Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/284

 280 factors in selecting some and eliminating other departures from the traditional methods of action. Even in the learning: of children or of animals, the striking feature of the process is not the fact that the child gradually approaches the standard of society, but the method by which the approach is brought about. If you study a child learning to speak, it will at once be seen that there is no inherent impulse to repeat the sounds that are spoken, but that all sorts of movements are made, and those which in themselves are interesting or acquire vicarious interest from their resemblance to the sounds about are repeated until learned. The child does not imitate everything, although from the indifference of his interests he sometimes seems to. His imitation is not from a desire to reach an end; rather the child selects from the spontaneous unforeseen movements of all kinds those which strike his fancy. In spite of the fact, then, that there seems to be no instinct in the German child to speak German rather than English, he nevertheless selects from his varying movements those which resemble the sounds that he hears and so he learns to speak German. The sounds heard about him are by no means the incentive to the endeavor. Experiments seem to indicate that even in adults a knowledge of what it expected, or even a desire to execute a certain movement when one has exact anatomical knowledge of the parts to be moved, is no aid to its accomplishment in advance of trial. Much less then can we assume that the unappreciated presence of a sound can spur to its production by the child. The instincts that may serve to produce the sounds from which selection is made are varied and are the expression of numerous connecting paths in the nervous system. There is no evidence of an instinct or impulse to imitate for the sake of imitation.

The explanation of the numerous actions that are imitated by the child is to be found, on the one hand, in the great variety of useless movements at his command, and on the other in the wide range of his interests as yet unrestricted by the training that tends to restrain the adult individual in one relatively narrow line.

Imitation, then, seems to be a subordinate form of the general law of learning rather than learning a subordinate form of imitation. The explanation of learning that depends upon trial and error alone differs from an explanation in terms of imitation merely in that it makes individual appreciation of the results of a movement the essential element rather than the presence of a similar movement in some of the individual's neighbors. The two theories are alike in that the former must insist that seeing a fellow perform the movement is an important factor in raising individual appreciation. But they must differ in that it as firmly denies that seeing a movement performed is any incentive to its performance by the second individual. A