498 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



made the goal of individual or social stress; even ridicule and 

 slander are forms of aggression, based on the real or fancied dis- 

 covery of fault, and therefore unlikeness in the person assailed. 

 But the action here illustrated, so far as human beings are con- 

 cerned, is not necessarily moral and not necessarily immoral. 

 Men may be in advance of as well as behind their age may be 

 larger as well as smaller than their fellows ; yet the social system 

 offers the same resistance to the individual too greatly contem- 

 plating the good of his kind as to him who wantonly plots its 

 harm. 



We thus come to note how the social group or system tends 

 constantly to the production of conditions of least resistance 

 within itself how, that is to say, its resistance to unlikeness acts 

 as a stress compelling likeness among its units. The fact that 

 profound differences between individuals are not to be eradicated 

 by the social stress after their appearance is quite consistent with 

 the power of that stress to assimilate human beings to each other 

 in their more superficial and temporary characters. The tend- 

 ency to do as others do is universally felt, no matter to what 

 extent, in individual cases, it may or can be resisted. It appears 

 both as imitation of the particular acts of particular persons and 

 of the acts in which a number of persons are generically alike ; 

 as imitation not only by the one of the many, but also by the 

 many of the one. It usually begins for wholly voluntary actions, 

 at any rate in that interesting process by which people are 

 assimilated to each other in their views and beliefs. 



Submission of opinion, whether accompanied by imitative ac- 

 tion or not, is clearly a path of least resistance a way in which 

 men avoid the difficulties of differing from the community in 

 which they live. And when action is involved, as it usually is, 

 the process shows us the enormous assimilative influence which it 

 brings to bear upon human development. It may be said, indeed, 

 that civilized human beings acquire their normal activities as 

 such largely through the molding influence which the social 

 community exerts upon them from their earliest years. 



This stress impelling individuals to imitate society is well 

 seen in industrial organization, and is thus obvious in the lowest 

 as well as the highest stages of human development. The civil- 

 ized human being who enters a savage community will be com- 

 pelled to go half naked through very lack of any means of pro- 

 ducing clothes to which he has been accustomed ; he will be 

 forced to hunt or fish for a living for the reason that there is yet 

 no system of co-operative supply in existence ; in the absence of 

 those functionaries, he must become his own farmer, his own sol- 

 dier, his own tailor and shoemaker, his own doctor, even his own- 

 priest. So a savage entering civilized society will be forced to 



