Of course it will be said that I am here selecting exceptional cases of childish imagination. I am quite ready to admit the probability of this. The best examples of any trait of the young mind will obviously be supplied by those who have most of this trait. Yet I very much suspect that ordinary and even dull children are wont to hide away a good deal of such superstitious belief. “One of the greatest pleasures of childhood,” says Oliver Wendell Holmes in The Poet of the Breakfast Table, “is found in the mysteries which it hides from the scepticism of the elders and works up into small mythologies of its own.”
I have treated the myths of children as a product of pure imagination, of the impulse to realise in vivid images what lies away from and above the world of sense. Yet, as we shall see later, they are really more than this. They contain, like the myths of primitive man, a true germ of thought.
In George Sand’s recollections we shall meet with a striking illustration of how the vivid imagination of supernatural beings is followed up by a reflective and half-scientific effort to connect the myth with the facts and laws of the known world. This infusion of childish reason into wonderland, the first crude attempt to adjust belief to belief, and to find points of attachment for the much-loved myth in the matter-of-fact world, is apt to lead, as we shall see, to a good deal that is very quaint and characteristic in the child’s mythology.
The conclusion which observation of children leads us to is that, as compared with adults, they are endowed with strong imaginative power, the activity of which leads to a surprisingly intense inner realisation of what lies above sense. For the child, as for primitive man, reality is a projection of fancy as well as an assurance of sense.
Now this conclusion is, I think, greatly strengthened by all that we know of the conditions of the brain-life in children, and of the many perturbations to which it is liable. With respect to this brain-life we have to remember that in the first years the higher cortical centres which take part in the co-ordinative and regulative processes of thought and volition are but very imperfectly developed. Hence the centres concerned in imagination—which, if not identical with what used to be called the sensorium or seat of sensation, are in closest connexion with it—are not checked and inhibited by the action of the higher centres as is the case with us. By exercising a volitional control over the flow of our ideas, we are able to reason away a fancy, and generally to guard ourselves against error. In young children all ideas that grow clear and full under the stimulus of a strong interest are apt to persist and to become preternaturally vivid. As has been suggested by more than one recent writer on childhood and education, the brain of a child has a slight measure of that susceptibility to powerful illusory suggestion which characterises the brain of a hypnotised subject. Savages, who show so striking a resemblance to children in the vivacity and the dominance of their fancy, are probably much nearer to the child than to the civilised adult in the condition of their brain.
This preternatural liveliness of the images of the imperfectly developed brain exposes children, as we know, to disturbing illusion. The effect of bad dreams, of intense feeling, particularly of fear, in developing illusory belief in sensitive and delicate children is familiar enough, and will be dealt with again later on. Some parents feel the dangers of such disturbance so keenly that they think it best to cut their children off from the world of fiction altogether. But this is surely an error. For one thing children who are strongly imaginative will be certain to indulge their fancies, as the Brontë girls did, even when no fiction is supplied and their eager little minds are thrown on the matter-of-fact newspaper. A child needs not to be deprived of story altogether, but to be supplied with bright and happy stories, in which the gruesome element is subordinate. Specially sensitive children should, I think, be guarded against much that from an older point of view is classic, as some of the ‘creepy’ stories in Grimm, though there are no doubt hardy young nerves which can thrill enjoyably under these horrors. As to confusing a child’s sense of truth by indulging him in story, the evil seems to me problematic, and, if it exists at all, only slight and temporary. But I hope to touch on this aspect of the subject in the next chapter.
[11]. Præterita, p. 76.
[12]. The different tendencies of children towards visual, auditory, motor images, etc., are dealt with by F. Queyrat, L’Imagination et ses variétés chez l’enfant. Cf. an article by W. H. Burnham, “Individual Differences in the Imagination of Children,” Pedagogical Seminary, ii., 2.
[13]. The references to the child C. are to the subject of the memoir given below, chap. xi.