g: but if I imitate them under proper
inhibitions and in the service of my own ends, I really understand them,
and, by representing what I do not bodily become, I preserve and enlarge
my own being and make it relevant ideally to what it physically depends
upon. Assimilation is a way of drifting through the flux or of letting
it drift through oneself; representation, on the contrary, is a
principle of progress. To grow by accumulating passions and fancies is
at best to grow in bulk: it is to become what a colony or a hydra might
be. But to make the accretions which time brings to your being
representative of what you are not, and do not wish to be, is to grow in
dignity. It is to be wise and prepared. It is to survey a universe
without ceasing to be a mind.

[Sidenote: Imitation leads to adaptation and to knowledge.]

A product of imitative sensibility is accordingly on a higher plane than
the original existences it introduces to one another--the ignorant
individual and the unknown world. Imitation in softening the body into
physical adjustment stimulates the mind to ideal representation. This is
the case even when the stimulus is a contagious influence or habit,
though the response may then be slavish and the representation vague.
Sheep jumping a wall after their leader doubtless feel that they are not
alone; and though their action may have no purpose it probably has a
felt sanction and reward. Men also think they invoke an authority when
they appeal to the _quod semper et ubique et ab omnibus_, and a
conscious unanimity is a human if not a rational joy. When, however, the
stimulus to imitation is not so pervasive and touches chiefly a single
sense, when what it arouses is a movement of the hand or eye retracing
the object, then the response becomes very definitely cognitive. It
constitutes an observation of fact, an acquaintance with a thing's
structure amounting to technical knowledge; for such a survey leaves
behind it a power to reconstitute the process it involved. It leaves an
efficacious idea. In an idle moment, when the information thus acquired
need not be put to instant use, the new-born faculty may work itself out
spontaneously. The sound heard is repeated, the thing observed is
sketched, the event conceived is acted out in pantomime. Then imitation
rounds itself out; an uninhibited sensation has become an instinct to
keep that sensation alive, and plastic representation has begun.

[Sidenote: How the arti