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.