408 PSYCHOLOGY. 



mation of new ones of a fundamentally different sort — wit 

 uess the inevitable ' foreign accent ' which distinguishes 

 the speech of those who learn a language after early youth. 

 Imitation. The child's first words are in part vocables 

 of his own invention, which his parents adopt, and which, 

 as far as they go, form a new human tongue upon the earth ; 

 and in part they are his more or less successful imitations 

 of words he hears the parents use. But the instinct of 

 imitating gestures develops earlier than that of imitating 

 sounds, — unless the sympathetic crying of a baby when it 

 hears another cry may be reckoned as imitation of a sound. 

 Professor Preyer speaks of his child imitating the protru- 

 sion of the father's lips in its fifteenth week. The various 

 accomplishments of infancy, making ' pat-a-cake,' saying 

 ' bye-bye,' ' blowing out the candle,' etc., usually fall well 

 inside the limits of the first year. Later come all the various 

 imitative games in which childhood revels, playing ' horse,' 

 * soldiers,' etc., etc. And from this time onward man is 

 essentially the imitative animal. His whole educability 

 and in fact the whole history of civilization depend on 

 this trait, which his strong tendencies to rivalry, jealousy, 

 and acquisitiveness reinforce. ' Hicmani nihil a me alienum 

 puto,' is the motto of each individual of the species ; and 

 makes him, whenever another individual shows a power 

 or superiority of any kind, restless until he can exhibit it 

 himself. But apart from this kind of imitation, of which 

 the psychological roots are complex, there is the more 

 direct propensity to speak and walk and behave like 

 others, usually without any conscious intention of so 

 doing. And there is the imitative tendency which shows 

 itself in large masses of men, and produces panics, and 

 orgies, and frenzies of violence, and which only the 

 rarest individuals can actively withstand. This sort of 

 imitativeness is possessed by man in common with other 

 gregarious animals, and is an instinct in the fullest sense 

 of the term, being a blind impulse to act as soon as a cer- 

 tain perception occurs. It is particularly hard not to imi- 

 tate gaping, laughing, or looking and running in a certain 

 direction, if we see others doing so. Certain mesmerized 

 subjects must automatically imitate whatever motion their 



