Children best illustrate it, but the familiar saying that genius consists in an infinite capacity for taking pains is a popular expression of the fact that progress depends on indefatigable perseverance. It is Baldwin’s persistent imitation again. And self-imitation is as indispensable to progress as is the imitation of others, acting in conjunction with the law of habit, according to which the frequent use of an act tends to make it easy. The conservative principle of imitation furnishes a basis for higher development by supplying an incentive for the mechanical effort required by the first laborious accomplishment of the task, as well as for the introduction of new details and the application of effective variations. Here, too, an example from child psychology clearly shows the coupling of new with old habits. A child observed by Perez had learned to draw a locomotive, and was so charmed with the accomplishment that he did not want to draw anything else. One day his grandmother wanted him to make a portrait of her, and what did the boy do but draw a locomotive with a first-class carriage attached, and his grandmother’s head protruding from one of the windows![598] In similar way the painting of landscape began in history with little pieces of background piping out of figure pictures. 4. _Inner Imitation_ The conviction has long prevailed[599] among German students of æsthetics that one of the weightiest problems of their science is offered by that familiar process by which we put ourselves into the object observed, and thus attain a sort of inward sympathy with it. In France the same problem has been treated in a notable manner by Jouffroy, who says, “Imiter en soi l’état extérieurement manifeste de la nature vivante, c’est ressentir l’effet esthétique fondamental.”[600] In this very complicated process we can distinguish these leading characteristics: 1_a_. The mind conceives of the experience of the other individual as if it were its own. 1_b_. We live through the psychic states which a lifeless object would experience if it possessed a mental life like our own. 2_a_. We inwardly participate in the movements of an external object. 2_b_. We also conceive of the motions which a body at rest might make if the powers which we attribute to it were actual (the fluidity of form). 3. We transfer the temper, which is the result of our own inward sympathy, to the object and speak of the solemnity of the sublime, the gaiety of beauty, etc. By including all these under the rather inadequate name of æsthetic sympathy, and bearing in mind what we learned in the review of æsthetic pleasure, we can not fall into the error of supposing that they include the whole field; yet at the same time we must see that their explanation involves not only its most difficult but also its most important problem. Why is this?