Mental Development in the Child and the Race
Chapter 9: Organic Imitation
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§ 1. The General Question
WE may now proceed to examine more carefully the type of reaction in which we have found both Habit and Accommodation to have their rise.
It will be remembered that we found the life process issuing in a great twofold adaptation, -- expansions and contractions, -- and we saw that the former represent waxing vital processes. Then we went on to say that all special adaptations are secured by the new hold upon beneficial stimulations reached by these expansive, outreaching movements. Thus a 'circular' activity is found in operation; life processes issuing in increased movements, by which in turn the stimulations to the life processes are kept in action. It will also be remembered that we found it necessary to postpone to the present chapter the further consideration of this type of activity.
In our consideration of suggestion we discovered an activity of a similar kind also, a 'circular' activity. We found it well to describe the child's imitations in terms of very similar import, and it has been intimated that, since consciousness, of which imitation is generally considered a characteristic, is probably never absent from living organisms, possibly these two cases of 'circular' activity might turn out to be one and the same thing.
Let us now examine this circular type of reaction somewhat
(250) more closely, finding our clue without more ado in the analogy between the kind of nervous reaction which we have already seen lo fulfil the conditions required by the preceding theory of development, and the mental function called Imitative Suggestion.[1]
This has the added advantage that it leads up to further investigation on the side of psychology, and we have the problem of accounting for mental development, although we shall consider it throughout as a new stage in the general problem already set for solution in the treatment of biological development.
Imitation is a matter of such familiarity to us all that it goes usually unattended to: so much so that professed psychologists long left it largely undiscussed. Whether it be one of the more ultimate facts or not, we now seem to have some evidence that it has never had its due in psychological theory. If we shall be able to trace its influence in the developed mind, even that will not be without its reward; but it may be possible that the law of the organic processes can be shown to be capable of an interpretation similar to that of the mental.
We may make it a part of our assumption at the start -- what I have endeavoured to prove above -- that an imitation is an ordinary sensori-motor reaction which finds its differentia in the single fact that it imitates: that is, its peculiarity is found in the locus of its muscular discharge. It is what we have called a 'circular activity' on the bodily side --
(251) brain-state due to stimulating conditions, muscular reaction which reproduces or retains the stimulating conditions, same brain-state again due to same stimulating conditions, and so on. The questions to be asked now are these: Where in our psycho-physical theory do we find place for this peculiar 'circular' order of reaction; what is its value in consciousness and in mental development, and how does it itself arise and come to occupy the place it does ?
It may be well to repeat that we might expect to find imitations -- using the word for the present in this broad organic sense -- wherever there is any degree of interaction between a living organism and the external world. The effect of imitation, it is clear, is to make the brain a 'repeating organ,' i.e. to secure the repetitions which on all biological theories the organism must have, if it is to develop. The muscular system is, as Eimer and others show, the expression and evidence of this fact. The place of imitation in life development is, therefore, theoretically solvable in two ways: (I) by an examination of living creatures for actual imitations, and (a) by the deduction of this function from the theory of repetition in neurology and psychology -- this latter provided we find that Nature does not herself present an environment sufficiently constant to give enough repetitions to supply the demands of neurology and psychology. If this last condition be unfulfilled -- that is, if Nature does actually repeat herself through her stimulating agencies, light, sound, etc., sufficiently often and with sufficient regularity to secure nervous and mental development -- then imitation may be a side phenomenon, an incident merely. In that case the old biological theory, which uses habit alone with lucky chance, and takes no account of the nervous process of pleasure and pain, or the function of consciousness, in securing accommodations, remains available. But I have already criticised that view.
(252) Without taking up these questions again, I wish, while citing incidentally cases of the occurrence of imitation, to show the importance of repetitions and of the imitative way of securing repetitions, in the progress of mind, and thus to supply further support to what we may call the 'psycho-physical theory of development' outlined in the earlier pages.
If it be true, at the outset, that organic development proceeds by reactions, and if there be the two kinds of reaction usually distinguished, i.e. those which involve consciousness as a necessary factor and those which do not, then the first question comes: In which of these categories do imitative reactions fall? Evidently in large measure in the category of consciousness; the child is usually conscious of what he imitates. If we further distinguish this category in so far as it marks the area of conscious life which is 'plum up,' so to speak, against the environment -- directly amenable to external stimulation -- by the word 'suggestion,' we have thus marked off the most evident surface features of imitation. Imitation is then, so far, an instance of 'suggestive reaction' -- another phrase now sufficiently well defined.[2] And this is the most evident meaning of the term 'imitation' in popular and strictly psychological usage. We shall therefore proceed out from this more popular conception.
Now let us look more closely at this kind of consciousness, and find its analogies. A mocking-bird, we say, imitates a sparrow, a beaver imitates an architect, a child imitates his nurse, a man imitates his rector. Calling the idea of the result which the imitator is supposed to have some dim or clear consciousness of, the 'copy,' we find that we are forced to consider this 'consciousness of the copy' very different in these several cases. The copy is clearly defined, certainly, in the child's mind when he imitates a movement; and also in the
(253) man's mind, although it is very much more complex and associative, when he imitates his rector. But we have a very different state of consciousness in the parrot or mockingbird, and this is true even more strikingly in the case of the beaver. Indeed, these four cases are typical divisions in the psychology of action, i.e. volition (the man), suggestion (the infant), reflex action (the mocking-bird), instinct (the beaver). Yet suppose I make any one of four remarks to an ordinary man on the street: 'the beaver's dam is a good imitation,' or 'the mocking-bird's song is a good imitation,' or 'the child's movement is a good imitation,' or 'the man's conduct is a good imitation' -- this working-man would understand me and accept the opinion with no further explanation on my part and no further questioning on his part.
We see, therefore, that even in popular language, these so-called kinds of action have something in common, and that the word 'imitation' is not greatly strained in expressing this common element. There is in all the instances some kind of constructive idea, a 'copy,' in more or less conscious clearness, which calls the action out, and which it is the business of the imitator to reinstate or bring about somehow for himself. Now, this is just what I wish to inquire into: the nature and significance of this 'copy': aiming, if possible, to show how all the forms of action which show this common element could have arisen. and what principles of development they imply.
Endnotes
- See above, Chap. VI., § 4, and Chap. VIII., §§ I-2. An early statement of 'imitation' in this sense is that of Chevreul. He speaks of it not only as a tendency to movement in a definite direction from the thought of the movement, but also as keeping itself going and so 'accelerating' itself. See his letter to Ampère on 'A Particular Class of Movements,' quoted by Binet, in Alterations of Personality, Eng. trans., pp. 222 f.
- See above, Chap. Vl.
§ 2. The Neurological Question
On the physiological side, the simple imitations of childhood present the purest type. And the law of repetition in neurology must be brought in, in some way, to supply its nervous basis. No one probably will be disposed to deny this. We find it possible, also, just as soon as we bring to
(254) mind the action of accommodation and habit, no matter what theory we adopt of their mechanism, to show that the element common to the child's imitations, and all the other instances mentioned, is very plain. Current theories agree that voluntary reactions repeated tend to become organic as direct suggestions; that the nervous process becomes smooth through habit; that suggestions repeated tend to become still more independent of consciousness as secondary automatic and reflex reactions, by the same principle; that reflex reactions, when repeated, co-ordinated, and inherited, or selected from congenital variations, become instincts. All this is simply and plainly habit; and habit is due to repetition, no matter, again, how it is secured.
But it is just as clear to current thought that the whole process works also the other way. Instincts are constantly being snubbed, contradicted, disused, modified, until all that is left is an instinctive torso, a fragment, a tendency merely, and this we call, in psychology, impulse; and these impulses, when recognized, ratified, indulged, work up into volitions again. Now, all this reverse process is due to the principle and fact of accommodation, so familiar to us in view of our earlier discussions. And here, again, we may speak only of the facts, leaving out of account all the theory of how it is done.
All this so far is so evident to current thought, that only details are now discussed in the books. It only remains, therefore, to ask whether the self-sustaining type of nervous action, that which is actually present in the child's conscious imitation, -- i.e. eye-stimulus, then central process, then movement of the child's own member, which itself reinstates the same eye-stimulus, -- whether this is present from the first stages of evolution. If so, then habit and accommodation as depicted in the earlier chapter will do the work by its aid; and psychological development can be read as a chapter of
(255) biological evolution. But if not, then when in the organic series did conscious imitation arise, and why? For as sure as it is that consciousness gives us imitation at all, so sure is it that the nervous system performs, without any violation of its ordinary methods, the circular process by which the imitation goes on.
This question, I insist again, as I have above, is an urgent one, and admits of only two possible answers: either the neurological analogue of imitation was present from the first, and in conscious imitation becomes explicit as mental accommodation, or it has come in somewhere in the biological series. I have already said that the second alternative might be true, if we allow a certain amount of development under constant conditions before the rise of special differentiated movements of expansion and contraction -- as much development as is represented by simple habit in very low organisms whose life is a round of recurring stimulations and reactions.
But it is difficult to see how reactions which represent habit merely could get much complexity. In a constant environment they would soon exhaust the compounding of results due to variety of stimulations. And if the environment changed, this compounding of habits would only make the organism more rigid and less able to adapt itself. The only solution of this point -- simply slurred or not seen by most biologists -- is that adopted by Spencer in his law of heightened nervous discharge; but this only gave a new factor, which served historically to bring in the nervous process of pleasure and pain, and so to lead to the other alternative given above. We have instances of what mere habit will do, in higher organisms, in the endless repetitions of the same sounds by the weak-minded, by children, and by parrots -- continued muscular tension kept up by circular discharge until
(256) nervous exhaustion ensues. This is characteristic of cataleptic and hysterical
conditions also, as we will have occasion to remark in speaking of aboulia. Such
persons do not develop or grow. They are like wound-up mechanical devices,
as far as a living organism can in any case be compared with such a self-repeating
mechanical device (say a swinging pendulum), which never gets exhausted nor grows.
We should expect accordingly to find evidence of the imitative, i.e. self-sustaining, type of reaction in very early organisms.
There is, in fact, a distinct trend in recent biological thought directly toward a construction of this kind. Indeed, this view of nervous adaptation is in line, I think, with the most important and thorough contributions lately made to the theory of organic movement. Two recent investigators have summed up evidence which supplies, in great part, the basis long desiderated for a theory of muscular action and development. Eimer has stated the facts which make it probable that all the " morphological properties of muscle are the result of functional activity." [1] On his view contraction waves leave markings which account for both muscle-fibres and striation. The series of stages in the development of voluntary muscle which biological science is now cognizant of is very striking. That there are no anatomical divisions corresponding to the striation of muscle is shown by recent observations. It remains, then, only to find a physiological conception of contraction which, while applicable primarily to unicellular creatures, should provide for the development of the organism and the differentiation of its parts by repetition of functions, with progressive evolution. Natural history requires, in the words of Engelmann, that "every attempt to explain
(257) the mechanism of protoplasmic movement must extend to all the other phenomena of contractility." [2]
This requirement a recent theory of contractility, that of Max Verworn, seems to me, in its type, [3] to go far toward supplying, accordant as it is with the detailed histological results of Kuhne, Schultz, Engelmann, and others. The outcome of Verworn's work is a chemical theory of contractility which rests upon two known cases of chemical action. Kuhne has proved that the oxygen of the air has chemical affinity for the outer layer of particles of a protoplasmic mass. The elements set free by this union find themselves impelled toward the centre by their affinity for the nuclear elements. This new synthesis releases elements which again move outward toward the oxygen at the surface. [4] Thus there are two contrary movements: away from the nucleus, or expansion, and toward the nucleus, or contraction. Considering the oxygen effect as stimulus, we have thus a reaction which keeps up the action of its own stimulus, and thus perpetuates itself, giving just the type of reaction which the theory outlined above calls 'circular.' Verworn pushes the claim of this type of vital process right up through all the forms of muscular action -- just as Eimer finds only the one type of function necessary, with repetition, to account for all the morphological variations. I am certainly, therefore, in touch with biological authorities in
(258) claiming that this type of reaction is essential to neurological development: and especially so when we come to see, in what follows, that the progress of consciousness can be accounted for in stages corresponding, in its great features, with the stages of differentiation required by the physiological and anatomical theories.
Further, recent researches on the behaviour of unicellular organisms and of plants show the same kind of so-called selective or 'nervous property,' with antithetic adaptations of attraction and repulsion. These creatures develop not by remaining still and awaiting the accidental repetition of stimulations by storming or assault. On the contrary they do exactly what we have long thought it the exclusive right of higher conscious creatures to do; they go after, or shrink from, a stimulating influence, according as its former impression has been beneficial or damaging. [5] In other words, they perform reactions of the stimulus-maintaining, or imitative, type. Binet [6] draws the conclusion that protozoa have memory, choice, volition; that is, as I should prefer to say, they behave as though they had. Bunge in his lectures on physiological chemistry, after describing the actions of certain 'apparently quite structureless' creatures, Vampyrella and Colpodella, says, "The behaviour of these monads in their search after food, and their method of absorbing it, is so remarkable, that one can hardly avoid the conclusion that the acts are those of conscious beings." "Later on," says a writer in the British Medical Journal, [7] " he gives the still more remarkable case of the orcellae. Whenever an attempt is made to place them in an inconvenient position, they are always able by the development of gas
(259) bubbles of appropriate size and at the proper spot, to right themselves . . . etc. 'It cannot be denied,' says Engelmann, 'that these facts point to psychical processes in the protoplasm."' Late researches showing the effect of lights of different colours upon these elementary creatures is also in evidence. They swarm into certain lights and avoid others. Certain bacteria distinguish the trillionth part of a milligramme of certain substances in solution -- showing lively attraction -- quantities which the tests of chemical reaction and the finest chemical balances fail to detect. If extract of meat be exposed near these creatures, which feed on it, they swarm toward it from afar, crawling over one another. But just as soon as a little poisonous extract, in the most minute quantity conceivable, be added, the bacteria fly from the mouth of the tubes in haste, with all the external signs of intelligence and fear.
In regard to plants, the recent evidence of their active responses to stimulations of all kinds by extension and retraction is simply remarkable. Pfeffer has shown the conditions of the perpetual movements known as geotropism, hydrotropism, heliotropism in plants. The fact of twining movement in the tendrils of various plants has been subjected by this investigator to delicate tests. He finds that the tendrils of the pea will twine about a thread of silk which exerts a pressure of only the 100,000th part of a milligramme, while the force of the wind and the rain or the constant pressure of a stream of mercury, have no effect whatever. The tendrils distinguish between liquid and solid touches. A wound upon a plant is a signal for a movement of protoplasm throughout the entire plant, and a migration toward the damaged part. "It is," says Pfeffer, "just as if the plant had the power of moving itself. Its sensibility is developed to the highest degree, and it reacts to light, heat, contact, electricity,
(260) and chemical influences." [8] The researches of Hegler show that if a weight be attached to a growth stem of a plant, greater mechanical strength is developed in the stem to withstand the weight, a fact analogous to the fact shown by Waller that an isolated muscle is able to do more work when a greater demand is made upon it in the way of resistance.[9] Growing roots show enormously increased growth power when resistances are put in their way. The fruit buds of certain plants resist the action of gravity, growing upward, as long as the germinal vesicles are uninjured. All the other parts of the buds and flower may be cut away, but it still grows serenely up. But only let the germinal vesicles be removed, -- parts which in size and weight are infinitesimally smaller than these others, -- and the whole bough sinks toward the earth.
The theory adopted by the great botanist mentioned, Pfeffer, in explaining these phenomena, falls in so easily, up to a certain point, with those of Eimer and Verworn already described, that it even suggests the via media which is required by the doctrine of accommodation through the law of 'excess' expounded in the foregoing pages. Says Pfeffer: "Having a view to all the particulars in the process of reaction and its effects, we find that the essential principle of all these phenomena is to be looked for in the production of a central organic response (Auslösung, d&eactuetente, release, or 'trigger-action'). This is the only definition which covers all the phenomena.... And it clearly results from it that irritability is never simply the result of the stimuli which bring out the reaction; these only serve to discover the properties and the specific agencies of the organism itself, and
(261) that the whole proceedings is due to the peculiar energy of the organism.... A simple mechanical action, for example, which represents an equivalent transformation of energy, does not constitute an irritation, although in the chain of phenomena due to irritability, there is more than one such transformation; for there is never irritation without an external or internal stimulant which sets in play the potential energy of the plant. Here we are dealing with phenomena of another order than those of a membrane drawing in water by stretching, or of a cell filling itself by osmosis, or finally of a branch bending under a weight." Further, in certain kinds of reaction, such as heliotropism, etc., Pfeffer points out the ability of the organism to 'release' its energies again and again to the same stimulus, and so to keep its processes a-going: "However little the ensemble of effects follow the release automatically, nevertheless the organism may prolong a reaction once provoked, or, after reacting, re-establish the state favourable to the reaction."[10] Uniform conditions, also, such as air, temperature, etc., he holds to afford constant stimulation by which the organism is kept in a state of static contraction. Plants continue to grow in forced directions some time after being again set free. " If the temperature remains constant, the plant finds itself in a state of static irritation -- a condition necessary to vital activity. It is in this sense that certain permanent influences are general and absolute conditions of the functioning of the organism." [11] This, it is clear, is in full accord with the theory of Verworn and with the oxygen discovery of Engelmann, and recognizes the ability of the lowest organisms to produce already reactions of the circular or imitative type.
The general theory of Auslösung, or 'trigger-action,' stated by Pfeffer, is as old, he says, as his work on Physiology (1881)
(262) and his Osmotische Untersuchungen (1877), and he also traces it to Dutrochet (1832). This is interesting, I think, on account of its close approach to the heightened nervous energy of Spencer, which also turns upon a storing up of potential energy. Yet I am not able to discover that Pfeffer uses this 'excess' storage for purposes of the further adaptation of the organism: a limitation of view which could not well be avoided in observing the actions of plants alone, which do not, as animals do, learn new adapted movements before our very eyes. He seems simply to recognize it as there, to account for reactions actually observed. [12]
Of course this class of facts, which show the same kind of selective reaction in lower organisms as in the higher, where consciousness is present, [13] may be used to support a certain dualism of chemistry and life. This is done among some later biologists, the so-called 'new vitalists'; but psychologists are becoming so familiar with the problems which demand a reconciliation of form and content, and so willing, for purposes of science, to state everything in terms of content, that this need not trouble them much. It is well to recognize, however, that if organic and mental accommodation are, as I am endeavouring to prove, one and the same thing, then the psychologist may have more right than is customarily given him of solving the dualism in this particular case by interpreting even the affinities of chemistry after analogy with the selective function of consciousness.[14]
(263) The bearing of the present condition of neurological research is now sufficiently evident from the evidence cited. VVhatever else it shows, this is clear, that wherever there is life there is irritability, nervous property. Further, wherever there is life there is the spontaneous selection of stimuli and the necessary motor accommodations. Wherever there is life there is means of continuing advantageous stimulations by drawing up to them by active movement, or by other actions whose evident result is the same. Such a property could only have arisen by the natural selection of the organisms which were endowed, by variation or otherwise (or by its abrupt appearance with life itself), with a central physiological process of a kind by which the contracting energies of the organism were directed into certain favourable pathways and withheld from other pathways. This is the principle of ' circular ' action with ' motor excess' as worked out above.
All this is equally true of the reactions which are consciously selective or inhibitory; the two great agents of such selection being attention, and pleasure and pain. I accordingly claim that the evidence of biology is in favour of the conclusion that the phenomena of 'excess' in unicellular creatures are, in some way, the nervous analogues to these conscious functions. How they are involved in pleasure and pain states of consciousness has already been touched upon in part. The theory of the rise of attention is to follow below.
The adaptation of all organisms is secured, therefore, by their tendency to act so as to reproduce or maintain stimulations which are beneficial [15] In this way only can new
(264) from a physiological point of view, I find Pfluger's idea and illustrations quite consonant with the views of the text. See especially, in the paper cited, ~ 3, pp. 37 ff., the teologisches Causalgesetz: " die Ursache jedes Bedurf
reactions be made available for repetition, and so secured to habit. But this reaction, which tends to secure a continuation of its own stimulation, is exactly the nervous process of conscious imitation. Hence we may say that all organic adaptation in a changing environment is a phenomenon of biological or organic imitation.[16]
Endnotes
- Zeitschrift für wissen. Zoologie, LIII., suppl. Bd., p. 67. see also his Organic Evolution; yet we cannot accept his Lamarckian views of heredity.
- Quoted by Soury, Revue Philosophique, July, 1893, p. 45.
- Die Bewegung der lebendigen Substanz (Jena, 1892). Verworn's work is well summarized by Soury (see last note). Cf. Burdon Sanderson's remarks on 'Chemiotaxis' in Nature, Sept. 14, 1893, p. 471. I say 'in its type,, since the particular chemical mode of stimulation which verworn makes exclusively the basis of life may not be, and probably is not, the only kind of stimulus to which the organism effects the same typical kind of circular reaction.
- The exhaustion of the nucleus by stimulation is shown by the work of Hodge, Changes due to Functional Activity of Nerve Cells (Boston, 1893),
- Jennings's work, Behaviour of Lower Organisms (1906), is now the best treatise on its topic.
- Psychic Life of Micro-organisms.
- May 12, 1894, p. 1027
- Pfeffer's 'Address at the first general meeting of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians,' at Nuremberg. See Revue Scientifique, Dec. 9, 1893, and Nature, April 19, 1894.
- Brain, XV., p. 388.
- Revue Scientifique, loc. cit., p. 741. Italics mine.
- Pfeffer, loc. cit.
- Professor Jennings (loc., cit.), who advocates the 'trial-and-error' theory of accommodation, insists also upon the complex character of the inner release processes.
- See an interesting collection of additional facts showing the 'nervous property' in low organisms, in Orr, Theory of Development and Heredity, Chap. IV. The authors cited are so easily accessible that I do not quote further from very many available instances.
- As do, among naturalists, Lloyd Morgan, and among philosophers, Paulsen.
- Professor C. S. Minot has called my attention to the similarity to this view of that of Pflüger in his 'Teologischen Mechanik der lebendigen Natur' (reprinted from Pfluger's Archiv, Bd. XV., T877). Although reached purely from a physiological point of view, I find Pfluger's idea and illustrations quite consonant with the views of the text. See especially, in the paper cited, § 3. pp. 37 ff., the teologisches Causalgsetz: "die Ursache jedes bedürfnisses eines lebendigen Wesens ist zugleich die Ursache der Befriedegung des Bedürfnisses."
- The use of the word 'imitation' in this wide sense has been justly criticised; but I am at a loss to suggest a better term. Besides, it is the essence of my contention that the method of organic adaptation is by reactions of this identical type with further repetitions of them. The term 'adaptation' is too general. 'Repetition,' the word used by the biologists, is too narrow, since it is only repetitions brought about in part by the organism itself which I have in mind, not all repetitions, as the old biological theory of adaptation is accustomed to hold. One of my correspondents -- and so also a critic in the Academy -- thinks ' habit ' covers it; but it is just my point that it does not cover it. I am asking just how habit could ever start and be controlled -- apart from fortuitous lucky chances. Of course this method of accommodation itself becomes a habit: the fact of imitation by children shows it. But the main function of the thing even then is that of modifying habits by the new actions which the child learns through its imitations. If any one will suggest a more happy term for the reaction which is at once a new accommodation to any sort of stimulation and the beginning of a habit or tendency to get that sort of stimulation again, I shall hail it gladly. In the meantime I use the word which expresses the type to which the reaction undoubtedly belongs, even at the risk of being charged with a desire to psychologize the facts of biology; but I do not wish, of course, to prejudice the argument by a word ill-used and suggest 'circular reaction' as an alternative.
§ 3. The Physical Basis of Memory and Association
In the nervous processes so far sketched we have, I think, the adequate basis of the development of an organism up to a certain point. It is evident that, in it all, the organism is directly dependent upon the actual stimulating agencies of nature. Sensations, perceptions, objects, are necessary to call out the reactions characteristic of it. And who would
(265) expect that the organism could in any way escape this dependence? Yet we have already found, in the fact of pleasure and pain reactions, that the organism takes active attitudes toward the sources of stimulation and thus in a measure turns the events of its environment to better account. But this is only the start: the marvels of development are not yet well begun !
Is the occurrence of any reaction, we may ask, possible in the absence of the external stimulus which is suited to start it? Evidently it is not possible, unless there be some way whereby the energies of the reaction in question may be started by something equivalent to the working of the original external stimulus.
We have seen how it is that the organism goes out to find its stimulus by a kind of imitation; we now find the still more remarkable fact for which this only is the preparation Cbut the necessary preparationCthe fact of memory. Memory is, as everybody says, on the bodily side, the reinstatement in the nervous centres of the processes concerned in the original perception, sensation, etc., or of others that stand for them. These processes, of course, tend always, when started, to issue in movement, just the same, no matter how they themselves are started. So the function of the reinstatement of processes in the act of memory is, in respect to the tendency to action which these processes arouse, essentially the same as that of the processes of perception, sensation, or other event which furnished the original of the memory.
But in memory the object or thing remembered is itself absent; yet inasmuch as its proper reaction in movement comes about just the same, we have a new stage in what is still our old friend the 'circular,' the 'stimulus-retaining,' reaction. It gets started from the brain centres to be sure,
(266) but it aims, just the same, to bring about the consequences which it did when it was directly started by the sense-stimulation. It aims, that is, to bring the organism into touch with the stimulation itself again if it be a desirable one, or, in contrary cases, to get the organism away from the stimulation.
This is accomplished in the organism by an arrangement whereby a group of processes, corresponding to what we call in consciousness 'copies for imitation,' some of them external as things, some internal as memories, conspire, so to speak, to 'ring up' one another. When an external stimulus starts one of them, that starts up others in the centres, and all the reactions which wait upon these several processes tend to realize themselves. So, many reactions which, but for this, would never get stimulated except when the actual material stimulus is there, are started by and with others whose stimuli are there. And with the multiplying of these secondary or remote ways of stimulation, the more and more varied and complex habits of the organism come to be less dependent upon the particular external events of the world, and more capable of remote stimulation through senses which originally did not constitute their stimulus, but which by this organic 'conspiracy,' called -- I may as well anticipate -- association, come to do so; while the increasing variety of the conspiring elements -- constantly recruited from the new experiences of the world and all represented by certain nervous processes -- make up a large and ever larger mass of connected centres, which vibrate in delicate counterpoise together.
The arrangement thus sketched, therefore, is the physical basis of memory. A memory is a copy for imitation taken over from the world into consciousness. Memory is a device to nullify distance in space and time. It remedies
(267) lack of immediate connection with the come-and-go occurrences of the world and makes the organism to a degree in dependent of them. Every act I set myself to do is either to imitate something which I find now before me, or to reproduce, by my own action, something whose elements I remember -- something whose copy I get set within me by a 'ring up' from elements which are events or objects in the world now before me.
This neurological theory of memory, advanced with too great brevity, is along the lines already announced by Tarde and others.[1] Tarde's theory, which I find obscure, is improved in quotation, and indorsed by Sighele. [2] It may be analyzed into two factors, i.e. (a) the securing of repetitions by imitation, a speculative idea based upon the mere fact that animals and man do consciously imitate; and (b) the theory of memory, considered as a means of perpetuating and complicating the effects of repetition in mental development. This latter factor I find only vaguely and inadequately stated by Tarde. It is readily seen that his view, also, assumes the fact of conscious or semi-conscious imitation, makes of it an original endowment or kind of social instinct, and is, in so far, open to the objections which may be urged [3] against such a position from the point of view of development; for one of the great problems of the theory of development is to account for instincts of all kinds. And, moreover, of all instincts the social are possibly the most complex and the latest. They involve a great measure of the individual organic and mental attainment found in memory, imagination, emotion, etc.
(268)
The theory now proposed, on the other hand, aims at supplying this lack. It gives a
derivation of imitation based upon an analysis of the imitative reaction itself. This
analysis -- the outcome of which we have expressed by calling imitation a 'circular
reaction,' i.e. one which tends to keep up its own stimulating process -- gives us a means
of defining imitation and fixing the limits of the concept. [4] The third and fundamental
factor, therefore, which the development stated above, compared with the earlier theories,
endeavours to supply, is the theory of the rise of imitation itself from the simple vital
processes of an organism through the occurrence, among 'spontaneous life variations' of
creatures whose vital discharges are movements of the 'circular' type, which tend directly
to secure the repetition or maintenance of certain good stimuli. And, in like manner, the
suppression of reactions which are damaging or useless follows, for by that very fact they
lower the vitality of the organism and so hinder their own recurrence. This derivation of
imitation secured, we are able to develop independently the two principles urged by Tarde
and Sighele, on both sides, the bodily and the mental.
We reach now a new stage in race history. As habit goes on forming, accommodation enters in a new form. New reactions which prove to be beneficial, have themselves to become matters of habit, have to be accommodated to by the organism as a whole, have to be taken up into the network of conspiring processes which represent the sum of adaptations to date, being stereotyped in the race by natural
(269) selection. Here it is that the principle of association largely gets its great value in nervous and mental development.
We have found reason to think that mere repetition with association would not suffice for development, and that the principle of 'organic imitation' must be added, for the reason that association alone would simply render habits more compact. This is true also in higher development after the process of memory comes; yet here association has much wider application. For example, a child does not learn to speak by merely getting his accidental vocal muscular sensations associated with the significant sounds which he makes, though I know that this is a widespread view. For at that rate of learning the number of words in his vocabulary would be less than the number of days in his life. On the contrary, he yields to his tendency to imitate sounds, and by strenuous effort succeeds, thus getting a great number of significant sounds and their necessary muscular sensations. This, now, becomes association's opportunity to show the manner of its action -- a chance it could not have had otherwise. And it does.
Nervous association does two things. First, it does here what it has been seen to do in the lower organisms: it binds sense of stimulus and sense of movement together. The child who has learned to make a sound, then makes it by association whenever he hears it. But second, association does more, -- and here comes in the very great influence of the fact which we have been describing by the phrase 'central conspiracy,' -- association brings different reactions together as wholes; it links together the elements of copy at the centre, so that a stimulus may produce, not only its own associated reaction, but, by its association with another stimulus, or with the memory of that other, it may suffice to produce the reaction associated with the second stimulus, or
(270) a third, fourth, etc. This we have already seen in the fact of 'substitution' in the matter of emotional attitudes. [5]
The play of this form of association and its importance appear on the mental side in the detailed facts of conscious association. This is mentioned below and traced further. Suffice it to say that the brain is a great mass of such sensory and motor processes bound together by 'association fibres,' all attesting the growth of the organ, as a whole, by the action of association upon simple functions. The fact that brains differ from one another only in degree of associative complexity, and the further fact that all complex brain functions arise from the complication of simple reactive functions, -- these facts are now axioms of physiology. There are two general truths involved, however, which are suggestive for our present topic.
The actual exercise of the most complex voluntary function involved in thought and conduct involves the motor apparatus which is also used by the simple reflex processes.[6] This has further mention in the chapter on ' Volition.' We are able to see now more clearly the reason for it. The new more complex functions are born out of the old simple ones by this principle of organic association. They are higher co-ordinations in which the lower enter as necessary elements. The apparatus of the old cannot be superseded; that would take away the basis for the new. All development is evolution. When an object approaches my eye, the lid flies to. But I use the same muscle when I will to wink my eye. In the one case, I stimulate the motor process by a percept or memory process, associated with the motor lid-
(271) movement process; in the other case, the same motor process is stimulated by an outside event.
The evident fact to be noticed, then, is that the more fixed of the two sides -- sensor and motor -- of the neural apparatus, is the motor side. It represents the habits, the organism's own repeated responses by apparatus which the different senses and the higher mental processes use in common. It also represents the great antithesis of ebb and flow in the vital processes into the terms of which all sorts of stimulation are translated: while the sensory side represents the shifting, varying life of stimulation; the relativities, the modifications, the reasons for accommodation, in short. The sensory centres have been likened by James to a funnel, which pours its flood down into the motor channel. Stimulations can be accommodated to only so far as the processes they excite can be drawn off successfully in the motor channels established by habit. Motor-habit, then, is the measure of nervous and mental unity. As we shall see below, [7] the sense of it affords largely the permanence, identity, self-persistence of the whole mental system.
A second fact of great importance arises from the increased complexity of associations in the brain. We have seen the elements of it in the association which one sensory process may form with a certain motor process through its earlier association with another sensory process more directly connected with the same motor process. The oft-cited instance of the burnt child dreading the fire is a case of it. The burn is at first associated organically with the withdrawing movement; but the sight of the blaze also entered originally into the complex experience of the fire. So the sight of the blaze now comes to bring about the withdrawing movements directly, although at first it was only the burn
(272) and its pain that were agents capable of doing it. Or, put terms of pleasure and advancing movements: the child sees -- tastes -- grasps an apple. The next time he sees an apple, he grasps at it before he gets the taste. If we note well that the first order is imitative, i.e. taste, then grasping to secure the taste again, and note also that it is by simple association, merely, that the real stimulus, taste, disappears largely from the series -- we are at once able to give a new meaning to the principle of association. The original imitative type seems entirely to disappear from the act as soon as the child gets the second order, seeing -- grasping -- tasting; and yet without imitation the reaction necessary to the association itself would not have been learned. It is possible to say, therefore, as our former chapters would lead us to expect, that each new accommodation secured by central nervous development is not new at all in principle, but rests directly upon imitation and association. Its characteristic feature, however, is its complexity. And this complexity is of such a kind that reactions seem to lose altogether the stimulus-repeating or imitative character which they had to have at first.
On the nervous side, this result is secured by the formation, between different brain areas, of direct connections, which take the place of the roundabout connections first painfully learned. Pathology is full of cases which illustrate it. Speech is learned by direct imitation through the ear, but afterwards gets to be stimulated through the eye; that is, a direct connection is formed from the optical verbal to the motor speech centre, and takes the place of the course through the auditory verbal centre. And it is now common doctrine, as I have said above, that the briefer, more automatic functions may represent, by neurological short-cuts, a long series of earlier processes.
(273) This is the secret, also, this fact of associative short-cuts, of the abbreviating of phylogenesis by ontogenesis, -- already noted above.[8] It may be well to repeat the point, now that we have had so much to do with neurology. Once let such a short-cut get so well established that it represents a more powerful organic tendency of habit than the longer process which in its genesis it represents; or once let the short-cut break in upon connections formerly used by the long -- and this result it becomes the business of heredity or natural selection to preserve. The child, in his own growth, cannot develop instincts for the performance of activities which he is also to learn to perform voluntarily; for the acquisition of volition involves the use in new forms of the very elements which would be held fast in the fixed reflexes of instinct. He is accordingly born a human infant without developed instincts, not a brute with them. His nervous system in its embryonic development does not fully carry out all the details of its ancestral history, but abbreviates them by a short-cut direct to the volitional stage, omitting the instinctive stage almost altogether. [9] Darwin notes the same falling away of certain simple social emotions which in his view lie at the basis of the ethical, when once these ethical feelings have become well established. [10]
We are able, therefore, in view of the foregoing expositions, to make the following general statement: the action of the
(274) cerebral centres concerned in memory is sufficiently accounted for as a development from the simple reactions of the imitative or 'circular, type. In these higher functions the principle of habit as applied to compounded reactions, fixed by selection, takes on the broader form commonly known as nervous 'association.'
And yet one additional remark. Just as soon as the copy for imitation becomes a matter of memory, a thing ' rung up' in the nervous centres and so already fully there in the organism, both in its sensory presence and in its motor worth, then it is no longer a thing to be accommodated to. It is then a thing already accommodated to. Its influence then is to fix more and more steadily the reaction associated with it at first by effortful imitation, so that its present imitation -- its circular process -- is now an agent of habit. Notice the great utility of the infant's incessant repetition of its own sounds, words, movements, etc., in exercising the organs and strengthening its nascent powers. The same is seen in the scale of race progress -- a species refining and fixing what it has already acquired -- in the fixing of instincts through the instinctive imitation of some animals by others, by their young, etc.,[11] made much of by Wallace.
As the processes in consciousness fall away, the reaction becomes more reflex. So by the extraordinary cunning of the organism, the very means of its new adaptations, that by which its old habits are modified and broken up, its imitative reinstatement of its experiences even at the high level of memory, this becomes itself a thing of habit, just as it does at the lower level of simple motor adjustment; sinks down to
(275) the lower levels of brain co-ordination; and is found actually in the child or animal as an impulse to imitate itself. But in the child the impulse to imitate is a matter of consciousness. The mental copy, imagined, remembered, is set up and aimed at; imitation is no longer the organism's weapon; it is now the sword of mind, as the following chapters on 'Conscious Imitation' aim to make clear. [12]
Endnotes
- Les Lois de l'lmitation, Chap. III.; published earlier in an article 'Qu'est-ce qu'une Société,' Revue Philosophique, XVIII., 1884, p. 489.
- La foule criminelle, pp. 42 ff.
- Cf. Bain, Senses and Intellect, 3d ed., pp. 4I3 ff., mentioned again below.
- Cf. Tönnies' remarks on Tarde's book in Philos. Monatshefte, 1893, p. 298, showing the need of more definition in this whole field. The relation of my views on imitation to those of M. Tarde is made matter of explicit remark in the Preface to Social and Ethical Interpretations, 3d ed.
- Above, Chap. VIII., § 4.
- See Chauveau on 'The Sensori-motor Nerve Circuit of Muscles' in Brain, 1891, pp. 145 ff., and Exner on 'Senso-mobilitat' in Pflüger's Archiv für die gesammte Physiologie, XLVIII, 592 ff.
- Chap. X., § 3, and Chap. XI., § I.
- Chap. I., § 4.
- Professor Minot suggests that "this point might be extended generally to the effects of disuse in biology -- ' i.e. the loss of characters." Such a position strongly favours a Darwinian or selective view of the origin of characters.
- Exp. of the Emotions, p. 69, I see hardly any limit to the application of this principle in the hands of evolutionists. Whatever seems native, a priori, may be held to be an outcome whose preparatory stages have been lost by the principle of abbreviation. See my own use of it, below, in finding the genesis of the sense of identity and sufficient reason (Chap. XI., § 1).
- Observations bearing on this latter aspect of the case, with quotations from Wallace and Romanes, are cited by Morgan, loc. cit., p. 454 ff; such as the constant dependence of certain birds' nest-building instinct upon the sight of their home nests, etc.
- Professor Lloyd Morgan says, in criticising my usage (Habit and Instinct, p. 168), that the word ' imitation ' should be confined to " the repetition by one individual of the behaviour of another individual." Yet what is the difference between my actions when I do what I see you do and when I do what I think or imagine you, me, or some one else doing ? In defining the reaction as such, it is impossible to maintain the social criterion. The term 'self-imitation,' used in the text, and also independently suggested by Royce, is sufficient to mark the absence of the social reference in a particular case.
