582 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a step in a squalid London street, blissfully engaged in cuddling 

 warmly a little bundle of hay tied round the middle by a string. 

 Laura Bridgman made a " baby " of a man's large boot. In these 

 cases, surely, the besoin d'aimer was little if any behind the besoin 

 de croire. 



Do any of us really understand this doll superstition ? Writers 

 with clear, long-reaching memory have tried to take us back to 

 childhood, and restore to us for a moment the whole undisturbed 

 trust, the perfect satisfaction of love which the child brings to its 

 doll. Yet even the imaginative genius of a George Sand is hardly 

 equal, perhaps, to the feat of resuscitating the buried companion 

 of our early days and making it live once more before our eyes. 

 The truth is, the doll illusion is one of the first to pass. There 

 are, I believe, a few sentimental girls who make a point, when 

 they attain the years of enlightenment, of saving their dolls from 

 the general wreckage of toys. Yet I suspect that the pets, when 

 thus retained, are valued more for the outside charm of pretty 

 face and hair, and most of all of their lovely clothes, than for the 

 inherent worth of the doll itself of what we may call the doll 

 soul, which informs it and gives it to the child its true beauty. 



Yet, if we can not get inside the old doll superstition, we may 

 study it from the outside, and draw a helpful comparison between 

 it and other known forms of sweet credulity. And here we have 

 the curious fact that the doll exists not only for the child but for 

 the "Nature-man." Savages, Sir John Lubbock tells us,* like 

 toys such as dolls, Noah's arks, etc. The same writer remarks 

 that the doll is " a hybrid between the baby and the fetich, and 

 that it exhibits the contradictory character of its parents." Per- 

 haps the changes of mood toward the doll of which George Sand 

 writes illustrate the alternating preponderance of the baby and 

 the fetich aspect. But, as Sir John also remarks, this hybrid is 

 singularly unintelligible to grown-up people, and it seems the part 

 of modesty here to bow to one of Nature's mysteries. 



The vivification of the doll is the outcome of the play impulse, 

 and this, as we have seen, is an impulse to act out, to realize an 

 idea in outward show. The absorption in the idea and its out- 

 ward expression serves to blot out the incongruities of scene and 

 actors which you or I, a cold observer, would note. 



How complete this play illusion may become here can be seen 

 in more ways than one. We perceive it in the child's jealous in- 

 sistence that everything shall for the time pass over from the 

 everyday world into the new fancy-created one. About the age 

 of four, writes M. Egger of his boy, " Felix is playing at being 

 coachman. Emile happens to return home at the moment. In 



* Origin of Civilization. Appendix, p. 621. 



