ng sense of power. All of those toys that enable you to act at
a distance, or to move rapidly, minister to the mastery impulse.
Imitative play does the same, in that it enables the child to perform,
in make-believe, the important deeds of adults. Children like to play
at being grown-up, whether by wearing long dresses or by smoking, and
it makes them feel important to do what the grown-ups do; you can
observe how important they feel by the way they strut and swagger.

{491}

All in all, there are several different ways of gratifying the
self-assertive or mastery impulse in play: always there is the toy or
game-situation to master and manage; often self-importance is
gratified by doing something big, either really or in make-believe;
and usually there is a competitor to beat.

Empathy

There is still another possible way in which play may gratify the
mastery impulse. Why do we like to see a kite flying? Of course, if it
is _our_ kite and we are flying it, the mastery impulse is directly
aroused and gratified; but we also like to watch a kite flown by some
one else, and similarly we like to watch a hawk, a balloon or
aeroplane, a rocket. We like also to watch things that balance or
float or in other ways seem to be superior to the force of gravity.
Why should such things fascinate us? Perhaps because of _empathy_, the
"feeling oneself into" the object contemplated. As "sympathy" means
"feeling with", "empathy" means "feeling into", and the idea is that
the observer projects himself into the object observed, and gets some
of the satisfaction from watching an object that he would get from
_being_ that object. Would it not be grand to be a kite, would it not
be masterful? Here we stand, slaves of the force of gravity, sometimes
toying with it for a moment when we take a dive or a coast, at other
times having to struggle against it for our very lives, and all the
time bound and limited by it--while the kite soars aloft in apparent
defiance of all such laws and limitations. Of course it fascinates us,
since watching it gives us, by empathy, some of the sense of power and
freedom that seems appropriate to the behavior of a kite. Perhaps the
fascination of fire is empathy of a similar sort; for fire is power.

Having thus found the mastery impulse here, there, and {492} almost
everywhere in the realm of play, we are tempted to assume a masterful
attitude ourselves and say, "Look you! We have discovered the one and
only p