HE last two centuries have been largely scientific and analytic. The effort has been to get away from the pictorial and symbolic, to get at the exact facts. Yet, after each new step forward in exact thinking, comes the reaction toward the more poetic forms of thought. The human imagination becomes hungry and demands that it shall have its share of intellectual food as well as the human reason. This is the secret of the power which the world’s great poets have always exercised. They throw essential truth back into its embodied or symbolic form, so that the imagination may see it pictured forth even where the reasoning power is not strong enough to grasp it in its abstract form.
The “myth” has always been the great educator of the race. The mighty prophets and seers of the past ages have ever made use of it as a means by which to express God’s messages to mankind.
Froebel, the apostle of childhood, illustrates to the mother how she can give an impression of a great spiritual law by means of a certain poetic presentation in play. He then adds:
“Behold then in this little play
A world-wide truth set free!
Easily may a symbol teach
What thy reason cannot reach.”
In fact, almost all of the kindergarten songs and stories and games have in them an inner or symbolic meaning. They not only teach to the child the facts of the world about him and guide him to observe accurately such properties of matter as form, color, number, position, size, etc., but they give him much deeper, more significant impressions of higher things.
One can see, at once, the direct connection between the study of the great poets of the world—there are not more than half a dozen of them—and the nursery and the kindergarten. The mother-heart of the race has instinctively felt this connection, and the folk lore of the ages has been handed down to us in nursery tale and childish legend. But the educators of older people do not always make use of the pictured forms of truth. The greatest educator that earth has ever known spake not unto the multitude—except by parables. His method of teaching has never been excelled.
The study of Dante emphasizes the value of the poetic