Creative imagination is a natural phenomenon in children. It rarely appears before the age of a year and a half, when the child becomes able to walk and to test for himself everything his eyes fall upon or his hands can reach. Then the little boy delights in riding a stick and calling it a racing horse, and the little girl in rolling up a towel and pillowing it on her arm as though she were cradling her beautiful baby... Creative imagination develops in them until we may even see children of similar ages acting out a play whose characters are all imaginary, keeping most faithfully to all the precision and mastery their parts demand.
Their imagination carries them to marvel at natural phenomena, and they explain the causes of these according to what their imagination — stripped of scientific facts — suggests to them. Therefore, when we judge a child's thinking and his mental reasoning, we must not let it slip from our minds that he lives in a world of imagination and possesses no trace of the scientific knowledge that governs the universe.
He wonders why the stars do not fall upon our heads as apples and apricots fall from the tree, and why people do not change their eyes and their legs as they change their clothes... We must not laugh at them over questions like these; rather let our answers be of such correctness and simplicity that we make ourselves understood to them in mind and in imagination, and satisfy the instinct of the love of knowledge in them.
(1) Sarmad is four years old. He learned from his
grandfather, as the outcome of his many questions, that God Almighty is He who sends us out of water food to eat and clothes to wear, and rewards people according to their deserts. Sarmad went up to the mountains and saw the fog for the first time in his life, and his little sister asked him: "Is this a sea advancing upon us, as if it were about to pounce on us and swallow us up?" Her brother reassured her, in the tone of the big to the small, saying: "Don't be afraid; this is not a sea. It is only the water coming down to the earth and passing by all the people, who take from it their need of food and drink and clothing."
So here is Sarmad: he saw a natural phenomenon — a mighty one in his eyes — and, unable to grasp its scientific secrets, he attributed it to God; and he was helped in forming his fancies by the likeness between the fog and the clouds, which he supposed to be water. For further assurance he hurried to his mother, asking whether his explanation was correct; and she sat with him on the balcony and, in an atmosphere of earnestness and mutual understanding, told him the story of the fog. A little while later she passed by him again and heard him retelling the story to his sister, trying to correct his first claim, while his sister listened, assenting with a nod of the head, though her two years kept her from grasping much of its import.
(2) I once sat watching the nursery children at their play in the sand in the garden, and I saw that they had divided into two parties: one party playing the part of the guests, seated on the edge of the sandbox, while the second party set about filling the little molds with sand, turning them out onto a piece