2 8o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



termining factors in selecting some and eliminating other departures 

 from the traditional methods of action. Even in the learning: of 

 children or of animals, the striking feature of the process is not the 

 fact that the child gradually approaches the standard of society, but 

 the method by which the approach is brought about. If you study a 

 child learning to speak, it will at once be seen that there is no inherent 

 impulse to repeat the sounds that are spoken, but that all sorts of 

 movements are made, and those which in themselves are interesting 

 or acquire vicarious interest from their, resemblance to the sounds about 

 are repeated until learned. The child does not imitate everything, 

 although from the indifference of his interests he sometimes seems to. 

 His imitation is not from a desire to reach an end; rather the child 

 selects from the spontaneous unforeseen movements of all kinds those 

 which strike his fancy. In spite of the fact, then, that there seems 

 to be no instinct in the German child to speak German rather than 

 English, he nevertheless selects from his varying movements those 

 which resemble the sounds that he hears and so he learns to speak 

 German. The sounds heard about him are by no means the incentive 

 to the endeavor. Experiments seem to indicate that even in adults a 

 knowledge of what it expected, or even a desire to execute a certain 

 movement when one has exact anatomical knowledge of the parts to 

 be moved, is no aid to its accomplishment in advance of trial. Much 

 less then can we assume that the unappreciated presence of a sound 

 can spur to its production by the child. The instincts that may serve 

 to produce the sounds from which selection is made are varied and 

 are the expression of numerous connecting paths in the nervous system. 

 There is no evidence of an instinct or impulse to imitate for the sake 

 of imitation. 



The explanation of the numerous actions that are imitated by the 

 child is to be found, on the one hand, in the great variety of useless 

 movements at his command, and on the other in the wide range of 

 his interests as yet unrestricted by the training that tends to restrain 

 the adult individual in one relatively narrow line. 



Imitation, then, seems to be a subordinate form of the general law 

 of learning rather than learning a subordinate form of imitation. 

 The explanation of learning that depends upon trial and error alone 

 differs from an explanation in terms of imitation merely in that it 

 makes individual appreciation of the results of a movement the essen- 

 tial element rather than the presence of a similar movement in some 

 of the individual's neighbors. The two theories are alike in that the 

 former must insist that seeing a fellow perform the movement is an 

 important factor in raising individual appreciation. But they must 

 differ in that it as firmly denies that seeing a movement performed is 

 any incentive to its performance by the second individual. A move- 



