224 THE PLAY OF ANIMALS. 



played on the stage, and yet our facial expression cor- 

 responds in a certain degree with that of the actor. — Or 

 suppose we are merely listening to a recital, we still 

 feel all the sympathetic passion that words can pro- 

 duce. Indeed, the mere reading of a narrative is suffi- 

 cient to produce that internal effect of imitation which 

 consists in aesthetic pleasure. Don Quixote shows us 

 how strong this impulse may be when he tries to realize 

 the ideal which he has formed by reading. It is illus- 

 trated, too, by boys who read of a seaman's life till they 

 can not be restrained from adopting his calling with 

 all its hardships and dangers; by the suicides that have 

 resulted from reading The Sorrows of Werther; and by 

 the mystical religious life of saints, and the stigmata 

 produced by auto-suggestion in many ecstatic fanatics. 

 All these are externalized effects of aesthetic emotion. 



A glance over these illustrations shows at once that 

 those effects depending on the power of speech can not, 

 of course, be attributed to animals, but that the cases 

 of the boys at play are probably equally well applicable 

 to them. All consciously imitative play must be pre- 

 ceded by that primary form of agsthetic perception 

 which we have called ^' inner imitation," as, for ex- 

 ample, when the monkey mimics his master, or when 

 the starling, with head on one side, listens attentively 

 to an air whistled in his presence. But, on the other 

 hand, there are plenty of examples of attentive watching 

 and listening without any external imitation. Most 

 conspicuous in this class is the hearkening of the female 

 bird to the song of the male. It can not be questioned 

 that she experiences an internal sympathy with his ex- 

 citement, for sometimes this feeling is so strong as to 

 require some kind of outward expression, and she joins, 

 though imperfectly, in the song of the male, and 



