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accustomed to drinking tea or wine, or a wine-grower who discovered a new and improved vine in a
country accustomed to beer but which could nevertheless adapt to vini-culture, would have no
success? Seek the cause of such failures not just in the climate, which circumscribed various rather
indefinite boundaries for the cultivation of different things, but also and especially in the traditional
influence of certain distant ancestors, regional Noahs or Bacchuses. It is because America had no
Noah or Bacchus before the arrival of the Europeans that wine was absolutely unknown even in the
numerous areas where vines grew wild. . . .
What we have just said about the inventors, artists, industrialists, men of state who have
manipulated, used, and channeled the great stream of Desire even while following it, can also be said
of the inventors, or rather the discoverers, scholars, theologians, and philosophers who have
exercised a similar action or channeled another great stream, partially independent of the first, the
river of Belief. When a discovery is brought before a fairly intelligent people and, despite its
plausibility and supporting evidence, is not taken up, that is, believed by anyone, it would be infantile
to explain this refusal by the brain conformation of these people or by the nature of their surroundings;
the refusal is due simply to the fact that this new idea is deemed contradictory to those beliefs already
established and consolidated in the minds of these people. But why are these ideas there? Because at
a more or less distant era they were sown by a few illustrious founders of religions, or apostles,
mystical discoverers, and manipulators of belief. Christendom’s long resistance to the discoveries of
Kepler and Galileo was basically no more than the battle of these new discoverers with older ones,
the fathers of the Greek and Latin church who founded and coordinated Christian dogma. In the same
way, when even firmly based new theories have difficulty finding acceptance among scholars or
educated men, it is because their authors are in disagreement with earlier authors of accredited
theories.
V
These examples could be multiplied infinitely, but those above suffice to show the true relationships
between the individual and the general, between the variations and the repetitions in societies. We
can see clearly that these relations are the same here as in the rest of nature: on the one hand, not
everything that is singular and individual, a new combination, succeeds in being propagated or
generalized; but on the other hand, everything that is widespread and generalized at a given time
began as a singular fact, comparable to an invention. Let us add that in the social world, as in the
biological and physical ones, we see that only the repeated variations become the proper domain of
science, whereas variations which are not repeated—the fugitive element, unique and gone forever in
the changing physionomy of things and beings, of landscapes, portraits, historical scenes—are the
most precious domain of art, whose gift it is to change this waste into gold, to eternalize these
ephemera. As for philosophy, the conflux of both science and art, it embraces in its sovereign
complexity these two faces of reality. From this point of view, then, sociology is reintegrated without
any difficulty into the other sciences; and at the same time it is freed from all servitude to the other
sciences and preserved from any attack on its own originality. Sociology need no longer be
subjugated to biology, giving itself scientific airs by borrowing the methods and framework, even the
vocabulary of biology, squandering abusive metaphors drawn from anatomy and physiology,
imagining the historical transformations of societies as similar to the development of a seed which,
through a rigorously predetermined cycle of embryonic states, reaches maturity, old age, and finally
death after having reproduced itself in a new seed which will follow the same course. No, to
establish social science it is not necessary to conceive the evolution of societies in this manner, with