564 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



that languages and religions are collective works, that 

 the masses, without any leader, have made Greek, 

 Sanscrit, Hebrew, Buddhism, Christianity, and lastly, 

 that it is by the coercive action of the ' collective ' on 

 the individual, small or large, yet always adjusted and 

 utilised, but not at all by the suggestive and contagious 

 action of chosen individuals, that the formations and 

 transformations of societies can be explained. In 

 reality such explanations are illusory ; their authors do 

 not perceive that by postulating such a collective force, 

 a similitude of millions of persons, simultaneously under 

 certain relations, they evade the major difficulty, the 

 question of understanding how this general assimilation 

 can have originated. The answer lies precisely in 

 pushing the analysis as far as I have done, down to the 

 intercerebral relation of two minds, to the reflection of 

 one on the other, and it is only thus that we can 

 explain those partial unanimities, those conspirations of 

 the hearts, those communions of the spirits, which, once 

 formed and perpetuated by tradition and imitation of 

 ancestors, exert a pressure often tyrannical, but more 

 frequently salutary, upon the individual. It is to this 

 relation that sociology must attach itself in the same 

 way as astronomy attaches itself to the relation of two 

 attracting and attracted masses ; in it we must find the 

 key to the social mystery, the formula for a few simple 

 laws, universally true, which can be disentangled in the 

 midst of the apparent chaos of human life and history." l 

 La WS 8 d'e. These simple laws which M. Tarde further develops 



hiii 1 * are, as he terms them, the law of repetition, the law 



1 See Gabriel Tarde, ' Les Lois Sociales ' (5 me ed., p. 39 tqq.) 



