Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/57

 PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF PLAY. 43 iis left the second boy unmoved. " It's got your name on." Complete defeat and a burst of tears. It was some years after iis that I found how wide-spread is this superstition of the lame. Imagination will not help in the explanation. There is no jreliminary question, such as, What can he do if he does mow my name '? with a picturing of possible consequences, connexion is immediate, and antecedent to all experi- ice which would logically give rise to it. There is here, before, a complex which added experience dissociates. ?he name is a sound percept bound up in temporal contiguity sight and smell and touch percepts, and is held to be [ually a part of the "thing ". Primitive peoples resemble lildren in this respect. " Name giving was an important svent in the child's life. Like other nations of antiquity, le Babylonians conformed the name with the person who )ore it ; it not only represented him, but in a sense was actually himself." l Nor need we spend long over such allied forms of magic as are exhibited in our own occasional violence to images and portraits. The point to note is that, as these beliefs die down, they die hard and linger on as play. The lover carv- ing or writing his beloved's name or rapturously kissing her Dhotograph does not now believe in cold blood that he is 'lereby advancing his suit. The functioning has lingered on play. The explanation I suggest is not a vivid imagina- tion, but imperfect dissociation of the elements of the sensa- tional complex. V. PSYCHOLOGY OF PLAY EEALITY AND FICTION. " Nothing," says Prof. Sully, " seems more to characterise the ' Childhood of the World ' than the myth-making impulse which by an overflow of fancy seeks to hide the meagreness of knowledge." 2 It is instructive to note how the mental attitude which is ustrated by the above extract is being undermined in other epartments of thought. The historical school, to which e characters of early history were a series of mental syn- iheses personified by the imagination, is now discredited. Lycurgus, Moses, fancied persons postulated as hypothetical causes, are to-day rehabilitated and invested again with the penalties of flesh. In anthropological research similar con- clusions are being arrived at, and much may be hoped from 1 Babylonians and Assyrians, Prof. Sayce, p. 44. 2 Studies in Childhood, p. 25.