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the first part of our statement relating to the impossibility of explaining the " compound " without taking into account the character of its elements. But the second part of the same statement, as to the necessity of taking into account, also, the law of the combination of the elements, will also be clear if we note that the " social " causes of suicide necessarily presuppose the action of society upon individuals in the only intelligible way, i. e. t by the way of transmission of modes of feeling, thought, and action through the imitative response to the sug- gestive inventiveness. Thus the so-called social causes of sui- cide discovered by Durkheim appear to be nothing but verbal entities, flatus vocis, if not connected, on the one side, with the individual factor of nervous degeneration and, on the other, with the general fact of the transmission of thought through " imita- tive instinct," which is at the very basis of social intercourse, as has been masterfully shown by Tarde and Baldwin.
Durkheim, it is true, believes that he has completely under- mined the Tardian theory of imitation by demonstrating that the meaning attached by Tarde to the word " imitation " is entirely different from the usual acceptance of the word, and by giving a so-called scientific definition of imitation, which arbitrarily restricts the word so as only to indicate "acts which have as immediate antecedents the representation of a similar act accomplished before by others, without any intellectual operation affecting the intimate character of the reproduced act ever having been inserted between the representation and the execution." J It is not necessary for me to refute a criticism of that kind, which only shows a complete misunderstanding of the fundamental idea of Tarde. What Tarde has roughly expressed by the word " imita- tion " is simply the fact of the influence of one brain upon another brain as incidental to the typical character of social fact, which is, essentially, a transmission of thought. A con- clusive refutation of the Tardian theory should have been directed against the fact itself and not against the word chosen
1 Le Suicide, p. 115; see the whole chapter " Limitation, " dedicated to the demolition of Tarde's theory. Pp. 107-38.
