Children's Ways: Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matterSully, James
Science
Children's Ways: Being selections from the author's "Studies of childhood," with some additional matter
Sully, James
Child development; Child psychology
Most people, perhaps, can recall from their childhood the pleasure of
cloud-gazing. The clouds are such strange-looking things, they change
their forms so quickly, they seem to be doing so many things, now
slumbering lazily, now rushing wildly on. Cloud-land is safe away from
the scrutiny of fingers, so we never can be sure what they would be if
we got to them. Some children take fright at their big, strange forms
and their weird transformations: but a happy child that loves
day-dreaming will spend many delightful hours in fashioning these forms
into wondrous and delightful things, such as kings and queens, giants
and dwarfs, beautiful castles, armies marching to battle, or driven in
flight, pirates sailing over fair isle-dotted seas. There is a delicious
satisfaction to young minds in thus finding a habitation for their
cherished images. To project them in this way into the visible world, to
know that they are located in that spot before the eye, is to "realise"
them, in the sense of giving them the fullest possible reality.
Next to the cloud-world come distant parts of the terrestrial scene. The
chain of hills, perhaps, faintly visible from the home, has been again
and again endowed by a child's fancy with all manner of wondrous scenery
and peopled by all manner of strange creatures. At times when they have
shown a soft blue, he has made fairy-land of them; at other times when
standing out black and fierce-looking against the western sky at
eventide, he has half shuddered at them, peopling them with horrid
monsters.
Best of all, I think, for this locating of images, are the hidden spaces
of the visible world. One child used to wonder what was hidden behind a
long stretch of wood which closed in a good part of his horizon. Many a
child has had his day-dreams about the country lying beyond the hills on
the horizon. One little girl who lived on a cattle-station in Australia
used to locate beyond a low range of hills a family of children whom she
called her little girls, and about whom she related endless stories.
With timid children this tendency to project images into unseen places
becomes a fearful kind of wonder, not altogether unpleasant when
confined to a moderate intensity. I remember the look of awe on the face
of a small boy whose hand I held as we passed one summer evening a dark
wood, and he whispered to me that the wolves lived in that wood.
This impulse of timid children to project their dark fancies into
obscure and hidden places often stops short at vague undefinable
conjecture. "When (writes a German author) I was a child and we played
hide and seek in the barn, I always felt that there must or might be
something unheard of hidden away behind every bundle of straw, and in
the corners." Here we can hardly speak of a housing of images: at such a
moment perhaps the little brain has such a rush of weird images that no
one grows distinct.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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