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emotion, the child cannot understand it. He tries the experiment. It is not the process of imitation that enables him to understand why the dog was kicked, but it is the result of that process, viz., the experience which it gives him, and which he reads into his father's mind ; then only does he understand why the dog suffered. It is only on the basis of such ejective interpretation that we gain the real significance of the actions of individuals in relation to other individuals. Professor Baldwin says :
It [imitation] enables me the child to pass from my experience of what you are, to an interpretation of what I am; and then from this fuller sense of what I am to a fuller knowledge of what you are."
In this consideration of M. Tarde's principle, we might with profit recall the statement by Mr. Bosanquet that " imitation is a bald and partial rendering of that complex reciprocal reference which constitutes social co-operation." 50 He says that a man hold- ing a hammer upon a rivet and another striking it is reciprocal reference, but no one would call it imitation. This would show that there is something more in the real imitation found in socie- tary fact than there is in the principle. In substantiation of this we might cite the following :
Merely the fact of social imitation does not necessarily make things socially available. If so, my parrot would, by imitating me, come into social status with reference to me. Another factor is necessary (2), i. e., imitative assimilation and growth, whereby what is imitated is also organized in the individual's own thought, and imitatively ejected into others. 51
Here it is noteworthy that there is a recognition on the part of a strong advocate of imitation as a social principle, of the fact that real imitation is not altogether an external process, but that what makes it a social principle is the internal element, the ejective interpretation. Furthermore, in addition to the foregoing, we must remember that when the child imitates his elders he learns by that process what were the internal states which preceded a certain reaction.
- Mental Development, p. 340.
10 Vide American Journal of Sociology, Vol. X, p. 369.
" Baldwin, Social and Ethical Interpretations, 3d ed., p. 536.
