The impulse to act a part meets us very early and grows out of the assimilative instinct. The very infant will, if there is a cup to hand, pretend to drink out of it.[19] Similarly a boy of two will put the stem of his father’s pipe into, or, if cautious, near his mouth, and make believe that he is smoking. A little boy not yet two years old would spend a whole wet afternoon “painting” the furniture with the dry end of a bit of rope. In such cases, it is evident, the playing may start from a suggestion supplied by the sight of an object. There is no need to suppose that in this simple kind of imitative play children knowingly act a part. It is surely to misunderstand the essence of play to speak of it as a fully conscious process of imitative acting.[20] A child is one creature when he is truly at play, another when he is bent on astonishing or amusing you. It seems sufficient to say that when at play he is possessed by an idea, and is working this out into visible action. Your notice, your laughter, may bring in a new element of enjoyment; for as we all know, children are apt to be little actors in the full sense, and to aim at producing an impression. Yet the child as little _needs_ your flattering observation as the cat needs it, when he plays in the full sense imaginatively, and in make-believe, with his captured mouse, placing it, for example, deliberately under a copper in the scullery, and amusing himself by the half-illusion of losing it. Indeed your intrusion will be just as likely to destroy or at least to diminish the charm of a child’s play, if only through your inability to seize his idea, and, what is equally important, to rise to his own point of enthusiasm and illusive realisation. Perhaps, indeed, one may say that the play-instinct is most vigorous and dominant when a child is alone, or at least self-absorbed; for even social play, delightful as it is when all the players are attuned, is subject to disturbance through a want of mutual comprehension and a need of half-disillusive explanations.[21] ----- Footnote 19: Of course, as Preyer suggests, this drinking from an empty cup may at first be due to a want of discriminative perception. Footnote 20: M. Compayré seems to go too far in this direction when he talks of the child’s play with its doll as a charming comedy of maternity (_L’Evolution intell. et morale de l’Enfant_, p. 274). Footnote 21: For a good illustration of the disillusive effect of want of enthusiasm in one’s playmates, see Tolstoi, _Childhood, Boyhood, Youth_, part i., chap. viii. -----