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“You would not assert that Prometheus owed the knowledge of how to light fire to his own meditations, and that when he struck a flint
for the first time he expected fire to burst forth. You will certainly admit that he owed this invention to chance . . . and that we owe the
discovery of plasters to the wild goat, musical modulations to the nightingale, enemas to the stork, and gunpowder to the pot cover which
flies into the air; in brief for all these discoveries we are obliged to chance and to something very different from dialectic
reasoning.”
7 Certain peoples, on continents and hence with more means of communicating with others, still did not have fire in the eighteenth
century. Such, according to a letter written in 1730 (Lettres Edifiantes), were the “long eared” Indians of Guiana. These savages were
still in the age of polished stones or rather the age of pebbles sharpened against one another.
8 The same remark is applicable to more civilized peoples which, although in fairly close proximity, do not communicate with each
other. We are surprised to learn for example that the Incas had scales while the Aztecs did not.
9 See Rivista di sociologia, September-October 1899, Salvioli’s article on “Gli asordi dell’agricultura.”
10 In different terms, has not the same cause produced an analogous effect in our own time? From the prodigious inventiveness of the
nineteenth century have not our own contemporaries, under the guise of skepticism, developed an equally extraordinary credulity?
Witness not only the progress of spiritualism and the renaissance of mysticism, but more generally the avid collection by the enlightened
classes, and even the masses, of any sort of novelty, whether remedy, legislative reform, or experiment in social dissection based on some
utopian ideal.
7 Opposition 1898
*1 Reprinted from Social Laws, translated by Howard C. Warren (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1899), pp. 85–133, with elisions.
8 Logical Laws of Imitation 1888
*1 Reprinted from The Laws of Imitation, translated by Elsie C. Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), pp. 140–85, with elisions.
9 Extra-Logical Laws of Imitation 1888
*1 Reprinted from The Laws of Imitation, translated by Elsie C. Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), pp. 189–254, with elisions.
1 I 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. Dostoevsky 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.”
10 Processes of Imitation 1890
*1 Reprinted from The Laws of Imitation, translated by Elsie C. Parsons (New York: Henry Holt, 1903), pp. 366–93, with elisions.
11 Belief and Desire 1880
*1 From Essais et mélanges sociologiques (Paris: Maloine, 1895), pp. 253–40, 264–75.
1 This study, which appeared in August and September 1880 in Mr. Ribot’s Revue, was my first philosophical publication. If I bring it
to light after such a lapse of time, it is not because I am blind to its being old or out of date here and there; but even this is instructive, as
an indication of the changes which have taken place in contemporary thinking. Furthermore, the problems, social more than
psychological, to which this essay is addressed have not lost any of their importance, and indeed the socialist preoccupations of the
present day render them even sharper, more disquieting, more arduous in nature. As for the solution that these problems receive here, it
still seems to me essentially correct, and the application which I made of it in my later work to various aspects of social life seems to
confirm it adequately. Is this an illusion? The reader may judge. I reprint these pages without any textual change even though in several
places I am now inclined to put question marks where I formerly made resolute assertions. [Tarde added this footnote in 1895.—Ed.]
2 See the Revue Philosophique, March 1876.
*2 Quietism is a form of mysticism stressing passivity and abandonment of effort, reason, emotion in order to achieve union with God.
—Ed.
*3 “Wish—not wish.”—Ed.
*4 Bertillon was a leading statistical sociologist at the turn of the century who completed important research on the causes of
depopulation. See Terry N. Clark, “Jacques Bertillon,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (New York: Macmillan-Free
Press, 1968) and “Discontinuities in Social Research: The Case of the Cours Elémentaire de Statistique Administrative,” Journal of
the History of the Behavioral Sciences, vol. 3, no. 1 (January 1967), pp. 3–16.—Ed.