ysical characteristics of the new
generation. Since modes of behavior, such as acts of courtesy, cannot be
transmitted through physical structure, they would tend to lapse if they
were not maintained through imitation from generation to generation.
Thus imitation gives uniformity to social practices and consequently is
to be treated as a form of supplementary inheritance extending beyond
physical inheritance and making effective the established forms of
social practice.

2. Attention, Interest, and Imitation[147]

Imitation is a process of very great importance for the development of
mental life in both men and animals. In its more complex forms it
presupposes trains of ideas; but in its essential features it is present
and operative at the perceptual level. It is largely through imitation
that the results of the experience of one generation are transmitted to
the next, so as to form the basis for further development. Where trains
of ideas play a relatively unimportant part, as in the case of animals,
imitation may be said to be the sole form of social tradition. In the
case of human beings, the thought of past generations is embodied in
language, institutions, machinery, and the like. This distinctively
human tradition presupposes trains of ideas in past generations, which
so mold the environment of a new generation that in apprehending and
adapting itself to this environment it must re-think the old trains of
thought. Tradition of this kind is not found in animal life, because the
animal mind does not proceed by way of trains of ideas. None the less,
the more intelligent animals depend largely on tradition. This tradition
consists essentially in imitation by the young of the actions of their
parents, or of other members of the community in which they are born.
The same directly imitative process, though it is very far from forming
the whole of social tradition in human beings, forms a very important
part of it.

a) _The imitative impulse._--We must distinguish between ability to
imitate and impulse to imitate. We may be already fully able to perform
an action, and the sight of it as performed by another may merely prompt
us to reproduce it. But the sight of an act performed by another may
also have an educational influence; it may not only stimulate us to do
what we are already able to do without its aid; it may also enable us to
do what we could not do without having an example to follow. When the
cough of one m