Читать книгу Studies of childhood - Sully James - Страница 12

The conclusion which observation of children leads us to is that, as compared with adults, they are endowed with strong imaginative power, the activity of which leads to a surprisingly intense inner realisation of what lies above sense. For the child, as for primitive man, reality is a projection of fancy as well as an assurance of sense.

Now this conclusion is, I think, greatly strengthened by all that we know of the conditions of the brain-life in children, and of the many perturbations to which it is liable. With respect to this brain-life we have to remember that in the first years the higher cortical centres which take part in the co-ordinative and regulative processes of thought and volition are but very imperfectly developed. Hence the centres concerned in imagination—which, if not identical with what used to be called the sensorium or seat of sensation, are in closest connexion with it—are not checked and inhibited by the action of the higher centres as is the case with us. By exercising a volitional control over the flow of our ideas, we are able to reason away a fancy, and generally to guard ourselves against error. In young children all ideas that grow clear and full under the stimulus of a strong interest are apt to persist and to become preternaturally vivid. As has been suggested by more than one recent writer on childhood and education, the brain of a child has a slight measure of that susceptibility to powerful illusory suggestion which characterises the brain of a hypnotised subject. Savages, who show so striking a resemblance to children in the vivacity and the dominance of their fancy, are probably much nearer to the child than to the civilised adult in the condition of their brain.

This preternatural liveliness of the images of the imperfectly developed brain exposes children, as we know, to disturbing illusion. The effect of bad dreams, of intense feeling, particularly of fear, in developing illusory belief in sensitive and delicate children is familiar enough, and will be dealt with again later on. Some parents feel the dangers of such disturbance so keenly that they think it best to cut their children off from the world of fiction altogether. But this is surely an error. For one thing children who are strongly imaginative will be certain to indulge their fancies, as the Brontë girls did, even when no fiction is supplied and their eager little minds are thrown on the matter-of-fact newspaper. A child needs not to be deprived of story altogether, but to be supplied with bright and happy stories, in which the gruesome element is subordinate. Specially sensitive children should, I think, be guarded against much that from an older point of view is classic, as some of the ‘creepy’ stories in Grimm, though there are no doubt hardy young nerves which can thrill enjoyably under these horrors. As to confusing a child’s sense of truth by indulging him in story, the evil seems to me problematic, and, if it exists at all, only slight and temporary. But I hope to touch on this aspect of the subject in the next chapter.

11. Præterita, p. 76.

12. The different tendencies of children towards visual, auditory, motor images, etc., are dealt with by F. Queyrat, L’Imagination et ses variétés chez l’enfant. Cf. an article by W. H. Burnham, “Individual Differences in the Imagination of Children,” Pedagogical Seminary, ii., 2.

13. The references to the child C. are to the subject of the memoir given below, chap. xi.

14. W. H. Burnham, loc. cit., p. 212 f.

15. See her article, “The History of an Infancy,” Longman’s Magazine, Feb., 1890.

16. See the article by G. Stanley Hall, “The Contents of Children’s Minds,” Princeton Review. New Series, 1883. Cf. the same writer’s volume, The Contents of Children’s Minds on entering School, 1894.

17. Ibid., p. 265.

18. This has been well brought out by Professor Flournoy of Geneva in his volume Des Phénomènes de Synopsie (audition colorée), chap. ii.

19. Of course, as Preyer suggests, this drinking from an empty cup may at first be due to a want of discriminative perception.

20. M. Compayré seems to go too far in this direction when he talks of the child’s play with its doll as a charming comedy of maternity (L’Evolution intell. et morale de l’Enfant, p. 274).

21. For a good illustration of the disillusive effect of want of enthusiasm in one’s playmates, see Tolstoi, Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, part i., chap. viii.

22. Uninitiated, p. 10.

23. The Invisible Playmate, p. 33 ff.

24. I fail to understand what Professor Mark Baldwin means by saying that an only child is wanting in imagination (op. cit., p. 358). In his emphasising of the influence of imitation and external suggestion the writer seems to have overlooked the rather obvious fact that childish imagination in its intenser and more energetic forms means a detachment from the sensible world, and that lonely children are, as more than one autobiography, as well as mother’s record, show, particularly imaginative just because of the absence of engaging activities in the real world.

25. Egger quoted by Compayré, op. cit., pp. 149, 150.

26. Goltz, Buch der Kindheit, pp. 4, 5.

27. See the study of George Sand’s childhood below, chap. xii.

28. Cf. Perez, L’Art et la Poésie chez l’enfant, p. 28.

29. For her remarkable analysis of the child’s feeling for his doll, see below, chap. xii.

30. Origin of Civilisation, appendix, p. 521.

31. Baldwin gives a pretty example of this, op. cit., p. 362.

32. An example is given by Paola Lombroso, Psicologia del Bambino, p. 126.

33. Quoted by Compayré, op. cit., p. 150.

34. De Guimp’s Life of Pestalozzi (Engl. trans.), p. 41.

35. Goltz, Das Buch der Kindheit, p. 276.

36. Quoted by Forster, Life of Charles Dickens, chap. i.