Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/544

502 associated, such unlikes being kept together for longer or shorter periods, the resistances which arise operate as a power tending to assimilate them. This process of assimilation is manifested in all degrees of our intercourse with others. Men rarely come into contact with each other, even for special and temporary ends, without feeling the molding influence of more or less unlike habits, manners, opinions, and speech. Unless our ways of thinking, acting, and speaking are so firmly established as to be unchangeable, we can not long remain in the society of others without feeling that the differences which separate us from them are gradually being worn down, if not disappearing altogether: strenuous as our determination may be. Nature herself seeks to lessen resistance, and thus guides us insensibly into the path which offers the least. Thus it is (in indifferent things, at any rate) that we gain our opinions and beliefs from those about us, that we unconsciously acquire the gestures and mannerisms of relatives and friends—that, in a word, we come at last to be profoundly modified by the more permanent characters of our human surrounding. In speech alone the change wrought is often considerable. Few succeed in avoiding the use of colloquialisms constantly heard, and fewer still escape the insidious influence of phrases and idioms peculiar to districts and countries: newcomers may at first regard them as strange, even barbarous, yet in the end they employ the novel forms as frequently and as unconsciously as the native. The very features of human beings living in close association with each other are known to undergo assimilation. The fact, again, that jockeys, hostlers, and cowherds sometimes betray more or less distant resemblances to the animals with which they habitually associate is well known; and although animals do not in feature grow to be like human beings by contact with them, it is certain that in the character of intelligence, as in the case of the dog and the cat, as well as in tameness generally, as in the case of cattle and poultry, a real and profound assimilation of them to men has undoubtedly taken place.

Fashion in all its forms illustrates the same assimilative process. The first fashions are seen under the domestic roof: there, children imitate their parents not only in speech, gesture, and action, but also sometimes in opinion and bent of mind, and (for the sons, at any rate) occasionally also in vocation. Men imitate individuals as well as communities; they borrow from each other mannerisms of dress, of conduct, of opinion, and even of literary style, whenever attention is strongly called to any of these; even maladies have been known to become fashionable. A remarkable exploit in athletics usually sends a fever of emulation through the sympathetic members of a social group, just as a fashion set