so swift and absolute a fate.
Our race would behave just as any single man behaves when death takes
him suddenly through some cardiac failure. It would feel very queer, it
would want to sit down and alleviate its strange discomfort, it would
say something stupid or inarticulate, make an odd gesture or so, and
flicker out. But it is compatible with the fantastic and ironical style
for M. Tarde to mock our conceit in our race's capacity and pretend men
did all sorts of organized and wholesale things quite beyond their
capabilities. People flee in "hordes" to Arabia Petraea and the Sahara,
and there perform prodigies of resistance. There arises the heroic
leader and preserver, Miltiades, who preaches Neo-troglodytism and loves
the peerless Lydia, and leads the remnant of humanity underground. So M.
Tarde arrives at the idea he is most concerned in developing, the idea
of an introverted world, and people following the dwindling heat of the
interior, generation after generation, through gallery and tunnel to the
core. About that conception he weaves the finest and richest and most
suggestive of his fantastic filaments.

Perhaps the best sustained thread in this admirably entertaining tissue
is the entire satisfaction of the imaginary historian at the new
conditions of life. The earth is made into an interminable honeycomb,
all other forms of life than man are eliminated, and our race has
developed into a community sustained at a high level of happiness and
satisfaction by a constant resort to "social tonics". Half mockingly,
half approvingly, M. Tarde here indicates a new conception of human
intercourse and criticises with a richly suggestive detachment, the
social relationships of to-day. He moves indicatively and lightly over
deeps of human possibility; it is in these later passages that our
author is essentially found. One may regret he did not further expand
his happy opportunity of treating all the social types to-day as ice
embedded fossils, his comments on the peasant and artisan are so fine as
to provoke the appetite. He rejects the proposition that "society
consists in an exchange of services" with the confidence of a man who
has thought it finely out. He gives out clearly what so many of us are
beginning dimly perhaps to apprehend, that "society consists in the
exchange of reflections". The passages subsequent to this pronouncement
will be the seed of many interesting developments in any mind
sufficiently attuned t