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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    much more of the childish mind. Play proper as distin¬ guished from mere day-dreaming is activity and imitative activity; and children show marked differences in the energy of this activity, and in the quickness and close¬ ness of their responses to the model actions of the real nurse, real coachman, and so forth. That is to say, obser¬ vation of others will count here. Again, while social surroundings, opportunities for imitation, are important, they are by no means all-decisive. Children show a curious selectiveness in their imitative games, germs of differential interest, sexual and individual, revealing them¬ selves quite early. It may be added that a child with few opportunities of observation may get quite enough play- material from storyland. But play is never merely imitative, save indeed in the case of unintelligent and ‘ stoggy ’ children. It is a bright invention into which all the gifts of childish intelligence may pour themselves. The relation of play to art will engage us later on. Free Projection of Fancies. In play and the kindred forms of imaginative activity just dealt with, we have been concerned with imagina¬ tive realisation in its connexion with sense-perception. And here, it is to be noticed, there is a kind of reciprocal action between sense and imagination. On the one hand, as we have seen, imagination interposes a coloured medium, so to speak, between the eye and the object, so that it becomes transformed and beautified. On the other hand, in what is commonly called playing, imaginative activity receives valuable aid from the senses. The stump of a doll, woefully unlike as it is to what the child’s fancy makes it, is yet a sensible fact, and as such gives support and substance to the realising impulse. Now this fact that imagination derives support from sense leads to a habit of projecting fancies, and giving them an external and local habitation. In this way the idea
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