Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/832

 8l8 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

is a universally potent force in human society, but not until quite recently has scientific study been made of imitation as a social factor. The name of M. Gabriel Tarde 1 is most prominently connected with this investigation, yet thirty years ago Walter Bagehot appeared as a forerunner of Tarde. He saw clearly the importance of imitation as a socializing power, and expressed his view in Physics and Politics. Through the workings of the imitative faculty he accounts for the evolution of national character :

At first a sort of "chance predominance" made a model, and then invinci- ble attraction, the necessity which rules all but the strongest men to imitate what is before their eyes, and to be what they are expected to be, molded men by that model. This is, I think, the very process by which new national char- acters are being made in our own time. In America and in Australia a new modification of what we call Anglo-Saxonism is growing. A sort of type of character arose from the difficulties of colonial life the difficulty of struggling with the wilderness ; and this type has given its shape to the mass of char- acters because the mass of characters have unconsciously imitated it

I believe this unconscious imitation to be the principal force in the making of national characters.*

He forcibly states his conviction that imitation is the main factor in social life in the following words :

I want to bring home to others what every new observation of society brings more and more freshly to myself that this unconscious imitation and encouragement of appreciated character, and this equally unconscious shrinking from and persecution of disliked character, is the main force which molds and fashions men in society as we now see it. Soon I shall try to show that the more acknowledged causes, such as change of climate, altera- tion of political institutions, progress of science, act principally through this cause ; that they change the object of imitation and the object of avoidance, and so work their effect. 3

Sir Henry Maine also recognized the importance of the factor of imitation in the early associations of mankind :

Nothing seems to me to have more affected primitive society, and yet to have been more neglected by those who have theorized on it, than the imitative faculty, which man has always possessed and which Sir Alfred Lyall has wit- nessed in actual employment by barbarous men. On superficial consideration, we are apt to think that man's mimetic faculty confines itself to matters of taste

1 Les Lois de f Imitation ; La Logique sociale; Les Transformations du Pouvoir.

2 Physics and Politics, pp. 36, 37. 3 Ibid,, p. 97.