P. Mc. L., a girl, observed from three and a half to five years of age, was a highly imaginative child as shown by the power of make-believe in play. The ball of soft india-rubber was to her on the teacher’s suggestion, say, a baby, and on it she would lavish all her tenderness, kissing it, feeding it, washing its face, dressing it in her pinafore, etc. So thorough was her delight in the play that the less imaginative children around her would suspend their play at ‘babies’ and watch her with interest. Whilst a most indifferent restless child at lessons, whenever a story was told she sat motionless and wide-eyed till the close. Children sometimes make babies of their younger brothers and sisters, going through all the sweet solicitous offices which others are wont to carry out on their dolls.[31] This suggests another and closely related question: Do the more imaginative children prefer the inert, ugly doll to the living child in these nursing pastimes? What is the real relation in the child’s play between the toy-companion, the doll or india-rubber dog, and the living companion? Again, a child will occasionally play with an imaginary doll.[32] How is this impulse related to the other two forms of doll-passion? These points would well repay a careful investigation. ----- Footnote 31: Baldwin gives a pretty example of this, _op. cit._, p. 362. Footnote 32: An example is given by Paola Lombroso, _Psicologia del Bambino_, p. 126. ----- The vivification of the doll or toy animal is the outcome of the play-impulse, and this, as we have seen, is an impulse to act out, to realise an idea in outward show. The absorption in the idea and its outward expression serves, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, to blot out the incongruities of scene and action which you or I, a cold observer, would note. The play-idea works transformingly by a process analogous to what is called auto-suggestion. How complete this play-illusion may become here can be seen in more ways than one. We see it in the jealous insistence already illustrated that everything shall for the time pass over from the every-day world into the new fancy-created 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’.”[33] ----- Footnote 33: Quoted by Compayré, _op. cit_., p. 150. -----