The Life of Reason by George Santayana — Read

Psychology of imitation.

Imitation is a fertile principle in the Life of Reason. We have seen that it furnishes the only rational sanction for belief in any fellow mind; now we shall see how it creates the most glorious and interesting of plastic arts. The machinery of imitation is obscure but its prevalence is obvious, and even in the present rudimentary state of human biology we may perhaps divine some of its general features. In a motor image the mind represents prophetically what the body is about to execute: but all images are more or less motor, so that no idea, apparently, can occupy the mind unless the body has received some impulse to enact the same. The plastic instinct to reproduce what is seen is therefore simply an uninterrupted and adequate seeing; these two phenomena, separable logically and divided in Cartesian psychology by an artificial chasm, are inseparable in existence and are, for natural history, two parts of the same event. That an image should exist for consciousness is, abstractly regarded, a fact which neither involves motion nor constitutes knowledge; but that natural relation to ulterior events which endows that image with a cognitive function identifies it at the same time with the motor impulse which accompanies the idea. If the image involved no bodily attitude and prophesied no action it would refer to no eventual existence and would have no practical meaning. Even if it meant to refer to something ulterior it would, under those circumstances, miss its aim, seeing that no natural relation connected it with any object which could support or verify its asseverations. It might feel significant, like a dream, but its significance would be vain and not really self-transcendent; for it is in the world of events that logic must find application, if it cares for applicability at all. This needful bond between ideas and the further existences they forebode is not merely a logical postulate, taken on trust because the ideas in themselves assert it; it is a previous and genetic bond, proper to the soil in which the idea flourishes and a condition of its existence. For the idea expresses unawares a present cerebral event of which the ulterior event consciously looked to is a descendant or an ancestor; so that the ripening of that idea, or its prior history, leads materially to the fact which the idea seeks to represent ideally.