s necessary, as I have said
above, in order to get the full psychological lesson. We need just the
information which concerns the rest of the family and the social
influences of the children's lives. I recognised at once every phrase
which the children used in this play, where they got it, what it meant
in its original context, and how far its meaning had been modified in
this process, called in a figure "social heredity." But as that story
is reported to strangers who have no knowledge of the children's
social antecedents, how much beyond the mere facts of imitation and
personification do they get from it? And how much the more is this
true when we examine those complex games of the nursery which show the
brilliant fancy for situation and drama of the wide-awake
four-year-old?

Yet we psychologists are free to interpret; and how rich the lessons
even from such a simple scene as this! As for Helen, what could be a
more direct lesson--a lived-out exercise--in sympathy, in altruistic
self-denial, in the healthy elevation of her sense of self to the
dignity of kindly offices, in the sense of responsibility and agency,
in the stimulus to original effort and the designing of means to
ends--and all of it with the best sense of the objectivity which is
quite lost in wretched self-consciousness in us adults, when we
personate other characters? What could further all this highest mental
growth better than the game by which the lessons of her mother's daily
life are read into the child's little self? Then, in the case of
Elizabeth also, certain things appear. She obeys without command or
sanction, she takes in from her sister the elements of personal
suggestion in their simpler childish forms. Certainly such scenes,
repeated every day with such variation of detail, must give something
of the sense of variety and social equality which real life afterward
confirms and proceeds upon; and lessons of the opposite character are
learned by the same process.

All this exercise of fancy must strengthen the imaginative faculty
also. The prolonged situations, maintained sometimes whole days, or
possibly weeks, give strength to the imagination and train the
attention. I think, also, that the sense of essential reality, and its
distinction from the unreal, the merely imagined, is helped by this
sort of symbolic representation. Play has its dangers also--very
serious ones. The adults sometimes set bad examples. The game gives
practise in cu