IMITATION (Lat. imitatio, from imitari, to imitate). The repetition of any thought or act, or the copying of any example or model. The example or model is a stimulus which sets up nervous reactions that result in more or less nearly perfect repetition or duplication. The repetition may be by one's self of one's own thoughts or acts, as when a child, having learned to pronounce a new word, says it over and over; or it may be repetition by one person of the example or copy set by any other person. Imita tion may filmier he subconscious, and due largely to suggestion, as it sometimes is in the behavior of crowds, or it may he clearly conscious, as it is in learning to write or to draw. The phenomena of imitation are of great importance in educa tion, in the theory of art, in ethnology. and in sociology. Froebel and Preyer especially have treated of the educational aspects. The discus sion of imitation in art dates from Aristotle.
In ethnology imitation is the key to an undor. standing of magic and primitive religion. The savage believes that he can reproduce or control desirable conditions by imitating them. In fish ing he puts a bit of wood cut in imitation of a fish into the stream, to attract the fish that he would catch. In hunting he dresses in imitation of his prey. To his enemy he aims to bring death by sticking an image of him full of thorns, or by filling it with poison. The whole investigation and literature of this subject the reader will find opened to him in Skeat's Malay Magic and Frazer's The Golden Bough. Imitation as a social fact was shrewdly commented on by Bacon in the essays, but the first writer to deal with it in a systematic way was Bagehot in his most thoughtful and suggestive Physics and Polities.
The `crust of custom,' which characterizes primitive and unprogressive communities, was shown to be the product of imitation. The most profound study of imitation, however, is Gabriel Tarde's great work. Les lois de l'imitation. Tarde finds in imitation the elementary and fundamental social fact, and he makes it there fore the basis of a system of sociology. Imita tions he classes as `custom' imitations, in which the copy is ancient or even immemorial, and `mode' or fashion imitations, in which the copy is new. Imitations extend from above (the high er social or intellectual ranks) downward, and all imitations tend to spread in a geometrical progression. One imitation may, however, inter fere with another. In the resulting duel, if one does not extinguish the other, they combine, each modifying the other, and so creating a new model to be imitated. All 'inventions' Tarde thus ex plains as a product of the conflict of imitations. Thus by imitations and their product, inventions, he tries to account for all the phenomena of language, manners, costume, amusement, art, religion, science. economy, morals, law, and politics. All modern civilization, he avers, is but the continuing imitation of Greece and Rome. The chief criticism to be made of Tarde's theory is that it fails to take account of original similarities of activity in the universe. Not all resembling phenomena are alike merely because they form a sequence. They may be simul taneously alike, as a part of coexistence. There fore, another system of sociology is possible, which builds upon the simultaneous like re sponses of like organisms to the same stimulus. See SOCIOLOGY.