Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/341

Rh 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 battlefield? 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, have told 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, for example, 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 reconsideration, in the light of these, of hasty theories. 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 wells up from the fount of a child's fantasy.

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 Fantasy holding the hand of—Reason as yet sadly rickety on his legs—and showing him which way he should take. In the beginning of the moral life, again, we shall see how easily the realizing force of young imagination may expose its possessor to deception by others, and to self-deception too, with results that clearly 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 a child's will, moving it dutyward.

The play of the young imagination meets us in the domain of sense-observation: a child is fancying when it 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, fantasy comes 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