o Giddings'. Imitation
is the process by which that like-mindedness, by which Giddings explains
corporate action, is effected. Men are not born like-minded, they are
made so by imitation.

This minute inter-agreement of minds and wills, which forms the
basis of the social life, even in troublous times--this
presence of so many common ideas, ends, and means, in the minds
and wills of all members of the same society at any given
moment--is not due, I maintain, to organic heredity, which
insures the birth of men quite similar to one another, nor to
mere identity of geographical environment, which offers very
similar resources to talents that are nearly equal; it is
rather the effect of that suggestion-imitation process which,
starting from one primitive creature possessed of a single idea
or act, passed this copy on to one of its neighbors, then to
another, and so on. Organic needs and spiritual tendencies
exist in us only as potentialities which are realizable under
the most diverse forms, in spite of their primitive similarity;
and, among all these possible realizations, the indications
furnished by some first initiator who is imitated determine
which one is actually chosen.[37]

In contrast with these schools, which interpret action in terms of the
herd and the flock--i.e., men act together because they act alike--is
the theory of Emile Durkheim who insists that the social group has real
corporate existence and that, in human societies at least, men act
together not because they have like purposes but a _common purpose_.
This common purpose imposes itself upon the individual members of a
society at the same time as an ideal, a wish and an obligation.
Conscience, the sense of obligation which members of a group feel only
when there is conflict between the wishes of the individual and the will
of the group, is a manifestation, _in_ the individual consciousness, of
the collective mind and the group will. The mere fact that in a panic or
a stampede, human beings will sometimes, like the Gadarene swine, rush
down a steep place into the sea, is a very positive indication of
like-mindedness but not an evidence of a common purpose. The difference
between an animal herd and a human crowd is that the crowd, what Le Bon
calls the "organized crowd," the crowd "in being" to use a nautical
term, is dominated by an impulse to achieve a purpose that