To the period of imitation succeed more serious attempts—he acts with a "spirit of mastery," he is possessed by his idea which he tends to realize. The personal character of creation is shown in that he is really interested only in a work that emanates from himself and of which he feels himself the cause. B. Perez relates that he wanted to give a lesson to his nephew, aged three and a half years, whose inventions seemed to him very poor. Perez scratched in the sand a trench resembling a river, planted little branches on both banks, and had water flow through it; put a bridge across, and launched boats. At each new act the child would remain cool, his admiration would always have to be waited for. Out of patience, he remarked shortly that "this isn't at all entertaining." The author adds: "I believed it useless to persist, and I trampled under foot, laughing at myself, my awkward attempt at a childish construction."[45] "I had already read it in many a book, but this time I had learned from experience that the free initiative of children is always superior to the imitations we pretend to make for them. In addition, this experience and others like it have taught me that their creative force is much weaker than has been said."
4. At the fourth stage appears romantic invention, which requires a more refined culture, being a purely internal, wholly imaginative (i.e., cast in images) creation. It begins at about three or four years of age. We know the taste of imaginative children for stories and legends, which they have repeated to them until surfeited: in this respect they resemble semi-civilized people, who listen greedily to rhapsodies for hours at a time, experiencing all the emotions appropriate to the incidents of the tale. This is the prelude to creation, a semi-passive, semi-active state, an apprentice period, which will permit them to create in their own turn. Thus the first attempts are made with reminiscences, and imitated rather than created.
Of this we find numerous examples in the special works. A child of three and a half saw a lame man going along a road, and exclaimed: "Look at that poor ole man, mamma, he has dot [got] a bad leg." Then the romance begins: He was on a high horse; he fell on a rock, struck his poor leg; he will have to get some powder to heal it, etc. Sometimes the invention is less realistic. A child of three often longed to live like a fish in the water, or like a star in the sky. Another, aged five years nine months, having found a hollow rock, invented a fairy story: the hole was a beautiful hall inhabited by brilliant mysterious personages, etc.[46]
This form of imagination is not as common as the others. It belongs to those whom nature has well endowed. It forecasts a development of mind above the average. It may even be the sign of an inborn vocation and indicate in what direction the creative activity will be orientated.
Let us briefly recall the creative rôle of the imagination in language, through the intervening of a factor already studied—thinking by analogy, an abundant source of often picturesque metaphors. A child called the cork of a bottle "door;" a small coin was called by a little American a "baby dollar;" another, seeing the dew on the grass, said, "The grass is crying."
The extension of the meaning of words has been studied by Taine, Darwin, Preyer, and others. They have shown that its psychological mechanism depends sometimes on the perception of resemblance, again on association by contiguity, processes that appear and intermingle in an unforeseen manner. Thus, a child applies the word "mambro" at first to his nurse, then to a sewing machine that she uses, then by analogy to an organ that he sees on the street adorned with a monkey, then to his toys representing animals.[47] We have elsewhere given more similar cases, where we perceive the fundamental difference between thought by imagery and rational thought.
To conclude: At this period the imagination is the master-faculty and the highest form of intellectual development. It works in two directions, one principal—it creates plays, invents romances, and extends language; the other secondary—it contains a germ of thought and ventures a fanciful explanation of the world which can not yet be conceived according to abstract notions and laws.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] One will find a large number of examples in Sully's work, Studies of Childhood, Chapter ii, entitled "The Age of Imagination." Most of the observations given in the present chapter have been borrowed from this author.
[41] Apropos of this subject compare especially the recent studies by William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. (Tr.)