by the principle of
adaptation which imitation expresses, it acts out these details for
himself.

It is an interesting detail, that at this stage the child begins to
grow capricious himself; to feel that he can do whatever he likes.
Suggestion begins to lose the regularity of its working, for it meets
the child's growing sense of his own agency. The youthful hero becomes
"contrary." At this period it is that obedience begins to grow hard,
and its meaning begins to dawn upon the child as the great reality.
For it means the subjection of his own agency, his own liberty to be
capricious, to the agency and liberty of some one else.

3. With all this, the child's distinction between and among the
persons who constantly come into contact with him grows on apace, in
spite of the element of irregularity of the general fact of
personality. As he learned before the difference between one presence
and another, so now he learns the difference between one _character_
and another. Every character is more or less regular in its
irregularity. It has its tastes and modes of action, its temperament
and type of command. This the child learns late in the second year and
thereafter. He behaves differently when the father is in the room. He
is quick to obey one person, slow to obey another. He cries aloud,
pulls his companions, and behaves reprehensibly generally, when no
adult is present who has authority or will to punish him. This stage
in his "knowledge of man" leads to very marked differences of conduct
on his part.

4. He now goes on to acquire real _self-consciousness_ and _social
feeling_. This stage is so important that we may give to it a separate
heading below.

It may not be amiss to sum up what has been said about
Personality-Suggestion. It is a general term for the information which
the child gets about persons. It develops through three or four
roughly distinguished stages, all of which illustrate what is called
the "projective" sense of personality.[2] There is, 1. A bare
distinction _of persons from things_ on the ground of peculiar
pain-movement-pleasure experiences. 2. A sense of the irregularity or
capriciousness of the behaviour of these persons, which suggests
_personal agency_. 3. A distinction, vaguely felt perhaps, but
wonderfully reflected in the child's actions, between the modes of
behaviour or _personal characters_ of different persons. 4. After his
sense of his own agency arises by the process of imitation