Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/183

SOCIAL AUTOMATISM AND THE IMITATION THEORY. 169 make us do or omit, by the weighing of pains against pleasures, what otherwise we should have violently objected to doing or omitting. It is not essentially directed against intentional rebellion, and would not be rendered superfluous if all men became well-meaning. It is much more analogous to the start of pain which recalls us to ourselves when an automatic activity has failed to be self-regulating. We stumble in walking and hurt our foot ; we pull ourself together, give full attention for a moment, and see that we were off the path ; we take care to get on to it again, and give more heed to our steps in the future. As long as an imperfect mind has to meet progressive requirements, and to maintain a complex activity in excess of its powers of attention, a system of such reminders will be essential to society. It must be noted that in a society a great deal of individual consciousness may be devoted to activities which are in the social sense automatic. That is to say, when anything has been reduced to routine by the public will, and handed over to a special class to carry out, then, as a matter of principle, it is in most cases withdrawn from the active attention of the community as such and of the bulk of its members, although a certain class are continuously occupied with it. The functions of the police are a case in point. It is plain that a difference exists between functions to which on the whole the maximum attention of the community is due, and functions which demand no attention, so to speak, for their own sake, but only in as far as is necessary to maintain order and freedom. 2. With reference to the rank or quality of these automatic activities a suggestion may be made in connexion with the biological principle of " short cuts," bearing on the problem of character and circumstance. It seems to be an accepted principle 1 that " animals may perform movements which seem to be voluntary, with a nervous apparatus which would be inadequate to their per- formance by the child or man ". The apparatus which represents a higher stage of mind has so encroached upon the independence of that which represents a lower stage, that the latter, in man, can no longer cany out the work which in the dog, for example, it will be able to take upon itself. A man, we are informed, can never recover his sight after the lesion of a certain higher brain centre ; in the dog a lower brain centre still retains the power of taking over 1 See Baldwin, Mental Development in the Child and the Pace, p. 20 ff.