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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 I 3 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 tn e 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 now 1
 
 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 dogma 1 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 
 being 1 , 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 globe 1 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 ygina. 
 
 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 
 curiosity 1 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 I e 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 
 XVIII e 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 
 quantities 1 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 says 1 , 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 Logical 1 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 bills 1 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 increasing 1 
 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 
 
 J It 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. 
 
 1 In 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 publicists 1 
 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 Siberia 1 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 adoption 1 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 
 sweep 1 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-goddess 2 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 [Middlemore r s 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- 
 land 1 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 his x eyes, 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'. r erflow- 
 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, finally 5 
 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. 
 
 J The 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 
 
 1 What 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 colonies 2 ) 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; progress 1 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, 
 2 94-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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