all the people of the
community. It should be the experiment station, the library, the
debating club, the art gallery for the whole community."[2]

[2] Pyle's _Outlines of Educational Psychology_, pp. 84-86.

=Imitation.= One of the fundamental original traits of human nature is the
tendency to imitate. Imitation is not instinctive in the strict meaning
of the word. Seeing a certain act performed does not, apart from
training and experience, serve as a stimulus to make a child perform a
similar act. Hearing a certain sound does not serve as a stimulus for
the production of the same sound. Nevertheless, there is in the human
child a tendency or desire to do what it sees others doing.

A few hours spent in observing children ought to convince any one of the
universality and of the strength of this tendency. As our experience
becomes organized, the idea of an act usually serves as the stimulus to
call it forth. However, this is not because the idea of an act, of
necessity, always produces the act. It is merely a matter of the
stimulus and the response _becoming connected in that way_ as the result
of experience. Our meaning is that an act can be touched off or prompted
by any stimulus. Our nervous organization makes this possible. The
particular stimulus that calls forth a particular response depends upon
how we have been trained, how we have learned. In most cases our acts
are coupled up with the ideas of the acts. We learn them that way.

In early life particularly, the connection between stimulus and response
is very close. When a child gets the idea of an act, he immediately
performs the act, if he knows how. Now, seeing another perform an act
brings the act clearly into the child's consciousness, and he proceeds
to perform it. But the act must be one which the child already knows how
to perform, otherwise his performance of it will be faulty and
incomplete. If he has never performed the particular act, seeing another
perform the act sets him to trying to do it and he may soon learn it. If
he successfully performs an act when he sees it done by another, the act
must be one which he already knows how to perform, and for whose
performance the idea has already served as a stimulus. Now if imitation
were instinctive in the strict sense, one could perform the act for the
first time merely from seeing another do it, without any previous
experience or learning. It is doubtful whether there are any such
inherited connection