The ordinary fairy-tale should be swept from the nursery; here the child does nothing but identify himself with the hero or heroine in the most impossible of situations of a purely phantastic type. There is plenty of scope for giving a child an interest in stories from the fairy-land of science, or from the lives of famous persons in the centuries that have passed; all of which, if properly selected and dressed up, will assist the child’s directive thought. For though the facts with which the stories may deal are as wonderful as any of Grimm’s fairy-tales, _they are facts of which the child will never have to be undeceived, and he will never have to have his faith shaken in the stories which he has learnt_; thus the child will learn from the outset to think directively. I know that many mothers, when they read this, will be inclined to shake their heads and say to themselves, “Poor little darling, I could never treat it so.” And that they will be inclined, as is shown very early in this book, to say “These things cannot be true,” for they are not the ideas they are accustomed to. Yet I can assure them that by means of carrying out many of those actions and teachings which they think are pleasant and harmless, they are really damning the child, while many of these ideas which they might term cruel are really of the greatest value and kindness to it. Moreover, experience has shown that if diplomacy be used, the child will be as equally interested in wonderful facts as in wonderful phantasies. The only difference is that it is more trouble to the parent or educator to search out and deal with facts himself. It is quite true that the child’s imagination requires training, as part of its intellectual education. But there is vast difference between encouraging it to imagine the possibility of impossible things, and encouraging it to exercise its imagination in realisation of facts, however far they may be removed from the experience of everyday life. Many people have the idea that a child should be encouraged to use its imagination; whereas in fact the child’s imagination requires curbing, training, sublimating. Such people do not realise that the early life of a child is lived almost entirely in imagination, that it has no difficulty whatsoever in using its imagination, and that the real difficulty is in preventing it from using too much imagination directed into false channels and by-paths of permanent unreality. CHAPTER VII IDENTIFICATION