190 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
Tarde, explains socialization much as natural selection with Dar- 
win explains biological evolution and the origin of species. 
The social ideal is well expressed in the following: — 
* If we take the ideas of invention, imitation and social logic as a guiding 
thread we are led to the more reassuring perspective of a great future con- 
fluence . . . of multiple divisions of mankind into a single peaceful human 
family. The idea of indefinite progress, which is such a vague and obstinate 
idea, has neither a clear nor precise meaning except from this point of view. 
The necessity of a progressive march towards a great but distant goal is an 
outcome of the laws of imitation. This goal, which becomes more and more 
accessible in spite of apparent, although transitory, set-backs, is the birth, 
the development, and the universal spread, — whether under an imperial 
or federated form is insignificant, —of a unique society. . . . We might 
demand to what extent this collective dream, this collective nightmare of 
society, was worth its cost in blood and tears if this grievous discipline, this 
deceptive and despotic prestige, did not serve to free the individual in calling 
forth, little by little, from the depths of his heart, his freest impulses, his 
boldest introspection, his keenest insight into nature, and in developing every- 
where, not the savage individualities, not the clashing and brutal soul-stuffs 
of bygone days, but those deep and harmonious traits of the soul that are 
characteristic of personality as well as of civilization, the harvest of both the 
purest and most potent individualism and consummate sociability. 
Tarde is open to criticism chiefly in the following points: — 
1. His system is essentially logical rather than factual, and he 
has not proven that logical classification fits life conditions. 
Although there seems to be a straining towards consistency in the 
belief-desire life of the individual, this is seldom attained, and 
chaos is not uncommon. The same holds of the co-adaptive 
process of socialization. 
2. His attempt to reduce life to mechanistic terms explicable 
by mechanical laws fails in two particulars: (a) it leads to strict 
determinism making the apparent freedom of individual and 
social activity an illusion,? and (6) it leads to a doctrine of socio- 
psychical measurements which is contradicted by every-day 
experience. The only possible way that evaluations can be 
quantitatively compared is by first reducing them to their physi- 
1 The Laws of Imitation, p. xxiv. 
° Especially apparent in his discussion of suggestion and auto-suggestion: 
“Létat social, comme l'état hypnotique, n’est qu’une forme de réve. . . . N’avoir 
que des idées suggérées et les croire spontanées: telle est l’illusion propre au som- 
nambule, et aussi bien 4 l’homme social,” Les Lois de I’ Imitation, p. 83. 
