s in acting a play,
or in delineating a flower; or in the common actions of our lives, as in
our dress, cookery, language, manners, and even in our habits of thinking.

Not only the greatest part of mankind learn all the common arts of life by
imitating others, but brute animals seem capable of acquiring knowledge
with greater facility by imitating each other, than by any methods by which
we can teach them; as dogs and cats, when they are sick, learn of each
other to eat grass; and I suppose, that by making an artificial dog perform
certain tricks, as in dancing on his hinder legs, a living dog might be
easily induced to imitate them; and that the readiest way of instructing
dumb animals is by practising them with others of the same species, which
have already learned the arts we wish to teach them. The important use of
imitation in acquiring natural language is mentioned in Section XVI. 7. and
8. on Instinct.

3. The sensitive imitations are the immediate consequences of pleasure or
pain, and these are often produced even contrary to the efforts of the
will. Thus many young men on seeing cruel surgical operations become sick,
and some even feel pain in the parts of their own bodies, which they see
tortured or wounded in others; that is, they in some measure imitate by the
exertions of their own fibres the violent actions, which they witnessed in
those of others. In this case a double imitation takes place, first the
observer imitates with the extremities of the optic nerve the mangled
limbs, which are present before his eyes; then by a second imitation he
excites to violent action of the fibres of his own limbs as to produce pain
in those parts of his own body, which he saw wounded in another. In these
pains produced by imitation the effect has some similarity to the cause,
which distinguishes them from those produced by association; as the pains
of the teeth, called tooth-edge, which are produced by association with
disagreeable sounds, as explained in Sect. XVI. 10.

The effect of this powerful agent, imitation, in the moral world, is
mentioned in Sect. XVI. 7. as it is the foundation of all our intellectual
sympathies with the pains and pleasures of others, and is in consequence
the source of all our virtues. For in what consists our sympathy with the
miseries, or with the joys, of our fellow creatures, but in an involuntary
excitation of ideas in some measure similar or imitative of those, which we
believe to exis