XXI

IMITATION1

After these long preliminaries I must develop an important chesis, 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 really superfluous and superficial. 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 following 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 concentric strata of attraction of which every heavenly body is a center) 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 comparative 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, — customimitation or fashion-imitation, sympathy-imitation or obedienceimitation, precept-imitation or education-imitation, naïve imitation, deliberate imitation, etc. In this lies the excellence of the contemporaneous method of explaining doctrines and institutions through their history. It is a method that is certain to come

1 From The Laws of Imitation, by Gabriel Tarde. Translated by Elsie Clews Matthews (copyright, 1903, by Henry Holt & Co., New York).

into more general 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 both authors of the same invention have drawn independently from some common fund of instruction. This fund consists of a mass of ancient traditions and of experiences that are unorganized, or that have been more or less organized and imitatively transmitted through language, the great vehicle of all imitations.

In this connection we may observe that modern philologists relied so implicitly upon the foregoing proposition that they have concluded, through analogy, that Sanskrit, 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 tradition. Each modification was, in truth, an anonymous linguistic invention which was, in turn, perpetuated by imitation.

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 resemblance, if every resemblance proceeds from repetition, and if every repetition is a vibration (or any other periodic movement), 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, 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 leveling which has from its very beginning 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 formulating 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!

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 interwoven 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 idiosyncrasies 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 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 pernicious erigeron of Canada, which has but quite recently been imported from Europe, flourishes already in every uncultivated 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 becomes, through imitation, a national idiom. In the beginning 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 civilization prodigiously accelerate their diffusion, just as velocity of sound is proportionate to density of medium. Every social thing, that is to say, every invention or discovery, tends to expand in its social environment, an environment which itself, I might add, tends to self-expansion, 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 the environment where these forms propagate themselves have taken a common direction. In this sense, this tendency 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 numerically 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 agglomerations 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 numerous to give birth to the principal moral varieties of the human species, but also of thousands of uniform repetitions of these groups, so that the uniformity of these repetitions makes an apparent homogeneity, in spite of the internal complexity of each group. Have we not some reason

for thinking that this is the kind of homogeneity which characterizes all the simple and apparently uniform realities which external nature presents to us? On this hypothesis, it is evident that the success of an idea, the more or less rapid rate at which it circulated on the day of its appearance, 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, provided no check, prohibitive or otherwise, intervened, or no superior article of the same class were discovered.

It has been said that the faculty of foresight is the criterion of science. Let us amend this to read, the faculty of conditional foresight. The botanist, for example, can foretell the form and color of the fruit which a flower will produce, 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