When things become signs, when they gain a representative
capacity as standing for other things, play is transformed from
mere physical exuberance into an activity involving a mental
factor. A little girl who had broken her doll was seen to
perform with the leg of the doll all the operations of washing,
putting to bed, and fondling, that she had been accustomed to
perform with the entire doll. The part stood for the whole;
she reacted not to the stimulus sensibly present, but to the
meaning suggested by the sense object. So children use a stone
for a table, leaves for plates, acorns for cups. So they use
their dolls, their trains, their blocks, their other toys.
In manipulating them, they are living not with the physical
things, but in the large world of meanings, natural and social,
evoked by these things. So when children play horse, play
store, play house or making calls, they are subordinating the
physically present to the ideally signified. In this way, a
world of meanings, a store of concepts (so fundamental to all
intellectual achievement), is defined and built up.--JOHN
DEWEY, “How We Think.”
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