In both of these cases I was a good deal impressed with the idea that the life of children, as compared with that of adults, is less determined in a merely suggestive way, and involves more will and choice, than is commonly supposed. Imitation, in the sense of visible or audible repetition, was not so omnipresent as I had expected, and when present seemed to be in great part rational and voluntary rather than mechanical. It is very natural to assume that to do what someone else does requires no mental effort; but this, as applied to little children, is, of course, a great mistake. They cannot imitate an act except by learning how to do it, any more than grown-up people can, and for a child to learn a word may be as complicated a process as for an older person to learn a difficult piece on the piano. A novel imitation is not at all mechanical, but a strenuous voluntary activity, accompanied by effort and followed by pleasure in success. All sympathetic observers of children must be impressed, I imagine, by the evident mental stress and concentration which often accompanies their endeavors, whether imitative or not, and is followed, as in adults, by the appearance of relief when the action has come off successfully.[3] The “imitative instinct” is sometimes spoken of as if it were a mysterious something that enabled the child to perform involuntarily and without preparation acts that are quite new to him. It will be found difficult, if one reflects upon the matter, to conceive what could be the nature of an instinct or hereditary tendency, not to do a definite thing previously performed by our ancestors—as is the case with ordinary instinct—but to do _anything_, within vague limits, which happened to be done within our sight or hearing. This doing of new things without definite preparation, _either in heredity or experience_, would seem to involve something like special creation in the mental and nervous organism: and the imitation of children has no such character. It is quite evidently an acquired power, and if the act imitated is at all complex the learning process involves a good deal of thought and will. If there is an imitative instinct it must, apparently, be something in the way of a taste for repetition, which stimulates the learning process without, however, having any tendency to dispense with it. The taste for repetition seems, in fact, to exist, at least in most children, but even this may be sufficiently explained as a phase of the general mental tendency to act upon uncontradicted ideas. It is a doctrine now generally taught by psychologists that the idea of an action is itself a motive to that action, and tends intrinsically to produce it unless something intervenes to prevent. This being the case, it would appear that we must always have some impulse to do what we see done, provided it is something we understand sufficiently to be able to form a definite idea of doing it.[4] I am inclined to the view that it is unnecessary to