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sides, not a subtraction, except when the knowledge exchanged is contradictory; but in this case there
is no exchange but a duel to the death either in the enclosed field of an individual mind or on the
battlefields of sects or parties or religious wars. And whereas advancement in wealth consists of
multiplying costly exchanges, advancement of knowledge consists of diminishing the frequency of the
duels just mentioned as well as multiplying truths which can be freely exchanged and be added
together without contradiction. By truth we mean this agreement of knowledge, just as by utility and
value we mean the adaptation of products to one another through their exchange, which renders each
one appropriate not only for its corresponding need but also, in a different sense, for all the other
products against which it can be exchanged. In certain respects, however, it is true to say that when
faced with two partially contradictory hypotheses, the individual, after quietly hesitating in a manner
comparable to bargaining, often makes a choice and exchanges one of these for the other, which he
then renounces. Even when two ideas are in no way contradictory, are we not required to refrain from
thinking of one in order to think of the other, hence to evaluate their relative importance? Yes, but
these are individual hesitations and sacrifices, which require no more than an individual measure of
truth or of the intellectual value of ideas. If one could learn something new from someone else only by
forgetting a truth one already knows, which one gives up in favor of others, there would arise the
necessity for a social measure of truth, of the general credibility of ideas, as there is a measure for
utility—the general desirability of products.
It is therefore due to its eminently liberal character and to its obvious superiority that truth, in the
sense I give it, was cast down from the sociological rank where it belonged and in the various
attempts to construct a social science has played a role so much less important than that of value. No
one, in fact, has tried to build sociology entirely upon it, when so many economists have thought to
universalize the idea of value or wealth and to create a systematic social science on this foundation
alone, thereby running the risk of mutilating the human spirit. Nonetheless it would have been easy to
see that, despite the absence of a form of mental currency accepted by everyone, it is permissible to
encompass several things under one point of view, to consider the knowledge of men, their most
heterogeneous ideas—religious, linguistic, legal, scientific and others—all as beliefs; and that this
synthesis is just as legitimate as to consider any satisfaction of human desire for food, love, luxury,
the military, industry, etc., as a desire. It is distressing that the first of these two variously useful
generalizations has been neglected, as it could have suggested interesting observations: that, for
example, the proportion of the total truth represented by the various great areas of mental activity—
language, religion, science, law—varies considerably from one century to another and that, among the
Ancients, by far the most important capital of truth was of a linguistic and religious nature, which
explains the particularly grammatical nature of Greek metaphysics. Language was the magic treasure
where one dug for the key to all problems, as we dig the earth for the secrets of geology. Language
retains this strength of fascination among children and absorbs the greatest proportion of belief
attached to the meanings of words.
Is there a pattern to the secular displacements of major truth which is incarnated in turn in myths
and poetry, in formulas of law, in moral maxims, in rules of art? It would seem so. And if the two
syntheses that I drew are compared, it also seems that the progress of enlightenment precedes rather
than follows the progress of wealth. But let us leave these questions aside. Elsewhere 5 I have shown,
I believe, that social statistics must never lose sight of their special mission, which is to measure as
exactly as possible, by all the direct or indirect means at their disposal, the imitative propagation of a
belief or a desire, of an idea or a type of act. But social statistics have great gaps here, some of which
will perhaps never be filled, which are explained either by the real or apparent practical inutility of