Why we call Children Imaginative.

One of the few things we seemed to be certain of with respect to child-nature was that it is fancy-full. Childhood, we all know, is the age for dreaming, for decking out the world as yet unknown with the gay colours of imagination; for living a life of play or happy make-believe. So that nothing seems more to characterise the ‘Childhood of the World’ than the myth-making impulse which by an overflow of fancy seeks to hide the meagreness of knowledge.

Yet even here, perhaps, we have been content with loose generalisation in place of careful observation and analysis of facts. For one thing, the play of infantile imagination is probably much less uniform than is often supposed. There seem to be matter-of-fact children who cannot rise buoyantly to a bright fancy. Mr. Ruskin, of all men, has recently told us that when a child he was incapable of acting a part or telling a tale, that he never knew a child “whose thirst for visible fact was at once so eager and so methodic”.^[11] We may accept the report of Mr. Ruskin’s memory as proving that he did not idle away his time in day-dreams, but, by long and close observation of running water, and the like, laid the foundations of that fine knowledge of the appearances of nature which everywhere shines through his writings. Yet one may be permitted to doubt whether a writer who shows not only so rich and graceful a style but so truly poetic an invention could have been in every respect an unimaginative child.

Perhaps the truth will turn out to be the paradox that most children are at once matter-of-fact observers and dreamers, passing from the one to the other as the mood takes them, and with a facility which grown people may well envy. My own observations go to show that the prodigal out-put of fancy, the revelling in myth and story, is often characteristic of one period of childhood only. We are apt to lump together such different levels of experience and capacity under that abstraction ‘the child’. The wee mite of three and a half, spending more than half his days in trying to realise all manner of pretty, odd, startling fancies about animals, fairies, and the rest, is something vastly unlike the boy of six or seven, whose mind is now bent on understanding the make and go of machines, and of that big machine, the world.

So far as I can gather from inquiries sent to parents and other observers of children, a large majority of boys and girls alike are for a time fancy-bound. A child that did not want to play and cared nothing for the marvels of story-land would surely be regarded as queer and not just what a child ought to be. Yet, supposing that this is the right view, there still remains the question whether imagination always works in the same way in the childish brain. Science is beginning to aid us in understanding the differences of childish fancy. For one thing it is leading us to see that a child’s whole imaginative life may be specially coloured by the preponderant vividness of a certain order of images, that one child may live imaginatively in a coloured world, another in a world of sounds, another rather in a world of movements. It is easy to note in the case of certain children of the more lively and active turn, how the supreme interest of story as of play lies in the ample range of movement and bodily activity. Robinson Crusoe is probably for the boyish imagination, more than anything else, the goer and the doer.^[12]

With this difference in the elementary constituents of imagination, there are others which turn on temperament, tone of feeling, and preponderant directions of emotion. Imagination is intimately bound up with the life of feeling, and will assume as many directions as this life assumes. Hence, the familiar fact that in some children imagination broods by preference on gloomy and terrifying objects, religious and other, whereas in others it selects what is bright and gladsome; that while in some cases it has more of the poetic quality, in others it leans rather to the scientific or to the practical type.

Enough has been said perhaps to show that the imaginativeness of children is not a thing to be taken for granted as existing in all children alike. It is eminently a variable faculty requiring a special study in the case of each new child.

But even waiving this fact of variability it may, I think, be said that we are far from understanding the precise workings of imagination in children. We talk, for example, glibly about their play, their make-believe, their illusions; but how much do we really know of their state of mind when they act out a little scene of domestic life, or of the battle-field? We have, I know, many fine observations on this head. Careful observers of children and conservers of their own childish experiences, such as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Jean Paul, Madame Necker, George Sand, R. L. Stevenson, tell us much that is valuable: yet I suspect that there must be a much wider and finer investigation of children’s action and talk before we can feel quite sure that we have got at their mental whereabouts, and know how they feel when they pretend to enter the dark wood, the home of the wolf, or to talk with their deities, the fairies.

Perhaps I have said enough to justify my plea for new observations and for a reconsideration of hasty theories in the light of these. Nor need we object to a fresh survey of what is perhaps the most delightful side of child-life. I often wonder indeed when I come across some precious bit of droll infantile acting, or of sweet child-soliloquy, how mothers can bring themselves to lose one drop of the fresh exhilarating draught which daily pours forth from the fount of a child’s phantasy.

Nor is it merely for the sake of its inherent charm that children’s imagination deserves further study. In the early age of the individual and of the race what we enlightened persons call fancy has a good deal to do with the first crude attempts at understanding things. Child-thought, like primitive folk-thought, is saturated with myth, vigorous phantasy holding the hand of reason—as yet sadly rickety in his legs—and showing him which way he should take. In the moral life again, we shall see how easily the realising force of young imagination may expose it to deception by others, and to self-deception too, with results that closely simulate the guise of a knowing falsehood. On the other hand a careful following out of the various lines of imaginative activity may show how moral education, by vividly suggesting to the child’s imagination a worthy part, a praiseworthy action, may work powerfully on the unformed and flexible structure of his young will, moving it dutywards.

Imaginative Transformation of Objects.

The play of young imagination meets us in the domain of sense-observation: a child is fancying when he looks at things and touches them and moves among them. This may seem a paradox at first, but in truth there is nothing paradoxical here. It is an exploded psychological fallacy that sense and imagination are wholly apart. No doubt, as the ancients told us, phantasy follows and is the offspring of sense: we live over again in waking and sleeping imagination the sights and sounds of the real world. Yet it is no less true that imagination in an active constructive form takes part in the very making of what we call sense-experience. We read the visual symbol, say, a splash of light or colour, now as a stone, now as a pool of water, just because imagination drawing from past experience supplies the interpretation, the group of qualities which composes a hard solid mass, or a soft yielding liquid.

A child’s fanciful reading of things, as when he calls the twinkling star a (blinking) eye, or the dew-drops on the grass tears, is but an exaggeration of what we all do. His imagination carries him very much farther. Thus he may attribute to the stone he sees a sort of stone-soul, and speak of it as feeling tired of a place.

This lively way of envisaging objects is, as we know, similar to that of primitive folk, and has something of crude nature-poetry in it. This tendency is abundantly illustrated in the metaphors which play so large a part in children’s talk. As all observers of them know they are wont to describe what they see or hear by analogy to something they know already. This is called by some, rather clumsily I think, apperceiving. For example, a little boy of two years and five months, on looking at the hammers of a piano which his mother was playing, called out: ‘There is owlegie’ (diminutive of owl). His eye had instantly caught the similarity between the round felt disc of the hammer divided by a piece of wood, and the owl’s face divided by its beak. In like manner the boy C. called a small oscillating compass-needle a ‘bird’ on the ground of its slightly bird-like form, and of its fluttering movement.^[13] Pretty conceits are often resorted to in this assimilation of the new and strange to the familiar, as when a child seeing dew on the grass said, ‘The grass is crying,’ or when stars were described as “cinders from God’s star,” and butterflies as “pansies flying”.^[14] Other examples of this picturesque mode of childish apperception will meet us below.

This play of imagination in connexion with apprehending objects of sense has a strong vitalising or personifying element. That is to say, the child sees what we regard as lifeless and soulless as alive and conscious. Thus he gives not only body but soul to the wind when it whistles or howls at night. The most unpromising things come in for this warming vitalising touch of the child’s fancy. He will make something like a personality out of a letter. Thus one little fellow aged one year eight months conceived a special fondness for the letter W, addressing it thus: ‘Dear old boy W’. Another little boy well on in his fourth year, when tracing a letter L happened to slip so that the horizontal limb formed an angle thus, L-like character. He instantly saw the resemblance to the sedentary human form and said: “Oh, he’s sitting down”. Similarly when he made an F turn the wrong way and then put the correct form to the left thus, F reversed F, he exclaimed: “They’re talking together”.

Sometimes this endowment of things with feeling leads to a quaint manifestation of sympathy. Miss Ingelow writes of herself: When a little over two years old, and for about a year after “I had the habit of attributing intelligence not only to all living creatures, the same amount and kind of intelligence that I had myself, but even to stones and manufactured articles. I used to feel how dull it must be for the pebbles in the causeway to be obliged to lie still and only see what was round about. When I walked out with a little basket for putting flowers in I used sometimes to pick up a pebble or two and carry them on to have a change: then at the farthest point of the walk turn them out, not doubting that they would be pleased to have a new view.”^[15]

This is by no means a unique example of a quaint childish expression of pity for what we think the insentient world. Plant-life seems often to excite the feeling. Here is a quotation from a parent’s chronicle: “A girl aged eight, brings a quantity of fallen autumn leaves in to her mother, who says, ‘Oh! how pretty, F.!’ to which the girl answers: ‘Yes, I knew you’d love the poor things, mother, I couldn’t bear to see them dying on the ground’. A few days afterwards she was found standing at a window overlooking the garden crying bitterly at the falling leaves as they fell in considerable numbers.”

I need not linger on the products of this vitalising and personifying instinct, as we shall deal with them again when inquiring into children’s ideas about nature. Suffice it to say that it is wondrously active and far-reaching, constituting one chief manifestation of childish fancy.

Now it may be asked whether all this analogical extension of images to what seem to us such incongruous objects involves a vivid and illusory apprehension of these as transformed. Is the eyelid realised and even seen for the moment as a sort of curtain, the curtain-image blending with and transforming what is present to the eye? Are the pebbles actually viewed as living things condemned to lie stiffly in one place? It is of course hard to say, yet I think a conjectural answer can be given. In this imaginative contemplation of things the child but half observes what is present to his eyes, one or two points only of supreme interest in the visible thing, whether those of form, as in assimilating the piano-hammer to the owl, or of action, as the falling of the leaf, being selectively alluded to: while assimilative imagination overlaying the visual impression with the image of a similar object does the rest. In this way the actual field of objects is apt to get veiled, transformed by the wizard touch of a lively fancy.

No doubt there are various degrees of illusion here. In his matter-of-fact and really scrutinising mood a child will not confound what is seen with what is imagined: in this case the analogy recalled is distinguished and used as an explanation of what is seen—as when C. observed of the panting dog: ‘Dat bow-wow like puff-puff’. On the other hand when another little boy aged three years and nine months seeing the leaves falling exclaimed, “See, mamma, the leaves is flying like dickey-birds and little butterflies,” it is hard not to think that the child’s fancy for the moment transformed what he saw into these pretty semblances. And one may risk the opinion that, with the little thinking power and controlling force of will which a child possesses, such assimilative activity of imagination always tends to develop a degree of momentary illusion. There is, too, as we shall see later on, abundant evidence to show that children at first quite seriously believe that most things, at least, are alive and have their feelings.

There is another way in which imagination may combine with and transform sensible objects, viz., by what is commonly called association. Mr. Ruskin tells us that when young he associated the name ‘crocodile’ with the creature so closely that the long series of letters took on something of the look of its lanky body. The same writer speaks of a Dr. Grant, into whose therapeutic hands he fell when a child. "The name (he adds) is always associated in my mind with a brown powder—rhubarb or the like—of a gritty or acrid nature.... The name always sounded to me gr-r-ish and granular."

We can most of us perhaps, recall similar experiences, where colours and sounds, in themselves indifferent, took on either through analogy or association a decidedly repulsive character. How far, one wonders, does this process of transformation of things go in the case of imaginative children? There is some reason to say that it may go very far, and that, too, when there is no strong feeling at work cementing the combined elements. A child’s feeling for likeness is commonly keen and subtle, and knowledge of the real relations of things has not yet come to check the impulse to this free far-ranging kind of assimilation. Before the qualities and the connexions of objects are sufficiently known for them to be interesting in themselves, they can only acquire interest through the combining art of childish fancy. And the same is true of associated qualities. A child’s ear may not dislike a grating sound, a harsh noise, as our ear dislikes it, merely because of its effect on the sensitive organ. En revanche it will like and dislike sounds for a hundred reasons unknown to us, just because the quick strong fancy adding its life to that of the senses gives to their impressions much of their significance and much of their effect.

There is one new field of investigation which is illustrating in a curious way the wizard influence wielded by childish imagination over the things of sense. It is well known that a certain number of people habitually ‘colour’ the sounds they hear, imagining, for example, the sound of a vowel, or of a musical tone, to have its characteristic tint which they are able to describe accurately. This ‘coloured hearing,’ as it is called, is always traced back to the dimly recalled age of childhood. Children are now beginning to be tested and it is found that a good proportion possess the faculty. Thus, in some researches on the minds of Boston school-children, it was found that twenty-one out of fifty-three, or nearly 40 per cent., described the tones of certain instruments as coloured.^[16] The particular colour ascribed to an instrument, as also the degree of its brightness, though remaining constant in the case of the same child, varied greatly among different children, so that, for example, one child ‘visualised’ the tone of a fife as pale or bright, while another imaged it as dark.^[17] It is highly probable that both analogy and association play a part here.^[18] As was recently suggested to me by a correspondent the instance given by Locke of the analogy between scarlet and the note of a trumpet may easily be due in part at least to association of the tone with the scarlet uniform.

I may add that I once happened to overhear a little girl of six talking to herself about numbers in this wise: “Two is a dark number,” “forty is a white number”. I questioned her and found that the digits had each its distinctive colour; thus one was white; two, dark; three, white; four, dark; five, pink; and so on. Nine was pointed and dark, eleven dark green, showing that some of the digits were much more distinctly visualised than others. Just three years later I tested her again and found she still visualised the digits, but not quite in the same way. Thus although one and two were white and black and five pink as before, three was now grey, four was red, nine had lost its colour, and eleven oddly enough had turned from dark green to bright yellow. This case suggests that in early life new experiences and associations may modify the tint and shade of sounds. However this be, children’s coloured hearing is worth noting as the most striking example of the general tendency to overlay impressions of the senses with vivid images. It seems reasonable to suppose that coloured hearing and other allied phenomena, as the picturing of numbers, days of the week, etc., in a certain scheme or diagrammatic arrangement, when they show themselves after childhood are to be viewed as survivals of early fanciful brain-work. This fact taken along with the known vividness of the images in coloured hearing, which in certain cases approximate to sense-perceptions, seems to me to confirm the view here put forth that children’s imagination may alter the world of sense in ways which it is hard for our older and stiff-jointed minds to follow.

I have confined myself here to what I have called the play of imagination, the magic transmuting of things through the sheer liveliness and wanton activity of childish fancy. How strong, how vivid, how dominating such imaginative transformation may become will of course be seen in cases where violent feeling, especially fear, gives preternatural intensity to the mind’s realising power. But this will be better considered later on.

This transformation of the actual surroundings is of course restrained in serious moments, and in intercourse with older and graver folk. There is, however, a region of child-life where it knows no check, where the impulse to deck out the shabby reality with what is bright and gay has all its own way. This region is Play.

Imagination and Play.

The interest of child’s play in the present connexion lies in the fact that it is the working out into visible shape of an inner fancy. The actual presentation may be the starting-point of this process of imaginative projection: the child, for example, sees the sand, the shingle and shells, and says, ‘Let us play keeping a shop’. Yet this is accidental. The source of play is the impulse to realise a bright idea: whence, as we shall see by-and-by, its close kinship to art as a whole. This image is the dominating force, it is for the time a veritable idÉe fixe, and everything has to accommodate itself to this. Since the image has to be acted out, it comes into collision with the actual surroundings. Here is the child’s opportunity. The floor is instantly mapped out into two hostile territories, the sofa-end becomes a horse, a coach, a ship, or what not, to suit the exigencies of the play.

This stronger movement and wider range of imagination in children’s pastime is explained by the characteristic and fundamental impulse of play, the desire to be something, to act a part. The child-adventurer as he personates Robinson Crusoe or other hero steps out of his every-day self and so out of his every-day world. In realising his part he virtually transforms his surroundings, since they take on the look and meaning which the part assigns to them. This is prettily illustrated in one of Mr. Stevenson’s child-songs, “The Land of Counterpane,” in which a sick child describes the various transformations of the bed-scene:—

Who can say to how many and to what strange play-purposes that stolid unyielding-looking object a sofa-head has been turned by the ingenuity of the childish brain?

The impulse to act a part meets us very early and grows out of the assimilative instinct. The very infant will, if there is a cup to hand, pretend to drink out of it.^[19] Similarly a boy of two will put the stem of his father’s pipe into, or, if cautious, near his mouth, and make believe that he is smoking. A little boy not yet two years old would spend a whole wet afternoon “painting” the furniture with the dry end of a bit of rope. In such cases, it is evident, the playing may start from a suggestion supplied by the sight of an object. There is no need to suppose that in this simple kind of imitative play children knowingly act a part. It is surely to misunderstand the essence of play to speak of it as a fully conscious process of imitative acting.^[20] A child is one creature when he is truly at play, another when he is bent on astonishing or amusing you. It seems sufficient to say that when at play he is possessed by an idea, and is working this out into visible action. Your notice, your laughter, may bring in a new element of enjoyment; for as we all know, children are apt to be little actors in the full sense, and to aim at producing an impression. Yet the child as little needs your flattering observation as the cat needs it, when he plays in the full sense imaginatively, and in make-believe, with his captured mouse, placing it, for example, deliberately under a copper in the scullery, and amusing himself by the half-illusion of losing it. Indeed your intrusion will be just as likely to destroy or at least to diminish the charm of a child’s play, if only through your inability to seize his idea, and, what is equally important, to rise to his own point of enthusiasm and illusive realisation. Perhaps, indeed, one may say that the play-instinct is most vigorous and dominant when a child is alone, or at least self-absorbed; for even social play, delightful as it is when all the players are attuned, is subject to disturbance through a want of mutual comprehension and a need of half-disillusive explanations.^[21]

The essence of children’s play is the acting of a part and the realising of a new situation. It is thus, as we shall see more fully by-and-by, akin to dramatic action, only that the child’s ‘acting’ is like M. Jourdain’s prose, an unconscious art. The impulse to be something, a sailor, a soldier, a path-finder, or what not, absorbs the child and makes him forget his real surroundings and his actual self. His day-dreams, his solitary and apparently listless wanderings while he mutters mystic words to himself, all illustrate this desire to realise a part. In this playful self-projection a child will become even something non-human, as when he nips the ‘bread-and-cheese’ shoots off the bushes and fancies himself a horse.^[22] It is to be noted that such passing out of one’s ordinary self and assuming a foreign existence is confined to the child-player; the cat or the dog, though able, as Mr. Darwin and others have shown, to go through a kind of make-believe game, remaining always within the limits of his ordinary self.

Such play-like transmutation of the self extends beyond what we are accustomed to call play. One little boy of three and a half years who was fond of playing at the useful business of coal-heaving would carry his coal-heaver’s dream through the whole day, and on the particular day devoted to this calling would not only refuse to be addressed by any less worthy name, but ask in his prayer to be made a good coal-heaver (instead of the usual ‘good boy’). On other days this child lived the life of a robin redbreast, a soldier, and so forth, and bitterly resented his mother’s occasional confusion of his personalities. A little girl aged only one year and ten months insisted upon being addressed by a fancy name, Isabel, when she was put to bed, but would not be called by this name at any other time. She probably passed into what seemed to her another person when she went to bed and gave herself up to sweet ‘hypnagogic’ reverie.

In the working out of this impulse to realise a part the actual external surroundings may take a surprisingly small part. Sometimes there is scarcely any adjustment of scene: the child plays out his action with purely imaginary surroundings. Such simple play-actions as going to market to buy imaginary apples occur very early, one mother assuring me that all her children carried them out in the second year before they could talk. Another mother writes of her boy, aged two and a half years: “He amuses himself by pretending things. He will fetch an imaginary cake from a corner, rake together imaginary grass, or fight a battle with imaginary soldiers.” This reminds one of Mr. Stevenson’s lines:—

This impulse to invent imaginary surroundings, and more especially to create mythical companions, is very common among lonely and imaginative children. A lady friend, a German, tells me that when she was a little girl, a lonely one of course, she invented a kind of alter ego, another girl rather older than herself, whom she named ‘Krofa’—why she has forgotten. She made a constant playmate of her, and got all her new ideas from her. Mr. Canton’s little heroine took to nursing an invisible ‘iccle gaal’ (little girl), the image of which she seemed able to project into space.^[23] The invention of fictitious persons fills a large space in child-life. Perhaps if only the young imagination is strong enough there is, as already hinted, more of sweet illusion, of a warm grasp of living reality in this solitary play, where fictitious companions perfectly obedient to the little player’s will take the place of less controllable tangible ones. But such purely imaginative make-believe, which derives no help from actual things, is perhaps hardly ‘play’ in the full sense, but rather an active form of day-dreaming or romancing.^[24]

In much of this playful performance all the interference with actual surroundings that the child requires is change of place or scene. Here is a pretty example of this simple type of imaginative play. A child of twenty months, who is accustomed to meet a bonne and child in the Jardin du Luxembourg, suddenly leaves the family living-room, pronouncing indifferently well the names Luxembourg, nurse, and child. He goes into the next room, pretends to say “good-day” to his two out-door acquaintances, and then returns and simply narrates what he has been doing.^[25] Here the simple act of passing into an adjoining room was enough to secure the needed realisation of the encounter in the garden. The movement into the next room is suggestive. Primarily it meant no doubt the child’s manner of realising the out-of-door walk; yet I suspect there was another motive at work. Children love to enact their little play-scenes in some remote spot, withdrawn from notice, where imagination suffers no let from the interference of mother, nurse, or other member of the real environment. How many a thrilling exciting play has been carried out in a corner, especially if it be dark, or better still, screened off. The fascination of curtained spaces, as those behind the window curtains, or under the table with the table-cloth hanging low, will be fresh in the memory of all who can recall their childhood.

A step towards a more realistic kind of play-action, in which, as in the modern theatre, imagination is propped up by strong stage effects, is taken when a scene is constructed, the chairs and sofa turned into ships, carriages, a railway train, and so forth.

Yet, after all, the scene is but a very subordinate part of the play. Next to himself in his new part, proudly enjoying the consciousness of being a general, or a school-mistress, a child who is not content with the pure creations of his phantasy requires the semblance of living companions. In all play he desires somebody, if only as listener to his talk in his new character; and when he does not rise to an invisible auditor, he will talk to such unpromising things as a sponge in the bath, a fire-shovel, a clothes’ prop in the garden, and so forth. In more active play, where something has to be done, he generally desires a full companion and assistant, human or animal. And here we meet with what is perhaps the most interesting feature of childish play, the transmutation of the most meagre and least promising of things into complete living forms. I have already alluded to the sofa-head. How many forms of animal life, vigorous and untiring, from the patient donkey up to the untamed horse of the prairies, has this most inert-looking ridge served to image forth to quick boyish perception.

The introduction of these living things seems to illustrate the large compass of the child’s realising power. Mr. Ruskin speaks somewhere of “the perfection of child-like imagination, the power of making everything out of nothing”. “The child,” he adds, "does not make a pet of a mechanical mouse that runs about the floor.... The child falls in love with a quiet thing—with an ugly one—nay, it may be with one to us totally devoid of meaning. The besoin de croire precedes the besoin d’aimer."

The quotation brings us to the focus where the rays of childish imagination seem to converge, the transformation of toys.

The fact that children make living things out of their toy horses, dogs and the rest, is known to every observer of their ways. To the natural unsceptical eye the boy on his rudely carved “gee-gee” slashing the dull flank with all a boy’s glee, looks as if he were realising the joy of actual riding, as if he were possessed with the fancy that the stiff least organic-looking of structures which he strides is a very horse.

The liveliness of this realising imagination is seen in the extraordinary poverty and meagreness of the toys which to their happy possessors are wholly satisfying. Here is a pretty picture of child’s play from a German writer:—

The doll takes a supreme place in this fancy realm of play. It is human and satisfies higher instincts and emotions. As the French poet says, the little girl—

I read somewhere recently that the doll is a plaything for girls only: but boys, though they often prefer india-rubber horses and other animals, not infrequently go through a stage of doll-love also, and are hardly less devoted than girls. Endless is the variety of rÔle assigned to the doll as to the tiny shell in our last picture of play. The doll is the all-important comrade in that solitude À deux of which the child, like the adult, is so fond. Mrs. Burnett tells us that sitting holding her doll in the armchair of the parlour she would sail across enchanted seas to enchanted islands having all sorts of thrilling adventures. At another time when she wanted to act an Indian chief the doll just as obediently took up the part of squaw.

Very humanely, on the whole, is the little doll-lover wont to use her pet, even though, as George Sand reminds us, there come moments of rage and battering.^[27] A little boy of two and a half years asked his mother one day: “Will you give me all my picture-books to show dolly? I don’t know which he will like best.” He then pointed to each and looked at the doll’s face for the answer. He made believe that it selected one, and then gravely showed it all the pictures, saying: “Look here, dolly!” and carefully explaining them.

The doll illustrates the childish attitude towards all toys, the impulse to take them into the innermost and warmest circle of personal intimacy, to make them a living part of himself. A child’s language, as we shall see later, points to an early identification of self with belongings. The ‘me’ and the ‘my’ are the same, or nearly the same, to a mite of three. This impulse to attach the doll to self, or to embrace it within the self-consciousness or self-feeling, shows itself in odd ways. In the grown-up child, Laura Bridgman, it took the form of putting a bandage like her own over her doll’s eyes. This resembles a case of a girl of six, who when recovering from measles was observed to be busily occupied with her dolls, each of which she painted over with bright red spots. The dolly must do all, and be all that I am: so the child in his warm attachment seems to argue. This feeling of oneness is strengthened by that of exclusive possession, the sense that the child himself is the only one who really knows dolly, can hear her cry when she cries and so forth.^[28] It is another manifestation of the same feeling of intimacy and solidarity when a child insists on dolly’s being treated by others as courteously as himself. Children will often expect the mother or nurse to kiss and say good-night to their pet or pets—for their hearts are capacious—when she says good-night to themselves.

Here, nobody can surely doubt, we have clearest evidence of play-illusion. The lively imagination endows the inert wooden thing with the warmth of life and love. How large a part is played here by the alchemist, fancy, is known to all observers of children’s playthings. The faith and the devotion often seem to increase as the first meretricious charms, the warm tints of the cheek and the lips, the well-shaped nose, the dainty clothes, prematurely fade, and the lovely toy which once kept groups of hungry-looking children gazing long at the shop-window, is reduced to the naked essence of a doll. A child’s constancy to his doll when thus stript of exterior charms and degraded to the lowest social stratum of dolldom is one of the sweetest and most humorous things in child-life.

And then what rude unpromising things are adopted as doll-pets. Mrs. Burnett tells us she once saw a dirty mite sitting on a step in a squalid London street, cuddling warmly a little bundle of hay tied round the middle by a string. Here, surely, the besoin d’aimer was little if anything behind the besoin de croire.

Do any of us really understand this doll-superstition? Writers of a clear long-reaching memory have tried to take us back to childhood, and restore to us for a moment the whole undisturbed trust, the perfect satisfaction of love, which the child brings to its doll. Yet even the imaginative genius of a George Sand is hardly equal, perhaps, to the feat of resuscitating the buried companion of our early days and making it live once more before our eyes.^[29] The truth is the doll-illusion is one of the first to pass. There are, I believe, a few sentimental girls who, when they attain the years of enlightenment, make a point of saving their dolls from the general wreckage of toys. Yet I suspect the pets when thus retained are valued more for the outside charm of pretty face and hair, and still more for the lovely clothes, than for the inherent worth of the doll itself, of what we may call the doll-soul which informs it and gives it, for the child, its true beauty and its worth.

Yet if we cannot get inside the old doll-superstition we may study it from the outside, and draw a helpful comparison between it and other known forms of naÏve credulity. And here we have the curious fact that the doll exists not only for the child but for the “nature man”. Savages, Sir John Lubbock tells us,^[30] like toys, such as dolls, Noah’s Arks, etc. The same writer remarks that the doll is “a hybrid between the baby and the fetish, and that it exhibits the contradictory characters of its parents”. Perhaps the changes of mood towards the doll, of which George Sand writes, illustrate the alternating preponderance of the baby and the fetish half. But as Sir John also remarks, this hybrid is singularly unintelligible to grown-up people, and it seems the part of modesty here to bow to one of nature’s mysteries.

It has been suggested to me by Mr. F. Galton that a useful inquiry might be carried out into the relation between a child’s preference in the matter of doll or other toy and the degree of his imaginativeness as otherwise shown, e.g., in craving for story, and in romancing. So far as I have inquired I am disposed to think that such a relation exists. A lady who has had a large experience as a Kindergarten teacher tells me that children who play with rough shapeless things, and readily endow with life the ball, and so forth, in Kindergarten games are imaginative in other ways. Here is an example:—

Children sometimes make babies of their younger brothers and sisters, going through all the sweet solicitous offices which others are wont to carry out on their dolls.^[31] This suggests another and closely related question: Do the more imaginative children prefer the inert, ugly doll to the living child in these nursing pastimes? What is the real relation in the child’s play between the toy-companion, the doll or india-rubber dog, and the living companion? Again, a child will occasionally play with an imaginary doll.^[32] How is this impulse related to the other two forms of doll-passion? These points would well repay a careful investigation.

The vivification of the doll or toy animal is the outcome of the play-impulse, and this, as we have seen, is an impulse to act out, to realise an idea in outward show. The absorption in the idea and its outward expression serves, as in the case of the hypnotised subject, to blot out the incongruities of scene and action which you or I, a cold observer, would note. The play-idea works transformingly by a process analogous to what is called auto-suggestion.

How complete this play-illusion may become here can be seen in more ways than one. We see it in the jealous insistence already illustrated that everything shall for the time pass over from the every-day world into the new fancy-created one. “About the age of four,” writes M. Egger of his boys, “Felix is playing at being coachman, Emile happens to return home at the moment. In announcing his brother, Felix does not say, ‘Emile is come,’ he says ‘The brother of the coachman is come’.”^[33]

As we saw above, the child’s absorption in his new play-world is shown by his imperious demand that others, as his mother, shall recognise his new character. Pestalozzi’s little boy, aged three years and a half, was one day playing at being butcher, when his mother called him by his usual diminutive, ‘Jacobli’. He at once replied: “No, no; you should call me butcher now”.^[34] Here is a story to the same effect, sent me by a mother. A little girl of four was playing ‘shops’ with her younger sister. “The elder one was shopman at the time I came into her room and kissed her. She broke out into piteous sobs, I could not understand why. At last she sobbed out: ‘Mother, you never kiss the man in the shop’. I had with my kiss quite spoilt her illusion.”

The intensity of the realising power of imagination in play is seen too in the stickling for fidelity to the original in all playful reproduction, whether of scenes observed in everyday life or of what has been narrated. The same little boy who showed his picture-books to dolly was, we are told, when two years and eight months old, fond of imagining that he was Priest, his grandmamma’s coachman. “He drives his toy horse from the arm-chair as a carriage, getting down every minute to ‘let the ladies out,’ or to ‘go shopping’. The make-believe extends to his insisting on the reins being held while he gets down and so forth.” The same thing shows itself in acting out stories. The full enjoyment of the realisation depends on the faithful reproduction, on the suitable outward embodiment of the distinct idea in the child’s mind.

The following anecdote bears another kind of testimony, a most winsome kind, to the realising power of play. One day two sisters said to one another: “Let us play being sisters”. This might well sound insane enough to hasty ears; but is it not really eloquent? To me it suggests that the girls felt they were not realising their sisterhood, enjoying all the possible sweets of it, as they wanted to do—perhaps there had been a quarrel and a supervening childish coldness. And they felt too that the way to get this more vivid sense of what they were, or ought to be, one to the other, was by playing the part, by acting a scene in which they would come close to one another in warm sympathetic fellowship.

But there is still another, and some will think a more conclusive way of satisfying ourselves of the reality of the play-illusion. The child finds himself confronted by the unbelieving adult who questions what he says about the doll’s crying and so forth. One little girl, aged one year and nine months, when asked by her mother how her doll, who had lost his arms, ate his dinner without hands, quickly changed the subject. She did not apparently like having difficulties brought into her happy play-world. But the true tenacious faith shows itself later when the child understands these sceptical questionings of others, and sees that they are poking fun at his play and his day-dreamings. Such cruel quizzings of his make-believe are apt to cut him to the quick. I have heard of children who will cry if a stranger suddenly enters the nursery when they are hard at play, and shows himself unsympathetic and critical.

Play may produce not only this vivid imaginative realisation at the time, but a sort of mild permanent illusion. Sometimes it is a toy-horse, in one case communicated to me it was a funny-looking toy-lion, more frequently it is the human effigy, the doll, which as the result of successive acts of imaginative vivification gets taken up into the relation of permanent companion and pet. Clusters of happy associations gather about it, investing it with a lasting vitality and character. A mother once asked her boy of two and a half years if his doll was a boy or a girl. He said at first, “A boy,” but presently correcting himself added, “I think it is a baby”. Here we have a challenging of the inner conviction by a question, a moment of reflexion, and as a result of this, an unambiguous confession of faith that the doll had its place in the living human family.

Here is a more stubborn exhibition on the part of another boy of this lasting faith in the plaything called out by others’ sceptical attitude. "When (writes a lady correspondent) he was just over two years old L. began to speak of a favourite wooden horse (Dobbin) as if it were a real living creature. ‘No tarpenter (carpenter) made Dobbin,’ he would say, ‘he is not wooden but kin (skin) and bones and Dod (God) made him.’ If any one said ‘it’ in speaking of the horse his wrath was instantly aroused, and he would shout indignantly: ‘It! You mutt’ent tay “it,” you mut tay he’. He imagined the horse was possessed of every virtue and it was strange to see what an influence this creature of his own imagination exercised over him. If there was anything L. particularly wished not to do his mother had only to say: ‘Dobbin would like you to do this,’ and it was done without a murmur."

There is another domain of childish activity closely bordering on that of play where a like suffusion of the world of sense by imagination meets us. I refer to pictures and artistic representations generally. If in the case of adults there is a half illusion, a kind of oneirotic or trance condition induced by a picture or dramatic spectacle, in the case of the less-instructed child the illusion is apt to become more complete. A picture seems very much of a toy to a child. A baby of eight or nine months will talk to a picture as to a living thing; and something of this tendency to make a fetish of a drawing survives much later. But it will be more convenient to deal with the attitude of the child-mind towards pictorial representations in connexion with his art-tendencies.

The imaginative transformation of things, more particularly the endowing of lifeless things with life, enters, I believe, into all children’s pastimes. Whence comes the perennial charm, the undying popularity, of the hoop? Is not the interest here due to the circumstance that the child controls a moving thing which in the capricious variations of its course simulates a free will of its own? As I understand it, trundling the hoop is imaginative play hardly less than riding the horse-stick and slashing its flanks. Who again that can recall early experiences will doubt that the delight of flying the kite, of watching it as it sways to the right or to the left, threatening to fall head-foremost to earth, and most of all perhaps of sending a paper ‘messenger’ along the string to the wee thing poised like a bird so terribly far away in the blue sky, is the delight of imaginative play? The same is true of sailing boats, and other pastimes of early childhood.

I have here touched merely on the imaginative and half-illusory side of children’s play. It is to be remembered, however, that play is much more than this, and reflects much more of the childish mind. Play proper as distinguished from mere day-dreaming is activity and imitative activity; and children show marked differences in the energy of this activity, and in the quickness and closeness of their responses to the model actions of the real nurse, real coachman, and so forth. That is to say, observation of others will count here. Again, while social surroundings, opportunities for imitation, are important, they are by no means all-decisive. Children show a curious selectiveness in their imitative games, germs of differential interest, sexual and individual, revealing themselves quite early. It may be added that a child with few opportunities of observation may get quite enough play-material from storyland. But play is never merely imitative, save indeed in the case of unintelligent and ‘stoggy’ children. It is a bright invention into which all the gifts of childish intelligence may pour themselves. The relation of play to art will engage us later on.

Free Projection of Fancies.

In play and the kindred forms of imaginative activity just dealt with, we have been concerned with imaginative realisation in its connexion with sense-perception. And here, it is to be noticed, there is a kind of reciprocal action between sense and imagination. On the one hand, as we have seen, imagination interposes a coloured medium, so to speak, between the eye and the object, so that it becomes transformed and beautified. On the other hand, in what is commonly called playing, imaginative activity receives valuable aid from the senses. The stump of a doll, woefully unlike as it is to what the child’s fancy makes it, is yet a sensible fact, and as such gives support and substance to the realising impulse.

Now this fact that imagination derives support from sense leads to a habit of projecting fancies, and giving them an external and local habitation. In this way the idea receives a certain solidity and fixity through its embodiment in the real physical world.

This incorporation of images in the system of the real world may, like play, start at one of two ends. On the one hand, the external world, so far as it is only dimly perceived, excites wonder, curiosity, and the desire to fill in the blank spaces with at least the semblance of knowledge. Here distance exercises a strange fascination. The remote chain of hills faintly visible from the child’s home, has been again and again endowed by his enriching fancy with all manner of wondrous scenery and peopled by all manner of strange creatures. The unapproachable sky—which to the little one, so often on his back, is much more of a visible object than to us—with its wonders of blue expanse and cloudland, of stars and changeful moon, is wont to occupy his mind, his bright fancy quite spontaneously filling out this big upper world with appropriate forms.

This stimulating effect of the half-perceivable is seen in still greater intensity in the case of what is hidden from sight. The spell cast on the young mind by the mystery of holes, and especially of dark woods, and the like, is known to all. C.’s peopling of a dark wood with his bÊtes noires the wolves illustrates this tendency.

“What (writes a German author already quoted) all childish fancy has almost without exception in common, is the idea of a wholly new and unheard-of world behind the remote horizon, behind woods, lakes and hills, and all objects reached by the eye. When I was a child and we played hide and seek in the barn, I always felt that there must or might be behind every bundle of straw, and especially in the corners, something unheard of lying hidden. And yet I had no profane curiosity, no desire to experiment by turning over the bundle of straw. It was just a fancy, and though I half recognised it as such it was lively enough to engage me as a reality.” The same writer goes on to describe how his imagination ever occupied itself with what lay behind the long stretch of wood which closed in a large part of his child’s horizon.^[35]

This imaginative filling up of the remote and the hidden recesses of the outer world is subject to manifold stimulating influences from the region of feeling. We know that all vivid imagination is charged with emotion, and this is emphatically true of children’s phantasies. The unseen, the hidden, contains unknown possibilities, something awful, terrible, it may be, to make the timid wee thing shudder in anticipatory vision, or wondrously and surprisingly beautiful. How far the childish attitude is from intellectual curiosity is seen in the remark of Goltz, that no impious attempt is made to probe the mystery.

The other way in which this happy fusion of fancy with incomplete perception may be effected is through the working of the impulse to give outward embodiment to vivid and persistent images. All play, as we have seen, is an illustration of the impulse, and certain kinds of play show the working of the impulse in its purity. It extends, however, beyond the limits of what is commonly known as play. The instance quoted above, the peopling of a certain wood with wolves by the child C., was of course due in part to the fact that the small impressionable brain was at this time much occupied with the idea of the wolf. Dickens and others have told us how when children they were wont to project into the real world the lively images acquired from storyland. When suitable objects present themselves the images are naturally enough linked on to these. Thus Dickens writes: “Every burn in the neighbourhood, every stone of the church, every foot of the churchyard had some association of its own in my mind connected with these books (Roderic Random, Tom Jones, Gil Blas, etc.), and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Piper go climbing up the church steeple; I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back stopping to rest himself on the wicket-gate.”^[36]

Along with this attachment of images to definite objects there goes a good deal of vague localisation in dim half-realised quarters of space. The supernatural beings, the fairies, the bogies, and the rest, are, as might be expected, relegated to these obscure and impenetrable regions. It would be worth while perhaps to collect a children’s comparative mythology, if only to see what different localities, geographic and cosmic, the childish mind is apt to assign to his fabulous beings. The poor fairies seem to have been forced to find an abode in most dissimilar regions. The boy C. selected the wall of his bedroom—hardly a dignified abode, though it had the merit of being within reach of his prayers. A child less bent on turning the superior personages to practical account will set them in some remoter quarter, in a vast forest, or deep cavern, on a distant hill, or higher up in the blue above the birds. But systems of child-mythology will occupy us again.

Imagination and Storyland.

We may now pass to a freer region of imaginative activity where the child’s mind gives life and reality to its images without incorporating them into the outer sensible world, even to the extent of talking to invisible playmates. The world of story, as distinct from that of play, is the great illustration of this detached activity of fancy.

The entrance into storyland can only take place when the key of language is put into the child’s hand. A story is a verbal representation of a scene or action, and the process of imaginative realisation depends in this case on the stimulating effect of words in their association with ideas. Now a word has not for a child the peculiar force of an imitative sensuous impression, say that of a picture. The toy, the picture, being, however roughly, a likeness or show, brings the idea before the child’s eyes in a way in which the word-symbol cannot do. Yet we may easily underestimate the stimulating effect of words on children’s minds, which are much more tender and susceptible than we are wont to suppose. To call out to a child, ‘Bow, wow!’ or ‘Policeman!’ may be to excite in his mind a vivid image which is in itself an approach to a complete sensuous realisation of the thing. We cannot understand the fascination of a story for children save by remembering that for their young minds, quick to imagine and unversed in abstract reflexion, words are not dead thought-symbols, but truly alive and perhaps “winged” as the old Greeks called them.

It may not be easy to explain fully this stimulating power of words on the childish mind. There is some reason to say that in these early days spoken words as sounds for the ear have in themselves something of the immediate objective reality of all sense-impressions, so that to name a thing is in a sense to make it present. However this be, words as sense-presentations have a powerful suggestive effect on children’s imagination, calling up particularly vivid images of the objects named. The effect is probably aided by the child’s nascent feeling of reverence for another’s words as authoritative utterances.

This impulse to realise words makes the child a listener much more frequently than we suppose. How often is the mother surprised and amused at a question put by her child about something said in his presence to a servant, a visitor, or a workman; something which in her grown-up way she assumed would not be of the slightest interest to him. In this manner, words soon become a great power in the new wondering life of a child. They lodge like flying seedlings in the fertile brain, and shoot up into strange imaginative growths. But of this more by-and-by.

This profound and lasting effect of words is nowhere more clearly seen than in the spell of the story. We grown-up people are wont to flatter ourselves that we read stories: the child, if he could know what we call reading, would laugh at it. With what deftness does the little brain disentangle the language, often strange and puzzling enough, reducing it by a secret child-art to simplicity and to reality. A mother when reading a poem to her boy of six, ventured to remark, “I’m afraid you can’t understand it, dear,” for which she got duly snubbed by her little master in this fashion: “Oh, yes, I can very well, if only you would not explain”. The explaining is resented because it interrupts the child’s own spontaneous image-building, wherein lies the charm, because it rudely breaks the spell of the illusion, calling off the attention from the vision he sees in the word-crystal, which is all he cares about, to the cold lifeless crystal itself.

And what a bright vision it is that is there gained. How clearly scene after scene of the dissolving view unfolds itself. How thrilling the anticipation of the next unknown, undiscernible stage in the history. Perhaps no one has given us a better account of the state of absorption in storyland, the oneirotic or dream-like condition of complete withdrawal from the world of sense into an inner world of fancy, than Thackeray. In one of his delightful “Roundabout Papers,” he thus writes of the experiences of early boyhood. "Hush! I never read quite to the end of my first Scottish Chiefs. I couldn’t. I peeped in an alarmed furtive manner at some of the closing pages.... Oh, novels, sweet and delicious as the raspberry open tarts of budding boyhood! Do I forget one night after prayers (when we under-boys were sent to bed) lingering at my cupboard to read one little half-page more of my dear Walter Scott—and down came the monitor’s dictionary on my head!"

As one thinks of the deep delights of these first excursions into storyland one almost envies the lucky boys whom the young Charles Dickens held spellbound with his tales.

The intensity of the delight is seen in the greed it generates. Who can resist the child’s hungry demand for a story? Edgar Quinet in his Histoire de mes IdÉes tells how when a child an old corporal came to drill him. He had been taken prisoner by the Spaniards and placed on an inaccessible island. Edgar loved to hear the thrilling story of the old soldier’s adventures, and scarcely was the narrative finished when the greedy boy would exclaim, “Encore une fois!” Heine’s delight when a boy at DÜsseldorf in drinking in the stories of Napoleon’s exploits from his drummer is another well-known illustration.

Through the perfect gift of visual realisation which a child brings to it the verbal narrative becomes a record of fact, a true history. The intense enjoyment which is bound up with this process of imaginative realisation makes children jealously exact as to accuracy in repetition. The boy C. when a story was repeated to him used to resent even a small alteration of the text. Woe to the unfortunate mother who in telling one of the good stock nursery tales varies a detail. One such, a friend of mine, repeating ‘Puss in Boots’ inadvertently made the hero sit on a chair instead of on a box to pull on his boots. She was greeted by a sharp volley of ‘No’s!’ The same lady tells me that when narrating the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ for the second time only she forgot in describing the effect of the Beast’s sighing to add after the words ‘till the glasses on the table shake’ ‘and the candles are nearly blown out’; whereupon the severe little listener at once stopped the narrator and supplied the interesting detail. The exacting memory of childhood in the matter of stories is the product of a full detailed realisation. In the case just quoted the reality of the story was contradicted by substituting a stupid conventional chair for the box, and by omitting the striking incident of the candles.

Happy age of childhood, when a new and wondrous world, created wholly by the magic of a lively phantasy, rivals in brightness, in distinctness of detail, aye, and in steadfastness too, the nearest spaces of the world on which the bodily eye looks out, before reflexion has begun to draw a hard dividing line between the domains of historical truth and fiction.

As the demand for faithful repetition of story shows, the imaginative realisation continues when the story is no longer heard or read. It has added something to the child’s inner supplementary world, given him one more lovely region in which he may live blissful moments. The return of the young mind to the persons and scenes of story is forcibly illustrated in the impulse, already touched on, to act out in play the parts of this and that heroic figure. With many children any narrative which holds the imagination delightfully enthralled is likely to become more fully realised in a visible embodiment. For instance, a child of five years, when told a story of four men going along a railway to stop a train before it neared a bridge which was on fire, at once proceeded to play the incident with his toy train. Here we see how story by contributing lively images to the child’s brain becomes one main stimulative and guiding influence in the domain of play. In like manner the images born of story may, as in the case of Dickens, attach themselves permanently to particular localities and objects.

To this lively imaginative reception of what is told him the child is apt very soon to join his own free inventions of figures, human, superhuman, or subhuman. The higher qualities of this invention properly come under the head of child-art, and will have to be considered in another chapter. Here we may glance at these inventions as illustrating the realising power of the child’s imagination.

This invention appears in a sporadic manner in occasional ‘romancings’ which may set out from some observation of the senses. A little boy aged three and a half years seeing a tramp limping along with a bad leg exclaimed: “Look at that poor ole man, mamma, he has dot (got) a bad leg”. Then romancing, as he was now wont to do: “He dot on a very big ’orse, and he fell off on some great big stone, and he hurt his poor leg and he had to get a big stick. We must make it well.” Then after a thoughtful pause: “Mamma, go and kiss the place and put some powdey (powder) on it and make it well like you do to I”. The unmistakable childish seriousness here, the outflow of young compassion, and the charming enforcement of the nursery prescription, all point to a vivid realisation of this extemporised little romance. This child was moreover more than commonly tender-hearted, and perhaps the more exposed on that account to such amiable self-deception. Another small boy when a little over two years, happening to hear a buzzing on the window, said: “Mamma, bumble-bee in a window says it wants a yump (lump) of sugar”: then shaking his head sternly, added: “Soon make you heat-spots, bumble-bee”. Other examples of this romancing will be met with in the notes on the child C.

In such simple fashion does the child build up a tiny myth on the basis of some passing impression, supplying out of his quaintly stored fancy unlooked-for adornments to the homely occurrences of every-day life.

Partly by taking in and fully realising the wonders of story, partly by the independent play of an inventive imagination, children’s minds pass under the dominion of more or less enduring myths. The princes and princesses and dwarfs and gnomes of fairy-tale, the workers of Christmas miracles, Santa Claus and Father Christmas, as well as the beings fashioned by the child’s imagination on the model of those he knows from story, these live on like the people of the every-day world, are apt to appear in dreams, in the dark, at odd dreamy moments when the things of sense lose their hold, bringing into the child’s life golden sunlight or black awful shadows, the most real of all realities.

This childish belief in myth is often curiously tenacious. A father was once surprised to find that his boy aged five years and ten months continued naÏvely to believe in the real personality of Santa Claus. It was Christmastide and the father, in order to test the child’s credulity, put his own pocket-knife into the stocking which Santa Claus was supposed to fill. The child, though he knew his father’s knife very well, did not in the least suspect that the knife he found in the stocking had been placed there by human hands, but expressed himself as pleased that Santa Claus had sent him one like his father’s. When his father followed this up by telling him that he had lost his knife, and by searching for it in the boy’s presence, the latter asked whether Santa Claus had stolen the knife—thus showing how its close similarity to the knife he had received had impressed him, though he would not for a moment doubt the fact of its coming from the mysterious personage. It might be thought that this child was particularly stupid. On the contrary he was well above the average in intelligence. In proof of this I may relate that the Christmas before this, that is to say when he was under five years, he was the only one among thirty children who recognised his uncle when extremely well disguised as Father Christmas. When asked by his father why he thought it was his uncle, he said at first he didn’t know, but thinking a moment he added, “I don’t see who else there is,” showing that he had reasoned out his belief by a method of exclusion.

Of course it will be said that I am here selecting exceptional cases of childish imagination. I am quite ready to admit the probability of this. The best examples of any trait of the young mind will obviously be supplied by those who have most of this trait. Yet I very much suspect that ordinary and even dull children are wont to hide away a good deal of such superstitious belief. “One of the greatest pleasures of childhood,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Poet of the Breakfast Table, “is found in the mysteries which it hides from the scepticism of the elders and works up into small mythologies of its own.”

I have treated the myths of children as a product of pure imagination, of the impulse to realise in vivid images what lies away from and above the world of sense. Yet, as we shall see later, they are really more than this. They contain, like the myths of primitive man, a true germ of thought.

In George Sand’s recollections we shall meet with a striking illustration of how the vivid imagination of supernatural beings is followed up by a reflective and half-scientific effort to connect the myth with the facts and laws of the known world. This infusion of childish reason into wonderland, the first crude attempt to adjust belief to belief, and to find points of attachment for the much-loved myth in the matter-of-fact world, is apt to lead, as we shall see, to a good deal that is very quaint and characteristic in the child’s mythology.

The conclusion which observation of children leads us to is that, as compared with adults, they are endowed with strong imaginative power, the activity of which leads to a surprisingly intense inner realisation of what lies above sense. For the child, as for primitive man, reality is a projection of fancy as well as an assurance of sense.

Now this conclusion is, I think, greatly strengthened by all that we know of the conditions of the brain-life in children, and of the many perturbations to which it is liable. With respect to this brain-life we have to remember that in the first years the higher cortical centres which take part in the co-ordinative and regulative processes of thought and volition are but very imperfectly developed. Hence the centres concerned in imagination—which, if not identical with what used to be called the sensorium or seat of sensation, are in closest connexion with it—are not checked and inhibited by the action of the higher centres as is the case with us. By exercising a volitional control over the flow of our ideas, we are able to reason away a fancy, and generally to guard ourselves against error. In young children all ideas that grow clear and full under the stimulus of a strong interest are apt to persist and to become preternaturally vivid. As has been suggested by more than one recent writer on childhood and education, the brain of a child has a slight measure of that susceptibility to powerful illusory suggestion which characterises the brain of a hypnotised subject. Savages, who show so striking a resemblance to children in the vivacity and the dominance of their fancy, are probably much nearer to the child than to the civilised adult in the condition of their brain.

This preternatural liveliness of the images of the imperfectly developed brain exposes children, as we know, to disturbing illusion. The effect of bad dreams, of intense feeling, particularly of fear, in developing illusory belief in sensitive and delicate children is familiar enough, and will be dealt with again later on. Some parents feel the dangers of such disturbance so keenly that they think it best to cut their children off from the world of fiction altogether. But this is surely an error. For one thing children who are strongly imaginative will be certain to indulge their fancies, as the BrontË girls did, even when no fiction is supplied and their eager little minds are thrown on the matter-of-fact newspaper. A child needs not to be deprived of story altogether, but to be supplied with bright and happy stories, in which the gruesome element is subordinate. Specially sensitive children should, I think, be guarded against much that from an older point of view is classic, as some of the ‘creepy’ stories in Grimm, though there are no doubt hardy young nerves which can thrill enjoyably under these horrors. As to confusing a child’s sense of truth by indulging him in story, the evil seems to me problematic, and, if it exists at all, only slight and temporary. But I hope to touch on this aspect of the subject in the next chapter.

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