Perhaps the truth will turn out to be the paradox that most children are at once matter-of-fact observers _and_ dreamers, passing from the one to the other as the mood takes them, and with a facility which grown people may well envy. My own observations go to show that the prodigal out-put of fancy, the revelling in myth and story, is often characteristic of one period of childhood only. We are apt to lump together such different levels of experience and capacity under that abstraction ‘the child’. The wee mite of three and a half, spending more than half his days in trying to realise all manner of pretty, odd, startling fancies about animals, fairies, and the rest, is something vastly unlike the boy of six or seven, whose mind is now bent on understanding the make and go of machines, and of that big machine, the world. So far as I can gather from inquiries sent to parents and other observers of children, a large majority of boys and girls alike are for a time fancy-bound. A child that did not want to play and cared nothing for the marvels of story-land would surely be regarded as queer and not just what a child ought to be. Yet, supposing that this is the right view, there still remains the question whether imagination always works in the same way in the childish brain. Science is beginning to aid us in understanding the differences of childish fancy. For one thing it is leading us to see that a child’s whole imaginative life may be specially coloured by the preponderant vividness of a certain order of images, that one child may live imaginatively in a coloured world, another in a world of sounds, another rather in a world of movements. It is easy to note in the case of certain children of the more lively and active turn, how the supreme interest of story as of play lies in the ample range of movement and bodily activity. Robinson Crusoe is probably for the boyish imagination, more than anything else, the goer and the doer.[12] ----- Footnote 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. ----- With this difference in the elementary constituents of imagination, there are others which turn on temperament, tone of feeling, and preponderant directions of emotion. Imagination is intimately bound up with the life of feeling, and will assume as many directions as this life assumes. Hence, the familiar fact that in some children imagination broods by preference on gloomy and terrifying objects, religious and other, whereas in others it selects what is bright and gladsome; that while in some cases it has more of the poetic quality, in others it leans rather to the scientific or to the practical type.