The whole of Tarde is in this little book. He has put into it along with a charming fancy his genialness and depth of spirit, his ideas on the influence of art and the importance of love, in an exceptional social milieu. This agreeable day-dream is vigorously thought out. On reading it we fancy we are again seeing and hearing Tarde. In order to indulge in a repetition of the illusion, a pious friendship has desired to clothe this fascinating work in an appropriate dress. A.L. CONTENTS DEDICATION

It reflects not at all on Mr Cloudesley Brereton's admirable work of translation to remark how subtly the spirit of such work as this of M. Tarde's changes in such a process. There are certain things peculiar, I suppose, to every language in the world, certain distinctive possibilities in each. To French far more than to English, belong the intellectual liveliness, the cheerful, ironical note, the professorial playfulness of this present work. English is a less nimble, more various and moodier t

The zenith of human prosperity seemed to have been reached in the superficial and frivolous sense of the word. For the last fifty years, the final establishment of the great Asiatic-American-European confederacy, and its indisputable supremacy over what was still left, here and there, in Oceania and central Africa of barbarous tribes incapable of assimilation, had habituated all the nations, now converted into provinces, to the delights of universal and henceforth inviolable peace. It had requir

On several occasions already the sun had given evident signs of weakness. From year to year his spots increased in size and number, and his heat sensibly diminished. People were lost in conjecture. Was his fuel giving out? Had he just traversed in his journey through space an exceptionally cold region? No one knew. Whatever the reason was, the public concerned itself little about the matter, as in all that is gradual and not sudden. The "solar anæmia," which moreover restored some degree of anim

In this extremity a man arose who did not despair of humanity. His name has been preserved for us. By a singular coincidence he was called Miltiades, like another saviour of Hellenism. He was not, however, of Hellenic race. A cross between a Slave and a Breton he had only half sympathised with the prosperity of the Neo-Græcian world with its levelling and enervating tendencies, and amid this wholesale obliteration of previous civilisation, and universal triumph of a kind of Byzantine renaissance

The day at length arrived on which, all the intellectual inheritance of the past, all the real capital of humanity having been rescued from the general shipwreck, the castaways were able to go down in their turn, having henceforth only to think of their own preservation. That day which forms, as everyone knows, the starting point of our new era, called the era of salvation, was a solemn holiday. The sun, however, as if to arouse regret, indulged in a few last bursts of sunshine. On casting a fin

It does not fall within the scope of my rapid sketch to relate date by date the laborious vicissitudes of humanity since its settlement within the planet from the year 1 of the era of Salvation to the year 596, in which I write these lines in chalk on slabs of schist. I should only like to bring out for my contemporaries, who might very well fail to notice them (for we barely observe what we have always before our eyes), the distinctive and original features of this modern civilisation of which

Love, in fact, is the unseen and perennial source of this novel courtesy. The capital importance it has assumed, the strange forms it has worn, the unexpected heights to which it has risen, are perhaps the most significant characteristics of our civilisation. In the glittering and superficial epochs, age of paper and electro-plating, which immediately preceded our present era, love was held in check by a thousand childish needs, by the contagious mono-mania of unsightly and cumbersome luxury or

Such is the moral miracle wrought by our excellence which itself is begotten of love and beauty. But the intellectual marvels which have issued from the same source, merit a still more extended notice. It will be enough for me to indicate them as I go along. Let us first speak of the sciences. One might have thought that from the day that the stars and celestial bodies, the faunas and floras, ceased to play a certain part in our lives or that the manifold sources of observation and experience ce

Gabriel Tarde was originally a member of the legal profession. For a long time he was examining magistrate at Sarlat. His works on sociology and criminology revealed him to the public. He was appointed head of the Statistical bureau at the Ministry of Justice, a post in which he was able to obtain first hand the most precious documents for his social studies. Later he was elected to the chair of modern philosophy at the College of France, then he was elected member of the Academy of moral and po