It has also an important part in helping to forecast a child’s future. “I fancy an individual standing hesitant at the center of a great circle, the circle of his possibilities,” says Mrs Howard Braucher. “One small amount of that circle, a part of his potential life, he actually lives--the dramatic instinct is the key which admits him to at least a glimpse of what the rest might have been.” Of what the rest _may_ be, she might have said, because the full expression of the dramatic instinct has often inspired a child with courage to enter the entire circle of his possibilities. Like all human instincts, the dramatic instinct may be misused. It must not be confused with dramatic talent, which is a special gift bestowed upon only a few. The dramatic impulse in children, as Joseph Lee says, is “not the impulse toward dramatics in the grown-up sense--toward representing to other people what is passing in the actor’s mind. It is, rather, the converse of this, being the method whereby children make clear to themselves what they suppose to be in the minds of other people and of other things, or of what is dimly passing in their own.” The educational value, therefore, of the instinct, lies not in producing finished dramatic products, but in cultivating the child’s imagination through expression. THE MORAL VALUE OF THIS INSTINCT The moral values are even greater than the educational. The dramatic instinct is, in the main, a wholesome outlet to a child’s energies. “Good imagination,” says Kirtley, “is good hygiene.” The child ceases to be an obstreperous nuisance who has some imaginative task to perform. Through taking his part, perhaps a minor one, in dramatic play, he learns to cooperate unselfishly with others. Acting itself develops a sense of humor which tends toward a sympathetic philosophy of life. Dramatic play tends to make the sympathetic attitude continuous. The adult whom you love because she is so sympathetic is sympathetic because she has imagination, because she can put herself imaginatively in your place. The only child or the child brought up by a private tutor lacks sympathy because he has had so few opportunities to put himself in the place of anybody else. But the great moral value of the dramatic instinct is that it gives a child the opportunity to understand moral issues by having imitative experiences of them. “In life,” says Mrs. Herts, “youth could hardly discern the miser, spendthrift, liar, hypocrite, egoist, prodigal, swindler, gambler, patriot, martyr, and all the rest. Each quality is disguised and mixed with others. But the drama presents a large repertory of such simplified, elemental human qualities, admirably adjusted to the educative or apprenticeship stage of life. The primitive traits, of which human nature is made up, can be observed and studied as a mechanic studies a machine, part by part, before it is put together.”