accompanying movements. The doctrine of
universal sympathy, a clear statement of which was given long ago in the
ethical theory of Adam Smith, has thus acquired a psychological
justification in the modern theories of imitative movement. Contemporary
science has at last learned to appreciate the fundamental importance of
imitation for the development of human culture. And some authors have
even gone so far as to endeavor to deduce all sociological laws from
this one principle. At the same time natural history has begun to pay
more and more attention to the indispensability of imitation for the
full development of instincts, as well as for training in those
activities which are the most necessary in life.

It is fortunate for the theory of art that the importance of the
imitative functions has thus been simultaneously acknowledged in various
departments of science. Whatever one may think of the somewhat audacious
generalizations which have been made in the recent application of this
new principle, it is incontestable that the aesthetic activities can be
understood and explained only by reference to the universal tendency to
imitate. It is also significant that writers on aesthetic had felt
themselves compelled to set up a theory of imitation long before
experimental psychologists had begun to turn their attention in this
direction. In Germany the enjoyment of form and form-relations has,
since Vischer's time, been interpreted as the result of the movements by
which, not only our eye, but also our whole body follows the outlines of
external things. In France Jouffroy stated the condition for the
receiving of aesthetic impressions to be a "power of internally
imitating the states which are externally manifested in living nature."
In England, finally, Vernon Lee and Anstruther Thompson have founded a
theory of beauty and ugliness upon this same psychical impulse to copy
in our own unconscious movements the forms of objects. And in the
writings of, for instance, Home, Hogarth, Dugald Stewart, and Spencer,
there can be found a multitude of isolated remarks on the influence
which is in a direct way exercised on our mental life by the perception
of lines and forms.

In most of these theories and observations, however, the imitative
activity has been noticed only in so far as it contributes to the
aesthetic delight which may be derived from sensual impressions. But its
importance is by no means so restricted as this; on the cont