174 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
the reader by only partially citing from his book is unpleasantly suggestive of pettifoggery. His course in this matter, all the more astonishing in a scholar of Professor Durkheim's standing, proves that my thrust went home, and I struck at the very root of the subtle and misleading error which so profoundly contam- inates Durkheim's sociological speculations.
II.
The second passage quoted by Durkheim in his alleged refu- tation of my criticism is the following (p. 350 ):
II est bien vrai que la soci6t6 ne comprend pas d'autres forces agissantes que celles des individus, seulement les individus, en s'unis- sant, ferment un etre psychique d'une espSce nouvelle .... Sans doute, les proprUtes elementaires, ifou resulte le fait social, sont contenues en germe dans les esprits particuliers. Mais le fait social n'en sort que quand elles ont ete transformees par rassociation. L'association est, elle aussi, un facteur qui produit des effets speciaux.
This passage is only a paraphrase of another one from the essay on the M^thode sociologique, where, on p. 127, Durkheim writes :
En s'agregeant, en se penetrant, en se fusionnant, les imes indi- viduelles donnent naissance a un etre, psychique si Ton veut, mais qui constitue une individualite psychique d'un genre nouveau. C'est done dans la nature de cette individualite, non dans celle des unites compo- santes, qu'ii faut aller chercher les causes prochaines et determinantes des faits qui s'y produisent.
By this quotation Durkheim endeavors to prove that he in no way denies that the germs of social fact are to be sought for in the individual, but only emphasizes the fact that society, like a chemical compound, possesses characters dissimilar to those of the constituent elements in isolation. All this, however, was by no means new to me, and I had perfectly understood that Durkheim's conception of the social phenomenon does not include the absurd hypothesis of a society without individuals. In my article I wrote :
We do not believe Tarde's interpretation of Durkheim's theory to be entirely correct, although it might apparently be justified by
