merit seen may become interesting if the organism chances to throw out a similar movement immediately after the first has been observed, but it will serve merely to make the individual repeat it a second time when once it has been made by chance; it will not serve to initiate a movement of itself.
The social factors which have been brought under the general term imitation have much the same relation to the more complicated conduct of the affairs of life that the simple copy has in spurring to the more simple and immediate action. They do not primarily initiate but serve to select factors otherwise initiated. Good form may lead to conscious imitation in an adult who already has command over the movement. Fashion may directly bring about imitation in the matters of dress, where the movements are already under control and mental processes alone are involved in the choice, but the impelling forces in society are those that make a man shunned who offends, and give him renewed applause when he initiates valuable lines of action. The enforcement of the moral law, apart from the material agencies, depends not upon precept or good example, but upon these vague social forces that are constantly repressing some and rewarding other departures from the accepted standards. Some of those rejected are rationally and by association apparently no worse than those retained. But social selection is none the less definite and absolute in fact because it seems irrational when attempt is made to explain it theoretically. The man who departs from the traditional course takes his reputation in his hands, for society is essentially conservative. Chances are that the result will be social death, and reasonably so, because the long course of evolution would probably make the existing the best, when we are dealing with any course of conduct that can have any survival value. Were it possible to reduce all the influences of social control to immediate or traditional survival values, the problem would be very much simpler than is really the case. Many courses of action which society represses most rigidly are apparently indifferent to survival, and many can not easily be shown to be associated with lines of action that could have been of value at present or at any earlier period.
The nature of the action selected will vary from civilization to civilization and from people to people and even from community to community within the same civilization. It does not seem possible as yet to push very far in the analysis of these elements, but it is nevertheless valuable to recognize their importance for both individual and sociological psychology. An insistence upon the importance of this factor under the term imitation or what else has probably been the most important contribution that psychological sociology has made, and an analysis into its elements and tracing it back to causes would undoubtedly have even more important results.
