"Why, Johnny," replied the mother, "how can you say such a thing? You know very well that was only a dog. Now go right in the corner and pray to God to forgive you for telling such a lie!"
Johnny went. When he came back, he said triumphantly, "See, mother,
God said He thought it was a lion Himself."
This poor mother is a typical example of a large class of mothers who fail to understand their children because they have no idea of what goes on in the child's mind. To Johnny the lion was just as real as the dog was to the mother. And even if the dog had not been there for the mother to see, Johnny could have seen just as real a lion.
Every mother ought to know that practically every healthy child has imagination. You will have to take a long day's journey to find a child that has no imagination to begin with—and then you will find that this child is wonderfully uninteresting, or actually stupid.
You can easily observe for yourself that as soon as a child knows a large number of objects and persons and names he will begin to rearrange his bits of knowledge into new combinations, and in this way make a little world of his own. In this world, beasts and furniture and flowers talk and have adventures. When the dew is on the grass, "the grass is crying." Butterflies are "flying pansies." Lightning is the "sky winking," and so on. This activity of the child's mind begins at about two years, and reaches its height between the ages of four and six. But it continues through life with greater or less intensity, according to circumstances and original disposition.
It is not only the poet and artist who need imagination, but all of us in our everyday concerns. Do you realize that the person to whom you like so much to talk about your affairs, because she is so sympathetic, is sympathetic because she has imagination? For without imagination we cannot "put ourselves in the place of another," and much of the misery in the relation between human beings exists because so many of us are unable to do this. The happy cannot realize the needs of the miserable, and the miserable cannot understand why anyone should be happy—if they lack imagination.
The need for imagination, far from being confined to dreamers and persons who dwell in the clouds, is of great practical importance in the development of mind and character. Imagination is a direct help in learning, and in developing sympathy. As one of our great moral leaders, Felix Adler, has said, much of the selfishness of the world is due, not to actual hard-heartedness, but to lack of imaginative power.
We all know the classic example of Queen Marie Antoinette, who, when told that the people were rioting for want of bread, exclaimed, "Why, let them eat cake instead!" Brought up in luxury, she could not realize what absolute want means. She had no imagination.
The world has progressed, but we still have among us the same type of unfortunate persons who are unable to put themselves in the place of others. I recently heard of a woman who, on being told of a family so poor that they had had nothing but cold potatoes for supper the night before, replied:
"They may be poor, but the mother must be a very bad housekeeper, anyway. For, even if they had nothing but potatoes to eat, she might at least have fried them."