Mental Development in the Child and the Race
Chapter 12: Conscious Imitation (Concluded)
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§ 1. Classification
IT is possible, on the basis of the preceding developments, to lay out a scheme of notions and terms to govern the discussion of the whole matter of imitation. This has been the 'loose joint' in many discussions; the utter lack of any well-defined limits set to the phenomena in question. Tarde practically claims all cases of organic or social resemblance as instances of imitation, overlooking the truth, as one of his critics takes pains to point out, that two things which resemble each other may be common effects of the same cause ! Others are disposed to consider the voluntary imitation of an action as the only legitimate case of imitation. This, we have seen, has given rise to great confusion among psychologists. We have reason to think that volition requires a finely complex system of copy elements, whose very presence can be accounted for only on the basis of earlier organic, or certainly ideo-motor, imitations. Further, it is the lower, less volitional types of mind that simple imitation characterizes, the undeveloped child, the parrot, the idiot, the hypnotic, the hysterical. If again we say, with yet others, that imitation always involves a presentation or image of the situation or object imitated, -- a position very near the popular use of the term, -- then we have great difficulty in accounting for the absorption and reproduction of subconscious, vaguely present
(333) stimulations; as, for example, the acquisition of facial expression' the contagion of e-m-motion, the growth of style in dress and institutions -- what may be called the influence of the 'psychic atmosphere.'
I think we have found reason from the analysis above, to hold that our provisional definition of imitation is just; an imitative reaction is one which tends normally to maintain or repeat its own stimulating process. This is what we find the nervous and muscular mechanism suited to, and this is what we find the organism doing in a progressive way in all the types of function which we have passed in review. If this is too broad a definition, then what we have traced must be given some other name, and imitation applied to any more restricted function that can be clearly and finally marked out. But let us give no rein to the fanciful and strained analogies which have exercised the minds of certain writers on imitation.
Adhering, then, to the definition which makes of imitation e' circular ' process, we may point out its various 'kinds,' according to the degree in which a reaction of the general type has, by complication, abbreviation, substitution, inhibition, or what not, departed in the development of consciousness from its typical simplicity. We find, in fact, three great instances of function, all of which conform to the imitative type. Two of these have already been put in evidence in detail; the third I am going on to characterize briefly in the following section under the phrase 'plastic imitation.'
First: the organic reaction which tends to maintain, repeat, reproduce, its own stimulation, be it simple contractility, muscular contraction, or selected reactions which have become habitual. This may be called biological or organic imitation. Under this head fall all cases lower down than the conscious picturing of copies; lower down in the sense of not
(334) involving, and never having involved, for their execution, a conscious sensory or intellectual suggesting stimulus' with the possibility of its revival as a memory. On the nervous side, such imitations may be called subcortical; and in view of another class mentioned below, they may be further qualified as primarily subcortical.
These 'biological' imitations are evidently first in order of development, and represent the gains or accommodations of the organism made independently of the conscious picturing of stimulations and adaptation to them. They serve for the accumulation of material for conscious and voluntary actions. In the young of the animals, their scope is very limited, because of the complete instinctive equipment which young animals bring into the world; but in human infants they play an important part, as the means of the gradual reduction to order and utility of the diffused motor discharges of the new-born. I have noted its presence under the phrase 'physiological' suggestion [1] another place. It is under this head that the so-called 'selective' function of the nervous system finds its first illustration.
Second: we pass to psychological, conscious, or cortical imitations. The criterion of imitation -- the presence of a copy to be aimed at -- is here fulfilled in the form of conscious presentations and images. The copy becomes consciously available in two ways: first, as presentation, which the imitative reaction seeks to continue or reproduce (as the imitation of words heard, movements seen, etc.); and second, as memory. In this latter case there arises complexity in the 'copy system,' with desire, in which there is consciousness of the imitative tendency as respects an agreeable memory copy; and with the persistence of such a copy, and its partial repression by other elements of memory, comes
(335) volition. We find, accordingly, two kinds of psychological or cortical imitation which I have called respectively ' simple ' and 'persistent' imitation. Simple imitation is the sensori-motor or ideo-motor suggestion which tends to keep itself going by reinstating its own stimulation; and persistent imitation is the 'try-try-again,' experience of early volition, to be taken up in more detail below. [2]
Third: a great class of facts which we may well designate by the term 'plastic' or 'secondarily subcortical' imitations, to which more particular attention may now be given.
Endnotes
- Above, Chap. VI., § 2.
- Cf. Chap. XIII.
§ 2. Plastic Imitation
This phrase is used to cover all the cases of reaction or attitude, toward the doings, customs, opinions of others, which once represented more or less conscious adaptations either in race or in personal history, but which have become what is ordinarily called 'secondary automatic' and subconscious. With them are all the less well-defined kinds of response which we make to the actions, suggestions, etc., of others, simply from the habit we are in, by heredity and experience, or conforming to social 'copy.' Plastic imitation represents the general fact of that normal suggestibility which is, as regards personal rapport, the very soul of our social relationships with one another.
These cases come up for detailed discussion in the later volume. They serve to put in evidence the foundation facts of a possible psychology of masses, crowds, organized bodies generally. They may be readily explained by one or both of two principles -- both really one, that of Habit. The principle of 'lapsed links,' already explained, applies to cases of conventional conformity, or custom, which is but an
(336) expression for abbreviated processes of social imitation. This accounts for the influence of the old' the venerated, the antique, upon mankind. The other principle is the application of habit itself to imitation, whereby absorption by imitation has become the great means, the first resort of consciousness, in the presence of new kinds of experience. We have become used to getting new accommodations, fine outlets for action and avenues of happiness, by taking up new thoughts, beliefs, fashions, etc. This accounts for the tyranny of novelty in all social affairs. So in these two principles, both exhibitions of the one law of imitation, we reach the two great forces of social life, conservatism and liberalism. So we find under this heading such fundamental facts as the social phenomena of contagion, fashion, mob-law, which Tarde and Sighele so well emphasize, the imitation of facial and emotional expression, moral influence, organic sympathy, personal rapport, etc., all matters set aside for later treatment. The term 'plastic' serves to point out the rather helpless condition of the person who imitates, and so interprets in his own action the more intangible influences of his estate in life.
The general character of plastic imitation may be made clearer if we give attention to some of its more obscure instances, and assign them places in the general scheme of development.
The social instances noticed at length by Tarde, and summarized under so-called 'laws,' are easily reduced to the more general principles now stated. Tarde enunciated a law based on the fact that people imitate one another in thoughts and opinions before they do so in dress and customs, his inference being that 'imitation proceeds from the internal to the external.' So far as this is true it is only partially imitation. Thoughts and opinions are imitated because they
(337) are most important, and most difficult to maintain for oneself, And. it is only a result of similar thought that action should be similar, without in all cases resorting to imitation to account for this last similarity. But the so-called facts are not true. The relatively trivial and external things are most liable to be seized upon. A child imitates persons, and what he copies most largely are the personal points of evidence, so to speak; the boldest, most external manifestations, the things that he with his capacity is most likely to see, not the inner essential mental things. It is only as he grows to make a conscious distinction between thought and action that he gets to giving the former a higher valuation. And so it is in the different strata of society. The relative force of convention, imitation of externals, worship of custom, seems to have an inverse relation to the degree of development of a people.
Again, Tarde's laws relative to imitation mode and imitation coutume -- the former having in its eye the new, fashionable, popular, the fad; the latter, the old, venerable, customary -- are so clearly partial statements of the principles of accommodation and habit, as they get application in the broader genetic ways already briefly pointed out, that it is not necessary to dwell further upon them. [1]
The phenomena of hypnotism illustrate most strikingly the reality of this kind of imitation at a certain stage of mental life. Delboeuf makes it probable [2] that the characteristic peculiarities of the 'stages' of the Paris school are due to this influence; and the wider question may well be opened, whether suggestion generally, as understood in hypnotic
(338) work, might not be better expressed by some formula which recognizes the fundamental sameness of all reactions -- normal, pathological, hypnotic, degenerative -- which exhibit the form of stimulus-repeating or 'circular' process characteristic of simple imitation. In normal, personal, and social suggestion the copy elements are, in part, unrecognized; and their reactions are subject to inhibition and blocking-off by the various voluntary and complicated tendencies which have the floor. In sleep, on the other hand, the copy elements are largely spontaneous images, thrown up by the play of association, or stimulated by outside trivialities, and all so weak that while action follows in the dream persons, it does not generally follow in the dreamer's own muscles. But in hypnotic somnambulism, the copy elements are from the outside, thrown in; the inner fountains are blocked; action tends to follow upon idea, whatever it is. Even the idea of no action is acted out by the lethargic, and the idea of fixed self-sustaining action by the cataleptic. [3]
Further, in certain cases of madness (folie a deux, etc.) the patient responds to the copy which has been learned from a single person only, and which has aided in the production of the disease.[4] In all these cases, the peculiar character of which is the performance, under conditions commonly called those of aboulia,[5] of reactions which require the muscular
(339) co-ordinations usually employed by voluntary action, we have illustrations of 'plastic' imitation. On the pathological side, we find, in aphasic patients who cannot write or speak spontaneously, but who still can copy handwriting and speak after another, cases which illustrate the same kind of defect, yet in which the defect is not general, but rather confined to a particular group of reactions, by reason of a circumscribed lesion.
In this form of imitative suggestion, it is now clear, we have a second kind of subcortical reaction. It is 'secondarily subcortical,' in contrast with the organic or 'primarily subcortical' imitations. When looked at from the point of view of race history, it gives us further reason for finding in imitation a native impulse. [6]
Endnotes
- Tarde's other principle, that 'inferiors imitate superiors,' is clearly a corollary from the view that the progressive sense of personality arises through social suggestion.
- Révue Philosophique, XXII., pp. 146 ff.
- It may be well to quote Janet's summary of his determinations of the characteristic features of general catalepsy, all of which indicate a purely imitative condition of consciousness, Aut. Psych., p. 55: " The different phenomena which we have described are these; i.e. the continuation of an attitude or a movement, the repetition of movements which have been seen and of sounds which have been heard, the harmonious association of the members and of their movements." Cf. Janet on hysteria, Arch. de Neurologie, June, July, 1893.
- Cf. Falret, Études cliniques sur les maladies mentales et nerveuses, p. 547.
- This would involve, as I have intimated on an earlier page, a doctrine which holds that in the hypnotic state, there is inhibition of the cortical associative or synthetic function, but not of the simple cortical function. Cf. Gurney's remarks on Heidenhain's explanation of 'hypnotic mimicry,' in Mind, 1884, p. 493.
- In the earlier publication of some of the positions of this chapter (Mind, January, 1894, p. 52), I argued against Bain's view, in his Senses and Intellect, pp. 413 ff. (3d ed.), of imitation as in all cases acquired. In his fourth edition, while repeating his former arguments, he neverthless so wakens them by a supplementary note that I find his concessions practically bringing him into accord with our own views. The note is as follows (loc. cit., p. 441): "As in other connections, I have to qualify the foregoining explanation by admitting the possibility and the fact of hereditary transmission in at least preparing the way or giving facilities for the operation now described.... The inheritance of tendencies favouring acquisition may decisively contribute to the advancement of our early powers of imitation. The term 'instinct' would thus hav a certain fitness . . . . "
§ 3. How to Observe Children's Imitations [1]
There are one or two considerations of such practical importance to all those who wish to observe cases of imitation by children, that I venture to throw them together, only
(340) saying by way of introduction that they all follow from the general statement that nothing less than the growth of personality is at stake in the method and matter of its imitations; for the 'self' is largely the form or process in which the personal influences surrounding the child take on their new individuality.
I. No observations are of much importance which are not accompanied by a detailed statement of the personal influences which have affected the child. This is the more important since the child sees few persons, and sees them constantly. It is not only likely -- it is inevitable -- that he make up his personality, under limitations of heredity, by imitation, out of the 'copy' set in the actions, temper, emotions, of the persons who build around him the social enclosure of his childhood. It is only necessary to watch a two-year-old closely to see what members of the family are giving him his personal 'copy' -- to find out whether he sees his mother constantly and his father seldom; whether he plays much with other children, and what their dispositions are, to a degree; whether he is growing to be a person of subjugation, equality, or tyranny; whether he is assimilating the elements of some low unorganized social content from his foreign nurse. For, to use Leibnitz's term, the boy or girl is a social 'monad,' a little world, which reflects the whole system of influences coming to stir its sensibility. And just in so far as his sensibilities are stirred, he imitates, and forms habits of imitating; and habits? -- they are character!
2 A point akin to the first is this: every observation should describe with great accuracy the child's relation to other children. Has he brothers or sisters; how many of each, and of what age? Does he sleep in the same bed or room with them? Do they play much with one another alone ? The reason is very evident. An only child has only
(341) adult 'copy.' He cannot interpret his father's actions, or his mother's, oftentimes. He imitates very blindly. He lacks the more childish example of a brother or sister near himself in age. And this difference is of very great importance to his development. He lacks the stimulus, for example, of games, in which personification is a direct tutor to self-hood, as is taught elsewhere. [2] And while he becomes precocious in some lines of instruction, he fails in wealth of imagination, in variety of fancy. The dramatic, in his sense of social situations, is largely hidden. It is a very great mistake to isolate children. One alone is perhaps the worse, but two alone are subject to the other element of social danger which I may mention next.
3. Observers should report with especial care all cases of unusually close relationship between children in youth, such as childish favouritism, 'platonic friendships,' 'chumming,' in school or home, etc. We have in these facts -- and there is a very great variety of them -- an exaggeration of the social or imitative tendency, a narrowing down of the personal suggestive sensibility to a peculiar line of well-formed influences. It has been little studied by writers either on the genesis of social emotion or on the practice of education. To be sure, teachers are alive to the pros and cons of allowing children and students to room together; but it is with a view to the possibility of direct immoral or unwholesome contagion. This danger is certainly real; but we, as psychological observers, and above all as teachers and leaders, of our children, must go even deeper than that. Consider, for example, the possible influence of a school chum and room-mate upon a girl in her teens; for this is only an evident case of what all children thus isolated are subject to. A sensitive nature, a girl whose very life is a branch of a social
(342) tree, is placed in a new environment, to engraft upon the members of her mutilated self -- her very personality; it is nothing less than that -- utterly new channels of supply. The only safety possible, the only way to conserve the lessons of her past, apart from the veriest chance, and to add to the structure of her present character, lies in securing for her the greatest possible variety of social influences. Instead of this, she meets, eats, walks, talks, lies down at night, and rises in the morning, with one other person, a 'copy' set before her, as immature in all likelihood as herself, or, if not so, yet a single personality, put there to wrap around her growing self the confining cords of unassimilated and foreign habit. Above all things, fathers, mothers, teachers, elders, give the children room ! They need all that they can get, and their personalities will grow to fill it. Give them plenty of companions, fill their lives with variety, -- variety is the soul of originality, and its only source of supply. The ethical life itself, the boy's, the girl's, conscience, is born in the stress of the conflicts of suggestion, born right out of his imitative hesitations; and just this is the analogy which he must assimilate and depend upon in his own conflicts for self-control and social continence. So impressively true is this from the human point of view, that in my opinion -- formed, it is true, from the very few data accessible on such points, still a positive opinion -- children should never be allowed, after infancy, to room regularly together; special friendships of a close exclusive kind should be discouraged or broken up, except when under the immediate eye of the wise parent or guardian; and even when allowed, these relationships should, in all cases, be used to entrain the sympathetic and moral sentiments into a wider field of social exercise.
4. The remainder of this section must be devoted to the further emphasis of the need of close observation of chil-
(343)-dren's games, especially those which may be best described as 'society games.' All those who have given even casual observation lo the doings of the nursery have been impressed with the extraordinary fertility of the child mind, from the second year onward, in imagining and plotting social and dramatic situations. It has not been so evident, however, to these casual observers, nor to many really more skilled, that they were observing in these fancy-plays the putting together anew of fragments, or larger pieces, of their own mental history. But here, in these games, we see the actual use which our children make of the personal 'copy' material which they have got from you and me. If a man study these games patiently in his own children, and analyze them out, he gradually sees emerge from the child's inner consciousness its picture of the boy's own father, whom he aspires to be like, and whose actions he seeks to generalize and apply anew. The picture is poor, for the child takes only what he is sensible to. And it does seem often, as Sighele pathetically notices on a large social scale, and as the Westminster divines have urged without due sense of the pathetic and home-coming point of it, that he takes more of the bad in us for reproduction than of the good. But be this as it may, what we give him is all he gets. Heredity does not stop with birth; it is then only beginning. And the pity of it is that this element of heredity, this reproduction of the fathers in the children, which might be used to redeem the new-forming personality from the heritage of past commonness or impurity, is simply left to take its course for the further establishing and confirmation of it. Was there ever a group of school children who did not leave the real school to make a play school, erecting a throne for one of their number to sit on and 'take off' the teacher? Was there ever a child who did not play 'church,' and force her father if
(344) possible into the pulpit ? Were there ever children who did not 'buy' things from fancied stalls in every corner of the nursery, when they had once seen an elder drive a trade in the market ? The point is this: the child's personality grows; growth is always by action; he clothes upon himself the scenes of his life and acts them out; so he grows in what he is, what he understands, and what he is able to perform.
In order to be of direct service to observers of games of this character, I shall now give a short account of an observation of the kind made a few weeks ago -- one of the simplest of many actual situations which my two little girls, Helen and Elizabeth, have acted out together. It is a very commonplace case, a game, the elements of which are evident in their origin; but I choose this rather than one more complex, since observers are usually not psychologists, and they find the elementary the more instructive.
On May 2, I was sitting on the porch alone with the children -- the two mentioned above, aged respectively four and a half and two and a half years. Helen, the elder, told Elizabeth that she was her little baby; that is, Helen became 'mama,' and Elizabeth 'baby.' The younger responded by calling her sister 'mama,' and the play began.
"You have been asleep, baby. Now it is time to get up," said mama. Baby rose from the floor, -- first falling down in order to rise, -- was seized upon by 'mama,' taken to the railing to an imaginary wash-stand, and her face washed by rubbing. Her articles of clothing were then named in imagination, and put on, one by one, in the most detailed and interesting fashion. During all this 'mama' kept up a stream of baby talk to her infant: " Now your stockings, my darling; now your skirt, sweetness -- or, no -- not yet -- your shoes first," etc., etc. Baby acceded to all the details with more than the docility which real infants usually show. When this
(345) was done, " Now we must go tell papa good-morning, dearie," said mama.
"Yes, mama," came the reply; and hand in
hand they started to find papa. I, the spectator, carefully read my newspaper, thinking,
however, that the reality of papa, seeing that he was so much in evidence, would break in
upon the imagined situation. But not so. Mama led her baby directly past me to the end of
the piazza, to a column in the corner. "There's papa," said mama; "now tell
him good-morning." -- " Good-morning, papa; I am very well," said baby,
bowing low to the column. "That's good," said mama, in a gruff, low voice,
which caused in the real papa a thrill of amused self-consciousness most difficult to
contain. "Now you must have your breakfast," said mama. The seat of a chair was
made a breakfast-table, the baby's feigned bib put on, and her porridge carefully
administered, with all the manner of the nurse who usually directs their breakfast.
"Now" (after the meal, which suddenly became dinner instead of breakfast),
"you must take your nap," said mama. " No, mama; I don't want to,"
said baby. " But you must." -- "No; you be baby, and take the nap." --
"But all the other children have gone to sleep, dearest, and the doctor says you
must," said mama. This convinced baby, and she lay down on the floor. "But I
haven't undressed you." So then came all the detail of undressing; and mama carefully
covered her up on the floor with a light shawl, saying, " Spring is coming now;
that'll be enough. Now shut your eyes, and go to sleep." -- "But you haven't
kissed me, mama," said the little one. "Oh, of course, my darling!" -- so a
long siege of kissing ! Then baby closed her eyes very tight, while mama went on tiptoe
away to the end of the porch. " Don't go away, mama," said baby. "No; mama
wouldn't leave her darling," came the reply.
So this went on. The nap over, a walk was proposed,
(346) hats put on, etc., the mama exercising great care and solicitude for her baby. One further incident to show this: when the baby's hat was put on -- the real hat -- mama tied the strings rather tight. "Oh! you hurt, mama," said baby. " No; mama wouldn't draw the strings too tight. Let mama kiss it. There, is that better, my darling?" -- all comically true to a certain sweet maternal tenderness that I had no difficulty in tracing.
Now in such a case, what is to be reported, of course, is the facts. Yet knowledge of more than the facts is necessary, as I have said above, in order to get the full psychological lesson. We need just the information which concerns the rest of the family, and the social influences of the children's lives. I recognized at once every phrase which the children used in this play, where they got it, what it meant in its original context, and how far its meaning had been modified in this process which I have called 'social heredity.' But as that story is reported to strangers who have no knowledge of the children's social antecedents, how much beyond the mere facts of imitation and personification do they get from it? And how much the more is this true when we examine those complex games of the nursery which show the brilliant fancy for situation and drama of the wide-awake four-year old ?
Yet we psychologists are free to interpret; and how rich the lessons even from such a simple scene as this! As for Helen, what could be a more direct lesson -- a lived-out exercise in sympathy, in altruistic self-denial, in the healthy elevation of her sense of self to the dignity of kindly offices, in the sense of responsibility and agency, in the stimulus to original effort and the designing of means to ends -- and all of it with the best sense of the objectivity which is quite lost in wretched self-consciousness in us adults, when we
(347) personate other characters ? What could further all this highest mental growth better than the game by which the lessons of her mother's daily life are read into the child's little self ? And then, in the case of Elizabeth, certain things appear. She obeys without command or sanction, she takes in from her sister the elements of personal suggestion in their simpler childish forms; and certainly such scenes, repeated every day with such variation of detail, must give something of the sense of variety and social equality which real life afterwards confirms and proceeds upon; and lessons of the opposite character are learned by the same process.
And all this exercise of fancy must strengthen the imaginative faculty. The prolonged situations, maintained sometimes whole days, or possibly weeks, give strength to the imagination and train the attention. And I think, also, that the sense of essential reality, and its distinction from the unreal, the merely imagined, is helped by this sort of symbolic representation. But it has its dangers also -- very serious ones. And possibly the best service of observation just now is to gather the facts with a view to the proper recognition and avoidance of the dangers.
Finally, I may be allowed a word to interested parents. You can be of no use whatever to psychologists -- to say nothing of the actual damage you may be to the children -- unless you know your babies through and through. Especially the fathers ! They are willing to study everything else. They know every corner of the house familiarly, and what is done in it, except the nursery. A man labours for his children ten hours a day, gets his life insured for their support after his death, and yet he lets their mental growth, the formation of their characters, the evolution of their personality, go on by absorption -- if no worse -- from common, vulgar, imported and changing, often immoral, attendants! Plato said the
(348) state should train the children; and added that the wisest man should rule the state. This is to say that the wisest man should tend his children ! Hugo gives us, in Jean Valjean and Cosette, a picture of the true paternal relationship. We hear a certain group of studies called the humanities, and it is right. But the best school in the humanities for every man is in his own house. [3]
Endnotes
- See the Century Magazine for December, 1894, and cf. Royce's article on 'The Imitative Functions' in the same magazine for May, 1894.
- See Thought and Things, Vol. I Chap. VI, 6 ff.
- In the detailed treatment of ' genetic logic ' in Thought and Things, Vol. I., Chap. VI., the make-believe or ' semblant ' mode of construction is found to be an essential stage in the development of knowledge.
