If by play we understand all that spontaneous activity which is wholly sustained by its own pleasurableness, we shall find the germ of it in those aimless movements and sounds which are the natural expression of a child’s joyous life. Such outpourings of happiness have a quasi-æsthetic character in so far as they follow the rhythmic law of all action. Where the play becomes social activity, that is, the concerted action of a number, we get something closely analogous to those primitive harmonious co-ordinations of movements and sounds in which the first crude music, poetry and dramatic action of the race are supposed to have had their common origin. Such naïve play-activity acquires a greater æsthetic importance when it becomes significant or representative of something: and this direction appears very early in child-history. The impulse to imitate the action of another seems to be developed before the completion of the first half-year.[220] In its first crude form, as reproducing a gesture or sound uttered at the moment by another, it enters into the whole of social or concerted play. A number of children find the harmonious performance of a series of dance or other movements, such as those of the kindergarten games, natural and easy, because the impulse to imitate, to follow another’s lead, at once prompts them and keeps them from going far astray. ----- Footnote 220: Preyer places the first imitative movement in the fourth month (_op. cit._, cap. 12). Baldwin, however, dates the first unmistakable appearance in the case of his little girl in the ninth month (_Mental Development_, p. 131). ----- It is a higher and more intellectual kind of imitation when a child recalls the idea of something he has seen done and reproduces the action. This is often carried out under the suggestive force of objects which happen to present themselves at the time, as when a child sees an empty cup and pretends to drink, or a book and simulates the action of reading out of it, or a pair of scissors and proceeds to execute snipping movements. In other cases the imitation is more spontaneous, as when a child recalls and repeats some funny saying that he has heard. This imitative action grows little by little more complex, and in this way a prolonged make-believe action may be carried out. Here, it is evident, we get something closely analogous to histrionic performance. A child pantomimically representing some funny action comes, indeed, very near to the mimetic art of the comedian.