But thus it may well come to pass that the child long knows other persons far better than he consciously recognizes himself. Yes, this is, in fact, inevitable. A person, I insist, is a possessor of a body of definite ideas. And the child being almost wholly without definite initiative and steady independent purpose of his own, and long remaining in this state, gets nearly all the activities which for him can embody intelligible plans, by means of imitations. Left to himself, he is, on the whole, a chaos, that plans, accomplishes, and thinks nothing in particular. His steady plans are all imitative plans, and he delights in them as such. Accordingly, his self-consciousness is, in the main, a vicarious self-hood. He conceives himself as another. He thinks and speaks in the characters of the beings whom he most loves to imitate. For the idea won in the course of an imitative act is, for the conscious imitator, an idea that originally belongs to and dwells in the interesting being imitated. The order of the child's reasoning about the minds of other beings is thus the precise reverse of the order supposed by the artificial theory before mentioned. The father, the gardener, and later, the hero of a fairy tale, become real persons for the child, not because they move as the child has already observed himself to move, but because the imitative child finds himself disposed to act as they act, and in carrying out this disposition, wins intelligible ideas which he at once refers to them, and which he makes his own only by first regarding them as originally another's.
Hence, I repeat, the child may, and in fact must, conceive far more clearly of the reality of the mind of even a fictitious being in an interesting fairy tale, or in an established game that he plays, than he does of his own individual mind as such. For the latter, in so far as it is his own mind, is for him relatively planless and contentless. Therefore, nearly every child in his movements of cheerful, intellectual life, conceives himself as almost any one,—a coachman, a horse, a giant, a fairy, a king, a bird,—rather than as what we regard as his literal self; and he knows himself chiefly in terms of such imitated play personalities. Even his more prosaic moments
