Professor Mark Baldwin’s use of the term “imitation” can only be understood in its relation to an hypothesis of organic and mental evolution, which he develops with no little skill and brilliancy.[76] He regards the processes of life as issuing in a great twofold adaptation, due to expansions and contractions,--the former representing waxing, the latter waning vitality; and he holds that all special adaptations are secured by the new hold upon beneficial stimulations reached by the expansive out-reaching movements. “Among the variations in organic forms,” he says, “it is easy to see that some of them might react in such a way as to keep in contact with the stimulus, to lay hold of it, and so keep on reacting to it again and again--just as our rhythmic action in breathing keeps the organism in vital contact with the oxygen of the air. These organisms will get all the benefit or damage of the repetition or persistence of the stimulus, or of their own reactions, again and again; and it is self-evident that the beneficial stimulations are the ones which should be maintained in this way, and that the organisms which did this would live. The organisms which reacted in such a way as to retain the damaging stimulations, on the other hand, by this same process, would aid nature in killing themselves. If this be true, only those organisms would survive which had the variation of retaining useful stimulations in what I have called, in speaking of imitation elsewhere, a ‘circular way’ of reacting.... So, when we come to consider phylogeny and ontogeny together, we find that if by an organism we mean a thing of contractility or irritability, whose round of movements is kept up by some kind of nutritive process supplied by the environment--absorption, chemical action of atmospheric oxygen, etc.--and whose existence is threatened by dangers of contact and what not, the first thing to do is to secure a regular supply to the nutritive processes, and to avoid these contacts. But the organism can do nothing but move, as a whole or in some of its parts. So, then, if one of such creatures is to be fitter than another to survive, it must be the creature which, by its movements, secures more nutritive processes and avoids more dangerous contacts. But movements toward the source of stimulation keep hold on the stimulation, and movements away from the contacts break the contacts; that is all. Nature selects these organisms; how could she do otherwise?”