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were these initiatives imitated, and not others? Why was the preference accorded to such and such a
model, among so many others which did not find any imitators? In other words, what are the laws of
imitation?
Of these two problems, the first can only be dealt with and resolved after the second; and the lack
of success of the sociological systems which have been devised up to now is a result of having
reversed this order. Biology gives us an instructive example on this point: would it ever have thought
of stirring up the question of the genesis of species without having thoroughly probed the laws of both
hereditary and nutritive generation? Similarly, though of course the laws of imitation are not the
whole of social science, they constitute its first chapter.
An investigation of the laws of imitation has been carried out elsewhere, and we need not
formulate them here. Suffice it to say that, from different points of view, they present real and precise
analogies to the laws of undulation and those of heredity in that the chosen models, like unsuppressed
physical waves and victorious biological varieties or species, tend to propagate themselves by
multiplying according to a geometric progression, a fact attested to by many regularly increasing
statistical curves. But this analogy is not among those which attack the autonomy of social phenomena,
the originality of individuals, or the eminent dignity of the human world in the midst of nature. To
men, to peoples, it leaves free play of their own movements and is marvelously in accord with the
exuberant diversity of their always unexpected, always new evolution, which forms the passionate
interest of history. Even if we clearly understood the open hostility of racial historians to sociology
when it is presented as a simple annex to biology, we would not explain their mistrust of a superior
and transfigured psychology, an inter-psychic psychology completed by a social logic which is both a
logic of ideas and of actions, founded on the elementary principles which we have just briefly
indicated.