Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/540

498 made the goal of individual or social stress; even ridicule and slander are forms of aggression, based on the real or fancied discovery of fault, and therefore unlikeness in the person assailed. But the action here illustrated, so far as human beings are concerned, is not necessarily moral and not necessarily immoral. Men may be in advance of as well as behind their age—may be larger as well as smaller than their fellows; yet the social system offers the same resistance to the individual too greatly contemplating the good of his kind as to him who wantonly plots its harm.

We thus come to note how the social group or system tends constantly to the production of conditions of least resistance within itself—how, that is to say, its resistance to unlikeness acts as a stress compelling likeness among its units. The fact that profound differences between individuals are not to be eradicated by the social stress after their appearance is quite consistent with the power of that stress to assimilate human beings to each other in their more superficial and temporary characters. The tendency to do as others do is universally felt, no matter to what extent, in individual cases, it may or can be resisted. It appears both as imitation of the particular acts of particular persons and of the acts in which a number of persons are generically alike; as imitation not only by the one of the many, but also by the many of the one. It usually begins—for wholly voluntary actions, at any rate—in that interesting process by which people are assimilated to each other in their views and beliefs.

Submission of opinion, whether accompanied by imitative action or not, is clearly a path of least resistance—a way in which men avoid the difficulties of differing from the community in which they live. And when action is involved, as it usually is, the process shows us the enormous assimilative influence which it brings to bear upon human development. It may be said, indeed, that civilized human beings acquire their normal activities as such largely through the molding influence which the social community exerts upon them from their earliest years.

This stress impelling individuals to imitate society is well seen in industrial organization, and is thus obvious in the lowest as well as the highest stages of human development. The civilized human being who enters a savage community will be compelled to go half naked through very lack of any means of producing clothes to which he has been accustomed; he will be forced to hunt or fish for a living for the reason that there is yet no system of co-operative supply in existence; in the absence of those functionaries, he must become his own farmer, his own soldier, his own tailor and shoemaker, his own doctor, even his own priest. So a savage entering civilized society will be forced to