The gradual gathering of a store of such clear memory-images is a necessary preliminary to reflexion and thought. It is because the child remembers as well as sees, remembering even while he sees, that he grows thoughtful, inquiring about the meaning and reason of this and that, or boldly venturing on some explanation of his own. And just as the child’s mind must take on many pictures of things before it reflects upon and tries to understand the world, so it must collect and arrange pictures of the successive scenes and events of its life, before it will grow self conscious and reflect upon its own strange existence. The only other pre-condition of this primitive thoughtfulness is that imaginative activity which we have already considered on its playful and pleasurable side. We are learning at last that the inventive phantasy of a child, prodigal as it is of delightful illusions, is also a valuable contributor to this sober work of thought. It is just because the young mind is so mobile and agile, passing far beyond the narrow confines of the actual in imaginative conjecture of what lies hidden in the remote, that it begins to _think_, that is, to reason about the causes of things. In the history of the individual as of the race, thought, even the abstract thought of science, grows out of the free play of imagination. The myth is at once a picturesque fancy, and a crude attempt at an explanation. This primitive thought is indeed so compact of bright picturesque imagery that we with our scientifically trained minds might easily overlook its inherent thoughtfulness. Yet a close inspection shows us that it contains the essential characteristics of thought, an impulse to comprehend things, to reduce the confusing multiplicity to order and system. We must not hope to trace clearly the lines of this first child-thought. The earliest attitude of the wakening intelligence towards the confusion of novelties, which for us has become a world, is presumably indescribable, and further, by the time that a child comes to the use of words and can communicate his thoughts, in a broken way at least, the scene is already losing something of its first strangeness, the organising work of experience has begun. Yet though we cannot expect to get back to the primal wonderment we can catch glimpses of that later wonderment which arises when instruction supplements the senses, and ideas begin to form themselves of a vast unknown in space and time, of the changefulness of things, and of that mystery of mysteries the beginning of things. The study of this child-thought as it tries to utter itself in our clumsy speech will well repay us. Only we must be ever on the alert lest we read too much into these early utterances, forgetting that the child’s first tentative use of words is very apt to mislead.