The play of young imagination meets us in the domain of sense-observation: a child is fancying when he looks at things and touches them and moves among them. This may seem a paradox at first, but in truth there is nothing paradoxical here. It is an exploded psychological fallacy that sense and imagination are wholly apart. No doubt, as the ancients told us, phantasy follows and is the offspring of sense: we live over again in waking and sleeping imagination the sights and sounds of the real world. Yet it is no less true that imagination in an active constructive form takes part in the very making of what we call sense-experience. We _read_ the visual symbol, say, a splash of light or colour, now as a stone, now as a pool of water, just because imagination drawing from past experience supplies the interpretation, the group of qualities which composes a hard solid mass, or a soft yielding liquid. A child’s fanciful reading of things, as when he calls the twinkling star a (blinking) eye, or the dew-drops on the grass tears, is but an exaggeration of what we all do. His imagination carries him very much farther. Thus he may attribute to the stone he sees a sort of stone-soul, and speak of it as feeling tired of a place. This lively way of envisaging objects is, as we know, similar to that of primitive folk, and has something of crude nature-poetry in it. This tendency is abundantly illustrated in the metaphors which play so large a part in children’s talk. As all observers of them know they are wont to describe what they see or hear by analogy to something they know already. This is called by some, rather clumsily I think, apperceiving. For example, a little boy of two years and five months, on looking at the hammers of a piano which his mother was playing, called out: ‘There is owlegie’ (diminutive of owl). His eye had instantly caught the similarity between the round felt disc of the hammer divided by a piece of wood, and the owl’s face divided by its beak. In like manner the boy C. called a small oscillating compass-needle a ‘bird’ on the ground of its slightly bird-like form, and of its fluttering movement.[13] Pretty conceits are often resorted to in this assimilation of the new and strange to the familiar, as when a child seeing dew on the grass said, ‘The grass is crying,’ or when stars were described as “cinders from God’s star,” and butterflies as “pansies flying”.[14] Other examples of this picturesque mode of childish apperception will meet us below. ----- Footnote 13: The references to the child C. are to the subject of the memoir given below, chap. xi. Footnote 14: W. H. Burnham, _loc. cit._, p. 212 f. -----