Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/749

 THEORY OF IMITATION IN SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY 735

conclusions, so far as we can see. He in no way embodies such recognition, for example, in his conclusions regarding social organization and progress. It must be remembered, too, that this is an impersonal criticism, a criticism of a theory as popu- larly accepted, not of a man or of a book. If it were the latter, generosity would compel us to observe that important modifications of Professor Baldwin's conclusions might be found implied in his discussion. Indeed, it would not be difficult to construct from implications scattered throughout his work an argument for the very position taken in this paper. 1

The truth for which we are contending, then, is that the process of imitation is at every turn limited, controlled, and modified by a series of instinctive impulses which have become relatively fixed in the individual through a process of evolution by natural selection. Such "instincts" include not only organic sympathy and antipathy (consciousness of resemblance or non- resemblance), the economic instinct, and the like, but a whole series of innate tendencies and mental attitudes, down even to certain innate attitudes toward the universe (instinctive religion) and toward social organization (instinctive morality). If the process of growth by imitation were not limited and modified by innate tendencies, we should expect children of different races, when reared in the same cultural environment, to develop the same general mental and moral characteristics. But the negro child, even when reared in a white family under the most favor- able conditions, fails to take on the mental and moral character- istics of the Caucasian race. His mental attitudes toward persons and things, toward organized society, toward life, and toward religion never become quite the same as those of the white. His natural instincts, it is true, may be modified by training, and perhaps indefinitely modified in the course of gen- erations ; but the race habit of a thousand generations or more is not lightly set aside by the voluntary or enforced imitation of visible models, and there is always a strong tendency to rever- sion. The reappearance of voodooism and fetichism among the

1 The argument which Professor Baldwin uses against Le Bon's " mob theory of society " might very well be turned against the imitation theory itself.