at rest, it finds its egress for several other hours through the brain. But in the child the mode of action must change every few minutes. He is made tired with five minutes' labor. He is satisfied with five minutes' rest. He will ride his rocking-horse, if alone, a short time, and then he comes to you to ask you to tell him a story. While listening to the story, his muscles are resting, and the force is spending its strength in working the mechanism of the brain. If you make your story too long, the brain, in turn, becomes fatigued, and he feels instinctively impelled to divert the vital force again into muscular action.

If, instead of being alone with his rocking-horse, he has company there, he will seem to continue his bodily effort a long time; but he does not really do so, for he stops continually, to talk with his companion, thus allowing his muscles to rest for a brief period, during which the vital force expends its strength in carrying on trains of thought and emotion through the brain.

He is not to be blamed for this seeming capriciousness. These frequent changes in the mode of action are a necessity, and this necessity evidently unfits him for any kind of monotonous or continued exertion-the only kind which, in ordinary cases, can be made conducive to any useful results.

3. Parents at home and teachers at school must recognize these physiological laws, relating to the action of the young, and make their plans and arrangements conform to them. The periods of confinement to any one mode of action in the very young, and especially mental action, must be short; and they must alternate frequently with other modes. That rapid succession of bodily movements and of mental ideas, and the emotions mingling and alternating with them, which constitutes what children call play, must be regarded not simply as an indulgence, but as a necessity for them. The play must be considered as essential as the

study, and that not merely for the very young but for all, up to the age of maturity. For older pupils, in the best institutions of the country, some suitable provision is made for this want; but the mothers of young children at home are often at a loss by what means to effect this purpose, and many are very imperfectly aware of the desirableness, and even the necessity, of doing this. As for the means of accomplishing the object-that is, providing channels for the complete expenditure of this force in the safest and most agreeable manner for the child, and the least inconvenient and troublesome for others, much must depend upon the tact, the ingenuity, and the discretion of the mother. It will, however, be a great point gained for her when she once fully comprehends that the tendency to incessant activity, and even to turbulence and noise, on the part of her child, only shows that he is all right in his vital machinery, and that this exuberance of energy is something to be pleased with and directed, not denounced and restrained.

CHAPTER XV.

THE IMAGINATION IN CHILDREN.

THE reader may, perhaps, recollect that in the last chapter there was an intimation that a portion of the force which was produced, or rather liberated and brought into action, by the consumption of food in the vital system, expended itself in the development of thoughts, emotions, and other forms of mental action, through the organization of the brain and of the nerves.

Expenditure of Force through the Brain.

The whole subject of the expenditure of material force in maintaining those forms of mental action which are carried on through the medium of bodily organs, it must be admitted, is involved in great obscurity; for it is only a glimmering of light which science has yet been able to throw into this field. It is, however, becoming the settled opinion, among all well-informed persons, that the soul, during the time of its connection with a material system in this life, performs many of those functions which we class as mental, through the medium, or instrumentality, in some mysterious way, of material organs, just as we all know is the case with the sensations-that is, the impressions made through the organs of sense; and that the maintaining of these mental organs, so to speak, in action, involves a certain expenditure of some form of physical force, the source of this force being in the food that is consumed in the nourishment of the body.

There is certainly no apparent reason why there should

be any antecedent presumption against the supposition that the soul performs the act of remembering or of conceiving an imaginary scene through the instrumentality of a bodily organ, more than that it should receive a sensation of light or of sound through such a channel. The question of the independent existence and the immateriality of the thinking and feeling principle, which takes cognizance of these thoughts and sensations, is not at all affected by any inqui ries into the nature of the instrumentality by means of which, in a particular stage of its existence, it performs these functions.

Phenomena explained by this Principle.

This truth, if it be indeed a truth, throws great light on what would be otherwise quite inexplicable in the playful activity of the mental faculties of children. The curious fantasies, imaginings, and make-believes-the pleasure of listening to marvellous and impossible tales, and of hearing odd and unpronounceable words or combination of words -the love of acting, and of disguises-of the impersonation of inanimate objects-of seeing things as they are not, and of creating and giving reality to what has no existence except in their own minds-are all the gambollings and frolics, so to speak, of the embryo faculties just becoming conscious of their existence, and affording, like the muscles of motion, so many different issues for the internal force derived from the food. Thus the action of the mind of a child, in holding an imaginary conversation with a doll, or in inventing or in relating an impossible fairy story, or in converting a switch on which he pretends to be riding into a prancing horse, is precisely analogous to that of the muscles of the lamb, or the calf, or any other young animal in its gambols-that is, it is the result of the force which the vital functions are continually developing within the sys

tem, and which flows and must flow continually out through whatever channels are open to it; and in thus flowing, sets all the various systems of machinery into play, each in its own appropriate manner.

In any other view of the subject than this, many of the phenomena of childhood would be still more wonderful and inexplicable than they are. One would have supposed, for example, that the imagination-being, as is commonly thought, one of the most exalted and refined of the mental faculties of man-would be one of the latest, in the order of time, to manifest itself in the development of the mind; instead of which it is, in fact, one of the earliest. Children live, in a great measure, from the earliest age in an ideal world-their pains and their pleasures, their joys and their fears being, to a vast extent, the concomitants of phantasms and illusions having often the slightest bond of connection with the realities around them. The realities themselves, moreover, often have far greater influence over them by what they suggest than by what they are.

Indeed, the younger the child is, within reasonable limits, the more susceptible he seems to be to the power of the imagination, and the more easily his mind and heart are reached and influenced through this avenue. At a very

early period the realities of actual existence and the phantasms of the mind seem inseparably mingled, and it is only after much experience and a considerable development of his powers, that the line of distinction between them becomes defined. The power of investing an elongated bag of bran with the attributes and qualities of a thinking being, so as to make it an object of solicitude and affection, which would seem to imply a high exercise of one of the most refined and exalted of the human faculties, does not come, as we might have expected, at the end of a long period of progress and development, but springs into exist