Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/55

PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF PLAY. 41 ii. That the child knows the object to be what we know it to be, though perhaps he cannot name it. iii. That it prefers to call the object something else and lolds an imaginary object in antithesis to a presented one. I believe these presuppositions to be misleading, and, prob- ibly, stating them in this way, I may obtain a fairly general agreement. But it remains to be shown that competent thinkers approximate in any way to the presuppositions con- lemned. Prof. Sully 1 says : Yet it is no less true that imagination in an active con- structive form takes part in the very making of what we call sense-experience ". " We read the visual symbol, say a splash of light or 2olour, now as a stone, now as a pool of water, just because imagination drawing from past experience supplies the inter- pretation, the group of qualities which compose a hard, solid lass or a soft yielding liquid." This is exactly what we should expect on the Professor's view, for he holds perception to be invariably a compound of sensation and ideation. But is it justifiable ? Must we not suppose that perceptual cognition is prior to imagination ? And are not many of the play perceptions of children the result of sheer lack of distinction ? Their names for things we often laugh at, it is true ; but in many cases, perhaps in most, they represent a quite serious activity. Prof. Sully further notes that many children possess col- oured hearing. This he explains in the same way 2 : " Children's coloured hearing is worth noting as the most striking example of the general tendency to overlay impres- sions of the senses with vivid images. It seems reasonable to suppose that coloured hearing and other allied phenomena, as the picturing of numbers, days of the week, etc., in a cer- tain scheme or diagrammatic arrangement, when they show themselves after childhood, are to be viewed as survivals of early and fanciful brain- work. This fact, taken along with the known vividness of the images in coloured hearing, which, in certain cases, approximate to sense-perceptions, seems to me to confirm the view here put forth, that children's imagination may alter the world of sense in ways which it is hard for our older and stiff-jointed minds to follow." It is we adults who are stiff-jointed ; and the epithet has a striking applicability, for the contents of our minds have pre- cisely that character of separation and articulation which the word "jointed" so well expresses. We may hope that the 1 Studies in Childhood, p. 29. 2 Ibid., p. 84.