180 SOCIAL BEHAVIOUR 
animals as high in the scale of life as cats and dogs cannot 
form new associations under the influence of imitation. ‘It 
seems sure,” he says,* “from these experiments, that the 
animals were unable to form an association leading to an act 
from having seen another animal, or animals, perform the act 
in a certain situation.” In face of such apparently diverse 
usage it is necessary to show within what limits and with 
what qualifications the word may profitably here be used to 
indicate a factor in social evolution. 
Professor Mark Baldwin’s use of the term “ imitation” can 
only be understood in its relation to an hypothesis of organic 
and mental evolution, which he develops with no little skill 
and brilliancy. t -He regards the processes of life as issuing in 
a great twofold adaptation, due to expansions and contractions, 
—the former representing waxing, the latter waning vitality ; 
and he holds that all special adaptations are secured by the new 
hold upon beneficial stimulations reached by the expansive out- 
reaching movements. ‘‘ Among the variations in organic 
forms,” he says, “it is easy to see that some of them might 
react in such a way as to keep in contact with the stimulus, to 
lay hold of it, and so keep on reacting to it again and again— 
just as our rhythmic action in breathing keeps the organism in 
vital contact with the oxygen of the air. These organisms will 
get all the benefit or damage of the repetition or persistence of 
the stimulus, or of their own reactions, again and again ; and 
it is self-evident that the beneficial stimulations are the ones 
which should be maintained in this way, and that the organisms 
which did this would live. The organisms which reacted in 
such a way as to retain the damaging stimulations, on the other 
hand, by this same process, would aid nature in killing them- 
selves. If this be true, only those organisms would survive 
which had the variation of retaining useful stimulations in 
what I have called, in speaking of imitation elsewhere, a ‘ circular 
way’ of reacting. ... So, when we come to consider phylogeny 
* “Animal Intelligence:” monograph supplement to Psychological 
Review, 1898, p. 61. 
+ Op. cit., pp. 263, 172, 201, 132, and 248 (note). 
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