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,
. 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,
, he exclaimed: “They’re talking together”.