Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/416

396 the science of society, Tarde declares (p. 24) that, if we consider a town, a crowd, an army, instead of the objects studied by astronomy or biology, the same scientific relations will appear, i. e., our knowledge passes from premature generalities, founded on vain and illusory analogies, to generalizations based on a mass of minute facts relatively precise and similar.

Sociology has been struggling long toward possession of such material in its own sphere. Tarde asserts that the vain efforts of Plato, Aristotle, Vico, Montesquieu, Chateaubriand, Hegel, and the recent evolutionists failed because they could not get their vision trained on sufficiently minute facts. A change promising better results came in with the attempts of the philologists, the philosophers of religion, and especially the economists, to perform the more modest task of identifying minute facts and of formulating their laws. In perfect accord with the view which this has editorially maintained, Tarde speaks of "these specialists in sociology" (p. 26). It is these searchers among the constituent facts of human activity who get out the raw material of sociology. No sociological generalizations can be worth considering, unless they are generalizations of the data furnished by these "specialists in sociology." Tarde next attends to the claim that the explanation of all the facts brought to notice by the " specialists in sociology " must be applied psychology. Referring to the argument to this effect at the close of Mill's Logic, he points out that the psychology to which Mill looked for the key to social phenomena was merely individual psychology; "a sort of English associationalism, magnified and exteriorized." On the contrary, says Tarde, our explanations of social facts will come, not from intra-cerebral, but from inter -cerebral psychology (p. 28). "The contact of one mind with another is an event entirely distinct in the life of each. It is sharply separated from the totality of their contacts with the rest of the universe, and it produces the most unforeseen states of consciousness, states inexplicable by physiological psychology."

Tarde finds in the facts of association this initial problem : " Many minds, impelled each by its own desires, fix upon the same objects, affirm the same idea, try to bring to pass the same thing. In other words, they act as though they were moved by a common impulse. They become practically a unified force producing types and qualities of associated activity. How is this convergence to be explained ? " In a word, says Tarde (p. 35), not by heredity, nor by identity of geographical environment, but by "suggestion-imitation." "Organic