TRIAL AND ERROR 281 



merit seen may become interesting if the organism chances to throw out 

 a similar movement immediately after the first has been observed, but 

 it will serve merely to make the individual . repeat it a second time 

 when once it has been made by chance; it will not serve to initiate a 

 movement of itself. 



The social factors which have been brought under the general 

 term imitation have much the same relation to the more complicated 

 conduct of the affairs of life that the simple copy has in spurring to 

 the more simple and immediate action. They do not primarily initiate 

 but serve to select factors otherwise initiated. Good form may lead 

 to conscious imitation in an adult who already has command over 

 the movement. Fashion may directly bring about imitation in the 

 matters of dress, where the movements are already under control and 

 mental processes alone are involved in the choice, but the impelling 

 forces in society are those that make a man shunned who offends, and 

 give him renewed applause when he initiates valuable lines of action. 

 The enforcement of the moral law, apart from the material agencies, 

 depends not upon precept or good example, but upon these vague 

 social forces that are constantly repressing some and rewarding other 

 departures from the accepted standards. Some of those rejected are 

 rationally and by association apparently no worse than those retained. 

 But social selection is none the less definite and absolute in fact be- 

 cause it seems irrational when attempt is made to explain it theo- 

 retically. The man Avho departs from the traditional course takes his 

 reputation in his hands, for society is essentially conservative. Chances 

 are that the result will be social death, and reasonably so, because the 

 long course of evolution would probably make the existing the best, 

 when we are dealing with any course of conduct that can have any 

 survival value. Were it possible to reduce all the influences of social 

 control to immediate or traditional survival values, the problem would 

 be very much simpler than is really the case. Many courses of action 

 which society represses most rigidly are apparently indifferent to sur- 

 vival, and many can not easily be shown to be associated with lines 

 of action that could have been of value at present or at any earlier 

 period. 



The nature of the action selected will vary from civilization to 

 civilization and from people to people and even from community to 

 community within the same civilization. It does not seem possible 

 as yet to push very far in the analysis of these elements, but it is 

 nevertheless valuable to recognize their importance for both individual 

 and sociological psychology. An insistence upon the importance of 

 this factor under the term imitation or what else has probably been 

 the most important contribution that psychological sociology has made, 

 and an analysis into its elements and tracing it back to causes would 

 undoubtedly have even more important results. 



