The social laws. Sketch of a sociology

The social laws.

Sketch of a sociology

Gabriel Tarde (1898)

Translated by Bayron Pascal

To walk through the Museum of history, outline the succession of paintings and weird, to travel through the people, all different and changing, the first impression of the superficial observer is that the phenomena of social life are beyond any formula General, any scientific law, and that the claim to establish a sociology is a chimera. But the first herdsmen who have regarded the starry sky, early farmers who tried to guess the secrets of the life of the plants, had to be impressed in the same way by the sparkling firmament disorder, by the multiformity of its meteors. by the exuberant diversity of plant and animal forms, and the idea of explaining the sky and the forest by a small number of concepts logically chained under the name of astronomy and biology, this idea, if she could have shine them, had been in their eyes the last straw of extravagance. There not less complication, indeed, real impropriety and caprice apparent in the world of meteors or inside of a virgin forest in the jumble of human history.

How so, despite this undulating diversity of heavenly States or States woodland, physical things or living things, is we managed to be born and grow little bit has an embryo or mechanics or biology? It is on three conditions, it is important to distinguish clearly to make a precise notion and complete what should be understood by the noun and the adjective if used, science and scientist. -Firstly, we started by see some similarities in the middle of these differences, a few repetitions among these variations: periodic returns to the same States of heaven, of the same seasons, the course regularly repeated ages, youth, maturity, old age in human beings alive, and the common traits in individuals of the same species. There is a science of the individual as such; There is no science of the general, in other words the individual considers as repeat or is likely to be repeated indefinitely.

Science, it's an order of phenomena considered by the side of their rehearsals. Which doesn't mean that differentiate is not one of the essential processes of the scientific spirit. Differentiate as well as assimilate, is doing work science; but so far as the thing you can see is a guy shot in nature to a certain number of copies and likely even to an indefinite edition. This is a specific type that we discover, we characterized much, but if it was judged to be the privilege of a unique individual which cannot be transmitted to his posterity, would point to interest the scholar, if not as a teratological curiosity.

Repetition means conservative production, simple and basic causation without any creation, because the effect, elementarily, reproduces the cause, as shown in the transmission of the movement from one body to another or the communication of the life of a living being in the bud only from him. But it isn't only the reproduction, is the destruction of phenomena that is important to science. Also science, to any region of reality that it applies, must search, second, the oppositions who are there and who are her own: she will so to the balance of forces and the symmetry of the shapes, to the struggles of organizations living, in the battles of all human beings.

Is not everything, and this isn't even the essential. First of all, must cling to adaptations of the phenomena, to their reports of really creative co-production. It is to enter, clear to explain these harmonies that the scholar is working; by discovering he manages to be this superior adaptation, the harmony of its system of concepts and formulas with the internal coordination of the realities.

Thus, science is to consider a reality any these three aspects: rehearsals, oppositions and the adaptations it contains, and that so many variations, so many asymmetries, so dysharmonies cannot see. It is not, indeed, cause-and-effect report which, alone, is the element of scientific knowledge to him. Has happened, pragmatic history, which is always a sequence of causes and effects, or we learn we always battle such or such insurgency had such consequences, would be the most perfect sample of science. History, however, we know, becomes a science insofar as causality reports what she tells us appear as established between a general, likely to repeat or repeat themselves in fact cause and effect generally, no less Repeat or likely to be. -On the other hand, mathematics never show us causality implemented; When they apply her under the name of function, it is concealing it under an equation. Yet they are a science and the prototype of science. What for? Because nowhere it is made more complete elimination of the side dissimilar, individual things, anywhere they arise under the aspect pattern clearer and more defined, and more symmetrical opposition. The large gap in mathematics is to not see or hurt to see adaptations of the phenomena. Their failure so strongly felt by the philosophers, even and especially surveyors, such as Descartes, County, Cournot.

Repetition, opposition, adaptation: these are, again, three different keys which the science used to open the mysteries of the universe. She seeks, above all, not precisely the causes, but the laws of repetition, the laws of the opposition, laws of the adaptation of the phenomena. -What are three types of laws should not be confused, but who are also solidarity that distinct: in biology, for example, the tendency of species to multiply following a geometric progression (law of repetition) is the Foundation of the competition vital and selection (opposition law), and production of the individual variations, skills and individual harmonies different, as well as the correlation of growth (laws of adaptation) are necessary to their operation. - But, these three keys, the first and third are much more important than the second: the first is the large mat; the third, thinner, gives access to treasure the more caches and most valuable; the second, intermediate and subordinate, reveals shocks and struggles of temporary use, sort of medium term intended to pass out little recently, although never completely, and even partially that disappear after many transformations and mitigations.

These considerations were necessary to indicate what sociology must be if it is to deserve the name of science, and in what ways must direct her sociologists if they care about to see her take a decidedly rank that belongs to him. It will succeed, like any other science, what with and with the awareness of owning his own domain of rehearsals, his own opposition area, its own area of adaptations, all features and good at it. She progresses that striving to always substitute like all the other sciences did before her, to fake real rehearsal rehearsals, false opposition of real opposition, to false harmonies of true harmonies, and also at rehearsals, oppositions, to real, but vague, rehearsals harmonies, oppositions, adaptations more precisely. -We place successively at each of these three points of view to check first if the evolution of science in general, in particular, sociology is made or done in the sense that I have just described imperfectly and I will define better and best; and then to indicate the laws of social development under each of these aspects.

Chapter I

REPETITION OF PHENOMENA

Are we in the presence of a large object, the starry sky, the sea, a forest, a crowd, a city. Of all the points of this object emanate impressions besetting the sense of the wild as well as those of the scientist. But, in the latter, these multiple and inconsistent feelings suggest logically designed concepts, a beam of explanatory formulas. How has been the slow development of these sensations in notions and laws? How the knowledge of these things became more scientific? I say that it is, first, as it is discovered more similarities or after having believed see superficial, apparent similarities and disappointing, it has found more real, deeper similarities. In general, this means that we spent similarities and mass rehearsals complex and confusing, similarities and recurrences of detail difficult to grasp, but more specific, basic and infinitely many as that infinitesimal. - And it is only after having seen these basic similarities that higher, further, more complex, more vague, similarities have been explained and reduced to their fair value. -This progress has occurred whenever it solved in combinations of many similarities of the original separate aspects that it considered to be sui generis. What does mean for science, progressing, to pass out or even decline, in short, the proportion of the phenomenal originalities, aspects not repeated from reality. No, under the eyes of the observer, the unique qualities of mass, large and showy, dissolve, it is true, but for the benefit of originalities deepest and most hidden, that will multiply indefinitely, as well as the uniformites Elementary.

Apply this to the starry sky. There was a beginning of astronomical science of the time when idle and curious patres have noticed the periodicity of the apparent celestial revolutions, Sunrise and sunset stars, circular walks of the Sun and the Moon, regular succession and regular return of their locations in the sky. But then the generality of this unique and grandiose circular revolution, certain stars seemed to make an exception: the wandering stars, the planets, which was a capricious market different from herself and others at every moment Until it was discovered is that there is regularity in these same anomalies. Considered also similar between them all fixed or wandering, Suns or planets, including stars, stars and be established clear-cut difference between them and the Sun or the Moon, which were deemed the only stars really original in the firmament.

However astronomy grew when, on the one hand, to the appearance of this huge and unique rotation of the whole sky, it has substituted the reality of an innumerable multitude of small rotations very different between them and no synchronic but whose each is repeated indefinitely; When, on the other hand, the originality of the Sun disappeared, replaced by, harder to see, every star, Sun of an invisible system, Center of a global world that is analogous to the whirlwind of our planets.

Astronomy has done more yet when differences of these sidereal gravitation, which the generality without null exception did not exclude inequality in speed, distance, ellipticity, etc, have vanished before the law of attraction Newtonian which presents all these periodicities of movement, since the smallest to the largest, from fastest to slowest, as the rehearsal continued and continues to a fact always the same, the attraction directly of the masses and inversely as the square of distance. - And it would be better still if explaining this fact itself in turn by a bold assumption, always hunted and still haunting, we saw the effect of bursts of etheric atoms, outbreaks due to atomic vibrations of an unimaginable smallness, as well as a multiplicity inconceivable.

So did I not correct that astronomical science has always worked on similarities and duplication, and that his progress was, from similarities and unique repetitions or in very small numbers, gigantic and related to result in an infinite number of infinitesimal similarities and rehearsals, real and basic, which, by appearing, gave the explanation of the first?

And what to say - brackets - that heaven has lost none of its picturesque as the progress of astronomy? By no means. First, increasing precision instruments and observations did distinguish in the repeated gravitations of the great stars of previously undetected differences and sources of new discoveries-from Leverrier including. Then the sky grew more each day, and in its vastness increased inequalities of the stars, groups of stars, by volume, speed, physical characteristics, have increased. The varieties of configuration of the nebulae have multiplied, and when, by the spectroscope, unheard-of thing, we were able to analyze the chemical composition of celestial bodies so wonderfully, there was between them of the differences that give rise to say deep between human beings that populate them. Finally, we saw better geography of the nearest stars, and if we judge others based on them, we must believe - after studying the canals of Mars, for example - that each of the planets without number orbiting over our heads or beneath our feet to its accidents because characteristics, his special world map, local peculiarities, which, the as home, give to any corner of the ground his charm to share and print, without a doubt, the love of the homeland in the heart of its inhabitants, whatever they may be.

That is not all, in my opinion, - but I say it quite low, for fear of incurring the serious reproach of making metaphysics... I believe that it is impossible to explain the dissimilarities of which I speak, - if only these location inequalities and this capricious distribution of matter through space - in the hypothesis, too dear to chemists, in this really metaphysicists, they, of perfectly similar atomic elements. I believe that Spencer's so-called law on the instability of the homogeneous explains nothing, and that, consequently, the only way to explain the flowering of exuberant diversities at the surface of phenomena is to admit to the bottom of things a tumultuous crowd of individually characterized elements. Thus, just as the mass similarities were resolved into detail similarities, the coarse and clearly visible mass differences were transformed into infinitely fine detail differences. And, just as the similarities of detail alone make it possible to explain the similarities of the whole, similarly the differences of detail, these elementary and invisible originalities that I suspect, make it possible alone to explain the apparent and voluminous differences, the picturesque of the visible universe.

So much for the physical world. For the living world, it is no different. Let us place ourselves, like primitive man, in the middle of a forest. There is all the fauna and flora of a region, and we now know that the so dissimilar phenomena presented by these diverse plants and animals are basically resolved in a multitude of small infinitesimal facts summarized by the laws of biology, animal biology or plant biology, no matter  one confuses the two now. But, at the beginning, we differentiated deeply what we assimilated, while we assimilated many things that we differentiate. The similarities and repetitions that were seen and nourished the nascent science of organisms were superficial and disappointing: unrelated plants were assimilated, whose foliage and habit were vaguely similar, while a chasm was cut between the plants of the same family, but of very unequal shape and size. Botanical science progressed when it learned the subordination of the most important characters, that is, the most repeated and significant ones - as accompanied by a procession of other similarities - were not the most conspicuous, but, on the contrary, the most hidden, the smallest ones, namely those drawn from the organs of the generation, the fact of having one or two cotyledons, for example, or not having any.

And biology, the synthesis of zoology and botany, was born the day that cell theory showed that, in animals as in plants, the element, repeated indefinitely, was first the cell, the ovular cell, and then all the others that process it, - and that the elementary vital phenomenon is the indefinite repetition by each cell of the modes of nutrition and activity, growth and proliferation, of which it has received the traditional deposit in inheritance and which it will faithfully transmit to its posterity. This conformity to precedents called habit or heredity - let us say heredity in one word, habit being only an internal heredity like heredity is only an externalized habit - is the truly vital form of repetition, like undulation or, in general, periodic movement, is its physical form, like imitation, we shall see, is its social form.

We therefore see that the progress of the science of living beings has had the effect of gradually breaking down all the barriers between them in terms of their similarities and their repetitions, by substituting, there too, for coarse and apparent, voluminous and few in number, very precise, innumerable and infinitesimal similarities, which alone give the reason for the others. But, at the same time, multiple distinctions appeared, and, not only the individual originality of each organism became more prominent, but one was forced to admit also cellular, ovular originalities first: for is there nothing more similar in appearance than two ova, and is there nothing, in reality, more different than their content? After having experienced the inadequacy of the explanations attempted by Darwin or Lamarck of the origin of the species, - whose descent, evolution, remains above all contestation - it must be admitted that the true cause of the species is the secret of the cells, the invention in a way of some initial egg of a particularly fertile originality.

Well, I claim that, if now we are looking at a city, a crowd, an army, instead of a forest or the firmament, the above considerations will find their application in social science, as they found it in astronomy and biology. Here, similarly, we had some hasty generalizations based on analogies futile and bogus, grandiose and illusory, generalizations based on clusters of small similar facts, a relatively clean and accurate similarity.

Long ago sociology works to be done. She tried its infancy and that, in the chaos confused social facts, it has unraveled or raw unravel something periodical and regular. It was already a first sociological groping the ancient design of the great cyclic year at the end of which all, in the social world as in the natural world, to breed in the same order. To this false and only repetition of whole, welcomed by the fanciful talent of Platon, Aristote did succeed rehearsals of detail, often true, but always well vague and difficult to tighten, it formulates its policy on this that there are more superficial and less deep in social life, the succession of Government Forms. Then stopped, the evolution of Sociology started ab ovo in modern times. The Vico ricorsi are resumed and the ancient cycles cutout, with less chimera; This thesis, as well as Montesquieu on the alleged resemblance of hatched civilization under the same climate, are two good examples of repetitions and similarities superficial or illusory social science was to feed themselves before to have found a more substantial food. Chateaubriand, in his essay on the revolutions, growing a long parallel between the revolution of England and the French revolution, and fun to the more superficial reconciliations. Others based big theoretical claims on of vain analogies established between the Punic genius and the English genius, or between the Roman empire and the British empire... This claim to enclose the social facts in formulas for development, which would force them to repeat themselves in mass with insignificant variations, has been the lure of sociology, either in the already more precise form that given Hegel with his series of triads, either in the form of more scholarly yet, more precise yet and less remote from the truth, that she has received contemporary evolutionists. These, about the transformations of the law, including the pension plan of the property - about changes in language, religion, industry, fine art -, and the family have hazarded general laws, of a certain sharpness, which apply the corporate market, under these various aspects, to spend and to go through the same trails of successive phases, arbitrarily plotted. It took to recognize that these so-called rules are chewed to exceptions, and that evolution linguistic, legal, religious, political, economic, artistic, moral, is not a single roadway but a network of roads or intersections abound.

Fortunately, in the shade and away from these ambitious generalizations, more modest workers struggled with more success, noted just otherwise strong retail laws. They were linguists, the mythologists, especially economists. These specialists of Sociology saw many interesting reports between consecutive or concurrent, facts reports that breed in every moment within the small area they study: found in the wealth of nations Adam Smith and in the comparative grammar of the Indo-European of Bopp, or the book of Dietz, to cite only these three books, a crowd of glimpses of that kind, or expressed the similarity of countless human actions in terms of pronunciation of some consonants of certain vowels, purchases or sales, production or consumption of certain items, etc. It is true that these similarities themselves, when economists or linguists have tried to formulate them in laws, have resulted in laws relating to the plerumque, imperfect fit; but that's because it is was too pressed to State, before clearing, breast of these partial truths, the really general truth that they involve, basic social fact that sociology continues obscurely and that she must achieve to hatch.

This report about a subject with an object that is itself a topic is not a perception that not nothing like the thing perceived and which allow there the idealistic skeptic to revoke questioned the reality of it, but the feeling of something smelling , the volition of one thing willing, belief in a religious thing, a person, in a Word, or the person percevante is reflected and it cannot be denied without is denying itself. This consciousness of consciousness is the quid inconcussum sought Descartes and the individual self could it provide. In addition, this singular relationship is not a physical impulse received or given, a transport of driving force from the subject to the inanimate object or vice versa, depending on whether it is active or passive state, but something inside, transmission of mind, happening of either of the two topics to another without being, oddly enough, lost or lessened for the first. And what that therefore can be transmitted this way a soul to a soul by their psychological report layout? What is their feelings, their emotional States? No, this is incommunicable, essentially. What two subjects can communicate with a conscience to share, so as to feel by the more United and more similar, these are their notions and their volitions, their judgments and their designs, forms that can stay the same despite the difference in their content, products of the spiritual development exerted on any sensory signs almost interchangeably. Also does it not differ significantly from the spirit of the Visual type to a spirit of the acoustic type or engine, so that a man born blind geometric ideas are exactly those surveyors doues view and a campaign plan suggested by one General bilious mood and melancholy to generals of bright and blood or phlegmatic temperament and resigns, leaves not to be quite the same: just that it relates to the same series of transactions, and on the other hand, he is wanted by them with a force equal desire, despite the way feel special, any individual who push each other to be desired. Energy psychic trend of mental greed, I call desire, is, like the energy of intellectual snatching, membership and mental constriction, which I call the belief, a homogenous and continuous current, variable coloration of shades of affectivity to each spirit, runs the same, sometimes divided, scattered, sometimes concentrate, and who, from one person to another, as well as a perception to another in each of them, communicates without alteration.

When I said that all real science results in a clean area of repetitions elementary, countless and infinitesimal, it is as if I had said that all real science is based on qualities that are special to him. Amount, in effect, is possibility of infinite series of infinitely small repetitions and similarities. That's why I allowed myself to insist on the quantitative character of two mental energy which, as two different rivers, water the double side of me, his intellectual activity and voluntary activity. If we deny this character, we declare impossible sociology. But we can deny it without refusing to clear, and the evidence that the amounts in question are strictly social, it of their quantitative nature appears much better, captures the spirit with more vivid sharpness, considering in masses larger, in the form of currents of faith or of popular passion, traditional beliefs and customary opiniatretes, embracing more many men's groups. More a community grows and more the rise or fall of opinion, i.e. from believing or wanting national, affirmative or negative, relatively to a given object - increase or decrease expressed especially by the sides of the purse - is likely to measurement and comparable to the movements of the temperature or atmospheric pressure or the force of falling water. This is because it is so that the statistics develops more easily when the States are growing; Statistics, whose own purpose is to search and sort out real quantities in the clutter of social facts and that better succeeds she strives to measure, inside, through human actions added up by it, masses of beliefs and desires. The value of stock market statistics Express changes in public confidence in the success of such or such companies, in such or such States borrowers creditworthiness, and variations of the public desire, of the public interest, to which it is given satisfaction by these loans or companies. Industrial or agricultural statistics expresses the importance of the General requirements that call for the production of such or such articles or the suitability of the means implemented to respond. The judicial statistics itself is interesting to consult in its counts trial or crimes that because it reads, through lines, the progression or regression, year by year, the proportion of the public desires engaged in channels processives or criminal, for example the tendency to divorce or the tendency to steal, and both the proportion of public expectations turned or side some trial of certain offences. It is not until the statistics of the population which, as a sociological - because it is simply biological in other respects and relates to the propagation of the species at the same time as a duration and to the progress of social institutions - expresses the growth or the decrease of the desire of paternity and maternity, the desire for marriage, as well as General persuasion that we find happiness to marry and form fertile unions.

But in what condition forces of belief and desire stored in separate individuals can legitimately be added? The condition of having the same object, to wear on a same idea to affirm, on the same action to run. But how this convergence of direction, which makes the individual energies likely form a social whole, occurred? What is spontaneously, by a chance encounter or a kind of pre-established harmony? No, if it isn't in very rare cases, and yet these apparent exceptions, if we had the time to press them, they would confirm the rule. This thorough compliance the minds and wills which is the basis of social life, even in the most troubled time, the simultaneous presence of so many ideas, so many goals and specific ways, in all the spirits and all the wishes of the same company at a time given, I claim that it is the effect, not of organic inheritance which has emerged quite similar to each other, men nor the identity of the geographical environment which offered skills roughly the same of resources about equal, but the suggestion imitation, which, from a first creator of an idea or an Act, to spread the example step by step. The organic needs, spiritual trends, do exist in us to the State of feasible possibilities in the forms the most various despite their similarity wave paramount; and among these possible achievements, it is an indication of a first imitated initiator which determined the choice of one of them.

Returned so the elementary social couple, I mentioned earlier, the couple not man and woman who love each other - this couple her, as a sexual, is purely vital- but well the couple of two persons, to any sex that they belong. which one is spiritually on the other. I claim that the report of those two is the unique and necessary part of social life, and it is always, originally in an imitation of one by the other. But it comes to understand this so do not fall within the scope of vain and superficial objections. What could not challenge me, is that saying, doing, thinking anything, once engaged in social life, we imitate others at every moment, unless we innovating, which is rare; still, it is easy to show that our innovations are largely combinations of previous examples, and that they remain foreign to social life as long as they are not imitated. You don't say a word that is not unconscious reproduction now, but initially desired, verbal articulation and conscious dating back to the past, with an accent to your entourage; you are not doing a traditional rite of your religion, cross, icon baisement, prayer, which never repeated gestures and sign forms, i.e. Forms by imitation ancestors; you are not running a military or civilian, you aren't an act any of your job don't you have been taught and you don't have a copy on a live model. you do not have a stroke, if you're a painter, you don't write one, if you are a poet, which is consistent with the habits or the Prosody of your school, and your originality even is made of accumulated trivialities and aspires to become commonplace in turn.

Thus, the constant character of a social fact, whatever it is, is good to be imitative. And this character is exclusively unique to social facts. On this point, however, it was made me by Mr. Giddings - who, with a remarkable talent, moved quite frequently in my sociological point of view - a specious objection; we be imitated, he said, of a company to another, we be imitated even between foes, has borrowed arms, ruses of war, trade secrets. The field of the imitativite so exceeds that of sociality and cannot be the characteristic of it. But the objection is to amaze me on the part of an author who looks at the struggle between companies as a powerful agent of their future socialization of their communion in a wider society, developed by their same battles. And, in fact, it is not visible that, insofar as the rival peoples, where the enemy people assimilate their institutions, they tend to merge? It is therefore quite certain that, not only between individuals associated with already, each new Act of imitation tends to retain or strengthen the social bond, but only between individuals not yet associated, she prepares the association of tomorrow, i.e. weaves already by invisible threads which will become a link shows.

As for other objections that have been made to me, as they are all of a very incomplete understanding of my ideas, I don't stop there not. They fall of these same eyes who placed clearly in my view. I refer to my books in this respect.

But it does point to recognize this imitative nature of any social phenomenon. I say, moreover, that the original report of imitation existed not between an individual and a blur of men like enough often later, but between two individuals only one, child, is born has the social life, and that the other, adult, already socialize for a long time, serves as a model. It's moving forward in life that we we often settle on collective and impersonal templates at the same time that unconscious usually; but, before we talk, think, act as we speak, as we think, as we act in our world, we begins to speak, think, and Act, as he or she speaks, thinks, is. And this he or this she, is particular to our pets. At the bottom of, looking good, we'll never find that a number of they and they who are scrambled and combined by multiplying. -So simple that is this distinction, it is forgotten by those who, in an institution and a social work, challenge to individual initiative the creative role, and believe something professing, for example, that the languages and the religions are collective works, crowds, crowds without no leader, have made the Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Buddhism, Christianity, and finally, it's by enforcement action of the community on the individual or small, always model and enslaved, not by action suggestive and contagious individuals of elite on the community, that explain formations and transformations of societies. In reality, such explanations are illusory, and their authors don't realize that by applying such a collective force, a similarity of millions of men at the same time in some respects, they avoid the major difficulty, the question of find out how could take place this General assimilation. We precisely respond by pushing the analysis how far I drove it, up to the inter-cerebrale relationship of two minds, to the reflection of one by the other, and it is only then that we can explain these partial unanimous, these conspiracies are hearts, these communions of the spirits who once trained and perpetuated by tradition, imitation of the ancestors, pressure so often tyrannical, yet most salutary, on the individual. It is this relationship that the sociologist should focus, as the astronomer attaches to the report of two attractive and attracted masses; It is to her that he should ask the social mystery, the formula of a few simple, universally true, laws that can be untangled in the apparent chaos of history and of human life.

In the long run, it will take well to open your eyes to the evidence and recognize the genius of a people or a race, instead of being the factor dominant and superior of the individual geniuses who are supposed to be his offspring and transient manifestations, is all simply the convenient label, the synthesis anonymous of these unique personal qualities, only real, only effective and active at every moment, men, who are fermenting continues within each society through loans constant and fruitful exchange of examples with neighbouring societies. The collective, impersonal, genius is so function and not factor in individual, infinitely many geniuses; It is composite, it must not be the mask. And we don't have certainly nothing to regret, in fact of picturesque social, own to remember the artist historian, when, through this phantasmagoria, rather informed that dissipated a few, large historical actors vaguely characterized, called Egypt. Rome, Athens, etc., we will notice a tingling of innovative individuals, each sui generis, marked its own distinct, recognizable seal anywhere.

So I then conclude yet once, by the introduction of this sociological point of view, we have done precisely what all other sciences by advancing, replaced similarities and differences false or vague, in small numbers, by of countless similarities and differences, true and accurate; What is double profit for the artist and the scientist, and above all to the philosopher who has less than nothing to separate, to synthesize the two.

A few comments yet. As long as it has not had discovered of basic astronomical fact, the attraction according to the Newtonian law, or at least the elliptical gravitation, there was heterogeneous astronomical knowledge, a science of the Moon, selenologie, a science of the Sun, heliologie, etc., but not astronomy. -As long as we saw no basic chemical fact (affinity, combination in defined proportions), there has been chemical knowledge, special chemistries, iron, Tin, copper, etc., but no chemistry. -As long as it has not been found does essential physics, wave communication of the molecular movement, there have been physical knowledge, optics, acoustics, the thermologie, the electrology, but not physics. -Physics became physical chemistry, the science of the whole inorganic nature, when they saw the opportunity to explain everything by the basic laws of mechanics, i.e. when believed to discover, as basic inorganic the reaction equal and contrary to action, energy conservation, reduction of all forces in the forms of the movement, the mechanical equivalent of heat, electricity, light, etc. Finally, before the discovery of the existing analogies, from the perspective of the reproduction between animals and plants, there was not even a botanical and a zoology, but the botanical and the zoologies, i.e. a lectures if you will, a canine etc. But the discovery of the similarities it give only a very partial unit to all these scattered science, these membra disjecta of future biology. Biology really took birth as when the cell theory is coming to show the elementary vital fact, the operation of the cell (or histological element) and its proliferation, continued by the egg cell itself, ensure that the nutrition and the generation were seen through the same angle.

Well, this is now and similarly to, after the social sciences, social science. There was, indeed, social sciences, at least in draft, beginnings of political, linguistic science, comparative mythology, aesthetics, morals, a national economy already advanced enough, long before that there was the embryo even of the Sociology. Sociology assumes a basic social fact. It guess it so well that when it was not able to find out, perhaps because it was bursting her eyes, be forgiven this expression she dreamed, she imagined in the form of one of these vain and imaginary similarities which clutter the cradle of all sciences, and believed something deeply instructive in designing a society as a large organization, the individual (or family according to others) as the cell social, and any form of social activity like a function somehow cell. I already have the greatest efforts, with most sociologists, to clear the emerging science of this space-saving design. But even a word about it.

Scientific knowledge if feel the need to rely primarily on similarities and repetitions, that, when it does not on hand, it creates, I repeat, of make-believe until the true; and this point of view, to classify the famous metaphor of the social organization among many other symbolic designs that have had the same passenger utility. The origins of all science, as well as all literature, allegory has played a huge role. In mathematics, we have allegorical dreams of Pythagoras and Plato before solid generalizations of Archimedes. Astrology and magic, astronomy, chemistry stammering vestibule, are based on the assumption of universal allegory rather than of universal analogy; they admit a pre-established harmony between the positions of some planets and the destinies of some men, between such simulated action and such real action, between the nature of a chemical substance and the heavenly body which it is named, etc. Let's not forget the symbolic character of the primitives procedures, actions of law in Roman law, former trial and error of jurisprudence. Also, note - since theology has been a science of our ancestors, as well as the case law - abuse of the senses figures ready to Bible stories by older theologians, who saw the early copy of Christ in the history of Jacob or who symbolized the love of Christ and his Church by those of the husband or the wife in the song of songs. So begins the science of theology of the middle ages, as modern literature by the romance of the Rose. There are away from these ideas to the sum of St. Thomas Aquinas. -up to our century, we find a last vestige of this symbolic in literature mysticism, now well forgotten - and however worthy to be exhumed by their graces feneloniennes style - this good father Gratry who believed see symbolized by the solar system successive relationships of the soul and God, around which, according to him, she turns. For him, the circle and the ellipse symbolize any morality, which is written hieroglyphiquement in Conic sections.

Certainly, I want point compare to these eccentricities developments, partly solid and always serious, that Herbert Spencer, after County, and most recently Mr. René Worms and Mr. Novicow, gave to the thesis of the company organization. I appreciate strong merit and momentary utility of such works, even criticizing. But generalizing now the foregoing, I have the right, I believe, to set out the following proposal: the progress of a science is to replace similarities and external repetitions, i.e. comparison of the own object of this Science with other objects, by similarities and internal repetitions, i.e. a comparison of this object with itself considered in its multiple copies, and in other aspects. The idea of the social organism which envisages the nation as a plant or an animal, corresponds to the vital mechanism that looks at a plant or an animal like a mechanic. But it is not by this comparison, dug and extended to a living body with a mechanism that biology has progressed, is by comparison of the plants, animals between them, living bodies between them. And it isn't by comparing companies with agencies, that sociology already made great strides forward and make more great again, is by comparison of the companies between them is by countless rated coincidences between the separate national developments from the point of view of language, the right to religion, industry, arts, manners: it is largely through the attraction given to these imitations of man to man, who provide the analytic explanation of the facts to set.

After these long preliminary, would be time to expose the general laws which govern the imitative repetition and are what the laws of habit and heredity are biology, sociology as the laws of gravitation are to astronomy , and the ripple to the physics laws. But I extensively treated this topic in one of my books, the laws of imitation, which let me to refer those interested in this matter. However I want to release what I didn't put enough light, namely that basically, all these laws are the result of a higher principle: the trend of an example, once launched, in a certain social group, to spread following a geometric progression, if This group remains homogeneous. -By this trend, by the way, I hear nothing mysterious. This means something very simple: when, for example, in a group, the need to express a new idea with a new Word is felt, the first who imagine an expression imaged own to satisfy that need has to pronounce that, close to close, she was soon passed by all the mouths of the group in question, and that she even, later spreading to neighbouring groups. This does not mean at all that this phrase is endowed with a soul that the door to radiate, any more than the physicist, by saying that the sound wave tends to spread in the air, ready to this simple form own force ambitious and greedy. No, it's a way to talk, to say, in one case, the driving forces inherent in the air molecules have found in this wave-like repetition a flow path, and to say, in the other, the inherent human individuals special need of the Group which it found to be satisfied by this imitative repetition, which avoids their laziness (similar to the physical inertia) worth to put themselves in charge of invention. -Whatever it is, the tendency to the geometric progression in question is not in doubt; only she is often hindered by obstacles of various kinds, and it is rare, very rare, that statistical diagrams related to the spread in the audience of a new industrial invention, paint in the eyes this steady progression. These obstacles, what are they? Is that come from the diversity of climates and the races, but they are not the strongest; the major obstacle which stops the expansion of social innovation and consolidation in traditional custom, it's some other similarly expansive innovation that the encounter on his way, and that, to use a physical metaphor, interferes with her. Each time, indeed, that each of us hesitate between two ways of speaking, between two ideas, between two faiths, between two ways of acting, interference of imitative radiation takes place in him, of imitative radiation which, from different homes. extremely distinct one from the other, often in space and in time, i.e. foster inventors, primitive individual imitators, spread up to him. So, how resolves his embarrassment? What are the influences which so decide? These influences are, I said, of two kinds: logical, the other extra-logiques. I need to add that these same are logical in some sense of the word, because, when between two examples, the plebeian chooses blindness of the patrician, the rural of the city dweller, the provincial of the Parisian (is what I called the) cascade of imitation up and down the social scale), imitation, so blind that she was, was driven basically by a presumption of superiority attached to the model which seems to have a social authority over him. It is the same when, from the example of his ancestors to a foreign innovative, primitive man does not hesitate to prefer one of the first it considers infallible, and, conversely, it is well, when, in any such perplexity the individual of our modern cities, convinced initially that the new is always better than the ancient, made a precisely contrary choice. -It is not less true that the opinion of the individual founded the so on considerations extraneous to the very nature of the two models compare the two ideas or two volitions in the presence, deserves to be carefully distinguished from the case or he opts in virtue of a judgment is the intrinsic character of these two ideas or these two volitions, and you can book the influences that decide, in this case, the epithet of logic.

But I will say no more for now, because, in our next chapter, we will have to talk about these duels logical and teleological, social opposition elements. -Add that not all mutual barriers of imitative radiation interference are, they are very often of mutual alliances and help speed up, to amplify these radiations; Sometimes they give the opportunity of a great idea that was born of their meeting and their combination in a brain, as discussed in the chapter on social adaptation.