Underground Man

According to Tarde the social phenomena proceed from individual inventions which in their turn are the offspring of imitation: the latter is for Tarde a capital factor in social life. Original ideas or inventions germinate ceaselessly in the social milieu, but only some, either by their superior adaptability or through the peculiar authority of their inventor, are accepted by the public as a whole. Sociology is thus reduced to a Psychology of the processus of invention and imitations. This explains why the great effort of Tarde has been to discover the "Laws of Invention". Thereby he has given in sociology a preponderating place to the individual, and the accidental, and has thus separated himself from the most general tendencies of thought in our times which are those of Comte.

The style of Tarde is abstract but supple. This fragment of future History forms a kind of exception to his general work which is very abstract. Tarde reveals himself in it one of the masters of literary French. The style is picturesque, intense, broad, even periodic, novel in respect to the thought, and entirely classical in its purity.

Joseph Manchon.

1

In appearance only: we must not forget that in accordance with all probability many extinct stars must have served as the scene of this normal and necessary phase of social life.