Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/742

 728 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

understand how a single instinct, "the instinct to imitate," has come to dominate the whole process of human society, and alone to constitute the method of all personal and social growth, 1 while many other instincts are plainly discernible determining the associations of animals below man. The theory sets up, in the language of Professor Baldwin himself, "an absolute gulf between man and the animal world in which instinctive equip- ment in definite directions is supreme," 2 and so violates the " doc- trine of development" which since Darwin has been the major premise of all scientific thought about man. How explain the enormous development in man of the imitative instinct which the imitation theory implies ? This Professor Baldwin does not attempt to do, but he evades the difficulty of his position by denying that the associations of animals constitute true societies. Animal associations he terms "companies ;" and the difference between companies and societies, he says, is that, while in the former the individuals^/ and act alike, in the latter the individ- uals also think alike? How he gets his knowledge that the indi- viduals of animal societies or groups do not think alike Professor Baldwin does not tell us ; indeed, the fact that they feel and act alike, which he admits, would seem to favor the presumption that they in some measure also think alike, since thought is acknowledged to be a function of activity. But the historical objection to such a classification, which makes a break between animal and human societies and estops reasoning from the one to the other, is even more cogent. As Professor Giddings says :

From the standpoint of the observer of animal and primitive human societies, it is difficult, if not impossible, to establish a line of demarcation between the more highly organized bands of animals, like troops of monkeys, or herds of elephants, or bands of wild horses, and the simplest hordes of human beings, like Bushmen or Australian Blackfellows. 4

Indeed, Professor Baldwin can refuse to consider animal societies only by denying that they are unified at all on the

1 For Professor Baldwin's argument in this connection see his Mental Develop- ment in the Child and the Race, chaps, ix-xii.

3 Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 237.

id., pp. 486, 487. 4 Democracy and Empire, p. 38.