is disclosed, all the world
exploits it, and it does not take long for it to become, for the
time being, exhausted, thereby swelling the legacy of the past
until some new vein be found; and when the last of these
mines shall have been discovered, we shall have our ances-
tors alone to appeal to for examples.

There is a certain reciprocity of stimulation between the
rule of fashion and the progress of contemporary invention
which should not make us fail to recognise the priority of
the latter. Undoubtedly, as I have said already, once the
current of fashion has been set free, it excites the inventive
imagination along the lines that are the fittest to accelerate
its overflow; but what set it free, if it was not the impetus
that was given to it by contact with some neighbouring
country whose fruitful novelties had been more or less spon-
taneously struck out? We cannot doubt that this is so in
our own century in whatever has to do with industry; for
certainly the first cause of that fascination which causes all
European peoples to imitate one another was steam ma-
chinery, which led to production on a large scale, and of rail-
roads, which led to the distant transportation of products —
not to speak of telegraphs. It is especially in the matters of
industry and science that the modern imagination has had
full swing; and it is especially on its economic and scientific
side that it has broken down the barriers of custom. In

344 Laws of Imitation

matters of art, on the contrary, just as the creative Imagina-
tion has often been lacking in them, so the spirit of tradition
has subsisted in them, taken as a whole. The details are
significant. In architecture we have invented almost noth-
ing; our epoch has slavishly copied Gothic, Roman, and By-
zantine models. In this respect the nineteenth century was
as much given over to tradition — at least until the advent
of what might be called architecture in iron — as the twelfth
century was given over to innovation.

In fact, in spite of the partly accidental character of inven-
tions, inventors themselves are so imitative, that there is in
every period a current of inventions which is in a certain
general sense religious or architectural or sculptural or
musical or philosophical. There are certain currents of imi-
tation which must through force of habit precede others.
For example, the mythological genius must have habitually
— I will not say, with Comte, necessarily — exerted itself be-
fore the metaphysical genius. The creative genius of lan-
guage was most certainly prior to either. And this was the
one to be exhausted first of all ; so we should not be surprised
if in the most progressive societies, societies which are the
most scornful of custom in other respects, the empire of cus-
tom in what has to do with language prevails more and more,
day by day, through a more exaggerated respect for orthog-
raphy and a growing spirit of philological conservatism. It
seems to me that many apparent peculiarities in history could
be explained by considerations drawn from the same source.
But the reader will be able to make for himself such applica-
tions as I have not indicated here.

VI. Morality and Art

Tastes which are formulated into principles of art and
morals which are formulated into principles of morality,
alike variable according to time and place, direct two im-
portant parts of social activity and, consequently, form part,

Extra-Logical Influences 345

like usages, laws, and constitutions, of the government of
societies, in the large and true meaning of the word. This
is so true that the more moral or artistic a people become,
the less need they have of being governed. Consummate
morality would make the coming of a-n-archy possible. But
in order to avoid the commonplaces which I might indulge
in in this twofold subject, I wish to limit myself here to a
very brief discussion. I need not prove, I think it is enough
to merely point out, the religious origin of art, of which I
spoke in a previous chapter,1 or of morality, whose
duties were at first understood as divine commands. /Moral
sentiments and artistic tastes emanate, then, from religion.
Let me add, from the family. At the time when every family
and tribe had its own language and worship, it had, when
it was artistically well endowed, its particular art, which was
piously transmitted from father to son, and when it was sup-
plied with sympathetic instincts it had its particular morality
where its own group of moral, often immoral, prejudices
and of odd and difficult sacrifices had been scrupulously ob-
served from time immemorial. How often must these walled-
up arts and exclusive morals have broken down their barriers !
How often, after their overflow outside, must they have shut
their doors and secured themselves behind their new fron-
tiers, only to push them forward again from time to time and
from age to age ! All this had to be done before it was pos-
sible to see on this earth the unheard-of sight of many vast
nations feeling, at the same time and in about the same way,
the beautiful and the ugly, good and evil, admiring or mock-
ing at the same pictures, the same novels, the same dramas,
the same operas, applauding the same acts of virtue or be-
coming indignant over the same crimes, crimes that are
made public by the daily press in the four corners of the
globe at the same, time.

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

346 Laws of Imitation

Under this new aspect the world shows us again the con-
trast which I have pointed out so often. Formerly, in those
times when custom predominated in art and in morals as in
religion and in politics, every nation and, to go back still
further, every province was distinguished from neighbour-
ing nations and provinces and cities by its original products
of jewelry, chiselled weapons, ornate furniture, figurines
and poetic legends as well as by its characteristic vir-
tues, so that often, in different places, the beautiful and
the good appeared quite different; but, on the other hand,
from one century to another, in each country, the beautiful
and the good were unchanging, and the same virtues, the
same objects of art, were invariably reproduced. Nowadays,
on the contrary, in our era of widespread and penetrating
fashions, artistic works and virtuous acts are about the same
everywhere, upon two continents at least, whereas, from
decade to decade, not to say from year to year, the styles and
schools of painters, musicians, and poets are transformed
along with the public taste, and moral maxims are them-
selves worn out and changed and renewed with alarming
facility. Nevertheless, we must not be over-alarmed by this
extraordinary mutability, if it be true that, in connection
with a corresponding universality, it is related to a whole
series of rhythmical oscillations which grow bigger and
bigger and whose consequences, from the point of view of
morality, especially, have been most salutary, and if it be
true that the experience of the past justify us in counting
upon a return, in the more or less immediate future, to a
reassuring fixity of ideals, joined, at last, to peace-bringing
uniformity.

However simple moral duties may seem to those who have
practised them for a long time, they were all in their begin-
nings individual and original inventions, inventions which,
like all others, appeared and spread one after the other.1

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

Extra-Logical Influences 347

They were instigated and helped to succeed, at times by the
dogmas of a new religion whose practical and, usually, ex-
tremely strange consequences they were logical in scorning,
at times by the new conditions of social life with which they
found themselves in agreement. It is in this way that suc-
cessive inventions of art owe their appearance and their
fortune to changes either in ideas or in morals. Respect for
old age, blood- feud, hospitality, bravery; later on, la-
bour, honesty, respect for the cattle, or fields, or women of
others ; still later, patriotism, feudal loyalty, almsgiving, the
emancipation of slaves, the relief of unfortunates, etc., were
ushered in in the different ages of humanity, like the Egyp-
tian tomb, or the Grecian temple, or the Gothic cathedral.
It was therefore necessary for the breath of fashion, so to
speak, to blow and scatter the germ of every new duty as
well as that of every new thing of beauty that had duly
blossomed forth somewhere or other, throughout the world,
over the forbidding walls of tribes and cities shut up in their
traditional art and morality. Hence the contradictions
which arose so frequently between ancient customs and im-
ported examples, and this partly explains the so frequently
negative character of moral proscriptions as well as of
canons of taste. Thou shalt not kill thy conquered enemy
to devour him, thou shalt not sell thy children or kill thy
slaves without a motive, thou shalt not kill or beat thy wives
except for infidelity, thou shalt not steal thy neighbour's
ass or ox, etc. — these are the highly original and much-dis-
cussed prohibitions which, in their respective epochs, com-
posed the major part of the moral code of every people.
Their aesthetic code is, likewise, full of prohibitions instead
of positive directions for the guidance of taste.

I do not mean to say in what has preceded that the senti-
ment of fraternity as well as of equality and liberty and
justice, that is to say, the germs and soul of moral life, is a
modern discovery. That which is modern is the enormous
compass of the human group where this superior sentiment
is supposed to rule. This sentiment has always existed as a
matter of fact, but it exists in groups which become more

348 Laws of Imitation

and more narrow the further back we go in the course of
history. This potent and exquisite sentiment is, in fact, the
very sweetening of social life, its peculiar charm and magic,
the sole counter-balance to its inconveniences, and these in-
conveniences are such that, if this unique advantage had ever
ceased to show itself in any society, that society would have
fallen straightway into dust. They who have seen nothing
in primitive humanity but combats and massacres, but the
cannibalism and other horrors that were commited by one
tribe upon another, they who have seen nothing but the
lashes of the whip upon the slave, or the sale of little children
by their fathers, these people have not understood primitive
societies. They have looked at them only on the outside,
they have not penetrated within. The inner side, the essence,
the content of these societies is the relation which existed in
them between the equals which composed them, between the
family heads of the same tribe or clan, between the citizens
of Sparta or Athens in the agora, between the nobles of the
old regime in a drawing room Always and every-
where, passing quarrels excepted, we see that union and
peace and politeness prevailed in the reciprocal relations
that were established between these equals, who in them-
selves exclusively composed the social group, to the exclu-
sion of slaves, of minor sons, and of women, not to mention
strangers. Strangers are, in comparison with the common
interest of the equals, the obstacle to be overcome. Minors,
women, and slaves are, in comparison with the same
interest, a mere means of service. But neither the latter
nor the former are associates.

Only, in the long run, contact with these peers inspires
inferiors with a lively desire to be admitted into their magic
circle, to force the circumference of their fraternal intimacy
to widen out. This desire is realised but gradually and not
without difficulty, not without revolutions. How is it
realised? By the mere play of long-continued imitation.1

1 The Roman plebeians were assimilated with the patricians through
imitation. According to Vico, the Roman plebs began by demanding

Extra-Logical Influences 349

When we attribute a preponderating share in this result to
the preaching of philosophers or theologians, be they Stoics or
Apostles, we take the effect for the cause. A moment always
comes when, from having copied the superior in everything,
in thought, in speech, in prayer, in dress, and in general
methods of life, the inferior inspires him with the irresistible
feeling that they both belong by right to the same society.
Then this feeling finds expression, ordinarily in an exagger-
ated form, in some philosophic or theological formula which
strengthens it and which favours its expansion. When Soc-
rates, in his dialogues, raised somewhat the dignity of
women and even of slaves, when Plato, going still further,
dreamed, in his Republic, of the complete equality of man
and woman and of the suppression of slavery, it was because,
in contemporaneous Athens, women had begun to cross the
thresholds of the gynecia, and because the slave was already
assimilated with the free man.1 " The common people of
Athens do not differ from the slaves in dress or in general
bearing or in any other particular," says Xenophon. Be-
sides, before his twofold Utopia could be realised, it was
necessary that for many more centuries the distance between
man and woman, between the citizen and the slave, should
continue to diminish until it reached the point that was at-
tained under the Antonines. Aristotle was much more con-
sistent with the practical morality of his time when he justi-
fied slavery ; and the contrary opinion of the first masters of
Stoicism on this point remained practically unechoed until
the day when the world was ripe for the words of Epio-
tetus.

Unfortunately, friendship, as well as society, is " a circle

" not the right of contracting marriages with the patricians, but of con-
tracting marriages like those of the patricians, cunnubia patrum, and
not cum patribus."

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

350 Laws of Imitation

which deforms itself in stretching out too far," and this
serious objection has instigated the resistance of conserva-
tives of all periods to the wishes of subject classes who
aspired to equality. But it is necessary for this objection to
fall away and for the social circle to widen itself out to the
limits of humankind. We may query whether the gradual ex-
tension of the field of the sentiment of which I am speaking
has not been bought at the price of its intensity, and whether
there is not reason for thinking that in the past, in the remote
past even, it was much more intense, where it existed, than
it is at present. Has the word pietas the same force and ful-
ness of meaning, has it the same divine unction, for us that it
had for the ancients ?

It has been very justly observed that just as foreign wars,
the Persian Wars, for example, tend to strengthen the
morality of the belligerents, so civil or quasi-civil wars, the
Peloponnesian War, for example, are demoralising. Why
so? The same means are used, there is always the same
trickery and violence. But, in the one case, it is directed
against a group of men who were strangers to one another
to begin with and who, after the struggle and in consequence
of the contact of war, become so much less strange to one
another than they were before that they usually fall to copy-
ing one another; whereas, in the other case, they are directed
against a group of men who were before that one another's
social brothers and relations, one another's friends and com-
patriots. Thus, in the one case, in that of foreign war, the
social field has not been curtailed, it even tends to enlarge
itself, and the social tie is strengthened; in the other case,
the social field is diminutised and the social tie is weakened.
Here, then, everything is social loss; and that is why we
properly talk of demoralisation. There is no better illustra-
tion of the eminently social character of morality.

At any rate, it is certain that from century to century the
moral public, like the artistic public, has not ceased to extend
itself, not by constant, but by intermittent, aggrandisement.
By this I mean that the group of persons to whom the indi-
vidual recognises that he owes certain duties and whose

Extra-Logical Influences 351

opinion influence his morality,1 just as the circle of persons
for whom the artist works and whose judgments count for
something in his eyes, has gone on enlarging. This enlarge-
ment has been twofold; on the surface, by the incessant
pushing forward of the urban and provincial and national
frontiers across which the virtuous man of the city or of the
province or of the nation saw no one to whom he felt under
any obligation of pity or justice and across which the artist
or the poet saw none but barbarians ;2 and, in depth, by the
lowering of the barriers which separated classes and limited
the horizon of duty and of good taste for each of them. This
was a progress which was already immense of itself, but
which was in addition accompanied necessarily by an inter-
nal remodelling of morals and arts. Now, how was this
progress accomplished, how must it have been accomplished?
We have first to answer that all the outbursts and o'.rerflow-
ings of external imitation that had been brought about from
the religious, political, industrial, legislative, or linguistic
point of view, indifferently, were potent contributions to this
result, through assimilating day by day an increasing num-
ber of men. If, from the beginning of the sixteenth century,
popular rights forbid the sacking of captured cities, the en-
slavement of the conquered or the confiscation of his goods,
if, from the same epoch, the right of succession to the estate
of a deceased alien (droit d'aubaine) was no longer claimed,

1 See on this subject my Criminalite comparee, p. 188 and the
following, and my Philosophic penale.

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

352 Laws of Imitation

if, in a word, duties towards the stranger, at least towards
the European and Christian stranger, came to be recognised,
it is largely due to the fact that this innovating century gave
a remarkable impetus to fashion-imitation on our continent
and was pre-eminently distinguished by the wide paths which
it opened out to this form of imitation. If Racine wrote for
some thousands of people of good taste in France, and if Vic-
tor Hugo has written in our day for some millions of admir-
ers in France and Europe, a great part of this extension of
the literary public is due to the fresh inundation of the
general current of examples, which, after the conservative
seventeenth century, was brought about in the eighteenth
century and which still flows under our eyes. Let us sup-
pose that the steam machine, the loom, the locomotive, and
the telegraph had not been invented, that the principal facts
of modern chemistry and physics had not been discovered,
Europe would unquestionably have remained broken up in
an endless number of little dissimilar provinces, a state of
things as incompatible with a broad system of art or
morality as with an extensive system of industry. Thus all
the good ideas which have civilised the world may be con-
sidered auxiliary inventions and discoveries of art and
morality.

But, in matters of morality, at least, this general cause
would not have sufficed to bring about the overthrow of the
obstacles which were in the way of the enlargement of its
domain. To the ideas which indirectly effected this prog-
ress, must be added those which had it for its direct and
more or less conscious object. In this class I place in the
first rank all those fictions which in those primitive times
when it was necessary to be related by blood in order to be
social and moral compatriots created artificial systems of
consanguinity and extended to them the advantages of
natural kinship. Among many barbarian peoples the custom
prevails of cementing an alliance by mixing together a few
drops of the blood of the different contracting parties, who
thereby become in a sense consanguineous. Such a usage
could only have been imagined in an epoch when men judged

Extra Logical Influences 353

themselves under moral obligations only within the limits
of the ties of blood; and Tylor has reason to celebrate this
as " a discovery of a solemn means of extending beyond the
narrow limits of the family the duties and affections of the
fraternity." Adoption with its many strange forms was
another no less ingenious means that worked towards the
same end. Finally, the practice of hospitality might well
have been based upon some analogous idea. The fact of
entering into a house, into the domestic temple, might well
have been regarded as a fictitious incorporation into the
family, remotely comparable to adoption or to the mingling
together of drawn drops of blood. But of all such ingenu-
ities, the most marvellous and the most fruitful is undoubt-
edly the word of Christ : " Every man is thy brother, ye are
all the sons of God." By virtue of this all men were included
in one blood-relationship.

When, through these processes or others like them, or
simply as a result of the levelling of civilisation, a more
ample opportunity is given for the doing of upright acts or
for the making of aesthetic things, we see peoples or classes
who had before been cooped up by their own peculiar arts
and morals inclined to interchange them; and from this
common tendency results the triumph of a higher art or
morality, which is, in turn, inevitably transformed. There
is the same difference between imported morality and inbred,
domestic morality, between a fashion-morality and a custom-
morality, as between an art that is exotic, that is acclimating
itself, and an art that is indigenous. The inspiration of the
latter, in spite of its relative age and immutability, has much
more freshness and force and originality. We have no cause
to wonder at this; any more than at the oddly youthful
energy which is inherent in the duties that are imposed by
antique customs, in the duty of family vengeance, especially.
But there are other points which I prefer to emphasise.

There are two points to note on the subject of art. In the
first place, art, in the ages of custom, when it is born sponta-
neously, without any wholesale importation, springs up from
handicraft, " like a flower from its stem," under the warmth

354 Laws of Imitation

of religious inspiration. This was the case in Egypt, in
Greece, in China, in Mexico and Peru, and in Florence.1
Architecture, Gothic or otherwise, is born of the builder's
craft ; the painting of the fourteenth century, of illuminating,
and illuminating, of the craft of the copyists; sculpture, of
mediaeval cabinet-making, of the tombs of Egypt; modern
music, of the ecclesiastical habit of intoning; eloquence, of
the professions which involve speaking, of bench and bar;
poetry and literature, of the different ways of speaking, of
narration, of instigation, of persuasion. In the second place,
at the same epochs, the work of art answers, not to the need
of knowing something new, which is peculiar to the ages of
fashion where curiosity is excited by the very stimulants
which come in from outside, but to the truly loving need of
seeing again, of finding again with tireless and ever keener
eagerness, that which one has already known and loved,
admired or adored, divine types of ancestral religion,
divine legends, the history of the saints, epic tales of
national history, the familiar scenes of life which conform
to old customs, in a word, the traditional emotions which are
summed up, for the artist and for his public, in a profound
love for a remote past and in a profound hope in a long
future on earth or in the posthumous future that is promised
by religion. We do not demand the expression of fleeting
impressions from architecture or music, impressions that are
borrowed from foreign or from dead and artificially restored
civilisations; we demand from them a vivid expression and
reproduction of the impressions that are wrought into our
life. We do not ask sculpture or painting to invent exotic
or imaginary groups and scenes and landscapes, but to repro-
duce vividly and expressively the twelve apostles, St.
Michael, St. Christopher, Christ, the Virgin, or family por-
traits or pictures representing the city of our birth with the
dresses and celebrations and idiosyncracies which we think
will last forever. We do not ask the epic or drama to inter-

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

Extra-Logical Influences 355

est us by keeping us in ignorance of its climax or by the
novelty of its subject, we ask it to vividly reproduce the
legendary lore that we have known from childhood, the
death of Prometheus or Hercules, the misfortunes of CEdi-
pus, the drama of the creation from Lucifer to Christ or
Anti-Christ, the death of Roland, etc.

These are the two principal characteristics of art proper
in the ages of tradition. It may be seen that they are linked
together. The art of these ages is, I will not say industrial,
but professional, because it is formed by a slow accumulation
of aesthetic processes which are transmitted with useful direc-
tions from father to son, and the cause which has produced
this effect, that is to say, the habit of having one's heart and
mind always turned towards the past, towards one's fore-
bears and their subjective models, also makes it necessary for
art to be the living and magical mirror of a past that is itself
still living, of a past, in other terms, that is full of faith in
its own future existence, instead of being the factitious
resurrection of some extinct past or the translation of some
foreign works. In ages of fashion, on the contrary, it
must naturally happen that the forms of imported art
show themselves detached from their stem, since it is the
flower, and not the stem, that, in this case, attracts curios-
ity. Then art becomes handicraft more often than handi-
craft becomes art. And curiosity, the characteristic of
these epochs, demands a misleading and irritating kind of
satisfaction, which supplies it with a continuous stream of
invention, of invention to order and by formula, of novels
and dramas based upon fictitious happenings, of fantastic
pictures, of unheard-of-music, of eclectic movements,
Curious times want only artists of imagination; loving
and believing times want artists imbued with faith and
love.

We see that either because of its origin, or of its subject,
or of its inspiration, the art of fashion differs 'from the art
of custom. A difference that is, in many respects, analo-
gous, distinguishes the two corresponding kinds of moral-
ity. Their origin, in the first place, is quite distinct. The

356 Laws of Imitation

essentially religious virtues of tradition are the natural
flowering of the wants of the restricted group where they
blossom. Reflected virtues, namely those of a lower class
that seeks to appropriate to itself the moral qualities of an
aristocracy, those of a people which is taking moral or
immoral lessons from another, just as at the Restoration
England copied French morals, these reflected virtues are
an ethical veneer, an arbitrary decoration of the every-
day conduct which they overlie, but which is not in touch
with them. In such cases the borrowed virtues are even
unearthed from the past, but from a dead or fashion-
revived past. This phenomenon of moral mimicry, by which
fashion takes on a false air of custom, is not at all rare in
history. But moral reforms, where we see, for example,
virtues which had their raison d'etre among the Hebrew
patriarchs or the Christians of the primitive Church, re-
appearing in the midst of the sixteenth century in Europe,
are, in reality, innovations which have been born in the soul
of an apostle in love with a past which he fails to under-
stand, and which have subsequently spread abroad, thanks
to the general drawing of people's hearts into the ways
of free imitation. In this they absolutely resemble those
literary or artistic renascences, another kind of conven-
tional archaism, which have often been seen. The objects
and the motives of the two kinds of morality which I am
comparing are no less clearly distinguished. Customary
duties impose upon the individual certain sacrifices in view
of certain peculiar but permanent wants of his walled-in
and exclusive society, of his family, tribe, city, canton, or
state. Borrowed duties, conventional and so-called na-
tional duties, order the individual to sacrifice himself to
more general interests, to interests that are scattered among
a large number of men, but to interests which are often
more transient and less lasting. The man of traditional
times draws the power to accomplish the sacrifice that is
demanded of him from the hereditary solidarity which
makes him one with the series of generations in which he
is a single link, in such a way that, in dying for his family,

Extra-Logical Influences 357

for his tribe, or for his city, in order to contribute to the
immortality of the great collective person of which he
is a part, he thinks that he is devoting himself to himself.
Moreover, he usually draws this power from the promises of
his inherited and ancestral religion. This double source
of energy dries up partly or wholly for the man of an
innovating age. In such ages imitation frees itself from
heredity, and ties between kindred, between forebears and
descendants, are obliterated by the connections between the
unrelated individuals who are detached from their fam-
ilies x and brought together by the age. In such ages, the
clash of different religions or of religion and philosophy
tends to engender scepticism. But the men of these pe-
riods substitute for these losses in part an entirely new
development of the highest kind of moral energy, the senti-
ment of honour.

I mean honour, not in the sense of family and aristocracy,
but in the democratic and individual sense, in the modern
sense, since we are unquestionably passing through a period
of fashion-imitation, one which is pre-eminently remarka-
ble for its breadth and permanency. This second mean-
ing, dating from the Italian Renascence, according to
Buckle, must in reality have been formed wherever the

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

358 Laws of Imitation

spread of public morality was rapid through the lowering'
of certain social barriers. Why is it, we shall be asked,
that this desire for personal consideration must grow while
the antique bases of morality, the family and religion, are
being more and more undermined? Because the same
cause which shakes the latter to their foundations is fit
to consolidate and extend the former, I mean the progress
of communication and of the indefinitely accelerated cir-
culation of ideas in a domain that is being incessantly en-
larged far and beyond the walls of clans, classes, creeds,
or states. The substitution of fashion-imitation for cus-
tom-imitation results in breaking down pride of birth and
dogmatic belief, but it also results in arousing, through
the progressive assimilation of people's minds, the irre-
sistible power of public opinion. Now, what is honour
but a passive, spontaneous, and heroic obedience to public
opinion ?

We are witnesses to the birth and growth of this new
and potent motive, whenever a young conscript passes out
from the paternal roof to his regiment. At the end of
a short time, he no longer thinks of the father for whom he
had had a reverential fear, or of the field which he coveted,
or of the young girl whom he was courting with the idea
of founding a family; he thinks still less of the catechisings
of his curate. All the springs of his laborious honesty
and of his relatively pure morals have dried up. But his
morality has changed rather than degenerated, and what
he has lost in continence or in love of work he has re-
gained in courage and in probity, because in addition to
the thought of court-martial he has had to sustain him in
his life of barrack-room discipline and at his post of duty
on the field of battle the idea of avoiding, even at the price
of death, shame or humiliation in the eyes of his com-
rades. At the same time he is conscious of being useful
in the accomplishment of his new duties to a mass of men
who have just become his fellows, to the great country
which is assimilating him and for which he formerly cared
so little, absorbed as he was in his domestic preoccupations.

Extra-Logical Influences 359

To this I may add that if his new morality is adapted
to the care of more numerous, less personal, and more ex-
tensive interests, his old morality was fitted to watch over
less momentary and more lasting interests. In any case,
the effect of the sacrifices that are required by his new
duties reaches much farther, proportionally, in space than
in time, whereas, formerly, the sacrifices demanded of him
by his duties had a utility that was narrowly hemmed in
by his immediate surroundings, but that was relatively con-
siderably prolonged into the future. All the strictly do-
mestic and patriarchal, local and primitive virtues, female
chastity, for example, are privations that are undergone
for the advantage of a single family, to be sure, but for
the advantage of the whole posterity of that family. In-
versely, modern morality, which is very indulgent to the
vices for which our grandchildren will alone have to suffer,
blames severely the faults which may react harmfully upon
Our contemporaries, remote though these contemporaries
may be. In this, it seems as if the morality of ages of fash-
ion resembled their politics. Whatever may be the form of
their government, the statesman of to-day differ from those
of other days both in their enlarged horizon of watchful-
ness over a larger number of similar interests subject simul-
taneously to identical laws, and by their much shorter
range of foresight. Formerly the feudal king of the Isle-
de-France, shut up in his narrow domain, looked forward
from the start to the development in future ages of this
fine realm of France and he toiled painfully on in the pur-
suit of this future ideal. We have seen the kinglet of
petty Prussia sacrifice the present in his calculation of a far
distant, imperial future which his grandchildren, alas ! have
seen shine. Nowadays, would any political assembly in
any country whatsoever, beginning with Germany, consent to
sacrifice some actual interest in view of some benefit from
which only the second or third generation to follow would
profit? Far from that, it is to our descendants that we
charge up the bill of our debts and follies. I need not
explain, after all that has been said, how this striking con-

360 Laws of Imitation

trast, this offsetting by extension of abbreviations in dura-
tion, is related to the distinction between the two forms of
imitation.

But if it is true that every stream of fashion tends to
betake itself to the big and tranquil lake of custom, this
contrast can be but temporary. Without doubt, as long
as the stream flows, the prescriptions or interdictions of
morality will bear less and less upon acts that are useful or
prejudicial to our children or grandchildren alone, espe-
cially upon certain facts of conjugal fidelity or infidelity,
of filial piety or domestic waywardness, of cowardice or
patriotic bravery, which were considered in other days
cardinal virtues or capital crimes, but whose salutary or
disastrous effects are experienced only in the long run.
After me, the deluge, society will say. Unfortunately,
society might end by perishing from the too frequent reit-
eration of this phrase. Besides, we have reason for think-
ing that after a time of progressive but transitory short-
sightedness, collective forethought will begin again to ap-
ply itself to time after it has vent itself upon space, and
that nations will become as widely conscious of their per-
manent as of their general interests. The moment will
arrive when civilisation will, finally, at its culminating point,
draw back upon itself, just as it has already done so many
times in the course of history, in Egypt, in China, at
Rome, at Constantinople. . . . The past speaks for the
future. Then morality will become again, in many re-
spects, what it has been, distinguished for grandeur and
logic. Casuistry will spring up again in a more rational set-
ting. To the duties of honour, an artificial morality which
contents an age enslaved to a fickle public opinion, the duties
of conscience, as our fathers knew them, will succeed.
They will be as imperious, as absolute, as deeply rooted
in the human heart, but they will be superior in light and
reason. And at the same time, art, turning back from its
brilliant vagaries, will drench itself again in the profound
sources of faith and love.

There is much to be said in explanation of the historic

Extra-Logical Influences 361

phenomenon of renascences, the hybrid phenomenon of
fashion and custom, to which I referred above. It is a
subject which is a little distinct from that of the present
chapter, for in connection with it we do not see a new fash-
ion becoming in its turn a custom, but we see it taking on
the aspect of some ancient custom. This additional re-
lation of the two branches of imitation deserves to be
examined. In science and industry, an entirely new idea
and one that it gives itself out as new, can spread through
fashion; for in its birth it brings with it experimental
proofs of truth and utility. But the case is different in
the fine arts, in religion, in literature, in philosophy itself
up to a certain point, in statecraft, in morals, and, finally5
wherever the choice of solutions is abandoned in large
measure to the discretionary power of the judgment and is
unable to depend upon a rigid demonstration. In this case*
upon what authority, that of facts being pretty nearly lack-
ing, could fashion depend for the triumph of its novelties
over the old strongholds of custom? By what right is
she entitled to array the products of enterprising reason or
imagination against time-proved rules and ideas and insti-
tutions? | Therefore, if she wish to succeed, she must as-
sume the mask of the enemy and besiege existing custom
by unearthing some ancient custom long since fallen into
discredit and rejuvenated for the needs of her cause. And
so we see all religious reforms pretending, with more or
less complete sincerity, to return to the forgotten sources
of the religion upon which they were grafted. This was the
pretence of the protestantism of all the sects of the sixteenth
century, the first century to inaugurate the grande mode of
modern times. It was also the pretence of the Mussulman
sect of the Ouahabites, which was born in the eighteenth
century and which spread and is still spreading in Asia
and Africa, where it boasts of steeping Islam again in
the primitive Koran (see Revue scientifique, November 5,
1887). And this is the pretence of all the sects which
swarm over the old but still fruitful trunks of Hindooism
and Brahmanism and which think that they are restoring

362 Laws of Imitation

the antique religion of India to its original state. This
was also the thought of Buddhism, the Protestantism of
the East.

If this is so with religious reforms, it is no less so with
reforms in literature or art. When fresh sap begins to cir-
culate in the souls of artists and poets, it is under the form
of a renascence of some distant past which it interprets
to the outer world. Shall I cite the humanism of the Italian
Renascence, the Ciceronianism of Erasmus, the neo-Hellen-
ism or neo-Latinism of the architects and sculptors and
painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the neo-
Gothic flavour of the romanticism of 1830? From the time
of Hadrian, the craze for Latin poetry, which had raged
among the upper classes at Rome from the time of Augus-
tus, and which had spread step by step to the provinces,
began to subside. Why? Because a new fashion put in
its appearance, that of the new Greek sophists, whose art
had been born again — a true renascence, indeed, — and
had aroused admiration and, later on, general imita-
tion. This fascination lasted a long time and produced
a factitious and, likewise, archaic reawakening of Greek
patriotism.

The same thing is true of legislative reform. The top of
fashion, in this connection, was a fashion which, in the six-
teenth century, made all the codes of Europe uniform. It
consisted of unearthing the Corpus Juris and of introducing
under cover of the Roman name all the salutary or perni-
cious usurpations of lawmakers or kings or emperors. The
same thing is even true of political reforms. Sometimes this
is obvious. The French parliament, for example, in in-
augurating an entirely new and original control of the royal
power by judicial authority, invoked the antique customs
of the Franks and imagined that they were resurrecting
the political constitution that they saw in their dreams.
At other times, although it is less obvious, it is none the
less true. Even the French Revolution prided itself upon
copying Athens and Sparta. Finally, the very boldest of
philosophers, men who were the least respectful of prece-

Extra-Logical Influences 363

dents, our French Encyclopedists, judged that the support
that logic seemed to lend to their plans of social recon-
struction was insufficient; and the at times sincere desire
to rediscover the forgotten attributes of the human race,
to reproduce in its primal purity the supposed state of
nature, combines in their writing, as well as it can, with
their cult of Reason. A great deal of prehistoric archaeology
is mixed up with their idealogy.

Moreover, renascences, let me repeat, are more apparent
than real. Burckhardt shows that the resurrection of an-
tiquity was only one of the innovations of the fiftenth cen-
tury in Italy, of the Italian Renascence, and that, in its
re-birth, Greek and Latin antiquity was strongly Italianised.
Besides, this innovation was only a fashion following, like
any other, in the tail of certain discoveries, namely, the
archaeological discoveries resulting from the diggings in the
sacred soil of antique Rome or in the libraries of the mon-
asteries. Prior to these numerous finds of statues, inscrip-
tions, manuscripts, and ruins of all kinds, antiquity may
well have been taken on faith and admired, but it could not
have been imitated.

The Reformation, I may say, was only a German Re-
nascence, just as the Renascence was only an Italian Refor-
mation. The return to life and youth which Italy exacted
from the old classical antiquity that she was said to be
imitating, Germany demanded from its alleged and still
more imaginary imitation of primitive Christianity. (It
would be a mistake, between parentheses, to see in the first
of these two movements merely the prelude of the second.
The Humanists were merely the chance allies of the Luther-
ans. As a matter of fact, each movement was a complete
evolution in itself. The Renascence was not, as has been
said, a superficial revolution of people's souls; it was, for
a narrow group of souls reared in the aristocracy of art
and intellect, a profound dechristianisation which, under-
neath the Reformation, was to spread among us in the
eighteenth century.) As the Renascence was connected
with discoveries in arts and letters, so the Reformation pro-

364 Laws of Imitation

ceeded, in large part, from the invention of printing. The
idea of acquiring by the mere reading of sacred books the
highest type of knowledge, a full solution of the most
difficult problems, could only have arisen when the sudden
and extraordinary diffusion and invasion of books, hitherto
unknown, had developed a general epidemic of reading and
of the illusion of thinking that books were the source of all
truth. It was perhaps because of this, Germany being the
birthplace of printing, that Protestantism was German in
its origin. Otherwise, this fact would be surprising, for,
prior to the Reformation, all great heresies, all attempted
rebellions against the Church, started from the South of
Europe, a more civilised region than the North.

Fashion and custom have still another relation of which
I have not spoken, and which requires to be distinguished
both from the revival of an antique custom by a recent
fashion and from the consolidation of a fashion into a
custom. I refer to the very frequent cases in which a
new fashion creeps, in order to introduce itself, under a still
living custom which it insensibly changes and appropriates
to itself.

For example, it has been noted that long after
the importation of bronze among communities that had
previously been restricted to the chipping of flints, bronze
tools and weapons were made to imitate the forms of en-
tirely outworn tools and weapons of flint. It has also been
proved that Greek architecture is explained by the reproduc-
tion in stone or marble of the peculiarities of the huts of
the primitive populations of Hellas, The most ornate
columns of the temples of Miletus or Athens were modelled
upon ancient wooden structures. The architectural type
of China is explained by the primitive tent. What does
this mean but the grafting of new fashions upon the still
living trunk of old customs? Does it not imply the neces-
sity of this grafting among societies based on custom, and is
it not, above all, an act of art and of morality in order to
make innovations live and endure? When the fashion of
iron or marble was introduced after the example of foreign

Extra-Logical Influences 365

peoples, the only way it could become acclimated was
through adopting the uniform of national usages.

An entirely parallel phenomenon is produced when new
maxims or sentiments of morality filter into a social group
whose horizon tends to enlarge and, in order to make them-
selves acceptable, have to have themselves introduced by the
very prejudices whose place they are taking. Thus in a
clan where only contracts between blood relations have
ever been recognised as valid, contracts are made with
strangers by means of such ceremonies as the intermingling
of drops of blood to counterfeit consanguinity. Thus,
when the feudal disintegration of the Middle Ages began
to give way to monarchical centralisation, the duty of
fidelity to the king, which was soon to be substituted for the
duty of the vassal towards his over-lord, began by affecting
a feudal colour, and seemed to express nothing more than
a more general tie of vassalage, etc.

CHAPTER VIII

REMARKS AND COROLLARIES

AFTER having studied the principal laws of imitation we
have still to make their general meaning clear, to complete
them by certain observations, and to point out several im-
portant consequences which proceed from them.

/The supreme law of imitation seems to be its tendency
towards indefinite progression. This immanent and im-
mense kind of ambition 1 is the soul of the universe. It
expresses itself, physically, in the conquest of space by light,
vitally, in the claim of even the humblest species to cover
the entire globe with its kind. It seems to impel every dis-
covery or innovation, however futile, including the most
insignificant individual innovations, to scatter itself through
the whole of the indefinitely broadened social field. But
unless this tendency be backed up by the coming together

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

366

Remarks and Corollaries 367

of inventions which are logically and Ideologically auxil-
iary, or by the help of the prestige which belongs to al-
leged superiorities, it is checked by the different obstacles
which it has successively to overcome or to turn aside. These
obstacles are the logical and teleological contradictions
which are opposed to it by other inventions, or the barriers
which have been raised up by a thousand causes, by racial
pride and prejudice, for the most part, between different
families and tribes and peoples and, within each people or
tribe, between different classes. Consequently, if a good
idea is introduced in one of these groups, it propagates
itself without any difficulty until it finds itself stopped short
by the group's frontiers. Fortunately, this arrest is only
a slowing up. It is true that, at first, in the case of class
barriers, a happy innovation which has happened to origi-
nate and make its way in a lower class, does not, dur-
ing periods of hereditary aristocracy and of physio-
logical inequality, so to speak, spread further, unless the
advantage of adopting it appear plain to the higher classes;
but, on the other hand, innovations which have been made
or accepted by the latter classes easily reach down, as I
have shown already, to those lower levels which are accus-
tomed to feel their prestige. And it happens that, as a
result of this prolonged descent, the lower strata gradually
mount up, step by step, to swell the highest ranks with their
successive increments. Thus, through assimilating them-
selves with their models, the copies come to equal them, that
is, they become capable of becoming models in their turn,
while assuming a superiority which is no longer hereditary,
which is no longer centred in the whole person, but which
is individual and vicarious. The march of imitation from
top to bottom still goes on, but the inequality which it
implies has changed in character. Instead of an aristo-
cratic, intrinsically organic inequality, we have a demo-
cratic inequality, of an entirely social origin, which we may
call inequality if we wish, but which is really a reciprocity
of invariably impersonal prestiges, alternating from individ-
ual to individual and from profession to profession. In

368 Laws of Imitation

this way, the field of imitation has been constantly growing
and freeing itself from heredity.

In the second place, in regard to barriers between fami-
lies, tribes, or peoples, it is equally true that while the knowl-
edge or institutions or beliefs or industries which belong
to any group while it is powerful and triumphant, spread
without difficulty to neighbouring groups that have been
conquered and brought low; on the other hand, the examples
of the weak and vanquished, if we except the case of those
whose civilisation is obviously superior, are practically non-
existent for their conquerors. Hence it follows, paren-
thetically, that war is much more of a civiliser for the
conquered than for the conqueror, for the latter does not
deign to learn from the former, whereas the former submits
himself to the ascendency of victory and borrows from his
enemy a number of fruitful ideas to add to his national store.
The Egyptians took nothing from the books of the captive
Hebrews. They made a great mistake. Whereas the Jews
gained much inspiration from the hieroglyphics of their
masters. But, as I have said, when a people dominates
others through its brilliancy, others, who heretofore had
imitated none but their forefathers, imitate it. Now, this
extra-national propagation of imitation, to which I have
given the name of fashion, is, at bottom, merely the appli-
cation to the relations between states of the law which
governs the relations between classes. Thanks to the in-
vasion of fashion, imitation always descends from the
state which is for the time being superior to those which
are for the time inferior, just as it descends from the high-
est to the lowest rungs of the social ladder. Conse-
quently, we shall not be surprised to see the rule of fashion
producing effects in the former case similar to those pro-
duced by it in the matter. In effect, just as the radiation of
the examples of the higher classes results in preparing the
way for their enlargement, where imitation is facile and
reciprocal, through the absorption of the lower classes by
them, so the contagious prestige of preponderating states
results in preparing the way for their extension, for the

Remarks and Corollaries 369

extension of states which were originally families, then
tribes, and, later, cities and nations, and which have been
constantly enlarged through the assimilation of neighbours
whom they have annexed, or through the annexation of
neighbours whom they have assimilated.

Another analogy. Just as the play of imitation from top
to bottom leads, in its continuation, to so-called democratic
equality, that is to say, to the fusion of all classes into one,
in which reciprocal imitation is admirably practised through
the acceptance of one another's respective superiorities, so
a prolonged process of fashion-imitation ends by putting
pupil-peoples upon the same level, both in their armaments
and in their arts and sciences, with their master-people. It
creates a kind of federation between them like that which is
called in modern times, for example, the European balance
of power. By this is meant the reciprocity of every kind
of service or exchange which goes on incessantly between
the different great centres which divide up European civ-
ilisation. In this way, in international relations, the free and
unimpeded domain of imitation has been enlarged with
scarcely an interruption.

But, at the same time, Tradition and Custom, the con-
servative forms of imitation, have been fixing and perpet-
uating its new acquisitions and consolidating its incre-
ments in the heart of every class of people that has been
raised up through the example of higher classes or of more
civilised neighbours. At the same time, too, every germ
of imitation which may have been secreted in the brain of
any imitator in the form of a new belief or aspiration, of
a new idea or faculty, has been steadily developing in out-
ward signs, in words and acts which, according to the law
of the march from within to without, have penetrated into
his entire nervous and muscular systems.

Here then we have the laws of the preceding chapters
in focus from the same point of view. Through them,
the tendency of imitation, set free from generation, to-
wards geometric progression, expresses and fulfils itself more
and more. Every act of imitation, therefore, results in

370 Laws of Imitation

the preparation of conditions that will make possible and
that will facilitate new acts of imitation of an increasingly
free and rational and, at the same time, precise and definite
character. These conditions are the gradual suppression
of caste, class, and nationality barriers and, I may add, the
lessening of distances through more rapid means of loco-
motion, as well as through greater density of population.
This last condition is realised in the degree that fruitful,
that is to say, widely imitated, agricultural or industrial in-
ventions, and the equally fruitful discovery of new lands
promote the world-wide circulation of the most inventive
and, at the same time, the most imitative races. Let us
suppose that all these conditions are combined and that
they are fulfilled in the highest degree. Then, wherever
a happy initiative might show itself in the whole mass of
humanity, its transmission by imitation would be almost
instantaneous, like the propagation of a wave in a perfectly
elastic medium. We are approaching this strange ideal.
Already, in certain special phases, where the most essential
of the conditions which I have indicated happen to be
combined, social life reveals the reality of the aforesaid
tendency. We see it, for example, in the world of scholars,
who, although they are widely scattered, are in constant
touch with one another through multiple international com-
munications. We see it, too, in the perpetual and universal
contact of merchants. Haeckel said in an address delivered
in 1882 on the success of Darwin's theories: "The prodi-
gious influence which the decisive victory of the evolutionary
idea exercises over all the sciences, an influence which grows
in geometric progression year by year, opens out to us the
most consoling perspectives." In fact, the success of Dar-
win and Spencer has been amazingly swift. As for the
rapidity of commercial imitation as soon as it is given free
scope, it has been a matter for observation in every period,
not merely in our own. Read in Ranke the description of the
progress of Antwerp from 1550 to 1566. During those six-
teen years the commerce of that city with Spain doubled;
with Portugal, Germany, and France it was more than

Remarks and Corollaries 371

tripled; with England, it increased twenty- fold! Unfortu-
nately, war put an end to this prosperity. But in such inter-
mittent flights we see the steady force which pushes on to
indefinite commercial expansion.

It is now proper to bring to light a general observation,
a special side of which I have just been indicating in point-
ing out the passing of unilateral into reciprocal imitation.
The mere play of imitation has resulted, then, not only in
extending it, but in making it two-sided as well. Now, this
effect which imitation produces upon itself, it also produces
upon many other connections between people. Ultimately
it transforms all unilateral into mutual relations.

We ceased long ago to believe in Rousseau's " social con-
tract." We know that far from having been the first tie
between human wills, contract was a bond of slow formation,
that it took centuries of subjection to the empire of the
coercive decree, of the passively obeyed command, to sug-
gest the idea of the reciprocal decree, as it were, of the com-
plex bond by which two wills are linked together in alternate
command and obedience. Nevertheless, many people still be-
lieve, although the error is quite similar, that exchange
was the first step taken by mankind. This was not
so at all. Before the idea of exchanging came that
of present making or that of thieving, much simpler rela-
tions.1 Perhaps you also believe that at the very outset men
talked, discussed, and interchanged ideas with one another
like the shepherds of an eclogue? Now, this exchange did
not occur in primitive times any more than did that of men's
products. Discussion presupposes the concession on both

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

372 Laws of Imitation

sides of the right of mutual enlightenment; but before that
it presupposes the possession of truth, that is to say, of an
individual perception or opinion which attributes to itself
the rightful power of being recognised by all normal minds.
Would the idea of this kind of power be possible without the
preliminary experience of such power as exercised by a
father, priest, or teacher? Is it not dogma that has alone
made possible the conception of truth? In the same way,
if some reader of idyls were inclined to think that primitive
men, even the gentlest savages, were familiar with courtesy
and mutual consideration, he should be shown the proofs
that urbanity in France and everywhere else, born as it was
'of the non-reciprocal homages and compliments paid to
chiefs, over-lords, and kings, is the gradual vulgarising, as
history clearly shows, of this one-sided flattery as it becomes
a mutual thing in its expansion. Alas! We cannot even
believe that war, if by that word we mean the exchange of
blows inflicted by weapons, which are more or less alike,
was the first international relation between human groups.
The chase, that is to say, the destruction or expulsion of
some defenceless being, of a peaceful tribe by a brigand
horde, preceded anything worthy of the name of war.1

Now, how did the human chase come to make way for
human warfare? How did flattery come to make way for
courtesy, credulity for free enquiry, dogmatism for mutual
instruction ? Docility for voluntary agreement and absolut-
ism for self-government ? Privilege for equality before the
law, present-making or theft for exchange,2 slavery for in-

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

* In the beginning the administration of the sacrament was gratu-
itous; it was an out-and-out gift. (On this subject see Paul Viollet,
Histoire du droit frangais, p. 385). " Little by little, communities came
to respond to these gifts with others, with presents that were sponta-
neous, and not in the least obligatory, until, finally, these offerings
came to be dues. Fire-insurance companies are societies for mutual aid.
They date back to 1786 under this reciprocal form. But they were pre-
ceded by non-mutual benefit societies, by systematic almsgiving for the

Remarks and Corollaries 373

dustrial co-operation ? And, finally, primitive marriage, the
one-sided appropriation of the wife by the husband, for mar-
riage as we know it, the appropriation of the wife by the
husband and of the husband by the wife? I answer : through
the slow and inevitable effect of imitation, of imitation under
all its forms. It will be easy to quickly prove this. I need
do nothing more than indicate the transitory phases that
have been traversed in the course of the above transforma-
tions.

In the beginning, one man always monopolises the power
and the right to teach; no one disputes it to him. Every-
thing that he says must be believed by all, and he alone has
the right to deliver oracles. But at last the desire arises
among those who have drunk in with the greatest credulity
the words of their master, to be infallible like him, to re-
semble him in that particular as well. Hence those efforts
of genius on the part of philosophers which will end one day
by bringing about the recognition of every individual's right
to spread his own particular faith and to evangelise even his
pristine masters. But before this they must limit themselves
to more humble pretensions ; and imitation of the theologians
is so thoroughly the spirit of their dissimulated revolt that
they feel happy if, while they submit without discussion to
dogma, although to dogma which is for the first time
hemmed into a particularly assigned sphere, they succeed in
dogmatising in their own little domain by imposing upon
scholars and scientists certain capital ideas which are laid
down as incontrovertible, the theories of Aristotle or Plato,
for example, in as much as they are not contrary to religious
faith. On the other hand, at the same period of transition,
scientists who also bow down to a certain extent under the
metaphysical yoke, know how to dogmatise in their turn.
It is a series of dogmatic rebounds which make evident the
need of imitation from which this singular stage of thought

benefit of sufferers from fire (see Babeau, La Ville sous I'ancien regime,
II, 146). The right of divorce began by being one-sided, to the
exclusive advantage of the husband, before it became reciprocal, etc.

374 Laws of Imitation

proceeds. It is nevertheless true that the emancipation of
human reason comes from the same source. In fact, there
is something contradictory and artificial in the attitude of
the mind which already feels its own power, but which, be-
lieving in its right to impose its convictions without discus-
sion upon others, nevertheless believes that it is its duty to
accept without examination the convictions of others. So
much timidity is inconsistent with so much pride. And so
the time comes when a bolder and more logical mind con-
ceives the desire of dogmatising without restriction, of
asserting and imposing its convictions both above and
below. Its example is at once followed, and discussion be-
comes general. Free thought is nothing else but the mutual
conflict and mutual restraint of many such self-asserting,
contradictory individual infallibilities.

Originally, one man commands and the others obey.
Authority, like instruction, is monopolised by the father or
the teacher. The rest of the group has no other function
but to obey. But this autocratic authority becomes an object
of envy. The ambitious among those that are ruled over
conceive the idea of reconciling their subjection with their
craving for power. At first they dream of limiting, of cir-
cumscribing the authority exerted over them by their rulers,
then of diverting it, still in a limited and definite form, to the
subjects next in rank. We have here a hierarchy of limited
but indisputable commanding powers. The feudal system
was the realisation of this idea on the greatest scale. But,
as a matter of fact, the military organisation of any period
is its most obvious incarnation, and this example shows us
that the conception in question, just as the preceding and
analogous conception, that of the hierarchy of dogmatic
systems, answers to a permanent need in societies, their need
of patriotic defence or of educating their children.
Later on, however, men dare more, they wish to be able to
command in certain respects those whom in other respects
they obey and vice versa, or to be able to command for a
time those who have been or who will be obeyed at another
time. This reciprocity is obtained by recruiting the men in

Remarks and Corollaries 375

the public service from all classes, by rotation in office, and
by the right of universal suffrage. The mere fact of voting
implies on the part of the voter a pledge to submit to whom-
soever may be elected and in this way imparts to the decrees
of the latter a character of tacit contract. Can the popular
sovereignty which is formed in this way be said to be any-
thing else but kingly sovereignty multiplied into millions of
examples? Without the example of the latter, as it is
notably embodied in Louis XIV, would the former have ever
been conceived ?

All social changes or advances which have been effected
by the substitution of the reciprocal for the unilateral rela-
tion, and which I deem consequences of the action of imita-
tion, are attributed by Spencer to the replacement of
" militancy " by " industrialism." But the development of
industry itself is subject to the law in question. In fact, the
first germ of industry is unpaid slave labour or the labour
of woman, the born slave of primitive man. The Arab, for
example, is waited on, nourished, dressed, and even lodged
by his numerous wives, just as the Roman was by his slaves.
For this reason polygny is as necessary to him as our
numerous tradesmen to us. The relations between producer
and consumer begin, then, like those between father and son
or between husband and wife, by being abusive. But by
dint of working gratis for others, the slave aspires to make
someone work gratis for himself, and, thanks to a gradual
restriction in the power of his masters in no longer control-
ling all his acts or all his time, he ends by accumulating
savings which first enable him to buy his freedom and then
to purchase one or more slaves, his victims in turn. Had he
dreamed only of freedom, he would have hastened to enjoy
it in isolation, providing for his own wants himself. But, as
a matter of fact, he copies the wants of his ancient masters;
in the satisfaction of these wants, he wishes to be served, like
them, by others; and as this condition becomes more and
more general, the times comes when all these ancient emanci-
pated slaves, all of whom pretend to have slaves, alternately
or mutually serve one another. Hence division of labour

376 Laws of Imitation

and industrial co-operation.1 Of course, let it be said once
for all, the desire of imitation would not have succeeded in
effecting either the aforesaid transformations or those I am
about to mention had not certain inventions or discoveries
made them possible. The invention of the water-mill, for
example, in lightening slave labour to a considerable degree,
prepared the way for the slave's emancipation; and, in
general, if a sufficient number of machines had not been suc-
cessively invented, we might still have slaves in our midst.
Scientific discoveries, notably astronomical ones, have alone
given the opportunity to individual reason to fight advan-
tageously against dogmatic authority. Juristic discoveries
or inventions, the dictation of new legal formulas by writers
or publicists, have alone permitted national sovereignty to
manifold and thereby replace the sovereignty of royalty. But
it is nevertheless true that the desire to imitate the superior,
to be, like him, believed in, obeyed, and waited upon, was an
immense, although latent, force which urged on the trans-
formations I have mentioned; and it needed only the neces-
sary accident of these inventions or discoveries to be devel-
oped.

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

Remarks and Corollaries 377

Let us continue. The chase of man is, as I have said, the
first international relation. A tribe, a folk, thanks to the
discovery of some new weapon or of some new improvement
of which it has the secret, exterminates or subjugates all its
neighbours. Such undoubtedly were the rapid conquests of
the ancient metal-possessing Aryans over the smooth- or
rough-stone peoples; such were the American " settlements "
of Europeans among the ill-fated Indians, a people without
horses or game-supplying guns. Now, how was true war-
fare, a two-sided chase, according to the usage of civilised
nations, substituted for this one-sided warfare, so to speak?
Through the imitative spread among all these peoples of the
weapons and tactics which had led to the triumph of one of
their number. But they dream of imitating this conqueror
still further, they seek to obtain a military monopoly like
him, to discover some overpowering weapon which will
make them invincible and will again reduce war to a chase.
Fortunately, this dream has never been fulfilled except in a
slight degree, although the Prussians with their needle-rifles
did in fact treat the Austrians at Sadowa as a sportsman
does a rabbit. As an intermediate stage between these two
terms of evolution, I may mention certain barbarous epochs
in which a people which has been completely overthrown
and made tributary consoles itself for its defeat by crushing
without a motive one of its more feeble neighbours and
making it in turn pay tribute. In Gaul, in Csesar's time, cer-
tain peoples were clients of others, an international arrange-
ment which could be defined as the feudal system applied to
inter-state relations.

I have kept to the last an example which, although it is
the least important, is the best fitted to illustrate the truth
of my ideas. In a democratic society, a society which has
always been preceded by aristocratic, monarchical, or theo-
cratic rule, we may see the people in the street bow to one
another, address one another with mutual politeness, and
shake hands with one another. Whence come these usages ?
I leave to Spencer the task of pointing out in a masterly way
the royal or religious source of all this and of showing how;

378 Laws of Imitation

the prostration of the whole body became slowly transformed
into a slight inclination of the figure or uncovering of the
head. Let me add that if removing the hat is but the much
modified survival of the primitive obeisance, it is also the
mutualised form of the latter. I may say as much of the
homage or flattery of the court whose crude incense, burned
on the altar of the mighty, suffocates us when a puff of it
reaches us over the distance of a century or two in the dedi-
cation of some old book. The compliments which well-bred
people pay each other to-day are far from being so exag-
gerated, but they have the advantage of being reciprocal.
So, too, are those visits which were formerly, in their char-
acter of homage, unilateral. Politeness is merely reciprocity
of flattery. Moreover, we know beyond a doubt that the
desire of the petty potentate for ambassadors, of the marquis
for pages, of the courtier for a court, that the general need
of being flattered, waited on, and saluted like a nobleman,
was the secret factor which little by little, in France and
elsewhere, made every man polite. It began with the court,
then reached the city, then the chateaux, and then all classes
to the very lowest. The urbanity which characterised the
ancient regime from the time of Louis XIV was the inter-
mediate state, analogous to the transitory phases that were
referred to above. Each of the innumerable ranks into
which the society of that period was broken up forced the
rank below it to pay it gratuitious courtesies, visits and obei-
sances, which it did not return.1 It was a hierarchy of
impertinences, as La Bruyere observes somewhere. But as

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

Remarks and Corollaries 379

we near the close of this vanished world, we perceive that
courtesies are becoming mutual and that " equality " is
approaching. In fact, of all the levelling methods that have
been invented in the course of civilisation perhaps none is as
powerful and as inconspicuous as that of politeness in man-
ners and customs. What Cicero said of friendship, amicitia
pares aut facit aut invenit, applies perfectly to urbanity and
especially to the life of polite society. The drawing room
admits equals only or equalises those whom it admits.
Through this latter feature, it constantly tends to diminish,
even outside of itself, those social inequalities which within
it are immediately effaced. When hierarchical functionaries
of very unequal rank meet very frequently in society, their
relations show the effects of it even during the interval
between their social meetings. Polite manners are even
superior to railroads in overcoming distances, not only
between civil or military functionaries, but also between
classes which eventually draw nearer to one another by virtue
of bowing to or shaking hands with one another. In our
changing society thousands of people are daily flattered
by hearing themselves addressed as sir or madam. In this,
as in so many other respects, in its countenance of the rules
of fashion, in its devotion to the philosophic ideas of the
eighteenth century, the nobility of the old regime helped to
undermine its own foundations and " buried itself in its
triumph."

II

The preceding considerations upon the transition of the
unilateral to the reciprocal lead us quite naturally to treat
of a question of greater interest and of one which should
have been handled by sociologists, I mean the problem of
what is reversible and what irreversible in history.1 Every-

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

380 Laws of Imitation

body feels that in certain respects a society can pass in a
precisely opposite direction through certain phases that it
has already traversed, but that in other respects it is cut off
from any such regression. We have seen above that after
having passed from custom to fashion, communities can go
back from fashion to custom — to custom that has broad-
ened, out, to be sure, never to that which has been narrowed
in; — but can they, after they have substituted reciprocal for
unilateral relations, retrograde from the former to the
latter? They cannot, and for a reason that I have already
implied. " Monopolies," Cournot very justly remarks,
" great trading or fighting corporations, the slave trade,
negro slavery, and all the colonial institutions which go with
it, are things for which the world has no further wish, which
have disappeared or which are about to disappear, without
our being able to think that they will ever return any more
than the slavery or the forum of antiquity or than mediseval
feudalism." This is true, but upon what is this conviction
based ? The reason should be stated, and yet Cournot does
not state it. We have learned that this necessary and irre-
versible transition from monopoly to commercial freedom,
from slavery to exchange of services, etc., is a corollary of
the laws of imitation. Now, these laws may cease to act,
either in part or in whole, and, in this case, a society perishes
partially or completely; but the laws cannot be reversed.

Again, is it conceivable for a great empire, like the Roman
Empire of Marcus Aurelius, to turn about and become first
an Italian republic Hellenised by a Scipio, then an unculti-
vated and fanatical republic governed by a Cato, then a little
barbarous village organised by a Numa? Or can it even
be conceived that after having passed from a violent to an
astute and voluptuous state of criminality, as is always the
case, and from crimes to vices, a society ceases to be vicious
to again become austere and sanguinary? We could as well
conceive of an adult organism retrograding from maturity to
youth, from youth to infancy, and ending by returning to the
ovum from which it issued, or of a burnt-out star, like the
moon, setting itself to retraversing the exhausted series of

Remarks and Corollaries 381

its ancient geological periods or of its vanished faunas and
floras. Dissolution is never, in spite of Spencer's opinion to
the contrary, the symmetrical pendant of evolution. Does
that mean that the world has really one direction and one
goal, or, rather, that all reality, in its constant discontent,
with its destiny and in its preference for the unknown or
even for annihilation as against its own past, refuses pri-
marily to relive its life, to retrace its path ?

I hasten to add that, on one of its important sides, histor-
ical reversibility or irreversibility cannot be explained by the
laws of imitation alone. Successive inventions and discov-
eries, which imitation lays hold of in order to spread them
abroad, do not follow one another accidentally. A rational
tie which we do not need to dwell upon here, but which has
been clearly pointed out by Auguste Comte in his concep-
tion of the development of the sciences and which has
been definitely traced out by Cournot, in his masterly treatise
upon L ' Enchainement des idees fondamentales, binds them
to one another ; and we cannot but admit that to a large ex-
tent their order, the order, for example, of mathematical dis-
coveries from Pythagoras to us, might have been inverted.
Here, irreversibility is based upon the laws of inventive
logic, and not upon those of imitation.

Let us stop for a moment to justify, in passing, the dis-
tinction that I have just drawn. yThe order of successive
inventions is distinct from the order of successive imitations,
although imitation does mean imitation of invention. The
laws, in fact, which govern the first of these two series should
not be confused with those, even the logical ones, which
govern the second. It is not necessary for all imitations
of inventions to pass through the terms of the irreversible
series which inventions, whether they be imitated or not,
must necessarily traverse one by one. We could, if put to
it, conceive of a succession of inventions, which were logic-
ally antecedent to the final consummate one, unfolding in
one and the same master mind; and, as a matter of fact, it
is seldom that an inventor does not climb up several obscure
rungs in such a ladder before reaching the illustrious step.

382 Laws of Imitation

The laws of invention belong essentially to individual logic;
the laws of imitation belong in part to social logic. More-
over, just as imitation does not fall exclusively within social
logic, but depends upon extra-logical influence as well, is
it not obvious that invention itself is produced mentally,
through conditions which are not alone the apparition of
premises in the mind of which it is the logical conclusion, but
which are also other associations of ideas, called inspiration,
intuition, genius?

Meanwhile, let us not forget that every invention and
every discovery consists in the interference in somebody's
mind of certain old pieces of information that have generally
been handed down by others. What did Darwin's thesis about
natural selection amount to? To having proclaimed the
fact of competition among living things ? No, but in having
for the first time combined this idea with the ideas of vari-
ability and heredity.1 The former idea, as it was proclaimed
by Aristotle, remained sterile until it was associated with the
two latter ideas. From that as a starting point, we may say
that the generic term, of which invention is but a species,
is the fruitful interference of repetitions. If this be true, I
may perhaps be allowed to set forth, without emphasis, an
hypothesis which occurs to me at this point. However
numerous may be the different kinds of things which are
repeated, if we suppose that the centres of these repetitive
radiations, otherwise known as inventions or the biological
or physical analogues of inventions, be regularly placed,
their interferences may be foreseen; and these interferences
or new centres will themselves present as much regularity
in their disposition as did the primary centres. In such a
universe, everything, however complex it might be, would
be regular; nothing would either be or seem accidental. If,
on the contrary, we assume that the primitive centres are
irregular in position, the position of the secondary centres
will also be unordered and their irregularity will equal that
of the primary centres. Thus, there will never be in the world

* See Giard's article in the Revue scientifique, December i, 1888.

Remarks and Corollaries 383

anything but the same quantity of irregularity, so to speak,
only it will appear under the most changing forms. Let me
add that, in spite of all, these changing forms must have a
certain indefinable likeness. The original irregularity is
reflected in its enlarged copies, the derived irregularities.
From this I conclude that, although the idea of Repetition
dominates the whole universe, it does not constitute it. For
the bottom of it, I think, is a certain sum of innate, eternal,
and indestructible diversity without which the world would
be as monotonous as it is vast. Stuart Mill was led by his
reflections to a similar postulate.

Whatever may be said of the conjecture which I have
just hazarded, I am sure that there must be a combination
of the two kinds of laws which I have pointed out to entirely
explain the irreversible character of even the simplest social
transformations. Let us take, for example, the changes in
dress in France during the last three centuries and let us
suppose them to have occurred in an inverse order. The
hypothesis seems acceptable, a priori; at least it seems to
involve no greater contradiction than the idea of playing a
melody backwards, beginning with the last note and ending
with the first. Parenthetically, it is a strange thing that in this
way an entirely new melody is produced which, without hav-
ing anything in common with the original one, is sometimes
satisfactory to one's ear. But imagine the courtiers of Louis
XIV dressed in the black coat and waistcoat, in the trousers
and silk hat of our present fashions. Imagine the trousers
gradually replaced by knickerbockers, the short hair by wigs,
the coats by embroidered, gilded, and many-coloured suits
with side-swords, and our democratic contemporaries decked
out like the followers of the Sun-King! It would be gro-
tesque. There would be such an inconsistency between a
man's exterior and his ideas, between the succession of cos-
tumes and that of events, opinions, and customs, that it is
useless to dwell upon the impossibility of the thing. It is
impossible, because the events, the opinions and the customs
of which the clothes should be, up to a certain point, the
expression, are linked together from the time of Louis XIV

384 Laws of Imitation

by a certain logic whose laws, as well as the laws of imita-
tion, are opposed to the reversing of their melody, so to speak.
This is so true that our hypothetical inversion would be in-
finitely less absurd if it were a question of women's clothes.
We could, at a pinch, without making any other change in
modern history, imagine the court ladies of the seventeenth
century wearing the dresses and even the hats of the fashion-
able ladies of the nineteenth century. We could imagine
that they were followed by the crinoline and then by the high
Greek bodice of Mme. Recamier and Mme. Tallien, and
that these metamorphoses led our contemporaries to dress
like Mme. de Maintenon or to arrange their hair like Mile.
de Fontange. It would be a little strange, but it would not
be out of the question. And yet how is it that the current of
women's fashions can be conceived of as turned back, with-
out its being necessary to think of the current of customs
and ideas as reversed also, whereas this is not true of men's
fashions? This can undoubtedly be explained because of
women's infinitely smaller participation in political and intel-
lectual work; because of their dominant interest at all times
and places in being physically pleasing, and because of the
fundamental immutability of their nature which, in spite of
their love of change, rebels against the wear of civilisation.
But let us note the fact that for women, as for men, it is
impossible to conceive of a reversion from extreme com-
plexity to primitive simplicity in that succession of inven-
tions relating to weaving which has brought us goods of a
more and more varied and intricate character. The laws of
logic forbid it. In the same way they forbid us to suppose
that the series of weapons which has reached us from the
Middle Ages might have been reversed and that we might
have passed from the needle-rifle to the flint-gun, to arque-
buses, to cross-bows and long-bows, or from Krupp gun
to culverin or balista. Besides, the laws of imitation show
us the impossibility of admitting that after either men's or
women's clothes had been, according to hypothesis, more
or less alike in cut and material for all classes and provinces
in France under Louis XIV, just as they are in our day, they

Remarks and Corollaries 385

could gradually become differentiated in different classes and
in different parishes as of yore. This is inadmissible,1 even
were we to suppose at the same time that all our telegraphs
and railroads had been destroyed after having existed under
Louis XIV, and had carried away with them the intense
desires for affiliation and assimilation to which they had
given birth. For such a violent death on the part of our
civilisation would reduce all its imitative functions to inertia,
but it would not make them retroactive. A chronicle 2 tells
us how Louis XIII was rilled with admiration, upon his
entrance into Marseilles, for the soldiers of the militia, and
was especially pleased to see that " some of them were
dressed in savage style, as Americans, Indians, Turks, and
Moors." It was only under Louis XV, in fact, that a uni-
form became general. Imagine the effect produced by a
return in our day, if one could be made, to such an antique
medley of military garments! Such diversity of costume
would not be tolerated, that is, it would not seem natural or
normal, unless it spread abroad as a fashion; and, in this
case, the very multiformity would be a kind of uniform, a
similitude which consisted of copying the variety of others.
Let us turn our attention to the kind of historical irre-
versibility which is adequately accounted for by the laws of
imitation, just as the laws of reproduction and of vibration
are able to explain some, but not all, kinds of irreversibility
in nature. A great national language cannot return to the
little local dialect from which it has sprung. Not that it
cannot be broken up by some political catastrophe into frag-
ments which will become dialects. But, in this case, the
differentiation of dialects will be due to the compulsory
imprisonment in each province of the linguistic innovations
that have sprung up in the place and that formerly would
have radiated to the remotest part of the land. Moreover,
each dialect that is made in this way will not resemble the
primitive dialect in the least, nor will it incline to reproduce

1What becomes here of the famous law of progressive differenti-
ation considered as a necessity of universal evolution?
2 See Babeau, La Ville sous fancien regime.

386 Laws of Imitation

the latter. It will tend to spread over to its neighbours and
to its own good to re-establish unity of language over a vast
area. What I say of language applies also to religion. But
let us cast a glance over the social life in its entirety.

It has often been remarked that civilisation has the effect
of raising the level of the masses from an intellectual and
moral, from an aesthetic and economic point of view, rather
than of rearing still higher in these different respects the
higher peaks of society. But this vague, indefinite formula
has been not unjustly the subject of refutation because of
failure to point out the cause of the phenomenon in view.
This cause we know. Since every invention which has once
been launched clear of the mass of those that are already
established in the social environment, must spread out and
establish itself in turn by winning a place for itself in one
class after another until it reaches the very lowest, it follows
that the final result to which the indefinite continuation of
all these outspreadings from centres which appear at distant
points and in high places, must be a general and uniform
illumination. It is in this way, by virtue of the law of vibra-
tory radiation, that the sources of heat as they appear one
after another tend to produce, according to a famous deduc-
tion of physicists, a great universal equilibrium of tempera-
ture which is higher than the actual temperature of inter-
stellar space, but lower than that of suns. It is in this way,
too, that the dissemination of species according to the law
of their geometric progression, or, in other terms, of their
prolific radiation, tends to cover the entire earth, which is
still very unequally peopled, with a uniform stratum of living
beings which will be denser throughout its whole extent than
the average density of its present population. Obviously,
the terms of our comparisons correspond exactly. The sur-
face of the earth is the domain that is open to the radiation
of light, just as space is the domain that is open to that of heat
and light and as the human species, inasmuch as it is a living
species, is the domain that is open to the spread of inventive
genius. After this statement, we can understand how cos-
mopolitan and democratic assimilation is an inevitable tend-

Remarks and Corollaries 387

ency of history for the same reason that the complete and
uniform peopling of the globe and the complete and uniform
calorification of space are the objects of the vital and of the
physical universe. It is so of necessity, for of the two
chief forces, invention and imitation, which help us to inter-
pret the whole of history, the former, the source of privi-
leges, monopolies, and aristocratic inequalities, is intermit-
tent, rare, and eruptive only at certain infrequent periods,
whereas the latter, which is so democratic and levelling, is
continuous and incessant like the stream deposition of the
Nile or Euphrates. But we can understand also that it may
well happen that at periods when works of genius crowd
upon and stimulate one another, in feverish and inventive
ages like ours, the progress of civilisation is accompanied by
a momentary increase of every kind of inequality, or, if the
imaginative fever has centred in one place, of a special kind.
In our day, when the creative spirit has turned primarily
towards the sciences, the distance between our most dis-
tinguished scholars and the most uncultivated dregs of our
population is much greater from the point of view of the sum
and substance of learning than it was in the Middle Ages or
antiquity. In the innovating periods of which I speak the
whole question consists of knowing whether the precipitate
eruption of inventions has been faster than their current of
example. Now, this is a question of fact which statistics
alone can solve.

Believing that the transition from an aristocratic to a
democratic order is irreversible, Tocqueville refuses to think
that any aristocracy can be formed in a democratic environ-
ment. But I must be clear on this point.1 If, in conse-

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

388 Laws of Imitation

quence of the cause of which we know, societies hasten
towards an increasing assimilation and an incessant accumu-
lation of similarities, it does not follow that they are also
progressing towards a greater and greater development of
democracy. For imitative assimilation is only the stuff out
of which societies are made; this stuff is cut out and put into
use by social logic, which tends to the most solid kind of
unification through the specialisation and co-operation of
aptitudes, and through the specialisation and mutual con-
firmation of minds. It is therefore quite possible and even
probable that a very strong hierarchy may be the destined
goal of any civilisation,1 although every consummate civili-
sation which has reached its ultimate fruition is marked by
the diffusion of the same wants and ideas, if not by the same
powers and wealth, throughout the mass of its citizens.
This much, however, may be granted to Tocqueville — after
an aristocracy which is based upon the hereditary prestige
of birth has been destroyed in a country, it can never come
to life again. We know, in fact, that the social form of Re-
petition, imitation, tends to free itself more and more from
its vital form, from heredity.

We are also justified in affirming that national agglomer-
ations will enlarge to a greater and greater degree, and that
they will consequently become less dense and that the con-
trary will never be realised unless a catastrophe occur. This
is a result (as pointed out by M. Gide in his little work upon
the colonies2) of universal assimilation, especially in the
matter of armaments. In fact " it is clear that the day when
we shall all be formed in the same mould, the day when one
man will be worth another, the power of every people will

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

2 M. Gide expressly refers to the '*' laws of imitation," for he was one
of the first to accept my point of view, and in his Principes d'economie
politique he gives a pretty good place to my theory of value, the applica-
tion of this general point of view, as I presented it a long time ago, in
several articles in the Revue philosophique.

Remarks and Corollaries 389

be mathematically proportioned to the number of its popula-
tion " and, consequently, a struggle between a small state
and a big one will be impossible or disastrous for the
former. This is an additional argument for the numerous
reasons which we have for foreseeing a colossal empire in
the future. In every period prior to our own, larger states
extended themselves as far or farther than the then means
of communication made practicable. But at present it is
plain that the great inventions of our times will make pos-
sible and enduring much more extensive agglomerations
than those which now exist. This is an historic anomaly,
unexampled in the past, and we must believe that it is fated
to disappear. The world is more ready at present for a
concentration of the whole of Europe, northern Africa, and
half of Asia into a single state than it ever was for the Ro-
man or Mahometan conquest, or for the empire of Charles
V. Does this mean that we must expect to see a single
empire extending over the entire globe? It does not; from
the law which I developed above on the alternation of
fashion and custom, on the final and inevitable return to
a protective tariff of custom after a more or less lengthy
period of free trade in examples, it follows that the natural,
I do not refer to the factitious, aggrandisement of a state
could never pass beyond certain limits. Consequently, we
are not justified in conceiving the hope that a single state
will rule over the whole earth or that the possibility of war
will be suppressed. On the other hand, as the unification
or at least the federation of civilised nations becomes more
desirable and more longed for, the obstacles in the way of its
realisation, patriotic pride and prejudice, national antagon-
isms, misunderstood or narrowly interpreted collective in-
terests, accumulated historical memories, all these things will
not cease to grow. The checking of this growing aspiration
by this growing difficulty might be considered the infernal
torment to which man is condemned by civilisation. It
seems as if the mirage of perpetual and universal peace
loomed up before our eyes with more and more brilliancy but
at a greater and greater distance.

390 Laws of Imitation

In a limited and relative sense, however, we may believe
that this ideal will be temporarily realised through the future
conquests of a people, whose name we do not know, who is
destined to play this glorious part. But then, after this
Empire has been established, after it has bestowed upon a
great part of the world a security comparable to the majesty
of a Roman peace increased tenfold in depth and extent,1

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

Here is an example, which I borrow from the very erudite Histoire
des institutions politiques of M. Viollet (p. 256). This distinguished
historian belongs to the very large number of those who contrast the
senility of the Roman Empire with the fruitful and spirited adolescence
of the German barbarians. He considers that the great imperial unity,
is artificial and, by contrast, he is led to consider that every little unity
produced by the break-up of the Empire is natural and spontaneous.
The frightful chaos from the sixth to the tenth century, which was
relieved only by the period of Charlemagne, the glorious and conscious
imitator of the Caesars, seems to him to be only a crisis in racial
development ; its gloom is " an aurora." It all seems admirable to him.
first the disintegration, and yet this is evidently a step backward, for I
do not know how many centuries, and then, and this seems contradictory
to me, the obvious but futile inclination to reconstruct the broken unity,
under the form of re-enlarging nationalities. " The Occident," he says,
" as it was happily and definitely disintegrated, having no longer any
uncontested tie but that of a community of religious and philosophic
beliefs, or any similar institutions, but institutions which were born
spontaneously, so to speak, from similar wants, was about to present
the admirable spectacle of a diversity a thousand times richer, more
fruitful, and more harmonious than the best-planned homogeneity."
Now, let us not forget that, had it not been for the long duration of the
Empire, for the age-long propagation of currents of imitation in
language, ideas, manners, and institutions, there would have been no
similarity of ^vants between so many originally heterogeneous peoples.
And, as for community of religious as well as of philosophic beliefs,

Remarks and Corollaries 391

it may happen that an entirely new social phenomenon, one
neither conforming nor contrary to the principles that I
have propounded, may appear to our descendants. We may
wonder, to be sure, whether universal similarity under all its
present or future forms, in regard to dress, to the alphabet,
perhaps to language, to sciences, to law, etc., we may wonder
whether it is the consummate fruit of civilisation or whether

this was clearly due to those multiple conversions, to those imitative
contagions between minds and souls that the unity of the Roman Empire
alone made possible. Thus, that which the writer I have quoted so
much admired as being contrary to a factitious imperial unity, is, in its
origin, imperial. Suppress that, and nothing remains but the unre-
stricted disintegration which takes us back to a state of savagery.

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

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

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

And so I do not join with those who consider that imperial unity

39 2 Laws of Imitation

its sole raiso'n d'etre and its final consequence are not the un-
folding of individual differences that will be more valid, more
intense, more radical, and, at the same time, more subtle,
than the differences that were annihilated. It is certain that
after a cosmopolitan inundation has left a thick deposit of
ideas and customs over all humanity, the demolished nation-
alities will never be reconstructed; men will never return to
their Chinese ancestor-worship nor to their contempt for
foreign usages; they will never prefer to accentuate their
fixed idiosyncrasies rather than to hasten general changes
shared in by all alike. But it is perfectly possible that civili-
sation may pause some day to draw back and give birth
to new offspring, that the flood of imitation may be banked
in,1 and that through the very effect of its excessive devel-
opment, the need of sociability may diminish or, rather, may
become altered and transformed into a sort of general
misanthropy. While this would be quite compatible with

was disastrous because of the very memory that it left behind, a
memory which proved a source of delusion for the Middle Ages.
" This dire idea of universal monarchy lasted for more than a thou-
sand years." Dire in Avhat? Is it not evident that the small degree
of higher order and harmony which persisted in this anarchy of
warring fiefs, the political dust of the imperial block, was due to
the very dream and memory of the Empire, and that without the
pope, the spiritual emperor, or even without the German Caesar, this
dust might have been incapable of ever regaining life and organisation?

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

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

Remarks and Corollaries 393

a diminution of commercial intercourse and with the reduc-
tion of economic exchange to what was strictly necessary,
it would be well fitted to strengthen in each of us the distinc-
tive traits of our individuality. Then the finest flower
of our social life, the aesthetic life, would blossom forth,
and as it became full-blown all men would come to have
a share in it, — a rare and imperfect condition at present. And
then the social life, with its complicated apparatus of confin-
ing functions and monotonous rehearsals, would finally ap-
pear, like the organic life which it follows and complements,
in its true colours. It would appear as a long, obscure, and
tortuous transition from a state of elementary diversity to
one marked by the possession of personal physiognomy. It
would appear as a mysterious alembic of numberless spiral
curves where one thing is sublimated in another, where out
of an infinite number of elements that have been bent and
crushed and despoiled of their distinct characteristics is
mental and fleeting attributes of personality, its idiosyn-
extracted an essential and volatile principle, the funda-
crasies, its ways of thinking and feeling, here to-day, van-
ished to-morrow.

INDEX

Accent, spread of, 217.

Adaptation to environment, ex-
planation of Hying or social
types not found in their, 141.

Adoption, fiction of, 53, 250, 315,

352-3, 365- .

Agriculture, its rivalry with com-
merce, 289; its progress depend-
ent upon uniformity of law, 321-
2; its failure to progress under
feudalism, 335.

Alcoholism, explanation of spread
of, 194, 195 ; spread of, from
superior to inferior, 231 N. I.

Amber, its importation in an-
tiquity, 96, 330.

Ammonite, 25 N. I.

Ancestor-worship, 53, 267 sq., 275.

Animals, invention among, 3, 4;
imitation among, 3, 4 N. i, 67
N. I, 198 N. i, 206; domestica-
tion of, 17, 42 N. 2, 46, 219 N. 2,
235, 236, 274 N. i, 276-80, 330 N.
i ; relation of primitive man to
wild, 271-8, 372 N. i ; deification
of, 274-8; human speech under-
stood by, 331 N. 2.

Animal societies, 4, 59, 60; of La
Fontaine's fables, 67.

Anthropology, distinction between
archaeology and, 89 sq.

Archaeology, methods of, 89 sq. ;
proof in, of preponderance of
imitation over invention, 98;
principle of imitation in, 98 sq. ;
the paleontology of society, 103 ;
comparison between Statistics
and, ib. ; branches of, 107; erro-
neous deduction about primitive
man in, 325.

Architecture, transmission of Ro-
man, 9; resemblances between
Old and New World, 39 N. i ;
imitation in, 54; development of
Greek and Egyptian, 54 sq. ; an-
alogies in, 56-7; logical conflicts
in, 161, 162; repetition of types

in, 191 ; invention of, 235 ; cli-
mate not an adequate explana-
tion of style in, 326; in times of
fashion, 335; in the igth cen-
tury, 344.

d'Argenson, 218 N. I.

Aristocracy, initiative character of,
221 ; influence of theocratic, 223 ;
of cities, 228; the cause of
democracy, 231 ; racial inter-
mixture, characteristic of, 238
N. i ; speech of the, 257 ;
Tocqueville's distinction between
democracy and, 303 ; the relation
of militancy to, 305 N. i ; assimi-
lation of usages in the, 335; the
future of, 388.

Art, laws of refraction in, 23 ;
differentiation in, 55 ; analysis of
Arabian, Greek, Egyptian, 99;
logical conflicts in, 159; inter-
play of fashion and custom in,
164; the ideal the substance of,
182 ; conventionality of, 191 ;
evolution of, 207; survivals in,
209; degeneration of, 210; ani-
mal drawings, first attempts in,
274 N. i ; transition from
fashion to custom in, 298; rela-
tion of evolution of, to industry,
303 N. i ; during periods of cus-
tom and of fashion, 342, 346-55 ;
religious origin of, 345 ; its
origin in handicraft, 353.

Assimilation, of modern civilisa-
tions, xxiii., 16, 388-9; of civili-
sations through imitation, 21,
128; social, point of departure
for social advance, 72; produced
through cities, 228 ; due to lan-
guage, 264; international politi-
cal, 290; due to mediaeval
preaching friars, 338.

Astronomy, accumulable discov-
eries in, 174; modern, reducible
to a single formula, 178; discov-
ery of, 235.

Atomism, 178.

395

Index

B

Babeau, Albert, 293 N. 2, 299, 372
N. 2, 385 N. 2.

Baldwin, 75 N. I.

Barante, de, 217.

Barth, 152 N. i, 222 N. i.

Baudrillaft, 49, 217, 218.

Beaunis, 76.

Belief, transmission of, a funda-
mental social relation, xvi. ; a
social force, 145 sq. ; the final
object of desire, 147; lowering
of plane of, 172 N. I ; credulity,
imitation of, 197.

Beliefs, interferences between, 24
sq. ; expressed by statistics, 104-
7; their relations to invention,
109; tendency to geometric pro-
gression of, 115 ; three phases of,
126 sq. ; conflict between, 149
sq. ; spread of, 210.

Bentham, iii.

Bergson, 145 N. I.

Bernard, Claude, 12.

Bernheim, 76.

Bertillon, in.

Binet, 76.

Biology, less advanced than sociol-
ogy. !3; statistics of, uo-ll.

Bodin, 199 N. 2.

Bopp, 260 N. i.

Bordier, 239.

Bourdeau, 42 N. 2, 46, 219 N. 2.

Boutmy, 168 N. I, 289 N. i.

Broca, 328 N. I.

Bronze, spread of art of working,
17; same transition in America
and Europe from age of stone to
age of, 39 N. I ; unknown in-
ventor of, 91 ; uniform compo-
sition of prehistoric, 329-30;
imitation of flint implements in,
364- .,

Brunetiere, 357 N. I.

Buckle, 269, 346 N. i, 357.

Burckhardt, 134 N. I, 191, 219 N.
i, 293, 363.

Burgess, 306 N. I.

Candplle, de, 100.

Cannibalism, a fashion, 127 ; expla-
nation of, 273; not typical of
primitive society, 348.

Ceremonial government, increase
of, 61 N. i, 192 N. 2, 211 N. i.

Chipiez, 57 N. I.

Cibrario, 334 N. 2.

Circumcision, among Aztecs and
Hebrews, 41 N. i.

Cities, increase in populations of,
104-5; the modern aristocracies,
226-9; cause of social superior-
ity, 236; intensity of imitation
iu» 239; fashion-imitation in,
248, 288; of refuge, 288; uni-
formity of laws in German, 314.

Civilisation, causes racial differen-
tiation, xxi., 239, 252; types of,
69; causes of set-backs in, 163
N. i ; defined, 180, 390 N. i ;
American race the outcome of
European, 239; formula of de-
velopment of every, 254 ; relation
of religion to, 279 sq. See As-
similation.

Civilisations, imitation between,
48; independence of different,
53; decomposition of, in archae-
ology, 99.

Colins, 153 N. i.

Commune, origin of, 227; spread
of charter of, 313.

Communication, in prehistoric
periods, 47; essential to imita-
tion, 115, 370; originally one-
sided, 205-6, 371 ; between
French and English courts, 229 ;
amount of, necessary for imita-
tion, 292 N. i ; its relation to
democracy, 307-8; effects of,
392 N. i.

Comte, Auguste, iv., xi., 285 N. I,
303 N. i, 344, 381.

Condorcet. xxiii.

Confession, rite of, among Aztecs
and Catholics, 41 N. I.

Coulanges, Fustel de, 228 N. I,
239, 242. 288.

Cournot, iii., xi., 260 N. I, 380, 381.

Courtesy, origin of, 217, 223; tran-
sition from unilateral to recip-
rocal in, 372, 377-9.

Couvade, 209.

Crime, imitation in, iv. ; Tarde on
problems of, v. ; statistics of,
104, 114; classification of, 113,
119-20; effect of marriage upon,
117; widespread publication of,

345-

Cross, widespread use of, 47 N. I.
Curtius, 144 N. i, 291, 299, 300,

322.
Custom, interplay of fashion and,

Index

397

164 ; its relation to reproduction,
253-4 ; effects of transition from,
to fashion and from fashion to
custom in language, 255-65; in
religion, 265-86; in government,
287-309; in legislation, 310-22;
in usages, 322-33; in industry,
333-44 ; in art and morality, 344-
65 ; paternal prestige the source
of, 276 ; relation of price to, 339-
40; empire of, in language, 344.
See Custom-Imitation under
Imitation.

steamboat, 44 ; of the circulation
of the blood, 44, 170; of mineral
springs in France, 92 N. i ; of
tea, coffee, tobacco, 93 ; for the
pleasure of discovery, 94; of
beet sugar, 104; of fire from
friction, 235, 270 N. i. See In-
vention.

Division of labor, among animals,
60 ; 61 sq. ; original lack of, 327.

Dostoiesky, 207 N. i, 246 N. I.

Dubois-Reymond, 125.

D

Darmesteter, 266 N. I.

Darwin, xvii., 12, 17, 37, 67 N. I,
370, 382.

Death, necessity of, 7; a justifica-
tion of pessimism, 266 N. I.

Delahante, 119 N. I, 129 N. I.

Delbceuf, 7, 76.

Democracy, tyranny of the many
during, 84; imitation during,
225 ; Tocqueville's distinction
between aristocracy and, 303,
387 ; increasing resemblances do
not necessitate, 388.

Desire, transmission of, a funda-
mental social relation, xvi.;
growth of, to invent, 43 ; specific
character of ; 44, 93 ; for a maxi-
mum of belief, 50; a social
force, 145; for reason, 149; do-
cility, imitation of, 197; for
equality, 303.

Desires, interferences between, 24
sq. ; expressed by statistics, 104-
7; their relation to invention,
109, 159; tendency of, towards
geometric progression, 115, 124;
for fraternity, 112, 121 sq., 260;
competition of, 115; for truth,
125; for property, 125-6; three
phases of, 126 sq., increase of, in
civilisation, 148 N. i ; conflict
between, 149 sq. ; spread of, 210 ;
satisiaction of, by industry, 322;
of consumption spread more
rapidly than corresponding de-
sires of production, 329 sq.

Diabolical possession, 50-1.

Discovery, of gallium, 12 ; the suc-
cessful, of the present deter-
mines that of the future, 19; of
Cicero's Republic, 34; of the

Eagle, two-headed, spread of,

through imitation, 47 N. I.
Ellis, Havelock, v.
Emission theory, 48.
English language, illustration of

linguistic refraction in, 22;

vowel differentiation in, 143 ;

spread of, 257, 331 ; grammatical

simplification in, 265.
Envy, the effect of obedience, 201 ;

assimilation produced by, 202

N. i.

Erigeron, spread of the, 17.
Eructation, as an act of courtesy^

42 N. i.
Espinas, xvii., 3, 4 N. I, 59 N. I.

Family, the nation developed from
the, xxii. ; spread of, dialects, 17,
255, 287; relation between imita-
tion and docility and credulity
shown in the, 199; the patri-
archal, 202-4, 267 N. i ; imita-
tion in the primitive, 250, 269 ;
the, not the unique source of so-
ciety, 268; religion cradled in
the, 280, 287; the, the original
social group, 287; origin of
and art in the morality 314-15*
345 ; industry in the, 328 ; under-
mining of the, 358. See Adop-
tion.

Fashion, progress of, in European
societies, 16; in crimes, 113; in-
terplay of custom and, 164; in
dress, 109, 212, 334 N. 2, 385;
contemporaneous prestige, the
source of, 276; parliamentarism
a, 293 ; sixteenth and eighteenth

398

Index

centuries periods of, 293 N. 2;
the secret ballot a, ib. ; spread of
municipal law through, 314;
jury system a, 317; trial by tor-
ture a, ib.; birth of political
economy during ages of, 320;
increase of rationality through,
321 ; tobacco-chewing a, 327 ;
naval, in America, 334 ; unchang-
ing, of monastic dress, 334 N. I,
383-4; in eating, 336 N. 2, 340;
relation of price to, 339 ; its rela-
tion to individualism and natur-
alism, 341-2; its relation to in-
vention, 343 ; the assumption by,
of the mask of custom, 361 sq. ;
Latin poetry a, 362; Roman jur-
isprudence a, ib. See Custom
See Fashion-Imitation under
Imitation.

Fere, 76.

Feudalism, assimilation of, 62-3;
formation of, 73, 239-43 ; per-
sistence of titles of, 152 N. i ;
a harmonising factor, 186 ; oppo-
sition of communes to, 226 ; fail-
ure of agriculture to progress
under, 335 ; a stage in the tran-
sition from unilateral to recipro-
cal authority, 374; disappearance
9f, 380.

Friday, superstition about, 106
N. i.

Friedlander, 257 N. I.

Gamier, 42 N. i.

Gaudry, 25 N. I.

Generation. See Reproduction.

Gerontocracy, influence of, in
primitive societies, 268.

Giard, 382 N. i.

Gide, 388.

Glasson, 240, 241.

Gobineau, de, xxii.

Goblet d'Alviella, 47 N. i, 274
N. i.

Government, originally an answer
to a demand for security, 174;
distinction between additions
and substitutions in, 180 ; a polit-
ical idea, 182; etiquette of, 191;
language, an instrument of, 206 ;
conservatism and liberalism in,
288; compared with religion,
289 N. i ; in times of fashion,

342 ; relation of art and morality
to, 345. See Ceremonial Gov-
ernment.

Grimm, 22, 260 N I.

Guibert, Louis, 186 N. I.

Guyau, 332.

H

Haeckel, 12, 370.

Heredity, inaccurate use of term,
xv. ; its relation to imitation,
xxi.-xxii., 25 N. i, 280, 328, 357,
368; organic progress dependent
upon, 7; analogous to imitation
and vibration, 1 1 ; during cus-
tom-imitation, 36 ; first repetition
in, 43; idea of, combined with
that of variability, 382.

Hesitation, opposed to imitation,
165.

Historic method, excellence of, 14.

History, interpretation of, 3, 109;
methods of, 8-10, 101 ; continuity
of, 12; action of imitation the
first principle of, 49; relation of
archaeology to, 90, 102; as com-
monly understood, 92; definition
of, 139; a tissue of tragedy and
comedy, 172; the reversible and
irreversible in, 379 sq.

Horse, its disappearance from
American fauna, 46; superseded
as a means_of locomotion, 158;
introduced into Egypt, 214; ad-
vantage of the, in war, 236;
primitive possessors of the, 277
N. i.

Houzeau, 331 N. 2.

Hugo, Victor, 98, 226, 352.

Hugonnet, 42 N. I.

Hypnotism, compared to social
phenomena, 76 sq. ; 199 N. I,
204, 275 N. 2.

Idealism, its relation to material-
ism, xviii. ; in sociology, 2, 3;

177-

Ideas, geometrical progression of,
18, 115; constituting a social
type, 68; imitation of, precedes
imitation of their expression,
207; spread more easily than
usages, 323 N. I.

Index

399

Imitation, meaning of term, xiii.-
xiv.; of self, xiv. N. i, 75, 88,
115 N. i; counter-, xvii.-xix.;
non-, xix.-xx.

Custom-, its path prepared by
non-imitation of foreign mod-
els, xix. ; influence of heredity
during, 36; predominance of,
over fashion- imitation, 52 N.
i ; 244 sq. ; in England, 289
N. i.

Fashion-, its path prepared by
non-imitation of anterior
models, xix. ; 192, 221 N. I,
231 ; compared with custom-
imitation, 244; in France, 289
N. i ; in the formation of the
United States, 296; individ-
ualistic 320; use of flint
spread by, 325 ; characteristics
of periods of, 328 N. i ; con-
temporaneous, 357 ; assimila-
tion of, 369.

In Japan, xx., 216 N. i, 254 N. I ;
progress a necessary outcome of
the laws of, xxiii. ; its relation
to invention, 3; analogous to
vibration and heredity, 7, 70-1,
189-90, 2II-I2, 386; its relation
to historic facts, 12; the cause
of all social resemblances, 14, 37 ;
linguistic, 15, 17; role of, in
Statistics and political economy,
16; of Columbus, 20; of Greco-
Roman civilisation, 21 ; its re-
lation to vibration and heredity
one-sided, 34; suppression of
embryonic phases in, 35-6; not
dependent upon direct contact,
48; spreads through education,
62 ; of Louis XIV., 64 ; its influ-
ence upon instinct, 67 N. i ; bio-
logical, 75 N. i ; psychological,
ib. ; mutual, 79 ; relation of
respect to, 87; a kind of
somnambulism, ib. ; of turn-
ing movement at Ulm, 91
N. i ; effect of laws upon,
94 N. i ; of Greece by Etruria,
98; its relation to sociological
statistics, in; effect of, upon
public expenditure, 119; in
the nineteenth century, 151 ;
modes of, 189 sq.; spread of
physiological activities through,
194-6; correlation between cre-
dulity, docility, and, 197 sq. ;
subjective and objective, 197 sq.,

3/01 ; of the superior by the in-
ferior, 213 sq., 368, 369; of the
inferior by the superior, 215; of
the foreigner, 221, 247 sq., 266
N. i, 269-70, 337, 340 N. 2; of
the nearest, 224; under democ-
racy, 225; in cities, 228; in
preaching, 229 N. i ; mutualised
and specialised, 232-3; emanci-
pated from heredity, 280; of
English parliamentarism, 293 ;
of Greece, 301 ; Tocqueville's
contribution to theory of, 309
N. i ; of jurisprudence of Paris,
312; from within out, 323 N. I,
332 sq. ; professional, 328 N. i ;
among the Persians, 334 N. 2;
sumptuary laws a check upon,
337 N. i; Roman plebs assimi-
lated to patricians through, 348
N. i ; in the sixteenth and eigh-
teenth centuries, 351-2; its ten-
dency towards indefinite pro-
gression, 366; rapid spread of
commercial, 370-1 ; transition of
unilateral into reciprocal, 371
sq. See Animals.

Imitations', geometrical progres-
sion of, 20; modification of, 22;
interferences between, 23 sq.. ;
control of, by statistics, in;
career of, the exclusive interest
of history, 139; order of, dis-
tinct from that of inventions,
381.

Individualism, promoted through
widespread imitation, xxiv. ;
in sociology, 2 ; a special kind of
realism, 7 ; in Greece, 301 ; rela-
tion of fashion to, 341 ; 357 N. i.

Indo-European languages, identity
of roots of, 8; common progeni-
tor of, 15, 103 ; vowel softening
and verbal differentiation in,
143-

Industry, logical conflicts in, 157-
8; interplay of fashion and cus-
tom in, 164; accumulated inven-
tions in, 174, 180-1 ; substitution
of ends in, 179; morality the end
of, 182; progress1 of modern,
184; relation of evolution of, to
art, 303 N. i ; its progress de-
pendent upon uniformity of law,
321-2; its progress dependent
upon spread of same wants and
tastes, 333 ; effects of transition
from custom to fashion, and

400

Index

from fashion to custom, upon,
333 sq. ; transition from the uni-
lateral to the reciprocal in, 375.
Intimidation, social meaning of,

85-

Invention, meaning of the term,
xiv.-xv. ; distinct from counter-
imitation, xviii.-xix. ; its rela-
tion to imitation, 3 ; of printing,
5,22, 153, 364; of gunpowder, n,
22, 171 ; of the Morse telegraph,
ii, Si, 93; of the mill, n, 152,
171, 235, 376; of railroads, n N.
I, 131 ; theory of, in Logique so-
ciale, 13 N. i ; tendency of
every, to expand, 17; every, an
answer to a problem, 45 ; of
steam engines, 104 ; of marriage,
in, 117; exhaustion of, 138; of
oil painting, 160; logical duels
of society ended through, 170-2;
of the telescope, 171 ; of the cart,
ib. ; of bows and arrows, 235;
of bone needles, ib. ; of feudal
royalty, 292; of means of fish-
ing, 326 N. I ; its relation to
fashion, 343 ; one form of the
interference of repetitions, 382.
See Animals.

Inventions, definition of, 2; tend-
ency of, to expand, 17; inter-
ference of, 20 N. i ; composed
of prior imitations, 45 ; non-
imitable, 91-2; relation of his-
tory to, 92; causes of social ne-
cessities, 93; history of, given
by archaeology, 100; progress of,
127, 250; interference of, 129:
general classification of, 149;
accumulable, 154, 173 sq.; con-
flicts between, 154 sq.; substi-
tution of, 162 sq. ; of science,
i?7, 376; their relation to social
superiority, 234 sq.; cosmog-
onies representative of series of.
270 N. i ; imitative nature of,
344; in morals, 346-7; in art,
347; in law, 376; their order
distinct from that of imitation,
381 ; relating to weaving 384.

Jametel, 42 N. I.
Jannet, Claudio, 306 N. I.
Jansenn, 197, 219 N. I.
Jusserand, 336 N. i, 337.

K

King-gods, as initiators, 81 ; loved
as well as feared, 202-3.

La Bruyere, 229 N. i, 378.

La Fontaine, 67, 241.

Lake-dwellings, of Switzerland
and New Guinea, 47.

Lang, 275.

Language, transmission of Coptic,
8; the great vehicle of imita-
tions, 15; spread of, 17, 255 sq.,
331 ; refraction in, 22-3 ; resem-
blances in, 40-1 ; origin of, 42,
294-S ,' physical causes in, 140 ;
role of analogy in, 142; imi-
tation and invention in, 142
sq. ; irreversibility in, 143, 385 ;
conflicts in, 154-5; substitu-
tions in, 163; duels in, 164,
166, 167; verbal accumulation
in, 173-5; grammatical addi-
tions in, 175; inflation in, 176;
grammar, the essential side of,
182; conventionality of, 190-1;
ideas borrowed before, 201 ;
survivals in, 209; contraction in.
210; imitation of the inferior by
the superior in, 215; monogen-
ism of, 255 N. i; classic liter-
ature dependent upon spread of,
264, 333 ; attributed to animals,
274 N. i ; transition from fash-
ion to custom in, 257; three
phases of, 311; in periods of
fashion, 342; persistence of cus-
tom in, 344; interpretation of
renascences in, 362; irreversi-
language, 385-6. See English
bility in, Indo-European lan-
guages, Latin language, Ro-
mance languages.

Latin language, spread of, 9, 219,
257 N. i ; Spanish or Gallic in-
fluence on, 22; vowel differen-
tiation in, 143; imitation of, 144;
different verbal forms in, 155;
worsted in conflict with Ro-
mance tongues, 163 ; grammati-
cal solidarity of, 175; Greek in-
fluence upon, 259; decomposi-
tion of, 259 sq.

Lavelaye, de, 125.

Lavisse, 227 N. I.

Index

401

Law, importance of, in social re-
lations, 61 ; logical conflicts in
Roman, 168; substitution and
accumulation in, 178; etiquette
of, 191 ; principles of, borrowed
before procedure, 201 ; survivals
of feudal, 209; a particular de-
velopment of religion, 310; dis-
tinction between common and
statute, 310-11; three phases
of, 311 sq.', of Twelve Tables
adopted through fashion-imi-
tation, 312; spread of Roman
and of French, 312-13; dis-
tinction between ancient and
modern, 314; history of penal,
316-17; in times of fashion,
342 ; renascences in, 362.

Laws, relation of wants and ideas
to, 209; sumptuary, illustrative
of imitation of superior by in-
fejior. 218; spread of new, 313;
distinction between justice and
equity in, 318; Roman, 318, 331;
industrial progress dependent
upon uniform, 321-2.

Lecoq de Boisbaudran, 12.

Lenormand, 329.

Like-mindedness, not the final cri-
terion of society, 60; law and,
61; spread of, 115, 358; inter-
national, 345.

Littre, 260, 262, 270 N. I.

Logique socials, vi., xiii., 13 N. I, 34
N. i, 169 N. i, 198 N. i, 339 N.
i.

Lubbock, 209.

Luchaire, 227.

Luxury, spread of, 217-19, 335;
of shrines and reliquaries, 338
N. i.

Lyall, 80 N. 2, 265 N. 2, 267.

M

Maine, Sumner, 95, 267 N. I, 288,
292, 293, 314, 315, 316.

Malthus, 17.

Marriage, its effect upon mor-
tality, in; statistics of, 117,
120; of Emperor of China, 192
N. i ; by capture, 209 ; imita-
tion of patrician, at Rome, 234
N. i, 348 N. i ; transition from
unilateral to reciprocal in, 373.

Mathematics, science of, depend-
ent upon repetition, 15.

Maudsley, 78, 79 N. i, 88.

Maury, 80, 96, 98, 99.

Mendelejeff, 12.

Menger, iii.

Mill, John Stuart, 383.

Mimicry, suggested explanation
of, 40 N. i.

Monadology, 177.

Monasticism, a fashion, 127; an
expression of the subjection of
reproduction to imitation, 251
N. i.

Monogenism, 43, 255 N. I.

Morality, rivalry between old and
new, 32 ; a form of industry,
158; its relation to religious
proselytism, 281 ; the spiritual
equivalent of ritual, 284; the
supremacy of, ib. ; religious ori-
gin of, 345, 347; inventions in,
345-7; during periods of cus-
tom and of fashion, 346 sq.;
social character of, 350.

N

Nadaillac, de, 96 N. I.

Naegeli, von, 6 N. I.

Naturalism, suggested by the su-
pernatural, xvii. ; relation of
fashion to, 341, 357 N. i.

Newspapers, future development
of, 136; power of, 206, 225 N. i,

335-

Newton, 26, 36, 48, 177, 178.
Niebuhr, 294.
Npminalism, its emphasis upon

individual variation, 7.
Novicow, 331 N. i.

O

Obelisks, satisfy a social need, 58
N. i.

Origin of species, suggested ex-
planation of, 4; compared with
that of atoms and of civilisa-
tions, 13.

Pangenesis, theory of, 45.
Paulhan, 88 N 2.
Patriotism, originally aristocratic,
231 N. i ; an enlarged family

402

Index

sentiment, 291 ; American, 297 j
spread of, in Greece and France,
351 N. 2; re-awakening of
Greek, 362.

Pelitot, Abbe, 223 N. I.

Per r ens, 231 N. i.

Perrot, 56, 57 N. I, 58.

Political economy, made possible
through effects of fashion, 16;
birth of, during ages of fashion,

320-

Pottery, art of, not instinctive, 325.

Prestige, force of, 78; a non-log-
ical social cause, 141, 214; of
Florence, 216; of political ma-
jorities, 230; of power and
wealth, 233; of antiquity, 246;
parental, 269-70, 276; animal,
276; of the foreigner, 291; of
Rome, 336 N. 2.

Property, distinction between real
and personal, connected with
that between custom- and fash-
ion-imitation, 319-20

Public opinion, on spread of rail-
roads in France, 131-2; con-
trol of, 230; relation of honour
to, 358, 360.

Q

Quatrefages, 38.
Quetelet, 114, 119, 120.

Rambaud, 227 N. i, 334 N. 2.

Ranke, 370.

Raynouard, 22.

Realism, its emphasis upon rer
semblance and repetition, 7.

Reclus, filisee, 326.

Regnaud, 143.

Religion, refraction in, 23; rivalry
of science with, 32; beginning
of, 42 ; futility of persecution in,
153 N. i ; logical conflicts in, 156,
167; interplay of fashion and
custom in. 164; non-contradic-
tory myths in, 173; non-accu-
mulable dogma and ritual in,
176; narrative and dogmatic,
176-7; dogma, the essential
side of, 182 ; etiquette of, 190-1 ;
belief in a. precedes prac-
tice of a, 200; spread of, 208,

287; survivals in, 209; origi-
nally a luxury, 231 N. I ; social
importance of, 244 N. i ; dis-
tinction between proselyting and
non-proselyting, 265-6 ; a n i-
mism, the beginning of, 268;
primitive forms of, 267-79; spir-
itualisation of, 279-80; rela-
tion of civilisation to, 279 sq. ;
relations of custom and fashion
to, 281 ; distinction between bar-
baric and civilised, 283-4;
compared with government, 289
N. i ; transition from fashion
to custom in, 297; three phases
of, 311; usage connected with,
322; the need of sentiment pre-
cedes the need of genius in, 331 ;
in times of fashion, 342 ; under-
mining of, 358; the assumption
by fashion of the mask of cus-
tom in, 361-2; irreversibility in,
386.

Renan, 172 N. I.

Repetition, relation of, to varia-
tion, 7 ; forms of universal, ib. ;
cause of all resemblance, 14;
resemblance of parts of space
apparently not due to, 15 ; cere-
bral, 74; interdependence of,
forms of, 249-51.

Repetitions, role of, in science,
5-6, 14; geometrical progression
of, 17; the source of universal,
366 N. i ; interference of, 382.

Reproduction, resemblances due
to, 14; Malthusian law of, 17;
relation of vibration and imi-
tation to, 34, 249-50; analogous
to vibration and imitation, 70-1,
189-90, 211-12, 386; its relation
to custom, 253-4.

Resemblances, role of, in science,
5-6, 14; due to repetition, 14;
biological, not due to reproduc-
tion, 37-8; social, not due to
imitation, 38-9, 325-6; between
arts and practices of Old World
and New World peoples, 38-9,
41 N. i, 47 N. i, 96 N. i ; spon-
taneous, 50; between Christian-
ity and Buddhism, 57; in dec-
orations of tombs, 96 ; in pre-
historic remains, ib. ; linguistic,
essential to other social resem-
blances, 264; in municipal legis-
lation of twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, 313-14; in modern

Index

403

•ways of living, 323-4; in
Oriental usages, 324-5; con-
sciousness of, necessary to in-
dustry, 337-8; during periods
of custom and of fashion, 346.

Respect, social significance of,
86-7.

Reuleaux, 63 N. I.

Ribot, 34 N. i, 197.

Richet, 76, 81.

Riviere, fimile, 326 N. I.

Romance languages, formation of,
259 sq.

Romanes, 37, 67 N. I.

Romanism, 9-10, 21, 63, 200.

Roscher, 227, 334 N. i, 336.

Rougemont, 329.

Royer, Clemence, 39 N. I.

Saint-Simon, 217.

Sayce, 142 N. I, 191, 255 N. I.

Schelling, 12.

Schliemann, 277.

Schulte, 314.

Science, place of affirmation in,
4-5 ; nature of, 4-6 ; starting-
point of, 6 N. i ; demands of,
10; subject of, 14; source of
social revolution, 80 N. I ; born
from Christianity, 125; exten-
sion of, 177; comparison be-
tween industrial inventions and
facts of, 180; the future religion,
286.

Seeley, 316.

Sensations, the statistics of the
external world, 315.

Sewing, use of tendons and fish
bones in, 47.

Slavery, 64, 171 ; imitation under,
219 N. 3, 375; origin of, 278-9;
at Athens, 349; disappearance
of, 380.

Smith, Adam, 79, 130.

Social causes, distinction between
logical and non-logical, 141.

Social dialectic, 168.

Social forces, composition of, 19.

Socialism, a special kind of real-
ism, 7 ; future conversion to, 30 ;
suppression o f competition
through State, 33; its spread in
cities, 228 N. I ; modern tend-
ency towards, 306.

Sociality, defined, 69

Socialisation, 65.

Social logic, xxiii., 150, 166, 238,
285, 310 N. i, 382, 388.

Social organization, its relation to
imitation, 74; dependent upon
agreement or opposition of be-
liefs, 146.

Social progress, cause of, 43 ; def-
inition of, 148.

Social reason, 149; relation of
fashion to, 341.

Social survivals, 152 N. i, 209.

Social type, analysis of, 68.

Society, starting-point of, 28; def-
inition of, 59, 68, 74; economic
conception of, criticised, 59-60;
distinction between nation and,
65 ; the organisation of imita-
tiyeness, 70; a conception of
primitive, 95; equality in primi-
tive, 348. '1

Sociology, as conceived by Comtei
and Spencer, iv. ; scope of pure,
ix.-x. ; misleading character
given to, I ; relation of human
to animal, 3 ; difference between!
methods of natural science and'
of, 8-10; more advanced than
chemistry or biology, 13; dis-
tinction between social philoso-
phy and, ib. ; power to predict
in, 19; position of race in, 19
N. I ; distinction between anal-
ogies and homologies in, 40.

Somnambulism. See Hypnotism.

Spencer, Herbert, iv., xvii., 13, 61
N. i, 147, 192 N. 2, 202, 207, 210,
217 N. i, 302 sq., 370, 371 N. i,
377, 38i.

Statistical curves, superior to sta-
tistical tables, 105 ; interpretation
of, 116 sq. ; compared to visual
images, 132-3-

Statistics, made possible through
effects of fashion, 16 ; definition
of, 102; the physiology of soci-
ety, 103 ; comparison between
archaeology and, ib. ; methods of,
105 ; gaps in, 108 ; function
of sociological, no-n; relation
of medical, to sociology, 1 1 1 ;
meaning of commercial, 112;
future of, 133 sq. ; beginnings
of, 134 N. i ; limitations of,
137; measurement of tendencies
to transmission through imita-
tion dependent upon, 194; cal-
culation of actions through, 307.

404

Index

Sympathy, the result of propitious
interferences of ideas and voli-
tions, 25; relation of prestige
to, 79-

Taine, 74.

Tarde, Gabriel, birth and educa-
tion of, iii. ; his analysis of mo-
tive, |iJ.-iv. ; writings of, iii., v.,
vi., vii., ix., 108 N. i, 145 N. i,
310 N. i, 317 N. i, 339 N. i,
351 N. i. See Logique sociakj
public and professional career
of, vi.

•Tattooing, 41 N. 2, 127.

Thierry, Amedee, 336 N. 3.

Thierry, Augustin, 227.

Thompson, 70.

Tocqueville, 225 N. i, 229, 231,
257. 296, 297, 302 sq., 334, 387,
388.

Totemism, 41 N. i, 275.

.Tylor, 45 N. 2, 353.

Tyndall, 12.

U

Undulation. See Vibration.

United States, spread of tele-
phones in the, 115; growth of
population in the, 127; imita-
tion among negroes in the, 219
N. i ; future carrying trade of
the, 220-1 ; Anglo-American
type in the, 252; formation of
the, 295-7; centralization in
the, 306 N. i ; transportation
and communication in the, 309;
tobacco-chewing in the, 327;
changeability of naval fashions
in the, 334.

Universal suffrage, value of, 108
N. i ; calculation of desires
through, 307 ; kingship the nec-
essary antecedent of, 375.

and imitation, n, 71, 189, 211-
12, 386; resemblances due to,
14; relation of reproduction to,
34, 249.

Vico, 13, 348 N. i.

Viollet, Paul, 21 1 N. I, 372 N. 2,
390 N. i.

Vogue, Melchoir de, 224 N. I.

Voltaire, 294, 328 N. i, 341.

Vortex theory, 70.

W

Walras, iii.

War, two opposing sides in, 156-
7, 161 ; accumulable inventions
in, 174; strategy constitutes,
182; a substitute for individual
struggles, 186; leads to peace,
187; imitation in, 216; its effect
upon morality, 350; more civi-
lising for conquered than for
conqueror, 368; priority of the
chase over, 372; transition from
the unilateral to the reciprocal
in, 377-

Weber, 57.

Whitney, 191.

Wiener, 93.

Women, assimilation of, with men,
66; imitation among, 212-13,
223 N. i ; smaller number of, in
cities than men, 228; originally
not the associates of men, 348;
emancipation of Athenian, 349;
the slaves of primitive men, 375 ;
dress fashions less reversible
for men than for, 384.

Writing, unknown inventor of, 91 ;
its relation to discoveries, 149;
conflict between cuneiform and
Phoenician, 154, 168; sacred
character of, 205 ; adoption by
Japanese of Chinese, 216 N. i ;
from rierht to left of sacerdotal
origin, 322; habit of, necessary
to extensive paper-making, 337.

Wurtz, 70.

V

Vibration, analogous to heredity Zoborowski, 330 N. i.

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