IMITATION AMONG ATOMS AND ORGANISMS. 499 



wear clothes, partly by social intolerance for human nudity in 

 public, and partly because of the facilities for obtaining clothes, 

 with all which that implies ; there will now be no game to pur- 

 sue and no need to pursue it, since the man's food supplies will 

 come from the agents of the industrial system ; he will soon lose 

 his primitive, many-sided industrial capacity, for he will have an 

 army of stock-raisers, farmers, tailors, shoemakers, house-build- 

 ers, and doctors at his service ; while in time society will impose, 

 in place of the powers which it abstracts, new functions and ac- 

 tivities, assimilating him industrially to the units of which it is 

 already composed. In both these cases, moreover, likeness will 

 be enforced by the resistance offered to unlikeness, and not by 

 any inherent superiority of one system or any inherent inferi- 

 ority of another ; for savages who have not yet learned to co- 

 operate are as much held to their rude industrial methods by the 

 stresses that impel to likeness as civilized men are held by such 

 stresses to the vastly more complex and highly organized activi- 

 ties of the modern society. 



The same is true of nonindustrial forms of social organiza- 

 tion. As a community imposes its industrial methods upon its own 

 and upon intruding members, whether it represent a high or a 

 low stage of human society, so does a community, quite irrespect- 

 ive of the degree of its development, insist upon a certain like- 

 ness of habits and customs in the units of which it is composed. 

 A civilized man forced to live among savages will find it impos- 

 sible to avoid barbarous methods of living, just as a savage com- 

 pelled to sojourn in a civilized community will inevitably adopt 

 the manners of the race among whom his lot is cast. In all com- 

 munities whatsoever, and under ordinary circumstances valid for 

 the majority of men, it is vastly easier to imitate others in general 

 characters than to differ from them in those characters, while the 

 difficulty of differing becomes almost insuperable when the stresses 

 tending to assimilate the individual to the sum of individuals are 

 exerted directly by the group or community as a whole. All acts 

 of race assimilation in history many of them already accom- 

 plished, some of them still going on all so-called civilizing pro- 

 cesses, whether carried out by individuals or by peoples, and all 

 proselytizing movements, by whomsoever conducted, are but so 

 many illustrations of the general process. Such modifications, 

 moreover, as have been wrought in the native races of India, and 

 in the negro of the United States, by dominant populations in 

 those countries, are going on within each nation, each city, and 

 every social group, however large or small its dimensions may be. 

 For if the traveler, when living in strange countries, finds it 

 expedient, if only temporarily, to conform to the customs of the 

 people he meets such customs being imposed upon him by the 



