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10
PROCESSES OF IMITATION *1
1890
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 important consequences which
proceed from them.
The supreme law of imitation seems to be its tendency towards indefinite progression. This
immanent and immense kind of ambition 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 discovery 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 of inventions
which are logically and teleologically auxiliary, or by the help of the prestige which belongs to
alleged superiorities, it is checked by the different obstacles which it has successively to overcome
or to turn aside. These obstacles are the logical and teleogical 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 originate and make its way in a lower class, does
not, during periods of hereditary aristocracy and of physiological 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 accustomed 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 themselves 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 aristocratic, intrinsically
organic inequality, we have a democratic 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 individual to individual and from profession to profession. In this way, the field of imitation has
been constantly growing and freeing itself from heredity. . . .
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, towards geometric progression,
expresses and fulfils itself more and more. Every act of imitation, therefore, results in 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 locomotion, as well as through greater density of population. This last