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.

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    quite sure that we have got at their mental whereabouts, and know how they feel when 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 observations and for a reconsideration of hasty theories in the light of these. 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 pours forth from the fount of a child’s phantasy. Nor is it merely for the sake of its inherent charm that children’s imagination deserves further study. In the early age of the individual and of the race what we en¬ lightened persons call fancy has a good deal to do with the first crude attempts at understanding things. Child- thought, like primitive folk-thought, is saturated with myth, vigorous phantasy holding the hand of reason—as yet sadly rickety in his legs—and showing him which way he should take. In the moral life again, we shall see how easily the realising force of young imaginati n may expose it to deception by others, and to self-deception too, with results that closely simulate the guise of a knowing false¬ hood. 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 worthy part, a praiseworthy action, may work powerfully on the unformed and flexible structure of his young will, moving it dutywards. Imaginative Transformation of Objects. The play of young imagination meets us in the domain of sense-observation : a child is fancying when he looks at things and touches them and moves among them.
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