51. [Trans. Note: Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827, mathematician and astronomer) was instrumental in developing a mechanical theory of the stability of the solar system. Urbain Le Verrier’s (1811-1877) prediction of the planet Neptune (1846) and its subsequent discovery by observation provided further confirmation of Laplace’s model.]
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47
of celestial mechanics, will one distant day, like the people of a na-
tion, sweep away all barriers and from their very wreckage con-
struct the instrument of a still higher diversity.
Let us insist on this central truth: we may approach it by re-
marking that, in all great regular mechanisms—the social mecha-
nism, the vital mechanism, the stellar mechanism, or the molec-
ular mechanism—all the internal revolts which in the end break
them apart are provoked by a similar condition: their constitutive
elements, the soldiers of these diverse regiments, the temporary
incarnation of their laws, always belong only by one aspect of their
being to the world they constitute, and by other aspects escape
it. This world would not exist without them; without the world,
conversely, the elements would still be something. The attributes
which each element possesses in virtue of its incorporation into its
regiment do not form the whole of its nature; it has other tenden-
cies and other instincts which come to it from its other regimen-
tations; and, moreover (we will shortly see the necessity of this
corollary), still others which come to it from its basic nature, from
itself, from its own fundamental substance which is the basis of
its struggle against the collective power of which it forms a part.
This collective is wider but no less deep than the element, but it is
a merely artificial being, a composite made up of aspects and fa-
çades of other beings.—This hypothesis can easily be verified in
the case of social elements. If they were only social, and in partic-
ular only national, it would follow that societies and nations would
exist without change for all eternity. But, in spite of our great debt
to the social and national environment, it is clear that we do not
owe everything to it. At the same time as being French or English,
we are mammals, and as such there circulate in our blood not only
the germs of social instincts which predispose us to imitate our
peers, to believe what they believe and want what they want, but
also the seeds of non-social instincts, including some which are
anti-social. Surely, if society had made us in our entirety, it would
have made us entirely sociable. It is therefore from the depths of
organic life (and from deeper still, we believe) that there wells up
among our cities this magma of discord, hatred and envy, which
on occasion submerges them. It is hardly possible to enumerate
all the States overthrown by sexual love, all the cults it has under-
mined or denatured, all the languages it has corrupted, and also
all the colonies it has founded, all the religions it has ameliorated
and made gentle, all the barbaric idioms it has civilized, all the
48
Monadology and Sociology
arts whose life-blood it has been! Rebellion and rejuvenation in-
deed spring from a single source. In truth, all that is truly social is
the imitation of one’s compatriots and ancestors,52 in the broadest sense of the term.
If the elements of societies are vital in nature, the organic ele-
ments of living bodies are chemical. One of the errors of the older
physiology was to think that as soon as they enter into an organ-
ism, chemical substances abdicate all their properties and are pen-
etrated to their innermost heart, to their most secret core, by the
mysterious influence of life. Our contemporary physiologists have
entirely dispelled this error. A molecule which forms part of an or-
ganic body, therefore, belongs at once to two worlds which are for-
eign or hostile to one another. Can it be denied that this indepen-
dence of the chemical nature of corporeal elements with respect
to their organic nature helps to explain the perturbations, the de-
viations and the fortunate recastings of living forms? Indeed, it
seems to me that we must go yet further and recognize that only
this independence can account for the resistance of some parts of
the organs to the acceptance of the inherited living form, and for
the necessity which sometimes obliges life (that is, the collection
of molecules which have remained obedient) to finally come to a
compromise with the rebellious faction of molecules by adopting
a new form. In effect, then, the only truly vital process seems to
be generation (of which nutrition and cellular regeneration are only special cases), in conformity with the hereditary form.
Is this the final word? Perhaps not; the analogy suggests that
chemical and astronomical laws themselves are not supported on
nothingness, but that their domain of application is populated by
tiny beings already endowed with inner characters and innate di-
versities, diversities which are in no way accommodated to the par-
ticularities of the celestial or chemical machinery. It is true that we
cannot perceive in chemical bodies the trace of any accidental ail-
ment or deviation which we could see as parallel to organic disor-
ders or social revolutions. But, since there do currently exist chem-
ical heterogeneities, there doubtless existed, in some far distant
era, chemical formations. Were these formations simultaneous?
Did hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, etc., appear at the same instant in
the heart of a single amorphous substance which was previously
52. In progressive societies, it is increasingly one’s compatriots rather than one’s ancestors who are imitated, and the converse in stationary societies. But to associate always and everywhere means to assimilate, that is, to imitate.
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non-chemical? If this is judged improbable, or rather impossible,
we must admit that an originary atomic form transmitted through
vibration, starting from a point—that of hydrogen, for example—
imposed itself throughout the whole or almost the whole of ma-
terial extension, and that, by breaking away in succession from
the primordial hydrogen, at long intervals of time, all the other
so-called simple bodies—whose atomic weights, as we know, are
often exact multiples of that of hydrogen—were formed. But how
can we explain such fission on the hypothesis that the primitive el-
ements are perfectly homogenous and governed by the same law,
which, it seems to me, should rather consolidate by the identity of
their structure the identity and immutability of their nature? Will
it perhaps be argued that the accidents of astronomical evolution
involving the primitive elements could have produced or catalysed
chemical formations? Unfortunately this hypothesis seems to me
to have been very clearly ruled out by the discovery of the spectro-
scope. Since, according to this instrument, all the so-called simple
bodies or many of them enter into the composition of the most dis-
tant planets and stars, which have evolved independently of each
other, common sense tells us that the simple bodies were formed
before the stars, as cloth before clothes. It follows that the piece-
meal dismembering of the primitive substance admits of only one
explanation: namely, that the particles were originally dissimi-
lar, and that their schisms were caused by this essential dissim-
ilarity. There is thus some reason to think that hydrogen, for ex-
ample, as it exists today after so many successive eliminations or
emigrations, is noticeably different from the ur-hydrogen, which
would have been a pell-mell of discordant atoms. The same obser-
vation applies to all the simple bodies which were subsequently
engendered. In being thus exhausted and reduced, each was con-
solidated in its equilibrium, and fortified by its very losses. But, if
so, it is highly improbable, despite the extraordinary stability thus
acquired by the oldest atomic or molecular forms, that complete
similarity obtains among the elements which subsist in each. It
would have sufficed, for the refining of each form to come to an
end, if the internal differences of its elements had diminished to a
point where it was no longer impossible for the elements to coex-
ist. These infinitesimal citizens of mysterious cities are so distant
from us53 that it is no wonder that the noise of their internal dis-
53. I say distant from us, not only by the incommensurable distance between their smallness and our relative immensity, and, conversely, between their relative 50
Monadology and Sociology
cord does not reach us, and their internal differences, if they exist
as I believe, must be of a fineness which cannot be apprehended by
our gross instruments. However, the polymorphism of certain el-
ements is a sufficient indicator that they harbour dissidences, and
we know enough of these to have some suspicion of the troubles
and disparities which afflict the fundamental nature of the princi-
pal substances employed by life, in particular carbon. How can it
be admitted that the atoms of a single substance bond with each
other so as to form what Gerhardt calls hydrogen hydride, chlo-
rine chloride, etc., while persisting in elevating to the status of
dogma the perfect similarity of the multiple atoms of a single sub-
stance? Does not such a union presuppose a difference of at least
an equal magnitude to the sexual difference which allows two in-
dividuals of a single species to unite intimately, and without which
they could only bump together?
If we observe that the element in which these unions of atom
to similar atom have been most clearly demonstrated to be proba-
ble, and indeed almost certain, namely carbon, is also the element
which manifests itself to us in its pure state in the most varied as-
pects, diamond, graphite, coal, etc., the preceding induction will
be confirmed. It is no surprise that the body most fertile in variet-
ies reveals most clearly the vigorous marriages between its constit-
uent atoms … Carbon is the differentiated element par excellence.
Wurtz says: ‘The affinity of carbon for carbon is the cause of
the infinite variety and the immense number of the combinations
of carbon; it is the raison d’être of organic chemistry. No other element possesses to the same degree this master-property of carbon,
this faculty which its atoms have of combining with one another,
of fastening onto one another, of forming this framework, so vari-
able in its form, its dimensions, its solidity, and which serves, as it
were, as the basis of other materials’.54
After carbon, the bodies which have to the greatest degree this
capacity for being partially or entirely saturated by themselves are
oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen; remarkably enough, exactly those
substances utilized by life!
Besides, one significant fact should give us pause for reflec-
tion: life began on this globe at a particular time and in a particular
apparent eternity and our brief duration (a very strange and perhaps imaginary contrast), but also by the profound heterogeneity of their inner nature and ours.
54. [Trans. Note: Adolphe Wurtz (1817-1884), chemist. The citation has not been traced.]
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place. Why at this place and not elsewhere, if the same substanc-
es were composed of the same elements? Let us even admit that
life is only a particular, highly complex chemical combination.
Nonetheless, how could it have been born, if not from an element
unlike all the others?
VII
In the two preceding chapters, we have shown that the universal
sociological point of view may be of service to science in two ways,
by liberating it, first, from those hollow entities brought about by
misunderstanding the relation of conditions to result, and then
mistakenly substituted for the real agents; and second, from the
prejudiced belief in the perfect similarity of these elementary
agents. These two advantages are, however, purely negative; I will
now try to show what more positive information we can gain by
the same method regarding the inner nature of the elements. It is
not enough to say that the elements are diverse, we must specify
in what their diversity consists. This will demand several develop-
ments of our theory.
What is society? It could be defined, from our point of view,
as each individual’s reciprocal possession, in many highly varied
forms, of every other. Unilateral possession, such as that in an-
cient law of the slave by the master, of the son by the father, or of
the wife by the husband, is only a first step towards the social link.
Thanks to the development of civilization, the possessed becomes
more and more a possessor, and the possessor a possessed, until,
by equality of right, by popular sovereignty, and by the equitable
exchange of services, ancient slavery, now mutualized and univer-
salized, makes each citizen at once the master and the servant of
every other. At the same time, the ways of possessing one’s fellow
citizens, and of being possessed by them, grow in number every
day. Every new administration or industry which is created sets to
work new administrators or industrialists on behalf of those who
are administered by them or who consume their products, and
who in this sense gain a real right with respect to them, a right
which they did not previously have, while they themselves con-
versely have come, by this new two-sided relation, to belong to these industrialists or administrators. We may say the same of any new
opportunity. When a newly opened railway brings produce from
the sea to a small town far inland for the first time, the domain
of the town’s inhabitants has grown to include the fishermen who
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Monadology and Sociology
are now part of it, and the clientele of the fishermen, correspond-
ingly, has grown to include the townspeople. As a subscriber to a
newspaper, I possess my journalists, who possess their subscribers. I possess my government, my religion, my police force, just as
much as my specifically human form, my temperament, and my
health; but I also know that the ministers of my nation, the priests
of my confession or the police officers of my county count me as
one of the flock they guard; and in the same way, the human form,
if it were somehow personified, would see in me only one of its
particular variations.
All philosophy hitherto has been based on the verb Be, the
definition of which was the philosopher’s stone, which all sought
to discover. We may affirm that, if it had been based on the verb
Have, many sterile debates and fruitless intellectual exertions
would have been avoided. From this principle, I am, all the sub-
tlety in the world has not made it possible to deduce any existence
other than my own: hence the negation of external reality. If, how-
ever, the postulate I have is posited as the fundamental fact, both that which has and that which is had are given inseparably at once.
If having seems to indicate being, being surely implies hav-
ing. Being, that hollow abstraction, is never conceived except as
the property of something, of some other being, which is itself
composed of properties, and so on to infinity. At root, the whole content of the concept of being is exhausted by the concept of having. But the converse is not true: being is not the whole content of
the idea of property.
The concrete and substantial concept which one discovers in
oneself is, therefore, that of having. Instead of the famous cogito
ergo sum, I would prefer to say: I desire, I believe, therefore I have.
The verb to be means in some cases to have, and in others to be equal to. ‘My arm is hot’: the heat of my arm is the property of my arm. Here is means has. ‘A Frenchman is a European, a metre is a measure of length’. Here is means is equal to. But this equality itself is only the relation of part to whole, of genus to species or vice versa, that is, a kind of relation of possession. In these two mean-ings, therefore, being is reducible to having.
If one wishes to forcibly draw from the concept of Being im-
plications which are precluded by its essential sterility, one has
to put it in opposition to non-being, and grant to the latter term
(which is nothing but an empty objectification of our faculty of de-
nial, as Being is an objectification of our faculty of affirmation) a
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53
wholly unwarranted importance.—In this respect, the Hegelian
system can be considered the last word in the philosophy of Being.
Embarked on this path, one will have to concoct impenetrable, and
basically contradictory, concepts of becoming and disappearance, the old empty pap of Teutonic ideologues.55 By contrast, nothing
could be clearer than the concepts of gain and loss, of acquisition and divestment, which take this place in the philosophy of Having,
if we may thus name something which does not yet exist. Between
being and non-being there is no middle term, whereas one can
have more or less.
Being and non-being, ego and non-ego: barren oppositions
which obscure the real correlatives. The true opposite of the ego is not the non-ego but the mine; the true opposite of being, that is of having, is not non-being but what is had.
The deep and accelerating divergence between the course of
science strictly speaking and that of philosophy comes from the
fact that the former, happily, has chosen for its guide the verb
Have. For science, everything is explained by properties, not by entities. Science disdains the unsatisfactory relation of substance to
phenomenon, two empty terms which only are only the doubles of
Being; it makes only moderate use of the relation of cause to ef-
fect, in which possession appears in only one of its two forms, and
the less important, namely possession by desire. But science has
made considerable use and, unfortunately, abuse of the relation of
proprietor 56 to property. The abuse has consisted primarily in having misunderstood this relation by failing to see that the real prop-
erty of any proprietor is a set of other proprietors; that each mass,
each molecule of the solar system, for example, has for its physical
and mechanical property not words like extension, mobility and
so on, but all the other masses, all the other molecules; that each
atom of a molecule has for its chemical property, not atomicities or
55. [Trans. Note: In Hegel’s logic, the ‘disappearance’ ( Verschwinden) of being into non-being and vice versa generates ‘becoming’ ( Werden) ( Science of Logic, vol 1, book 1, sec 1, ch 1.C.1, ‘Unity of Being and Nothing’).]
56. [Trans. Note: Tarde’s concept of ‘property’ ( propriété) is deliberately ambig-uous between the sense of ‘goods owned’ and the sense of ‘characteristic’ or ‘quality’. The term ‘proprietor’ ( propriétaire) is standard in both French and English for a person who has a property in the first sense, but not in the second. In English-language analytic philosophy, ‘instance’ is sometimes used to describe an entity which has a property in the second sense (which ‘instantiates’ the property), but this brings with it an implicit ontology of properties which is incompatible with Tarde’s; I have therefore retained the term ‘proprietor’. The theory of properties is discussed further in the Afterword.]
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Monadology and Sociology
affinities, but all the other atoms of the same molecule; that each
cell of an organism has for its biological property, not irritability,
contractibility, innervation, and so on, but all the other cells of the
same organism, and in particular, of the same organ. Here pos-
session is reciprocal, as in every intra-social relation; but it can be unilateral, as in the extra-social relation of master to slave, or of the farmer to his cattle. For example, the retina has for its property,
not vision, but the luminously vibrating ethereal atoms, which do
not possess it; and the mind possesses mentally all the objects of
its thought, to which it in no way belongs. Is this to say that the ab-
stract terms, mobility, density, weight, affinity, and so on, express
nothing and correspond to nothing? They mean, I think, that be-
yond the real domain of every element, there is its conditionally
necessary domain, that is certain although unreal, and that the an-
cient distinction between the real and the possible, in a new sense,
is not a chimera.
The elements are, certainly, agents as much as they are pro-
prietors; but they can be proprietors without being agents, and
they cannot be agents without being proprietors. Moreover, their
action can be revealed to us only as a change in the nature of
their possession.
On closer investigation, it will be seen that the sole cause of
the superiority of the scientific point of view over the philosoph-
ical point of view is the fortunate choice of fundamental rela-
tion adopted by scientists, and that all the remaining obscurities
and weaknesses of science spring from the incomplete analysis
of this relation.
For thousands of years, thinkers have catalogued the different
ways of being and the different degrees of being, and have never
thought to classify the different types and degrees of possession.
Possession is, nonetheless, the universal fact, and there is no bet-
ter term than acquisition to express the formation and growth of
any being. The terms correspondence and adaptation,57 brought into fashion by Darwin and Spencer, are more vague and equivocal, and grasp the universal fact only from the outside. Is it true
that the bird’s wing is adapted to air, the fish’s fin to water, the eye
to light? No, no more than the locomotive is adapted to coal, or the
57. [Trans. Note: ‘Adaptation’ refers to Darwin’s concept of the process through which a population becomes better suited to its environment through natural selection. Herbert Spencer developed Darwin’s idea by seeing adaptation as a process of increasing ‘correspondence’ between the organism and its environment.]
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55
sewing machine to the seamstress’ thread. Shall we also say that
the vasomotor nerves, the ingenious mechanism by which the in-
ternal equilibrium of the body’s temperature is maintained de-
spite variations in the external temperature, are adapted to these
variations? Fighting against would be a curious form of adapting to! The locomotive is adapted, if you will, to terrestrial locomotion, and the wing to aerial locomotion, and this comes down to
saying that the wing utilizes the air to move, as the locomotive
uses coal, as the fin uses water. Does this using not mean tak-
ing possession? Every being wants, not to make itself appropriate
for external beings, but to appropriate them for itself. Atomic or molecular bonding58 in the physical world, nutrition in the living
world, perception in the intellectual world, law in the social world,
possession in its innumerable forms never ceases to extend from
a being to other beings, by the interlacing of various and increas-
ingly subtle domains.
It is variable in its infinite degrees as well as in its multiple
forms. Stars, for example, possess each other with an intensity
which grows or shrinks in inverse proportion to the square of their
distance