-模仿的法则、法国社会学家G塔尔德，1903年版.DOC

INTRODUCTION GABRIEL TARDE, whose most interesting and important book is here given to American readers, is Professor of Modern Philosophy in the College de France, and a member of the Lnstitut. A true philosopher, but also a man of af- fairs, with wide intellectual sympathies, M. Tarde is a writer of great charm, and his influence amonghisowncountrymen and abroad has steadily increased since he began, in 1880, to contribute to the Revue philosophique. American scholars, long familiar with M. Tardes suggestive works, have felt that his thought should be made more accessible to English-speaking readers. Hitherto only a little book, Les Lois sociales, presenting a mere outline of his philos- ophy, has been translated. 4 M. Tarde was born in 1843, at Sarlat, Dordogne. After 2 school days were over, instead of entering upon university 1 life at Bordeaux, or Montpellier, or Paris, he took up legal ^ studies, and presently became juge dinstruction in his native town. This office he held for nearly eighteen years, years of keen observation, but also of much solitude, of patient reflection, of the gradual unfolding of original ideas O of man, of society, and of the world, which were presently ^ to combine in a complete philosophical scheme. Aborn student of human nature, M. Tarde was from the first interested in that oldest of philosophical problems, the explanation of motive. He early perceived not only that motive may be resolved into terms of belief and desire, but v? also that it may be measured. This discovery had, of course, been made before by Bentham, Cournot, Menger, Walras, and Jevons, but Tardes presentation of the sub- fO ject in his first contribution to the Revue philo