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In play and the kindred forms of imaginative activity just dealt with, we have been concerned with imaginative 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 receives a certain solidity and fixity through its embodiment in the real physical world.

This incorporation of images in the system of the real world may, like play, start at one of two ends. On the one hand, the external world, so far as it is only dimly perceived, excites wonder, curiosity, and the desire to fill in the blank spaces with at least the semblance of knowledge. Here distance exercises a strange fascination. The remote chain of hills faintly visible from the child’s home, has been again and again endowed by his enriching fancy with all manner of wondrous scenery and peopled by all manner of strange creatures. The unapproachable sky—which to the little one, so often on his back, is much more of a visible object than to us—with its wonders of blue expanse and cloudland, of stars and changeful moon, is wont to occupy his mind, his bright fancy quite spontaneously filling out this big upper world with appropriate forms.

This stimulating effect of the half-perceivable is seen in still greater intensity in the case of what is hidden from sight. The spell cast on the young mind by the mystery of holes, and especially of dark woods, and the like, is known to all. C.’s peopling of a dark wood with his bêtes noires the wolves illustrates this tendency.

“What (writes a German author already quoted) all childish fancy has almost without exception in common, is the idea of a wholly new and unheard-of world behind the remote horizon, behind woods, lakes and hills, and all objects reached by the eye. When I was a child and we played hide and seek in the barn, I always felt that there must or might be behind every bundle of straw, and especially in the corners, something unheard of lying hidden. And yet I had no profane curiosity, no desire to experiment by turning over the bundle of straw. It was just a fancy, and though I half recognised it as such it was lively enough to engage me as a reality.” The same writer goes on to describe how his imagination ever occupied itself with what lay behind the long stretch of wood which closed in a large part of his child’s horizon.^[35]

This imaginative filling up of the remote and the hidden recesses of the outer world is subject to manifold stimulating influences from the region of feeling. We know that all vivid imagination is charged with emotion, and this is emphatically true of children’s phantasies. The unseen, the hidden, contains unknown possibilities, something awful, terrible, it may be, to make the timid wee thing shudder in anticipatory vision, or wondrously and surprisingly beautiful. How far the childish attitude is from intellectual curiosity is seen in the remark of Goltz, that no impious attempt is made to probe the mystery.

The other way in which this happy fusion of fancy with incomplete perception may be effected is through the working of the impulse to give outward embodiment to vivid and persistent images. All play, as we have seen, is an illustration of the impulse, and certain kinds of play show the working of the impulse in its purity. It extends, however, beyond the limits of what is commonly known as play. The instance quoted above, the peopling of a certain wood with wolves by the child C., was of course due in part to the fact that the small impressionable brain was at this time much occupied with the idea of the wolf. Dickens and others have told us how when children they were wont to project into the real world the lively images acquired from storyland. When suitable objects present themselves the images are naturally enough linked on to these. Thus Dickens writes: “Every burn in the neighbourhood, every stone of the church, every foot of the churchyard had some association of its own in my mind connected with these books (Roderic Random, Tom Jones, Gil Blas, etc.), and stood for some locality made famous in them. I have seen Tom Piper go climbing up the church steeple; I have watched Strap with the knapsack on his back stopping to rest himself on the wicket-gate.”^[36]

Along with this attachment of images to definite objects there goes a good deal of vague localisation in dim half-realised quarters of space. The supernatural beings, the fairies, the bogies, and the rest, are, as might be expected, relegated to these obscure and impenetrable regions. It would be worth while perhaps to collect a children’s comparative mythology, if only to see what different localities, geographic and cosmic, the childish mind is apt to assign to his fabulous beings. The poor fairies seem to have been forced to find an abode in most dissimilar regions. The boy C. selected the wall of his bedroom—hardly a dignified abode, though it had the merit of being within reach of his prayers. A child less bent on turning the superior personages to practical account will set them in some remoter quarter, in a vast forest, or deep cavern, on a distant hill, or higher up in the blue above the birds. But systems of child-mythology will occupy us again.