Few parents or teachers may now be found so benighted as to deny the delight and profit of letting the child grow in all the joy and freedom possible, following his instinctive interests, expressing his original primitive impulses. But we must grant, however sadly, that the modern child is not to be a member of a primitive society; that he is living and to live in a complex, advanced community, to whose standards he must be, on the whole, adjusted and adapted. Therefore, his interests and activities must be channeled and guided; new interests must be awakened; he must be in a certain sense put, while he is still a child, into possession of what his race has acquired only after many generations. In literature then, as in the other subjects, we must try to do three things: (1) allow and meet appropriately the child's native and instinctive interests and tastes; (2) cultivate and direct these; (3) awaken in him new and missing interests and tastes. What is there in literature serviceable for any or all of these purposes, and is there in literature anything that is distinctively and uniquely useful in the whole process? It seems only reasonable to look for the answers to these questions among the distinctive features of literature. The most conspicuous and distinguishing fact about literature is, of course, its relation to the imagination. Now, when the student of literature or any other art talks about the imagination, he must be allowed to begin, as one may say, where the psychologist leaves off, because, while the psychologist as a scientist likes to limit his attention to the mind acting as imagination, the literary critic must consider, not only this activity of the mind, but its product--a product that presents itself as an elaborate phenomenon. This is the reason why the natural process of the literary critic seems to the student of psychology a beginning at the wrong end; because it is a beginning with an objective product, and with the larger and more salient features of that product. Literature finds its material in nature, and in human nature and life. It has no source of supply other than that of every other kind of human thought. But before this material becomes literature, the imagination has lifted it from its place in the actual world and elevated it to the plane of art. Working upon this plane with this material, the imagination modifies, transforms, rearranges it, making new combinations, discovering unsuspected relations, bringing to light hidden qualities, revealing new likenesses and unlikenesses; and at last returns to us a product that is a new creation. Working in its larger creative capacity, the imagination constructs out of material which may be scattered or chaotic when gathered by observation, unified and organic wholes.