As this instinct bears so profoundly upon the later life of the
individual, and as we may reasonably suppose the child to be the mother
of the woman as well as the father of the man, the matter is worth
looking at a little further.
But, in the first place, it has been asserted that the doll instinct has
really nothing whatever to do with the parental instinct in either sex.
Psychologists, whom one suspects of being bachelors, tell us that what
we really observe here is the instinct of acquisition: it really does
not matter what we give the child, though it so happens that we very
commonly present it with dolls; it is the lust of possession that we
satisfy, and in point of fact one thing will satisfy it as well as
another.
The evidence against this view is quite overwhelming. We might quote the
universal distribution of dolls in place and in time as revealed by
anthropology. Wherever there is mankind there are dolls, whether in
Mayfair or in Whitechapel, Japan, the South Sea Islands, Ancient Egypt
or Mexico. Further, there is the observed behaviour of the child,
opportunities for which have presumably been denied to the psychologists
whose opinion has been quoted. The only objection to the theory that the
child will be content with the possession of anything else as well as of
a doll is the circumstance that the child is not so content, but asks
for a doll for choice, and will lavish upon any doll, however
diagrammatic, an amount of love and care which no other toy will ever
obtain.
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