sts carefully the edge of the
door he has shut, to see whether it is really closed, because he does
not understand the effect of lock and bolt. For even in the eighteenth
month he goes back and forth with a key, to the writing-desk, with the
evident purpose of opening it. But at twelve months, when he tries
whether it is fast, he does not think of the key at all, and does not
yet possess a single word.

An adult, before watering flowers with a watering-pot, will look to see
whether there is water in it. The child of a year and a half, who has
seen how watering is done, finds special pleasure in going from flower
to flower, even with an empty watering-pot, and making the motions of
pouring upon each one separately, as if water would really come out. For
him the notion "watering-pot" is identical with the notion "filled
watering-pot," because at first he was acquainted with the latter only.

Much of what is attributed to imagination in very young children rests
essentially on the formation of such vague concepts, on the inability to
combine constant qualities into sharply defined concepts. When, in the
twenty-third month, the child holds an empty cup to his mouth and sips
and swallows, and does it repeatedly, and with a serene, happy
expression, this "play" is founded chiefly on the imperfect notion
"filled cup." The child has so often perceived something to drink,
drinking-vessel, and the act of drinking, in combination with one
another, that the one peremptorily demands the other when either appears
singly; hence the pleasure in pouring out from empty pitchers into empty
cups, and in drinking out of empty cups (in second to fifth years).
When adults do the same in the play of the theatre, this action always
has a value as language, it signifies something for other persons; but
with the child, who plays in this fashion entirely alone, the pleasure
consists in the production of familiar ideas together with agreeable
feelings, which are, as it were, crystallized with comparative clearness
out of the dull mass of undefined perceptions. These memory-images
become real existences, like the hallucinations of the insane, because
the sensuous impressions probably impress themselves directly--without
reflection--upon the growing brain, and hence the memory-images of them,
on account of their vividness, can not always be surely distinguished
from the perceptions themselves. Most of the plays that children invent
of themselves may