the imitative impulse is far less
conspicuous because impulsive activity in general is checked and
overruled by activity organized in a unified system. Civilized men
imitate not so much because of immediate interest in the action imitated
as with a view to the attainment of desirable results.

3. The Three Levels of Sympathy[148]

Sympathy is not an instinct or a tendency, i.e., a group of co-ordinated
movements adapted to a particular end, and showing itself in
consciousness as an emotion, such as fear, anger, sex attraction; it is,
on the contrary, a highly generalized psycho-physiological property. To
the specialized character of each emotion it opposes a character of
almost unlimited plasticity. We have not to consider it under all its
aspects but as one of the most important manifestations of emotional
life, as the basis of the tender emotions, and one of the foundations of
social and moral existence.

a) _The first phase._--In its primitive form sympathy is reflex,
automatic, unconscious, or very slightly conscious; it is, according to
Bain, the tendency to produce in ourselves an attitude, a state, a
bodily movement which we perceive in another person. This is imitation
in its most rudimentary form. Between sympathy and imitation, at any
rate in this primitive period, I see only one difference of aspect:
sympathy everywhere marks the passive, receptive side of the phenomenon;
imitation, its active and motor side.

It manifests itself in animals forming aggregates (not societies), such
as a flock of sheep, or a pack of dogs who run, stop, bark all at the
same time, through a purely physical impulse of imitation; in man,
infectious laughter or yawning, walking in step, imitating the movements
of a rope-walker while watching him, feeling a shock in one's legs when
one sees a man falling, and a hundred other occurrences of this kind are
cases of physiological sympathy. It plays a great part in the psychology
of crowds, with their rapid attacks and sudden panics. In nervous
diseases, there is a superfluity of examples: epidemics of hysteric
fits, convulsive barking, hiccup, etc. I omit the mental maladies
(epidemics of suicide, double or triple madness) since we are only
considering the purely physiological stage.

To sum up, sympathy is originally a property of living matter: as there
is an organic memory and an organic sensitiveness, being those of the
tissues and ultimate elements which compose them, there