3 24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 re- 

 garded as queer and not just what a child ought to be. Yet sup- 

 posing that this is the right view, there still remains the question 

 whether imagination always works in the same way in the child- 

 ish 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 inter- 

 ests, 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 do- 

 ings of the great j)eople 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 any- 

 thing else the goer and the doer.* 



With this difference in the elementary composition of imagi- 

 nation there are others which turn on temperament, tone of feel- 

 ing, 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 sci- 

 entific or the practical type. 



Enough has been said perhaps to show that the imaginative- 

 ness 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 fac- 

 ulty, 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 



r ^ 



* The different tendencies of children toward visual, auditory, niotpr images, etc., are 

 dealt with by I'. Qiieyrat, L'Imagination et ses vanetes cliez Tenfant. 



