as
we may still observe in ourselves, quite without thought of eventual
profit; although if chase leads to contact, and contact stimulates
hunger or lust, movements important for preservation will quickly
follow. Such eventual utilities, however, like all utilities, are
supported by a prodigious gratuitous vitality, and long before a
practical or scientific use of sensation is attained its artistic force
is in full operation. If art be play, it is only because all life is
play in the beginning. Rational adjustments to truth and to benefit
supervene only occasionally and at a higher level.

[Sidenote: Imitative art repeats with intent to repeat, and in a new
material.]

Imitation cannot, of course, result in a literal repetition of the
object that suggests it. The copy is secondary; it does not iterate the
model by creating a second object on the same plane of reality, but
reproduces the form in a new medium and gives it a different function.
In these latter circumstances lies the imitative essence of the second
image: for one leaf does not imitate another nor is each twin the
other's copy. Like sensibility, imitation remodels a given being so that
it becomes, in certain formal respects, like another being in its
environment. It is a response and an index, by which note is taken of a
situation or of its possible developments. When a man involuntarily
imitates other men, he does not become those other persons; he is simply
modified by their presence in a manner that allows him to conceive their
will and their independent existence, not without growing similar to
them in some measure and framing a genuine representation of them in his
soul. He enacts what he understands, and his understanding consists
precisely in knowing that he is re-enacting something which has its
collateral existence elsewhere in nature. An element in the percipient
repeats the total movement and tendency of the person perceived. The
imitation, though akin to what it imitates, and reproducing it, lies in
a different medium, and accordingly has a specific individuality and
specific effects. Imitation is far more than similarity, nor does its
ideal function lie in bringing a flat and unmeaning similarity about. It
has a representative and intellectual value because in reproducing the
forms of things it reproduces them in a fresh substance to a new
purpose.

If I imitate mankind by following their fashions, I add one to the
million and improve nothin