suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which all teachers are familiar.  And, both in its sensible and in its rational developments, disinterested curiosity may be successfully appealed to in the child with much more certainty than in the adult, in whom this intellectual instinct has grown so torpid as usually never to awake unless it enters into association with some selfish personal interest.  Of this latter point I will say more anon.

Imitation.  Man has always been recognized as the imitative animal par excellence.  And there is hardly a book on psychology, however old, which has not devoted at least one paragraph to this fact.  It is strange, however, that the full scope and pregnancy of the imitative impulse in man has had to wait till the last dozen years to become adequately recognized.  M. Tarde led the way in his admirably original work, “Les Lois de l’Imitation”; and in our own country Professors Royce and Baldwin have kept the ball rolling with all the energy that could be desired.  Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue of his imitativeness.  We become conscious of what we ourselves are by imitating others—­the consciousness of what the others are precedes—­the sense of self grows by the sense of pattern.  The entire accumulated wealth of mankind—­languages, arts, institutions, and sciences—­is passed on from one generation to another by what Baldwin has called social heredity, each generation simply imitating the last.  Into the particulars of this most fascinating chapter of psychology I have no time to go.  The moment one hears Tarde’s proposition uttered, however, one feels how supremely true it is.  Invention, using the term most broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the human race historically has walked.

Imitation shades imperceptibly into Emulation.  Emulation is the impulse to imitate what you see another doing, in order not to appear inferior; and it is hard to draw a sharp line between the manifestations of the two impulses, so inextricably do they mix their effects.  Emulation is the very nerve of human society.  Why are you, my hearers, sitting here before me?  If no one whom you ever heard of had attended a ‘summer school’ or teachers’ institute, would it have occurred to any one of you to break out independently and do a thing so unprescribed by fashion?  Probably not.  Nor would your pupils come to you unless the children of their parents’ neighbors were all simultaneously being sent to school.  We wish not to be lonely or eccentric, and we wish not to be cut off from our share in things which to our neighbors seem desirable privileges.