The Parents' Review

A Monthly Magazine of Home-Training and Culture

The Imaginative faculty in Children.

[Italicized footnotes courtesy of J.J. Liu, 2024.]

* [Master of Arts, Doctor of Canon Law.]

I am somewhat puzzled at the outset as to how aptly to define the Imaginative Faculty, and am rather driven to the conclusion that, as in so many cases, an explanation and a description are perhaps more enlightening than an exact definition.

In order to arrive at even a low estimate of the part which imagination plays in our life and thought we have but to conceive of life without it. I do not speak here of that "inward eye which is the bliss of solitude," * but of the ordinary work-a-day effort of this faculty, which consists, for example, in our setting before us a picture of each day's duties and of the part which we mean to take in them. By the power of Imagination life unfolds before us from day to day, like Ariadne's clue, ** leading us along a path now winding, now straight, now rising, now narrowing. The relation between imagination and fact--or rather realisation--in this case, is something like that between the telegraphic message passing from signal box to signal box, and the express train which is the realisation of it; and he is the successful man who makes the realisation the exact fulfilment of the image. Deprive life of this power and you have taken away the secret spring of incentive, the only source of effort and persevering action--the salt of life.

* [Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" (1815), famous for its vivid imagery of daffodils.]
** [Mythological Cretan princess who helped Theseus escape the Labyrinth.]

Like most mind states, imagination is the result of other mind processes and is part of them. Perception and memory must precede the imaginative faculty, and if we would understand the power and position of this faculty in the mind of the child we must pay due heed to the preceding processes. Having thus cleared the ground, it will be convenient to treat of our subject in a threefold manner, viz.: (1) an explanation of the meaning of the Imaginative Faculty; (2) the characteristics of this faculty, and (3) some suggestions for its evolution in the minds of children. Perception may be defined as the reception of a natural phenomenon, fact or circumstance, into the mind so as to become resident there. Perception takes place through the senses acting in conjunction with the brain and is, of course, one of the first stages in the growth of the intellect. The repetition of any phenomenon, fact or circumstance, brings into play at once the faculty of memory. The impression formerly made on the mind is recalled by its power and compared and recognised. Imagination, then, is the third stage. It is the result of the combined forces of perception and memory. I say the result--and yet imagination has in it other ingredients, other components. It seems somewhat cold-blooded, and I express my apologies for thus attempting to define the parts of so subtle and beautiful a quality as imagination, and yet such dissection, like that of the life it lives upon or in, has its uses. The dissector's knife only reveals bone and tissue, but it gives some understanding and insight into, at all events, the setting of the jewel. A large and varied store of percepts, then, is the first condition of success in laying a foundation for a proper exercise of imagination. In short, the clearer, the better defined the percepts, the more true the exercise of the imagination. Is not this, then, an object of real care and attention on the part of the parent? The more exact and clear the impression of events and facts on the mind of the child, the more fruitful and useful will be the exercise of the imaginative faculty. The child's mind, then, must be well and truly stored. You cannot gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles. The fallow soil will always produce weeds. The fruit of the wild vine will ever be sour and unnutritious. We must teach our children to observe. Nothing more easy, nothing more difficult. There is no royal road to, no rule of thumb for, this all-important process. The solution of the problem is to be found in a mutual sympathy.

Cela va sans dir you must love your child, but you must also understand him, you must study him. I need not ay that you cannot achieve this end by proxy, i.e., through a nurse or governess. You must do it yourself. It will entail pains and trouble; every great and good work does. But it will be well worth it. For your child's sake, for the sake of his eternal future, for his eternal happiness, do not set about it in any trifling, superficial spirit. The most sensitive photographic film is a coarse travesty in comparison with the God-sent tissue upon which you must paint pictures--must leave impressions--for time and eternity. Woe-betide us if we neglect, if we abuse, so awful a responsibility. True percepts, then, are received and quickened in the sunshine of the home. The actinic light of the love of father, mother, brothers, sisters, leaves its holy impression on the sensitive surface of the child-mind for weal or, if misused, for woe.

The mother, the father, imparts impression after impression in the growing intellect, of the products of a holy life, of lofty ideals, of a true conception of duty, of large heartedness, of purity of purpose, of all the springs of life which make for righteousness. And in the manufacture of percepts let us never expect too much. The wise gardener is not ever digging up the roots to see if they have struck. Never expect, for example, definite descriptions of percepts. You have not got to this stage. It is well that you have not. We do not want our children to be walking "Johnson's Dictionaries," still less encyclopaedias of correct views of life. Plant the seed with all love and diligence. You can leave the growth in higher hands. You will get evidence enough of the growth as time goes on, and you will be amply, richly repaid. There is no higher joy than the evidence of results--good results--in such work.

It is a foretaste of heaven. To watch a young, fresh mind unfolding to a knowledge of the pure and the holy is an ecstasy of happiness of which the very angels are ignorant. May we all know it. But it may be asked, "Why is it that imagination is the strongest when you have the least knowledge?" as, for example, in the savage or, which is the same thing, in the child who has had few or none of the advantages of training. The answer is a contradiction of the question. The imagination in such a case is not really strong; it is wild, as the untrained plant is wild. For lack of percepts it finds for itself grotesque and weird concepts, groping wildly in the darkness of an ignorance which sees no illumination or beacon light. In such cases, imagination, unable to fulfil its true function, unnourished and unstrengthened, wastes its life in a consuming fever of unsatisfied longing for tangibility, for realisation. And such a state of being is not confined to the young or to the ignorant. It is to be found in the life and work of the educated and of the literary. Among such minds may be classed those of Coleridge, and perhaps Shelley, minds which express in their work a brilliant power of imagination, but the lack of the guiding power of a real knowledge and understanding of percepts.

We can admire the brilliance and force of such imagination, but they are certainly not models for us in our care for the due growth of our children's imaginative faculty. Again, let us be warned against overcrowding the child's mind at the percept-receiving age. Old heads are not to be found on young shoulders. Let us be thankful for it. The tendency to-day is to give our children too much pleasure, too much entertainment, too many toys. The little brain is overworked and over-excited, and confusion, not clearness, is the result. An occasional treat leaves its mark and is remembered; go on repeating the process frequently and you get the real result--indifference. Remember, impressions which are commonplace to you are absolutely fresh and strange to the untried experience of the child. The ideal life for the child--alas! we cannot always realise our ideals in this world--seems to me to be the quiet residence in the country where the earliest impressions are those of the peaceful processes of Nature. These make at first the most wholesome of all foundations for the child-mind.

But I pass on to consider briefly Memory as a Factor in the Birth of Imagination. Here we have a distinct step forward. The stage of memory-exercise is a great advance on that of mere perception. Not only are percepts and the knowledge of them strengthened, but powers of comparison and judgment are beginning to be brought into play.

The element of pleasure, too, must be considered, for the child experiences a growing satisfaction in the recognition of percepts which are, for the second and succeeding times, brought before his consciousness. He begins to group them, with many a failure of course, at first, but with an ever-increasing sense of power and knowledge. I would suggest that the parent here, too, should, in a large measure, let the child work out his own salvation. The process of memory is, at this stage, largely involuntary. The parent, not even the child himself, were this possible, can interfere with it. With our materials, then, the power of perception, with its ready-made store of percepts, guided and aided by memory, we are in a position to understand the nature and working of the imaginative faculty of which we speak.

And let us first treat of that class of imagination which is the power of conjuring up to the mind by the aid of memory, past concepts, and so reproducing them in the mind as to bring back more or less faithfully the pictures of past pleasures or sorrows, past events and phenomena, and which has been called reproductive imagination. A very useful faculty this, and yet very liable to abuse. Here the parent has a distinct duty to perform. Indulgence in the recollection of past events, however attractive--whether it be an attraction of pain or pleasure, and they are perhaps equally powerful--must never be permitted to develop into day-dreaming or idle reveries. There are times when reveries are the soul's resting-places--oases in the wilderness--times of refreshing, but they are, perhaps, more fitting for the time of life when the battle is behind us and when the noise of war is becoming fainter and yet more faint. It is most important for us, as parents, to remember that the efforts of reproductive imagination must never exactly repeat themselves. If, for an example, two persons describe any given occurrence it will be found not only that their accounts differ one from the other, but that they are not in any sense accurate descriptions of the occurrence itself. How easy, them, for the untrained imagination of a child, in reproducing a picture of past events, to colour it to suit his own wish and will. In every reproduction of this kind there are, then, unconscious additions and subtractions. It is for the parent to observe with all possible care whether such additions and subtractions are indeed conscious or unconscious. In short, whether the child speaks the truth or a lie. Twenty years' experience as a schoolmaster has convinced me--I speak with the humility begotten of such experience--that children speak the truth--I mean, what they believe to be the truth--far more often than they get the credit for so doing. One of the most fatal errors that can be made is to accuse an innocent child of falsehood, and yet, I believe, it is an error into which the most conscientious of us have more than once fallen in our dealings with children. I yield to none in my earnest desire to impress upon our children's mind utter hatred and abhorrence for falsehood of every kind, but to place the stigma of such a sin on the name of an innocent child is a possibility which must make us pause most carefully before we denounce. Of the two errors, that of pronouncing the innocent guilty, or allowing the guilty to go unpunished, I believe the latter is the lesser and would do less harm.

Before leaving the subject of reproductive imagination, let us mark two important points, viz., that this faculty is more than mere memory, because not only has it the power of recollection, but also, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, that of rejecting or adding material facts to complete the picture. And, in the second place, there is added the factor of pleasure or pain. There is distinct feeling superadded to the ordinary efforts of the intellect in the case of reproductive imagination, and we shall see this factor increase in strength and power as we pass on to consider constructive imagination.

Constructive imagination is, I take it, what is really intended by the popular use of the word imagination, and I am now in a position to attempt, perhaps, the definition for which in an earlier stage of our enquiry I was not prepared, viz., that imagination is the power of summoning before the mind, at will, past events and phenomena to form new images. It will be observed that this definition only covers constructive imagination, and would be unsuitable for reproductive imagination--but, as we have noticed, constructive imagination is, in reality, imagination proper. In very young children the power of constructive imagination is weak. That is what we should expect, and we find the illustration of it in the fact that the child on hearing a story repeated, exhibits almost a kind of fretfulness if the wording of the narrative differs from that previously employed. The child is using all the power of representative imagination, or perhaps, only memory, to make a picture of what he has been told, and his mind is, at present, too feeble to have the power of presenting to itself unaided the necessary picture. And, let us note, that the elements of constructive imagination present nothing new. Could the brains of the greatest poets, artists, and statesmen be explored, it would be found that their greatest efforts and triumphs simply present a marvellous combination of old materials worked up by the power of imagination, into new forms and images. The powers of elimination and addition, marvellously increased and strengthened, make, with the addition of a strong feeling of pleasurable excitement, what we call genius. Let us note how far more accurate are the powers of elimination and division in this process than in that of reproductive imagination. Let us suppose, for example, that you are so indiscreet as to tell your child a ghost-story. You picture the hero ensconced in bed, when suddenly the customary white-robed figure enters noiselessly, bearing the time-honoured blue light, and to the well-remembered accompaniment of groans and rattling chains. Where does the child get the idea of the ghost from? You have never seen one. He has never seen one. It is simply a carefully chosen conglomeration of old concepts to make a new creation which exists nowhere outside his own imagination. This power has, too, a wonderfully educative capacity. You want to describe to a child that which he has never seen--a snow-covered Alp, for example. The child has never seen a mountain. A careful selection and combination, however, and you can make the snow-clad peak live before him. Let us observe the enormous power of this faculty of constructive imagination. We see a child, for example, utterly absorbed in a game of make-believe, living in a world of his own and peopling it with his own creations. The objects which represent these creations are most frequently utterly inadequate, it would seem, to the part which they are playing, but the child's all-absorbing power of imagination fills his puppets with a life and a power not their own. See yonder child on the hearth. He has ceased to be interested in your adult conversation and has gone off into a world of his own. He has two little bits of sticks, but they are not sticks to him. They are two men, one a railway official, the other a passenger. There is an altercation going on and if you listen without seeming to watch you will witness a very pretty little drama.

An interesting question is: "Is the child really deceived by the creations of his own imagination?" And the answer is, I think, a negative one. The child loves to indulge in these creations, and he therefore continues to do so, but there are indications that he is by no means so completely duped as one would imagine. See him, for example, throw his doll angrily to the ground; his doll, which but a moment before commanded his highest reverence as a duchess, perhaps, because her limited muscular powers will not admit her of her standing as he desires. So does the savage destroy the idol, to which but a few hours before he paid the highest reverence, because it will not grant an answer to his prayer. But the self-deception must be, in many cases, very thorough, very real, for we see the child shed genuine tears over a broken doll or toy representing a living reality, and this is in no sense the expression of annoyance because a useful article has been broken, it is genuine sorrow for the loss of a personality between whom and the child there existed a real bond of affection.

I digress for one moment to express an opinion--an almost universal one, I believe--as to how soon the child develops the power of true aesthetic imagination, one of the forms, and, perhaps, the highest form of constructive imagination. I think this power does not become developed until the attainment of at least three years. Possibly, some of us may dissent from this view, but let me explain. I know that the child shows pleasure before that age, in music, pictures, colour, etc., but the harmony of the music is a matter of no moment to him. It is a noise and that is all he is at that age capable of appreciating. He is interested and attracted in a picture, not because it is a Landseer or a Turner, but because it represents something that he knows and recognises. He is interested in colours, because they are brilliant; the combination of crushed strawberry, mauve and scarlet has no terrors for him.

A few more suggestions in conclusion, and I have done. The parent having done her--for it is mostly the mother's--duty in the early stages in the richly storing of the child's mind with healthy, beautiful and varied percepts, she must by every means see to it that his faculties are thoroughly trained in the power of re-grouping for reproduction. Many a child who has been well-educated is found not to care for reading--is not interested in books. It may be said that this is, perhaps, rather the schoolmaster's business, but this, I think, is to shirk one's duty. The schoolmaster makes the boy read because the boy must; it is our business to see that he develops a taste for reading because he likes it. Do not allow yourself to become an Encyclopaedia Britannica for your child. You can so judiciously whet his appetite as to thoroughly interest him, and then send him to the fountain-head for the information--taking care to use judgment as to the fountain-head so as not to disgust or weary him in the initial stage. You could not lay the foundation of a more invaluable habit than this. All his mind powers are brought into play. And, one final word, do not let us imagine that the cultivation of the imagination, any more than any other product of Nature, will yield a harvest without industry and care. We cannot say, "I will let my child's imaginative faculty grow naturally, it is sure to come all right."

There never could be a greater fallacy. If you do not sow, someone else will. Whether a human or supernatural agency, it is outside the province of this paper to discuss. There is no such thing, really, as fallow land. Leave the land alone for a year or two, and you will return to find a crop whose power for evil and whose far-reaching destructiveness will fill you with amaze.

A mighty responsibility is ours in the training of the men and women of the future. Our industry, our patience, our love, our sympathy can, by the all-pervading power of imagination, make for our children heaven in earth; our neglect and evil example can, by the same power, plunge them into the hell of distorted fancy, of unholy longings, of blackest despair.

Typed by J.J. Liu, Dec. 2024