The play of this form of association and its importance appear on the mental side in the detailed facts of con- scious association. This is mentioned below and traced farther. 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 func- tions. 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 complica- tion 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 func- tion involved in thought and conduct involves the motor apparatus which is also used by the simple reflex pro- cesses.^ 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 The apparatus of the old cannot be superseded; that would take away the basis for the new.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-movement process; 1 See Chauveau on 'The Sensori-motor Nerve Circuit of Muscles' in Brain, 1891, pp. I45ff., and Exner on * Senso-mobilitiit ' in Pfliigcr's Archiv filr die gesaniuile Physiologie, XLVIIL, 592 ff.
286 Organic Imitation, 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 accovi- modation, 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 as far as the processes they excite can be drawn off successfully in the motor channels established by habit. Motor-habit, then, is the ineasure of nervotis and vieiital unity. As we shall see below,^ 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 organ- ically with the withdrawing movement; but the sight of the blaze also entered originally into the complex experi- Physical Basis of Memory and Association. 287 ence of the fire. So the sight of the l^laze now comes to bring about the withdrawing movements directly, although it was only the burn and its pain which were the dynamo- genie agents capable of doing it. Or, put in 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,?>., taste, then grasp- ing 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 rest directly upon imita- tion and association. Its characteristic feature, however, is its complexity. And this complexity is of such a kind that reactions seem to lose altogether the stininlus-repeating or imitative character ivhich they had to have at first.
On the nervous side, this result is secured by the forma- tion, between different brain areas, of direct connections, which take the place of the round-about connections first painfully learned. Pathology is full of cases which illus- trate 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 op- tical verbal to the motor speech centre, and takes the 288 Ormnic Imitation.
<b 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, processes which at first required a longer series of processes.
This is the secret, also, this fact of associative short- cuts, of the abbreviating of phylogenesis by ontogenesis, — already noted above. ^ 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 repre- sents a more powerful organic tendency or 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 per- formance 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 accord- ingly born a human infant without developed instincts, not a brute with them. His nervous system in its embry- onic 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. 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.^ - 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 p7-iori, Physical Basis of Memory and Association. 289 We arc able, therefore, in view of the foregoing" expo- sitions, to make the following general statement: tJie 7ien'o?is action of tJic cerebral centres concerned in memory is sufficiently acconnted for as a development from the simple reactions of organic contractility, in accordance zvith the principle of ' organic imitatioji ' already defined. In these higher functions the principle of habit as applied to com- pounded reactions takes on the broader form commonly known as ' 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 accommo- dated 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 nas- cent 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.,^ made much of by Wallace.
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. XL, § i).
1 Observations bearing on this latter aspect of the case, with quotations from Wallace apd Romanes, are cited by Morgan, loc. cit., pp. 454 ff.; such as the constant dependence of certain birds' nest-building instinct upon the sight of their home nests, etc.
290 Organic Imitation.
All the processes in consciousness fall away; the reac- tion becomes almost 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 the lower levels of brain co-ordination; and is found actually in the child and in animals as an instinct to imitate. But at this level the instinct to imitate is a matter of consciousness. The mental copy, seen, heard, 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.
CHAPTER X.
Conscious Imitation (begun); the Origin of Memory AND Imagination.
§ I. Certain General Facts and Explanations.
We are now clear of neurological considerations in the main, and may trace the development of consciousness. The place of consciousness in phylogenetic progress has already come up for notice, and we have been able to find in consciousness a higher sphere of organic accommodation. That is, it seemed necessary to assume the analogue of the nervous basis of pleasure and pain very early in the life series, in order to get any complexity of development at all. Assuming, moreover, the truth of our theory of development as now sketched, which bases it, from the start, on the two factors, contractility, and the pleasure and pain analogue found in central 'excess,' we ought now to find the further development of consciousness an illus- tration of the same processes.
The rest of our discussions, therefore, may turn upon further analyses of conscious states, whose reason for being is evident only when we connect them with the function of consciousness in development as a whole. And as it is the essence of our doctrine of accommoda- tion that the imitative reaction is the type of all organic accommodations, our further interesting task becomes that of tracing and explaining the presence of imitation in the development of consciousness.
We may preface our detailed treatment of this topic with two statements already put in evidence, both of which are the clear outcome of current psychological opinion. I quote them from my earlier work, in which they appear as the natural result of a statement of nervous structure and function in its relation to consciousness, written for purposes of exposition only.
"All the phenomena of consolidation or 'downward growth,' on the one hand, illustrate what is known as the law of Habit; all the phenomena of specialization, or 'upward growth,' illustrate the law of Accommodation.
''As for Habit: Physiologically, habit means readiness for function, produced by previous exercise of the function. Anatomically, it means the arrangement of elements more suitably for a function, in consequence of former modifica- tions of arrangement through that function. PsycJiologi- cally, it means loss of oversight, diffttsioji of attejition, subsidijig consciousness.
''As for Accommodation: Physiologically and anatomi- cally, it means the breaking up of a habit, the widening of the organic for the reception or accommodation of new conditions. Psychologically, it means reviving conscious- ness, concentration of attention, voluntary control — the m,ental state ivhicJi has its most general expression iji what we know as Interest. In habit and interest we find the psychological poles corresponding to the lowest and the highest in the activities of the nervous system." The application of these conclusions, especially those italicized, will be plain as we go on.
General Faefs anei Explanations. 293 The books on psychology which have had the courage to say anything about imitation — and they are few — have generally, by what they said, only tended to justify the conservatism of those who had not the courage. It has been a topic of extraordinary neglect and confusion. One of the latest authors ^ makes certain statements about imitation which may be considered typical of the uncer- tainty which seems to shield itself behind eclecticism.
He says (p. 218): ''Since it only begins to appear about the fourth month, when simple voluntary action directed towards an end is also first recognizable, it is possible that imitation is acquired"; then (219), ''As a rapid reaction of a sensori-motor form, it has the look of a mechanical process...in many cases there seems to be no conscious purpose...There is much to favour the view that it is purely ideo-motor and so sub-volitional"; then (219, note), " It is pointed out by Gurney that imitation plays a con- spicuous part in the hypnotic state"; and again (219-220), '' Imitation follows on the persistence of motor-ideas having a pleasurable interest...The child does not imitate all the actions it sees, but only certain ones which specially impress it...Hence in most, at least, of a child's imi- tation there is a rudiment of desire. For the rest, the abundant imitative activity of early life illustrates the strength of the playful impulse, of the disposition to indulge in motor activity for the sake of its intrinsic pleasurableness " (italics his). Again (109), he makes imitative sympathy instinctive.
And yet if we examine these separate statements, we find that they rest generally upon fact, and it becomes evident that the need in this topic is a theory of the reac- ^ Sully, The Human Mind.
294 Conscious Imitaiioii, tion in question which will cover facts drawn from an area wider than that which individual or analytic psychology is usually called upon to cover. It may therefore be taken as the legitimate task of such a theory as mine, which not only recognizes imitation but endeavours also to explain it, to set in order the array of facts cited by current psy- chologists.
Fact i. The late rise of conscious imitation in the child: sixth or seventh month. This fact may be ac- counted for on the very evident ground of the distinction of inherited habit from the new accommodations of the individual child. The child's early months are taken up with its vegetative functions. The machinery of heredity is working itself out in a new individual. Further, acci- dental imitations struck by him do not give pleasure until the senses are sharpened to discern them, and until the attention is capable of its operations of comparison, co- ordination, etc.; before this there is no element of pleas- ure in the happy successes of imitations, to lend its influence for the continuance of them. As soon as these conditions get fulfilled, however, we find not only that the child begins to show germinal imitations, such as the monoto- nous repetition of its own vocal performances (ma-ma-ma-), but also that its nervous connections give it an instinctive tendency to biological subconscious reactions, distinctly of the imitative type, such as the walking alternation of the legs. In the main, therefore, there is instinctive tendency to functions of the imitative type and to some direct organic imitations; but those clear conscious imitations which represent new accommodations and acquirements are not as such instinctive, and so come later as individual acquirements.
General Faels eiud Expleiuaiious. 295 Fact 2. Imitation is often a simple sensori-motor reac- tion without conscious purpose, e.g., it is involuntary. This is so evident that I have based an important dis- tinction on it in an earlier chapter — that between 'simple' imitation, considered as 'suggestion,' and 'persistent' imi- tation, which turns out to be the first typical exhibition of volition. So it is in hypnotic conditions, imitation is there ideo-motor suggestion. This means that, after all, imitation considered as a type of reaction, is organic and inherited. It has its place among race habits. Infants show remark- able differences, for example, in the readiness and facility with which they learn to speak. This does not arise from difference in practice, for practice never overcomes the difference; but it is due to differences in the instinctive tendencies of the infants to a reaction which is, par excel- lejice, imitative in its type and method of development.^ On this basis it is possible to admit the truth of the first fact cited, that many imitations are late acquisitions in the child's first year, and are, therefore, phenomena of accommodation and acquired things involving volition o5: purpose; and, at the same time, admit reflex imitations and explain them.
Further, our theory requires, as a matter of fact, just this state of things. Volition would be impossible without this great class of quite involuntary sensori-motor and ideo-motor, as well as purely biological reactions, which fall under the imitative type, and which represent instinc- tive inherited tendencies to movement. In more unde- veloped consciousness, further, we find that the purely suggestive influence of a ' copy for imitation ' may be so 1 The same is true of handwriting: cf. Romanes, Ment. Evolution in Anistrong, as is remarked below, that reactions follow despite their painful character: a fact which would be impos- sible on the theory that all voluntary action is acquired under lead of the pleasure-pain association, without such a basis of native tendency. The law of habit, which exhibits itself in the inherited motor tendencies I have spoken of, is in these cases too strong for the law of accommodation through pleasure and pain, and works itself out in conduct in opposition to warnings of temporary damage to the organism.
Again, not only is this true of imitation itself consid- ered as a phenomenon. It is true of all motor acquisi- tions, i.e., that they become instinctive in some cases, and yet must be acquired in others. I have already pointed this out in the case of many instincts and of emotional expres- sion. The chick is born with full-fledged space instincts; man acquires 'intuitions' of space relations, and in such a finished way that Kant thinks them native. Beasts in many cases seem to inherit their vocal cries; man learns his speech, indeed, but learns it so well that it gets to be reflex, as is seen in certain aboulic patients. And in many cases the original process of learning is seen to be iden- tical with imitation from the fact that many animals do not learn their characteristic cries, as birds their songs, if they do not hear adults of their kind make such sounds, although they apparently never consciously imitate their adults at all. The instinct of imitation is so bound up in all these race acquisitions or habits that its exercise is often necessary to bring them out.
Fact 3. Children are more imitative than animals, with one or two striking exceptions, such as monkeys, the mocking-bird, etc. This is due simply to the fact that General Facts and Explanations. 297 the child's life, as heredity has laid it out for him, is to be largely one of acquisitions or new adjustments, while the animal's is to be one of repetitions of race habits or old adjustments. In the words of Preyer,^ "the more kinds of co-ordinated movement an animal brings into the world, the fewer is he able to learn afterwards." The child is par excellence the animal that learns; and if imita- tion is the way to learn, he has ' chosen the better part ' in being more imitative than the rest. He is born with a more 'broken up' or mobile nervous organization, because his immediate ancestors have had full consciousness and volition, whose function is to secure new adaptations by choice, memory, etc., in opposition to the old reflex adaptations of animal instinct. The long period of his infancy has come with this mobility and relative helpless- ness, to give him time to acquire these higher conscious adaptations.
Animal imitativeness is generally understated, however.^ The most social animals, including man, are the most imitative, as we would expect from what is said below about the imitation factor in the social consciousness, and this would seem also to give us an explanation of the strength of the imitative tendency in certain animals which show it strongly marked.
Another reason for the difference is to be found in the fact that we are usually looking for a particular kind of imitation in the cases of animals — the imitation of acts which they do not normally perform. The animals have so much instinctive endowment that most of their perform- ^ Physiologic des Embryos, p. 545.
2 Cf. the remarkable performances of dogs, cats, birds, etc., in the way of imitation given by Romanes, EvoL of Mind in Animals, Chap. XIV.
ances are taken as a matter of nature, and only those clear cases of imitation are noted which are novel and rare. Yet it is probable that many of the most ' innate ' powers of the animals are brought out, perfected, and constantly kept efficient, by the imitation of their own species. In these cases the presence of imitation can only be detected by the artificial separation of mate from mate, young from young, etc.; but interesting cases of crippled performances in circumstances of such separation are coming to light, such as the abortive crowing of young cocks, the failure in barking of young dogs, the loss of the form of nest- building in young birds, when the example of their elders is ruled out in these instances respectively.
Fact 4. The tendency to imitate may come into direct conflict with the prudential teachings of pleasure and pain, and yet may be acted upon. A child may do, and keep on doings imitations zvhick cause him pai?z.
This may be readily explained when we take the facts simply in hand, and rid ourselves of current doctrines of ethics and theories of conduct. If imitation is anything like the fundamental fact which the foreo-oins: account takes it to be, — the means of selection among varied external stimulations, — it becomes evident in what ways pleasure and pain may be related to such reactions. Pleas- ure and pain are now seen to be the index of a change brought about by a stimulus or by a reaction itself consid- ered as a new stimulus. The repetition of this stimulus is desirable, and this is secured by further imitation. The pleasure is enhanced by the repetition, which thus aims at securing the continued presence of the 'copy'; that is to say, the pleasure accruing is something additional to the copy or 'object' which the original reaction aims at.
General Facts and Explanations. 299 The observation of young children directly and plainly confirms the truth of this position. The child invariably reacts at first upon objects, presentations, things present to it. So in some circumstances, suggestion, serving to urge him on to new accommodation, or simply calling out an old habit into exercise, works in spite of the pleasure or pain to which it gives rise. I have illustrated this above ^ with concrete cases from infant life. Romanes finds it in the animal world. ^ Pathology is full of striking illustra- tions of it.
Further, the transition from this nai've suggestibility to the reflective consciousness in which pleasures and pains become considerations or ends, is marked in the life-his- tory of the infant. He learns to dally with his bottle, to postpone his enjoyment, to subordinate a present to a dis- tant pleasure, by a gradual process of reflective self-control. He gradually grows out of the quasi-neutrality of habit to be a reflective egotist.
In adult life it is undoubtedly true that we usually do things because we like to do them and stop doing them when they hurt, but even then it is not always so. Just as the little child sometimes acts from mere suggestion, at the same time moved to tears by the anticipation of pain to result from it; so to the man a copy may be presented so strongly for imitation, it may be so moving by its simple suggestiveness, that he acts upon it even though it have a hedonic colouring of pain. The prin- ciple of accommodation requires that it be so, for other- 1 Chap. VI., § 3, on * Deliberative Suggestion.'
2 " There is abundant evidence of one individual imitating the habits of another individual, whether the action imitated be beneficial or useless" (^Mental Evolution in Animals, \). 220).
300 Consciotts Imitation.
wise there could be no development, except within the very narrow range afforded by accidental discharges. No new adjustment or adaptation could be effected without risk of pain and damage. If the child never reacted in any way, but in pleasurable ways guaranteed already by its inheritance or by its experience, how could it grow } So if we sought only what we have already grown to like, how could new appetites be acquired } The ethical truth that pain is a schoolmaster, that we cannot dispense with its discipline and also grow — this truth holds for the vital organism and its reactions as well.
But the question then remains: How is this possible, if the criterion of what is advantageous is pleasure, and if the organism has developed all the way through on that principle } How can imitation, dictated itself by pleasure and pain, come to conflict with the indications of pleasure and pain?