In play and the kindred forms of imaginative activity just dealt with, we have been concerned with imaginative realisation in its connexion with sense-perception. And here, it is to be noticed, there is a kind of reciprocal action between sense and imagination. On the one hand, as we have seen, imagination interposes a coloured medium, so to speak, between the eye and the object, so that it becomes transformed and beautified. On the other hand, in what is commonly called playing, imaginative activity receives valuable aid from the senses. The stump of a doll, woefully unlike as it is to what the child’s fancy makes it, is yet a sensible fact, and as such gives support and substance to the realising impulse. Now this fact that imagination derives support from sense leads to a habit of projecting fancies, and giving them an external and local habitation. In this way the idea receives a certain solidity and fixity through its embodiment in the real physical world. This incorporation of images in the system of the real world may, like play, start at one of two ends. On the one hand, the external world, so far as it is only dimly perceived, excites wonder, curiosity, and the desire to fill in the blank spaces with at least the semblance of knowledge. Here distance exercises a strange fascination. The remote chain of hills faintly visible from the child’s home, has been again and again endowed by his enriching fancy with all manner of wondrous scenery and peopled by all manner of strange creatures. The unapproachable sky—which to the little one, so often on his back, is much more of a visible object than to us—with its wonders of blue expanse and cloudland, of stars and changeful moon, is wont to occupy his mind, his bright fancy quite spontaneously filling out this big upper world with appropriate forms. This stimulating effect of the half-perceivable is seen in still greater intensity in the case of what is hidden from sight. The spell cast on the young mind by the mystery of holes, and especially of dark woods, and the like, is known to all. C.’s peopling of a dark wood with his _bêtes noires_ the wolves illustrates this tendency.