Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/185

 SOCIAL AUTOMATISM AND THE IMITATION THEORY. 171 it is an elementary fact of psychology that ideas, habits and actions tend to propagate themselves by suggestion through a number of minds which have the opportunity of acting upon each other. We are not therefore surprised to be told that imitation the tendency to reproduction of suggestion is a notable fact in the working of social intelligence. There is an aspect in which one individual may be regarded as a similar repetition of another, and the propagation of fashions or impulses throughout a multitude may be regarded as the imitation of one by others, and the repetition by others of the suggestion presented by one. Nevertheless, upon a scrutiny of the true operative nature of social unity, we find that repetition and similarity are bat superficial characteristics of it. What hold society together, we find, are its correlative differences ; the relation which expresses itself on a large scale in the division of labour, or in Aristotle's axiom " No State can be composed of similars ". And we look to our social psychologists for a recognition of the element of adapted difference apart from which co- operation and co-existence are impossibilities. But here, it would almost seem, a technical difficulty bars the way. Imitation, or the propagation of similarities among simi- lars, holds the field as an account of the common features of a society. But no differentiation can be got out of the tendency to reproduce a copy per se ; and we seem none the less brought to a deadlock that we are supplied with the word "invention," to indicate the desired well-spring of novelty and individuality. Somehow, we are given to understand, the individual invents, and then, as we can easily imagine, his invention is generalised by the universal tendency to " take suggestion as a cat laps milk ". But here we seem to have an aw r kward dualism. Imita- tion and similarity divide the province of mind unequally with invention and difference ; and instead of operating through- out with the same indivisible nature, intelligence appears to have an inexplicable preference for creation in some cases and for propagation in others. And the results are un- satisfying. The theory of a social mind is reduced by M. Le Bon to the explanation of impulsive emotion in a mob the mere propagation of similitudes, as if critical discussion and the collation of points of view were a thing unknown in the formation of the social will. Even for M. Durkheim the spheres of similitude and of difference are wholly dis- parate ; and the force put upon facts in order to demonstrate that penal and industrial law (corresponding to similitude and difference respectively) occupy different regions of the