Curiosity and Imitation as Native Impulses

Next, a word might be said about Curiosity. This is perhaps a rather poor term by which to designate the impulse toward better cognition in its full extent; but you will readily understand what I mean. Novelties in the way of objects of the senses, especially if their sensory quality is bright, vivid, or startling, invariably arrest the attention of the young and hold it until the desire to know more about the object is assuaged. In its higher, more intellectual form, the impulse toward more complete knowledge takes the character of scientific or philosophic curiosity. In both its sensory and its intellectual form the instinct is livelier during childhood and youth than in later life. Young children are possessed by curiosity about every new impression that assails them. It would be quite impossible for a young child to listen to a lecture for more than a few minutes, as you are now listening to me. The outside sights and sounds would inevitably carry his attention away. And, for most people in middle life, the sort of intellectual effort required of the average schoolboy in mastering his Greek or Latin lesson, his algebra or physics, would be out of the question. The middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the routine details of his business; and new truths, especially when they require involved trains of close reasoning, are no longer within the scope of his capacity.

The sensory curiosity of childhood is appealed to more particularly by certain definite kinds of objects. Material things, things that move, living things, human actions and accounts of human action, will win the attention better than anything that is more abstract. Here again the advantage of object teaching and manual training methods comes in. The pupil’s attention is spontaneously held by any problem that involves the presentation of a new material object or of an activity on anyone’s part. The teacher’s earliest appeals, therefore, must be through objects shown or acts performed or described. Theoretical curiosity, curiosity about the rational relations between things, can hardly be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. The sporadic metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made God, and why they have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. But, when the theoretical instinct has once come alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of pedagogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes, abstract conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which all teachers are familiar. And, both in its sensory and in its rational developments, disinterested curiosity can be appealed to successfully in the child with much more certainty than in the adult. In the adult this intellectual instinct has grown so torpid that it usually never awakes unless it enters into association with some selfish personal interest. I will say more about this latter point later.

Consider Imitation. Man has always been recognized as the imitative animal par excellence. And there is hardly a book on psychology, however old, that has not devoted at least one paragraph to this fact. It is strange, however, that the full scope and significance of the imitative impulse in man have had to wait until 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 comes first—and 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. I have no time to go into the particulars of this most fascinating chapter of psychology. 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 has historically walked.