me
that their creative force is much weaker than has been said."

4. At the fourth stage appears romantic invention, which requires a more
refined culture, being a purely internal, wholly imaginative (i.e.,
cast in images) creation. It begins at about three or four years of age.
We know the taste of imaginative children for stories and legends, which
they have repeated to them until surfeited: in this respect they
resemble semi-civilized people, who listen greedily to rhapsodies for
hours at a time, experiencing all the emotions appropriate to the
incidents of the tale. This is the prelude to creation, a semi-passive,
semi-active state, an apprentice period, which will permit them to
create in their own turn. Thus the first attempts are made with
reminiscences, and imitated rather than created.

Of this we find numerous examples in the special works. A child of three
and a half saw a lame man going along a road, and exclaimed: "Look at
that poor ole man, mamma, he has dot [got] a bad leg." Then the romance
begins: He was on a high horse; he fell on a rock, struck his poor leg;
he will have to get some powder to heal it, etc. Sometimes the invention
is less realistic. A child of three often longed to live like a fish in
the water, or like a star in the sky. Another, aged five years nine
months, having found a hollow rock, invented a fairy story: the hole was
a beautiful hall inhabited by brilliant mysterious personages, etc.[46]

This form of imagination is not as common as the others. It belongs to
those whom nature has well endowed. It forecasts a development of mind
above the average. It may even be the sign of an inborn vocation and
indicate in what direction the creative activity will be orientated.

Let us briefly recall the creative role of the imagination in language,
through the intervening of a factor already studied--thinking by
analogy, an abundant source of often picturesque metaphors. A child
called the cork of a bottle "door;" a small coin was called by a little
American a "baby dollar;" another, seeing the dew on the grass, said,
"The grass is crying."

The extension of the meaning of words has been studied by Taine, Darwin,
Preyer, and others. They have shown that its psychological mechanism
depends sometimes on the perception of resemblance, again on association
by contiguity, processes that appear and intermingle in an unforeseen
manner. Thus, a child applies the word "mambro" at first to his nurse