Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/544

 528 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

makes out the reason for putting prestige and not sympathy at the basis of society to be that " the unilateral must have preceded the reciprocal." Mr. Spencer holds that in order to sympathize with our fellows we must be able to represent to ourselves their con- sciousness and their actual mental condition. 58 In this connec- tion it might be added that Professor Ormond thinks that "the whole theory of imitation may be regarded as a grounding of this general principle by showing how the representation of another's consciousness is achieved." 57 This appreciative moment in the sympathetic consciousness has been previously commented upon.

The point that remains to be dwelt upon is that imitation is an appreciatively descriptive process through which the inner experi- ence of one individual is enriched through the indirect transmis- sion of content from the inner experience of another individual. This is brought out forcibly in Professor Ormond's article on the " Social Individual " when, after giving the example of the boy imitating his father's actions and learning thereby how his father feels, his conclusion of that portion of the argument is :

It is clear that the effort to imitate is in reality an effort on the part of the boy to identify himself with his model, and that his identification involves his reading himself consciously into the standpoint of his model, so that his own consciousness and that of his model [as a result of the imitation], so far

forth as that special series of activities is concerned, shall be the same

The touch that makes us kin is, therefore, an inner touch, while the objective and outer motive that leads to the touch is cither an imitative movement or a representation that is rendered capable of a reference to the inner conscious- ness of another by means of its prior association with inner experiences of our

own But when we pass from the consideration of external instruments

to that of internal process, we will find that we are able to enter into intel- ligible social relations with our other only because our nature is such that we are able to draw from the inner definitions of our own consciousness brought about by certain objective agencies, a concept or construct of the consciousness of the other, which we conceive to be a true representation of his inner experi- ence, and it is through this construct or representation that we are able to enter sympathetically into his life and treat him as a socius; a being like ourselves."*

pathy."
 * Principle* of Psychology, Vol. II, " Corollaries ; " I, " Sociality and Sym-

" Ptychological Review, Vol. VIII (1901), p. 37. m lbid., pp. 36 ff.