Through fairy tales we have seen that the emotional power of the child
is strengthened. This has been effected because, in the tale just as
truly as in life, action is presented in real situations; and back of
every action is the motive force of emotion. This cumulative power of
emotion, secured by the child through the handling of tales, will
serve daily a present need. It will be the dynamic force which he will
require for anything he wishes to accomplish in life. It will give the
child the ability to use it in any situation similar to that in which
it was acquired. It will make a difference in his speech; he will not
have to say so much, for what he does say will produce results. This
growing power of emotion will carry over into feelings of relation and
thus lead to judgment of values. This evaluation is the basis of
reasoning and answers to the child's daily call to think from causes
to consequences. This increasing power of emotion develops into the
æsthetic sensibilities and so results in a cultivation of taste and an
understanding of life. Emotion therefore leads to appreciation, which,
when logically developed, becomes expression. Fairy tales, thus, in
conducting emotional capacity through this varied growth and toward
this high development, hold an educational value of no mean order.
(2) The power to appeal to the imagination. Emotion can be aroused by
showing the objects which excite emotion. Imagination is this power to
see and show things in the concrete. Curry says, "Whenever the soul
comes vividly in contact with any fact, truth, etc., whenever it takes
them home to itself with more than common intensity, out of that
meeting of the soul and its object there arises a thrill of joy, a
glow of feeling. It is the faculty that can create ideal presence."
When through imagination we select spontaneously from the elements of
experience and combine into new wholes, we call it creative
imagination.--The creative imagination will be viewed here as it
appears in action in the creative return given by the child to his
fairy tales.--When we emphasize a similarity seen in mere external or
accidental relations or follow suggestions not of an essential nature
in the object, we call it fancy. Ruskin, in his _Modern Painters_,
vol. I, part III, _Of the Imaginative Faculty_, would distinguish
three classes of the imagination:--
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