How early this splitting of the child’s imaginative activity into these two forms, the playful and the thoughtful, takes place is not, I think, very easy to determine. Many children at least are apt at first to take all that is told them as gospel. To most of them about the age of three and four, I suspect, fairyland, if imagined at all, is as much a reality as the visible world. The disparity of its contents, the fairies, dragons and the rest, with those of the world of sense does not trouble their mind, the two worlds not being as yet mentally juxtaposed and dove-tailed one into the other. It is only later when the desire to understand overtakes and even passes the impulse to frame bright and striking images, and, as a result of this, critical reflexion applies itself to the nursery legends and detects their incongruity with the world of every-day perception, that a clear distinction comes to be drawn between reality and fiction, what exists and can (or might) be verified by sense, and what is only pictured by the mind. With this preliminary peep into the _modus operandi_ of children’s thought, let us see what sort of ideas of things they fashion. Beginning with their ideas of natural objects we find, as has been hinted, the influence of certain predominant tendencies. Of these the most important is the impulse to think of what is far off, whether in space or time, and so unobservable, as like what is near and observed. Along with this tendency, or rather as one particular development of it, there goes the disposition already illustrated, to vivify nature, to personify things and so to assimilate their behaviour to the child’s own, and to explain the origin of things by ideas of making and aiming at some purpose. Since, at the same time that these tendencies are still dominant, the child by his own observation and by such instruction as he gets, is gaining insight into the ‘how,’ the mechanism of things, we find that his cosmology is apt to be a quaint jumble of the scientific and the mythological. Thus the boy C. tried to conceive of the divine creation of men as a mechanical process with well-marked stages—the fashioning of stone men, iron men, and then real men. In many cases we can see that a nature-myth comes in to eke out the deficiencies of mechanical insight. Thus, the production of thunder and other strange and inexplicable phenomena is referred, as by the savage, and even by many so-called civilised men and women, to the direct interposition of a supernatural agency. The theological idea with which children are supplied is apt to shape itself into that of a capricious and awfully clever demiurgos, who not only made the world-machine but alters its working as often as he is disposed. With this idea of a supernatural agent there is commonly combined that of a natural process as means employed, as when thunder is supposed to be caused by God’s treading heavily on the floor of the sky. Contradictions are not infrequent, the