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on the great secret of life? Conceived of as an association of cells or as a federation of cellular
societies or colonies, the living body becomes for the first time penetrable to man’s probing. Much
more than natural selection, the cellular theory puts us on the road to an explanation of the vital
enigma. Natural selection is now regarded as one of the keys to life, but no one any longer considers
it the master key. Its mainly negative efficacity, its quality of eliminating harmful varieties and
purifying the species, is no longer contested, but less and less is it credited with a truly creative
power. The successful attempts to interpret historical progress by social selection exposed the
insufficiency of this principle and its negative character. Neither in its bellicose form nor even in its
commercial or industrial form has social competition sufficed to create a single one of those
fundamental inventions which are the necessary condition for human renewal. Is the discovery of
gunpowder or dynamite due to the age-old furor about battles? Is the discovery of the compass due to
the greed for profit of the Phoenician and Venetian merchant fleets who over the years battled for
control of the seas? Is the discovery of the steam engine due to the unrestrained rivalry of competing
industries? Not in the least. Warriors, merchants, and industrialists could have continued to battle for
thousands of years, and all their efforts would have been in vain as far as invention is concerned, had
there not been here and there a few seekers, the least warlike of men—from the chemists or
alchemists of ancient Egypt to our Lavoisiers and Pasteurs, from Archimedes to Papin and Watt, from
the Chaldean shepherds to Newton and Lavoisier—curious and empassioned men who little by little
extracted from nature some of its secrets and at intervals communicated them to each other. There is
not one industrial or even military advance that has arisen directly from a battle or a commercial
rivalry and which does not have as its father someone outside the world of hate and war, someone
who remained unknown until the day he furnished decisive arms to the combatants . . . and to the
competitors. Undoubtedly wars, battles of all sorts, venomous conflicts of passions or interests call
the spirit of invention to their aid when it has already come to life somewhere else and has proved
itself. These calls stimulate invention, but it is not they that engender the invention itself. How much
more often does it happen that they kill the germ of an idea! Invention had peace, love, family, or
professional fraternity for a cradle, the disinterested cult of truth and beauty for a soul; and its
motivation was genius served by luck, which favored the encounter of different ideas in a mind
sufficiently gifted to guess their fitness, to make them reciprocally fruitful, to serve, so to speak, as the
go-between for their mutual love. And to verify this idea in the very study which presently concerns
us, is it not clear that sociologists ought to turn not to the daily polemics in the press on social
questions for the basic ideas of their science, but rather to solitary meditations?
An excellent idea, not to be confused with the metaphor of the social organism, was the study of
animal societies from the standpoint of their similarities to and differences from human societies.
This study was done well by Mr. Espinas. It is unfortunate only that his book, which opened so
productive a route, did not have a successor. If he redid his work today he would probably indicate
more clearly the distinction between the pseudosocieties of the lower species of animals, in which
the solidarity of individuals, if indeed they are individuals, is entirely physiological, as in the polyp,
and the true societies of a psychological nature like ours, which are the privilege of the vertebrates
and the higher insects. A polyp is no more a society than a synanthous flower. There is in fact no
vegetable society; why not? Not because a plant, taken separately, cannot be a society if we suppose
—a hypothesis like any other—that its cells are animated by a sensitivity allowing them to recognize
each other and to cling together. But once again we face the mystery of life, and, moreover, even from
this point of view the vegetable would be like a state that had no international relations with its
neighbors. It is precisely these international or interorganic relations that are the subject of social