Studies of childhood / by James Sully.

  • James Sully
Date:
1903
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Studies of childhood / by James Sully. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    39/544 page 27
    Crusoe is probably for the boyish imagination, more than anything else, the goer and the doer.1 With this difference in the elementary constituents 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 scien¬ tific or to the practical type. Enough has been said perhaps to show that the imag¬ inativeness of children is not a thing to be taken for granted as existing in all children alike. It is eminently a variable faculty requiring a special 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 ex¬ ample, glibly about their 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 battle-field ? We have, I know, many fine ob¬ servations on this head. Careful observers of children and conservers of their own childish experiences, such as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Jean Paul, Madame Necker, George Sand, R. L. Stevenson, tell us much that is valuable : yet I suspect that there must be a much wider and finer investi¬ gation of children’s action and talk before we can feel 1 The different tendencies of children towards visual, auditory, motor images, etc., are dealt with by F. Queyrat, L’Imagination et ses vavutes chez Venfant. Cf. an article by W. H. Burnham, “In¬ dividual Differences in the Imagination of Children,’ Pedagogical Seminary, ii., 2.
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