traditional habit would prevent their copying it. But in practice
the two tendencies co-operate. There is a strong tendency to copy
the most common thing, and that common thing is the old habit. Daily
imitation is far oftenest a conservative force, for the most
frequent models are ancient. Of course, however, something new is
necessary for every man and for every nation. We may wish, if we
please, that to-morrow shall be like to-day, but it will not be like
it. New forces will impinge upon us; new wind, new rain, and the
light of another sun; and we must alter to meet them. But the
persecuting habit and the imitative combine to insure that the new
thing shall be in the old fashion; it must be an alteration, but it
shall contain as little of variety as possible. The imitative
impulse tends to this, because men most easily imitate what their
minds are best prepared for,--what is like the old, yet with the
inevitable minimum of alteration; what throws them least out of the
old path, and puzzles least their minds. The doctrine of development
means this,--that in unavoidable changes men like the new doctrine
which is most of a 'preservative addition' to their old doctrines.
The imitative and the persecuting tendencies make all change in
early nations a kind of selective conservatism, for the most part
keeping what is old, but annexing some new but like practice--an
additional turret in the old style.

It is this process of adding suitable things and rejecting
discordant things which has raised those scenes of strange manners
which in every part of the world puzzle the civilised men who come
upon them first. Like the old head-dress of mountain villages, they
make the traveller think not so much whether they are good or
whether they are bad, as wonder how any one could have come to think
of them; to regard them as 'monstrosities,' which only some wild