Laws and Hypotheses for Behavior 257 
which is most like it,’ we can account for a thousand ‘imita- 
tions,’ and still not have made a large demand upon childish 
powers of learning. 
No one should pretend to have disproved direct imitation 
in the case of learning to talk until he has subjected all these 
and other matters to crucial experiments. But the burden 
of proof does seem to belong upon those who deny the ade- 
quacy of the laws of exercise and effect. In so far as the 
choice is between accepting or rejecting a general law that, 
other things being equal, the perception of a response in 
another produces that response, we surely must reject it. 
Some of the cases of imitation may be unexplained by the 
laws of exercise and effect. But for others no law of imita- 
tion is required. And of what should happen by such a law 
not over a trivial fraction at most does happen. 
cr he idea of a response is in and of itself unable to produce 
that response. 
The early students of behavior, considering human be- 
havior and emphasizing behavior that was thought about 
and purposive, agreed that the sure way to connect a re- 
sponse with a situation was to choose, or will, or consent to, 
that response. Later students still agreed that to think 
about the response in some way, to have an image of it or of 
the sensations caused in you by previous performances of it, 
was a strong provocative to it. To get a response, get some 
sort of conscious representative of it, has been an acceptable 
maxim. Medicine, education and even advertising have 
based their practice upon the theory that ideas tended to 
issue in the particular sort of acts that they were ideas of. 
The laws of exercise and effect, on the contrary, if they 
1 This would, of course, result from a well-known corollary of the laws of 
habit. 
8 
