One phase of instinct was left out of our discussion except as it was touched upon primarily in the analysis of a child’s instinctive interest in rhythm. This is the instinct to express through bodily movements the ideas that have found a permanent place for themselves in the mind.
Little E, three years old, was told by her nurse the folk tale of “The Old Woman and Her Pig.” She had heard very few stories, and this one seemed to delight her beyond words. She laughed and clapped her hands over it, and begged to have it repeated and retold even a third time. She made no comment upon the text of the story, however. A week later, she was left alone in her nursery for a short period during the morning and her mother, busy with household duties upon the floor below, thought that she heard E’s voice. Going, quietly, to the door of the nursery she saw E standing, dramatically, in the center of the room, holding a toy broom under her arm, and shaking her finger at a small china pig that stood on the floor in front of her. As she did this, she said in the exact words of the story that had been told her:
“Piggy won’t get over the stile, and I shall not get home to-night.”
“What are you doing, E?” her mother asked in some surprise.
E looked up in wonder as if she, herself, knew a reason for her actions but one that needed no explanation. Finally she spoke:
“I’m _doing_ a story, mother,” she replied.
This incident of E’s instinctive and almost unconscious dramatization of a story which she had heard and whose images had become fixed in her mind illustrates a very common characteristic of a child’s mental life, the instinctive impulse to vitalize the mental life by putting it into terms of _expression_. It is true that instinctive expression as commonly defined includes in its first manifestations only certain _unlearned_ motor responses, those forms of expression that are ours without previous training or experience. A child cries at a pain, laughs when he is tickled, starts in fear at a sudden and loud noise. These are the primitive forms of instinctive expression, but beyond these and through the use of certain child stories that are full of action, compelling dialogue, and quick movement comes a development of the dramatic instinct in childhood of wonderful value to the teacher.