Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/116



trite comparison of savages to "grown-up children" is in the main a sound one, though not to be carried out too strictly. In the uncivilized American or Polynesian, the strength of body and force of character of a grown man are combined with a mental development in many respects not beyond that of a young child of a civilized race. It has been already noticed how naturally children can appreciate and understand such direct expressions of thought as the gesture-language and picture-writing. In like manner, the use of dolls or images as an assistance to the operations of the mind is familiar to all children, though among those who grow up under the influences of civilized society it is mostly superseded and forgotten in after life. Few educated Europeans ever thoroughly realize the fact, that they have once passed through a condition of mind from which races at a lower state of civilization never fully emerge; but this is certainly the case, and the European child playing with its doll furnishes the key to several of the mental phenomena which distinguish the more highly cultivated races of mankind from those lower in the scale.

When a child plays with a doll or plaything, the toy is commonly made to represent in the child's mind some imaginary object which is more or less like it. Wooden soldiers, for instance, or the beasts in a Noah's ark, have a real resemblance which any one would recognise at once to soldiers and beasts, and all that the child has to do is to suppose them bigger, and alive, and to consider them as walking of themselves when they are pushed about. But an imaginative child will be content with much less real resemblance than this. It will bring in a larger subjective element, and make a dog do duty for a horse, or