Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/117

Rh a soldier for a shepherd, till at last the objective resemblance almost disappears, and a bit of wood may be dragged about, representing a ship on the sea, or a coach on the road. Here the likeness of the bit of wood to a ship or a coach is very slight indeed; but it is a thing, and can be moved about in an appropriate manner, and placed in a suitable position with respect to other objects. Unlike as the toy may be to what it represents in the child's mind, it still answers a purpose, and is an evident assistance to the child in enabling it to arrange and develop its ideas, by working the objects and actions and stories it is acquainted with into a series of dramatic pictures. Of how much use the material object is in setting the mind to work, may be seen by taking it away and leaving the child with nothing to play with.

At an early age, children learn more from play than from teaching; and the use of toys is very great in developing their minds by giving them the means of, as it were, taking a scene or an event to pieces, and putting its parts together in new combinations, a process which immensely increases the definiteness of the children's ideas and their power of analysis. It is because the use of toys is principally in developing the subjective side of the mind, that the elaborate figures and models of which the toyshops have been full of late years are of so little use. They are carefully worked out into the nicest details; but they are models or pictures, not playthings, and children, who know quite well what it is they want, tire of them in a few hours, unless, indeed, they can break them up and make real toys of the bits. What a child wants is not one picture, but the means of making a thousand. Objective knowledge, such as is to be gained from the elaborate doll's houses and grocer's shops with their appurtenances, may be got in plenty elsewhere by mere observation; but toys, to be of value in early education, should be separate, so as to allow of their being arranged in any variety of combination, and not too servile and detailed copies of objects, so that they may not be mere pictures, but symbols, which a child can make to stand for many objects with the aid of its imagination.

In later years, and among highly educated people, the mental process which goes on in a child playing with wooden soldiers