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Russian, farmers, merchants, industrialists, or criminal or reformatory recidivists. In these various
enumerations, statistics treat truly social quantities. But if they indiscriminately enumerate Frenchmen,
Chinese, Polynesians, and Negroes, or if they consider race only in the physiological and not the
ethnic sense of the word and do not distinguish nationalities, classes, cults, or professions, they are
looking at men only from the point of view of their vital similarities and are then dealing with vital,
not social, quantities.
One essential observation must be added: if it is the similarity of beings or phenomena that allows
us to enumerate them and treat them as dimensions, the numbers thus obtained will have quite a
different meaning according to whether the similarity is a fortuitous one, produced by an unsolicited
encounter of different causes, or is the direct and in some way intentional effect of a single cause—as
for example elasticity, which is the cause of the repetition of light and sound waves, or generation, the
cause of the hereditary repetition of living phenomena, or attraction, 2 the cause of the imitative
repetition of the acts, thoughts or feelings of others. In the first case the number only expresses a
subjective grouping; but in the second it grasps an objective reality distinct from the unities of which
it is composed. Thus when a physicist gives us the number of light waves per second in the same ray
from the same source or the number of sound waves emanating from the same chord of the same organ
pipe, he knows that the optical number, or color, and the acoustical number, or note, are not pure
entities. Similarly, when Malthus and Darwin speak of the geometric progression of individuals of a
living species unhindered by the competition of neighboring species, they know that this specific
number, however hypothetical, is real in the highest degree. And analogously, when a new idea such
as Marxism or anarchism, when a new passion such as locomotion for the sake of locomotion, or
change for the sake of change, or revolution for the sake of revolution, is advanced by some great
theoretician, mechanic, or politician, no one doubts but that the spread of the idea among the masses,
the number of examples of the idea projected into the heads and hearts of the people, is a social
reality of the first order.
Therefore let no one reproach me any longer—and I am answering the criticism once and for all—
for having absorbed sociology into psychology because, in order to find this newcomer science a
place all its own, I do not feel obliged, as do other sociologists, to deny it every psychological
element, to drain it of all substance in order to emphasize its originality. I have not had to hunt that
philosopher’s stone, the “purely social thing,” which, by hypothesis, is pure and purged of all
individual reality. It sufficed for me to see that with individual entities, with mental entities, men
assembled together create a social entity by virtue of their animal or presocial attraction, and that the
social thing is distinct from psychological things, precisely because it is composed of them, because
it is the nonartificial synthesis of them, their true union, their objective number, and (which I have not
yet shown) their logical aggregate. But let us return to the subject.
Thus, sociological quantities would or could exist even if there were no psychological ones; and in
fact, with the imitative diffusion of certain aural and visual aesthetic predelictions, great artists are
creating social forces just as worthy of the name force, just as capable of increasing and decreasing
with regularity, as the energies of a living being. But it is no less true that the quantitative aspects of
psychological phenomena are those which are by far the most easily and rapidly communicated from
one mind to another, the most recognizable as identical in all minds, the most able to form logical and
fruitful unions—fruitful in products—called ideas and needs, which spread and combine with the
same facility, and so forth ad infinitum. There is nothing more contagious among men than faith, unless
perhaps passion. Sensations are not contagious, and one is never certain that they are transmitted
without considerable alteration; an image loses its special character when it passes from visual to