More
commonly this is seen in childish play, which owes a part of its charm
to self-deception. Children make believe they are animals, doctors,
ogres, play school, that they are dead, mimic all they see and hear.
Idealising temperaments sometimes prompt children of three or four
suddenly to assert that they saw a pig with five ears, apples on a
cherry tree, and other Munchausen wonders, which really means merely
that they have had a new mental combination independently of
experience. Sometimes their fancy is almost visualisation and develops
into a kind of mythopeic faculty which spins clever yarns and suggests
in a sense, quite as pregnant as Froschmer asserts of all mental
activity and of the universe itself, that all their life is
imagination. Its control and not its elimination in a Gradgrind age of
crass facts is what should be sought in the interests of the highest
truthfulness and of the evolution of thought as something above
reality, which prepares the way for imaginative literature. The life
of Hartley Coleridge,[11] by his brother, is one of many
illustrations. He fancied cataract of what he named "jug-force" would
burst out in a certain field and flow between populous banks, where an
ideal government, long wars, and even a reform in spelling, would
prevail, illustrated in a journal devoted to the affairs of this
realm--all these developed in his imagination, where they existed with
great reality for years.
Pages:
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187