His attention dwells upon details, and by the principle of adaptation which imitation expresses, it acts out these details for himself.
It is an interesting detail, that at this stage the child begins to grow capricious himself; to feel that he can do whatever he likes.
Suggestion begins to lose the regularity of its working, for it meets the child's growing sense of his own agency.

The youthful hero becomes "contrary." At this period it is that obedience begins to grow hard, and its meaning begins to dawn upon the child as the great reality.
For it means the subjection of his own agency, his own liberty to be capricious, to the agency and liberty of some one else.
3.

With all this, the child's distinction between and among the persons who constantly come into contact with him grows on apace, in spite of the element of irregularity of the general fact of personality.

As he learned before the difference between one presence and another, so now he learns the difference between one _character_ and another.

Every character is more or less regular in its irregularity.