STUDIES OF CHILDHOOD. 325 



tlieir play, their make-believe, their illusions; but how much do 

 we really know of their state of mind when they act out a little 

 scene of domestic life or of the battlefield ? We have, I know, 

 many fine observations on this head. Careful observers of chil- 

 dren and conservers of their own childish experiences, such as 

 Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Jean Paul, Madame Necker, George Sand, 

 have told us much that is valuable ; yet I suspect that there must 

 be a much wider and finer investigation of children's action and 

 talk before we can feel quite sure that we have got at their men- 

 tal whereabouts, and know how they feel when, for example, they 

 pretend to enter the dark wood, the home of the wolf, or to talk 

 with their deities, the fairies. 



Perhaps I have said enough to justify my plea for new obser- 

 vations, and for reconsideration, in the light of these, of hasty 

 theories. Nor need we object to a fresh survey of what is perhaps 

 the most delightful side of child life. I often wonder, indeed, 

 when I come across some precious bit of droll infantile acting, or 

 "of sweet child-soliloquy, how mothers can bring themselves to 

 lose one drop of the fresh, exhilarating draught which daily wells 

 up from the fount of a child's fantasy. 



Nor is it merely for the sake of its inherent charm that chil- 

 dren's imagination deserves further study. In the early age of 

 the individual and of the race what we enlightened persons call 

 fancy has a good deal to do with the first crude attempts at un- 

 derstanding things. Child-thought, like primitive folk-thought, 

 is saturated with myth, vigorous Fantasy holding the hand of 

 Reason as yet sadly rickety on his legs and showing him 

 which way he should take. In the beginning of the moral life, 

 again, we shall see how easily the realizing force of young imagi- 

 nation may expose its possessor to deception by others, and to 

 self-deception too, with results that clearly simulate the guise of 

 a knowing falsehood. On the other hand, a careful following out 

 of the various lines of imaginative activity may show how moral 

 education, by vividly suggesting to the child's imagination a wor- 

 thy part, a praiseworthy action, may work powerfully on the un- 

 formed and flexible structure of a child's will, moving it duty- 

 ward. 



The play of the young imagination meets us in the domain of 

 sense-observation : a child is fancying when it looks at things and 

 touches them, and moves among them. This may seem a paradox 

 at first, but in truth there is nothing paradoxical here. It is an 

 exploded psychological fallacy that sense and imagination are 

 wholly apart. No doubt, as the ancients told us, fantasy comes 

 of sense ; we live over again in waking and sleeping imagination 

 the sights and sounds of the real world. Yet it is no less true 

 that imagination in an active constructive form takes part in the 



