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The third session, presided over by Mr. Croiset, dean of the Faculty of Letters, was devoted to the
discussion of the first two lectures summarized above. Mr. Durkheim and Mr. Tarde maintained their
respective theses with enthusiasm.
Mr. Tarde granted the importance of general laws extracted by the comparative method, but asked
that another method be followed at the same time and that one use the social microscope of intermental
psychology.
Mr. Durkheim replied that the general sociology exterior to the social sciences can only be the
synthesis of the results from the particular sciences and that one cannot say what these results will be
nor whether they can be achieved by inter-mental psychology as long as the special sciences are so
little advanced. “Mr. Tarde claims that sociology will arrive at such and such results; but in the
present state of our knowledge we cannot say what the elementary social fact is. There are too many
things that we do not know, and under these conditions the construction of the elementary social fact
can only be arbitrary. Whatever this inter-mental psychology is worth, it is inadmissible for it to
exercise a sort of directive action on the special disciplines of which it must be the product.”
Mr. Tarde replied that to formulate laws it is not necessary that the sciences be definitely
established. A directive idea is necessary in research. Social sciences do not owe their progress to
rules of objective method but to their development in the direction of psychology. Once again in
social life there are only acts from one individual to another. Does Mr. Durkheim think that social
reality is anything other than individuals and individual acts or facts? “If you believe that,” said Mr.
Tarde, “I understand your method, which is pure ontology. Between us is the debate between
nominalism and scholastic realism. I am a nominalist. There can only be individual actions and
interactions. The rest is only a metaphysical entity, mysticism.”
Mr. Durkheim thought that Mr. Tarde was confusing two different questions, and declined to say
anything about a problem that he had not touched upon and, he maintained, had nothing to do with the
discussion.