IMITATION AMONG ATOMS AND ORGANISMS. 497 



man systems in which, they appear, and to be associated, in the 

 act of separation, according as they are likes to each other. 

 From whatever causes the unlikenesses which differentiate men 

 from each other take their rise, it is manifest that even in the 

 most minute of them the law of likes and unlikes finds illustration. 

 Perhaps the most common and familiar example of this simulta- 

 neous association and dissociation is afforded by the breaking up 

 of a social gathering into minor groups of likes that do not easily 

 coalesce. In all such cases the individuals who so naturally fall 

 into pairs or groups move from associations that involve the 

 greatest resistance into associations that involve the least resist- 

 ance, while the movement itself (given the need of association) 

 is manifestly the product of the stress of the greater resistance. 



In what multifarious ways this stress is exerted may be easily 

 shown. As a small group of men surrounded in battle by a larger 

 force naturally come together and are compacted for defense by 

 the stress of those who attack, so the individual members of 

 classes or races despised, hated, or feared, when persecuted by the 

 community in which they live, are in like manner thrust and 

 welded together by the stress which they encounter. Individuals, 

 again, who differ from their fellows to the extent of being unable 

 or unwilling to work to take part in those co-operative activities 

 that are necessary for individual as well as social maintenance 

 meet with the resistances which failure in self-maintenance in- 

 volves, and are by them, though nominally by society, thrust into 

 hospitals or poor-houses; while men whose actions are unlike 

 those of others beyond the amount of difference permitted by law 

 are dissociated, either by exile or imprisonment, from the com- 

 munities which they injure. When expulsion of the unlikes is 

 not practicable, there is association of them as prisoners within 

 the system. Savages, again, often abandon or destroy individu- 

 als deformed at birth or incapacitated from social duties by age ; 

 even a comparatively advanced people like the Spartans exposed 

 their weaklings to death by starvation. That there is still a 

 tendency to offer undue resistance to the unlikenesses of physical 

 and mental deformity is shown by the treatment of lunatics and 

 criminals even in the most civilized countries ; not many years 

 ago positively cruel, it is still in many cases culpably careless 

 and inadequate. The treatment ordinarily given by human be- 

 ings to the lower animals; offenses against the helplessness of 

 children and women ; the oppression of individuals by autocrats, 

 by governments, by official tyrants abusing power intrusted to 

 them by the people, and by capitalists taking unfair advantage of 

 the economic condition of those whom they employ these are all 

 cases of stress directed against unlikes. So shortcomings of men 

 of every kind veritable unlikenesses are in numberless ways 



VOL. XL VIII. 35 



