326 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



very making of what we call sense-experience. We learn to read 

 the visual symbol, a splash of light or color, now as a stone, now 

 as a pool of water, just because imagination drawing from past 

 experience supplies the interpretation, the group of qualities 

 which composes a hard, solid mass, or a soft, yielding liquid. 



Children's fanciful readings of things, as when they call the 

 twinkling star a (blinking) eye, are but an exaggeration of what 

 we all do. Their imagination carries them very much further. 

 Thus they may attribute to the stone they see a sort of stone-soul, 

 and speak of it as feeling tired. 



This lively way of envisaging objects is, as we know, similar to 

 that of primitive folk, and has something of crude Nature-poetry 

 in it. This tendency is abundantly illustrated in the metaphors 

 which play so large a part in children's talk. As everybody 

 knows, a child describes what he sees or hears by analogy to some- 

 thing he knows already. This is called by some, rather clumsily, 

 I think, apperceiving. For example, a small, oscillating compass 

 needle was called by a child a bird, on the ground of a faint like- 

 ness of form and fluttering movement. M. Taine tells us of a 

 little girl who called the eyelids prettily eye-curtains. Distant 

 and unknown things, for example the moon, will naturally come 

 in for much of this vivid imaginative interpretation. Thus the 

 moon when reduced to a crescent was said by a boy of three to be 

 broken. American children described it ingeniously as half stuck 

 or half buttoned into the sky.* Similarly with sounds. The 

 spluttering of coals in the fire was called barking by a little girl 

 of four and a half years. The American children already referred 

 to described thunder variously as a throwing down of toys, a 

 shooting in of coals, and so forth. 



This play of imagination in connection with apprehending 

 objects of sense has a strong vitalizing or personifying element. 

 That is to say, children, in. common with uncivilized peoples, see 

 what we regard as lifeless and soulless as alive and conscious. 

 Thus a child will say a tree rustling in a cold wind " shivers." 

 The tree is apprehended or " apperceived " as having sensation 

 and behaving as the child itself behaves. Moving things come in 

 for most of this personifying impulse. A little girl of five, pleased 

 at being able to manage her hoop, said : " Mamma, I do b'lieve 

 this hoop must be alive, it's so sensible ; it goes where I want 

 it to." 



Children's fear of feathers, of which I have several instances, 

 and which they have in common with uncultured folk, is proba- 



* These were children entering the primary school of Boston, whose ideas are described 

 by Dr. Stanley Hall, in an article on The Contents of Children's Minds, in the Princeton 

 Review. 



