THE EVOLUTION OF THE MORAL SENSE 105 



held before him; sometimes he is told that it will 

 make his parents "feel badly" if he does a certain 

 thing; sometimes he is urged to do it "to please 

 mother"; but the young child is never urged to 

 obey because it is right. By these means he slowly 

 acquires a feeling of some forces outside of his own 

 inclination that guide his actions, a feeling that 

 in earlier life he did not have. One of the next steps 

 in this development is learning to imitate a model. 

 To imitate their elders seems to be an instinct im- 

 planted in all children, and very early each begins to 

 imitate unconsciously the actions of those around 

 him. Naturally his first model is likely to be his 

 mother, with whom he is best acquainted. She thus 

 becomes an ideal and the argument that "mamma 

 would not do it if she were you" begins to have 

 strong force with him, so that he comes to pattern his 

 life after hers. A little later he is likely to choose, 

 quite unconsciously of course, a model outside of 

 his family, always, however, one with whom he is 

 brought into more or less close contact. This model 

 may be a school teacher, a Sunday school teacher, a 

 soldier, or, indeed, any other person that attracts 

 his admiration. But each model in turn proves 

 unsatisfactory as his intelligence grows, for uncon- 

 sciously he finds flaws in them all. Then he begins to 

 substitute an imaginary model for an actual one. 

 Perhaps it is a historical character in regard to 

 whom only a few facts are known, so that ample room 

 is left for his imagination to fill out the remainder 

 and thus create out of the personage just the kind of 

 bundle of characters he pleases. Sometimes the 

 model has no basis even in history, but is pure fiction, 

 a pure ideal, or, as he sometimes calls it, "his other 



