Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/540

 524 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

tation, and trains of imitations, of original inventions. These inventions, in turn at least most of them have arisen as a result of previous chains of imitations. In his Laws of Imita- tion 45 he advances many facts to substantiate his point. It will now be our problem to search, as briefly as possible, for some metaphysical element either in it or involved by it.

His definition of the term " imitation " certainly does not smack of the appreciative when he says :

I have always given it a very precise and characteristic meaning: that of the action at a distance of one mind upon another, and of action which consists of a quasi-photographic reproduction of a cerebral image upon the sensitive plate of another brain.**

When we examine this critically, we find that he has accounted only for the purely sensory side of imitation. But how about the motor side ? He has said that it is a " quasi-photographic repro- duction of a cerebral image upon the sensitive plate of another brain." How can this be imitation unless there is some activity on the part of the possessor of the " sensitive plate " toward actually working out that impression? There certainly must be some activity if imitation is to become social. Such a purely sensory process would be entirely inadequate to produce any social activities, and therefore such a sensory principle cannot be taken to be a sociological one, for, unsupplemented, it would explain nothing at all. For example, such an impression would not give an imitative basis for the later desires or inventions for the present letting alone the question as to where the original desires and inventions which gave rise to the first chains of imitation came from.

M. Tarde thinks that, before there is an imitation of some invention in the individual, there is a clash of two alternatives, one of which is the old action satisfying the want. After the indi- vidual has adopted this, then only can social imitation begin. 47 This raises the question as to what are the criteria upon the basis of which these choices are made. He says somewhere that they are utility and truth. This demands that you should ask, in try-

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"Ibid., p. xiv. "Ibid., p. 165.
 * Tarde, Laws of Imitation, translated by E. C. Parsons (New York, 1903).