The treating of the doll and images of animals, such as the wooden or india-rubber horse, as living things is the outcome of the play-impulse. All the imaginative play of children seems, so far as we can understand it, to have about it something of illusion. This fact of the full sincere acceptance of the play-world as for the moment the real one, is illustrated in the child's jealous insistence that everything shall for the time pass over from the every-day world into the new one. "About the age of four," writes M. Egger of his boys, "Felix is playing at being coachman; Emile happens to return home at the moment. In announcing his brother, Felix does not say, 'Emile is come;' he says, 'The brother of the coachman is come'." It is illustrated further in the keen resentment of any act on the part of the mother or other person which seems to contradict the facts of the new world. A boy of two who was playing one morning in his mother's bed at drinking up pussy's milk from an imaginary saucer on the pillow, said a little crossly to his mother, who was getting into bed after fetching his toys: "Don't lie on de saucer, mammy!" The pain inflicted on the little player by such a contradictory action is sometimes intense. A little girl of four was playing "shops" with her younger sister. "The elder one (writes the mother) was shopman at the time I came into her 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'. I had with my kiss quite spoilt her illusion." But there is still another, and some will think a more conclusive way of satisfying ourselves of the reality of the play-illusion. The child finds himself confronted by the unbeliever who questions what he says about the doll's crying and so forth, and in this case he will often stoutly defend his creed. "Discussions with sceptical brothers (writes Dr. Stanley Hall), who assert that the doll is nothing but wood, rubber, wax, etc., are often met with a resentment as keen as that vented upon missionaries who declare that idols are but stocks and stones." It is the same with the toy-horse. "When (writes a mother of her boy) he was just over two years old L. began to speak of a favourite wooden horse (Dobbin) as if it were 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 mut'ent tay _it_, you mut tay _he_.'"