Laws and Hypotheses for Behavior 251 
tion’ or {ideo-motor’ action may be phrased differently, 
“but in whatever form, it insists that the bond between 
situation and some conscious representation of a response 
or of its consequences can do the work of the bond between 
the situation and the response itself. In acts of reasoning 
man has been supposed to connect with a given situation a 
response that could never have been predicted merely from 
knowledge of what responses were connected with that 
situation by his original nature or had been connected with 
it by the laws of exercise and effect. Inference has been 
supposed to create bonds in and of itself and to be above 
the mere laws of habit. 
Various forms of statement, most of them vague, have 
been and would be used in describing the potency of a per- 
ceived response, a thought-of response, or a train of infer- 
ence, to produce a response and bind it to the given total 
situation. Any forms will do for the present argument, 
since all forms mean to assert that responses can be and 
often are bound to situations otherwise than by original 
bodily nature, satisfaction, discomfort, disuse and use. I 
shall try to show that they cannot; ‘that, on the contrary, 
\the laws of exercise and effect account for all eee 
\The facts of imitation in human and animal behagior ane 
explainable by the laws of instinct, exercise and effec 
Some cases of imitation are undoubtedly mere instincts 
in which the situation responded to is an act by anether of 
the same species. If the baby smiles at a smile, it is be- 
cause of a special, inborn connection between that sight 
and that act, — he smiles at a smile for just the same rea- 
son that he draws down his mouth and wails at harsh 
words. At that stage of his life he does not imitate other. 
simple acts. A man runs with a crowd for the same reason 
that he runs from a tiger. Returning a blow is no more due 
to a general tendency to imitate than warding it off 1 is. 
