Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/199

Rh moon and star as mamma and baby. So it does not talk of abstract force, but figures some concrete form of agency, as in explaining the wind by the idea of somebody's waving a big fan somewhere. This first crude attempt of the child to envisage the world is indeed largely mythological, proceeding by the invention of concrete and highly pictorial ideas of fairies, giants, and their doings.

The element of thought comes in with the recognition of the real as such and with the application of the products of young fantasy to comprehending and explaining this reality. And here we see how this primitive child-thought, though it remains instinct with glowing imagery, differentiates itself from pure fancy. This last knows no restraint, and aims only at the delight of its spontaneous playlike movements, whereas thought is essentially the serious work of realizing and understanding what exists. The contrast is seen plainly enough if we consider first the mental attitude of the child when he is frankly romancing, giving out now and again a laugh which shows that he himself fully recognizes the absurdity of his talk; and, secondly, his attitude when in gravest of moods he is calling upon his fancy to aid reason in explaining some puzzling fact. How early this splitting of the child's imaginative activity into these two forms, the playful and the thoughtful, takes place, is not, I think, very easy to determine. Many children at least are apt at first to take all that is told them as gospel. To most children of three and four, I suspect, fairyland, if imagined at all, is as much a reality as the visible world. The disparity of its contents, the fairies, dragons, and the rest, with those of the world of sense does not trouble their mind, the two worlds not being as yet mentally juxtaposed and dovetailed one into the other. It is only later, when the desire to understand overtakes and even passes the impulse to frame bright and striking images, and, as a result of this, critical reflection applies itself to the nursery legends and detects their incongruity with the world of e very-day perception, that a clear distinction comes to be drawn between reality and fiction, what exists and can (or might) be verified by sense, and what is only pictured by the mind. When this date is reached, the child's imaginative activity, losing its first naïveté and unconsciousness of its own worth, becomes conscious of itself; that is to say, the child, when framing his mental pictures, is aware that he is playing, pretending, or fooling; or, on the other hand, trying to understand things.

With this preliminary peep into the modus operandi of children's thought, let us see what sort of ideas of things they fashion.

Beginning with their ideas of natural objects we find, as has been hinted, the influence of certain predominant tendencies. Of