So far as I can gather from inquiries sent to parents and other observers of children, a large majority of boys and girls alike are for a time fancy-bound, A child that did not want to play and cared nothing for the marvels of story-land would surely be regarded as queer and not just what a child ought to be. Yet supposing that this is the right view, there still remains the question whether imagination always works in the same way in the childish brain. This is a point about which we are beginning to know something definite. The movements of fancy may be expected to have as many directions as the impulsive forces of young interests, and these we know are numberless. Fairies and angels (which are not differentiated in the child's consciousness), the animal world, the mysterious past before the baby came, the doings of the great people up in the sky—these appear to be some of the favorite haunts of the young fancy.
Science is beginning to aid us in understanding the differences of childish imagination. For one thing it is leading us to see that a child's whole imaginative life may be specially colored by the preponderant vividness of certain orders of images; that one child may live imaginatively in a colored world, another in a world of sounds, another rather in a world of movement. It is easy to note in the case of certain children of the more lively and active turn how the supreme interest of story as of play lies in the ample range of movement and bodily activity. Robinson Crusoe is probably for the boyish imagination more than anything else the goer and the doer.[1]
With this difference in the elementary composition of imagination there are others which turn on temperament, tone of feeling, and preponderant directions of emotion. Imagination is intimately bound up with the life of feeling, and will assume as many directions as this life assumes. Hence the familiar fact that in some children imagination broods by preference on gloomy and terrifying objects, religious and other, whereas in others it selects what is bright and gladsome; that while in some cases it has more of the poetic quality, in others it leans rather to the scientific or the practical type.
Enough has been said perhaps to show that the imaginativeness of children is not a thing to be taken for granted as existing in all in precisely the same way. It is eminently a variable faculty, requiring especial study in the case of each new child.
But, even waiving this fact of variability, it may, I think, be said that we are far from understanding the precise workings of imagination in children. We talk, for example, glibly about
- ↑ The different tendencies of children toward visual, auditory, motor images, etc., are dealt with by P. Queyrat, L'Imagination et ses variétés chez l'enfant.
