t nothing
less than the child's personality is at stake in the method and matter
of its imitations. The Self is really the form in which the personal
influences surrounding the child take on their new individuality.

1. No observations are of much importance which are not accompanied by
a detailed statement of the personal influences which have affected
the child. This is the more important since the child sees few
persons, and sees them constantly. It is not only likely--it is
inevitable--that he _make up his personality_, under limitations of
heredity, by imitation, out of the "copy" set in the actions, temper,
emotions, of the persons who build around him the social enclosure of
his childhood. It is only necessary to watch a two-year-old closely to
see what members of the family are giving him his personal "copy"--to
find out whether he sees his mother constantly and his father seldom;
whether he plays much with other children, and what in some degree
their dispositions are; whether he is growing to be a person of
subjection, equality, or tyranny; whether he is assimilating the
elements of some low unorganized social personality from his foreign
nurse. The boy or girl is a social "monad," to use Leibnitz's figure
in a new context, a little world, which reflects the whole system of
influences coming to stir his sensibility. And just in so far as his
sensibilities are stirred, he imitates, and forms habits of imitating;
and habits?--they are character!

2. A point akin to the first is this: the observation of each child
should describe with great accuracy the child's relations to other
children. Has he brothers or sisters? how many of each, and of what
age? Does he sleep in the same bed or room with them? Do they play
much with one another alone? The reason is very evident. An only child
has only adult "copy." He can not interpret his father's actions, or
his mother's, oftentimes. He imitates very blindly. He lacks the more
childish example of a brother or sister near himself in age. And this
difference is of very great importance to his development. He lacks
the stimulus, for example, of games in which personification is a
direct tutor to selfhood, as I shall remark further on. And while he
becomes precocious in some lines of instruction, he fails in variety
of imagination, in richness of fancy, at the same time that his
imaging processes are more wild and uncontrolled. The dramatic, in his
sense of social situation