Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/604

584 seems to me even more conclusive on the point: "I remember" (writes a lady) "that one of my children, when about four, was playing 'shops' with the baby. The elder one was shopman at the time when I came into the room and kissed her. She broke out into piteous sobs; I could not understand why. At last she sobbed out, 'Mother, you never kiss the man in the shop.' For the time being her game was spoiled." The mother's kiss, though sweet in itself, had here wrought a sudden disillusion.

It is only right to say that this same lady adds that her children varied considerably in this susceptibility to the play illusion, and that she feels sure her second child, who is less intelligent, would not have troubled about the kiss.

Play may produce not only the vivid imaginative realization at the time, but a sort of mild permanent illusion. Sometimes it is a toy horse, in one case communicated to me it was a funnylooking toy lion, more frequently it is the human effigy, the doll, which, as the result of successive acts of imaginative vivification, gets taken up into the relation of permanent companion and pet. Clusters of happy association envelop it, endowing it with a fixed vitality and character. A mother once asked her boy of two years and a half if his doll was a boy or a girl. He said at first, "A boy," but presently correcting himself added, "I think it is a baby." Here we have a challenging of the inner conviction by a question, a moment of reflection, and as a result of this, the unambiguous confession that the doll had its place in the living human family.

Here is a more stubborn exhibition on the part of another boy of this lasting faith in the plaything called out by others' skeptical attitude. "When" (writes a lady correspondent) "he was just over two years old, L began to speak of a favorite wooden horse (Dobbin) as if it was a real living creature. 'No tarpenter (carpenter) made Dobbin,' he would say; 'he is not wooden, but kin (skin) and bones, and Dod (God) made him.' If any one said 'it' in speaking of the horse his wrath was instantly aroused, and he would shout indignantly: 'It! You muttent tay it, you mut tay he' He imagined the horse was possessed of every virtue, and it was strange to see what an influence this creature of his own imagination exercised over him. If there was anything L particularly wished not to do, his mother had only to say, 'Dobbin would like you to do this,' and it was done without a murmur."

There is another domain of childish activity closely bordering on that play where we may observe a like suffusion of the world of sense by imagination. I refer to pictures and artistic representations generally. If in the case of adults there is a half illusion, a kind of oneiratic trance condition, induced by a picture or