tions
in which persons are mutually concerned (or interested in acting
responsively to one another) leads to treating imitation as the chief
agent in promoting social control.

4. Some Applications to Education. Why does a savage group perpetuate
savagery, and a civilized group civilization? Doubtless the first answer
to occur to mind is because savages are savages; being of low-grade
intelligence and perhaps defective moral sense. But careful study
has made it doubtful whether their native capacities are appreciably
inferior to those of civilized man. It has made it certain that native
differences are not sufficient to account for the difference in culture.
In a sense the mind of savage peoples is an effect, rather than a cause,
of their backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to
restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit
the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects that come
within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest
observation and imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the
mind. Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of
natural objects enter into associated behavior. Only a small number of
natural resources are utilized and they are not worked for what they are
worth. The advance of civilization means that a larger number of natural
forces and objects have been transformed into instrumentalities of
action, into means for securing ends. We start not so much with superior
capacities as with superior stimuli for evocation and direction of
our capacities. The savage deals largely with crude stimuli; we have
weighted stimuli. Prior human efforts have made over natural conditions.
As they originally existed they were indifferent to human endeavors.
Every domesticated plant and animal, every tool, every utensil, every
appliance, every manufactured article, every esthetic decoration,
every work of art means a transformation of conditions once hostile
or indifferent to characteristic human activities into friendly and
favoring conditions. Because the activities of children today are
controlled by these selected and charged stimuli, children are able to
traverse in a short lifetime what the race has needed slow, tortured
ages to attain. The dice have been loaded by all the successes which
have preceded.

Stimuli conducive to economical and effective response, such as our
system of roads and means of t