r time
in looking at and admiring other people's houses, and never get time to
do any building for themselves.

WE SHOULD CARRY OUR IDEALS INTO ACTION.--The best training for the
imagination which I know anything about is that to be obtained by taking
our own material and from it building our own structure. It is true
that it will help to look through other people's houses enough to
discover their style of building: we should read. But just as it is not
necessary for us to put in all the time we devote to looking at houses,
in inspecting doll houses and Chinese pagodas, so it is not best for us
to get all our notions of imaginative structures from the marvelous and
the unreal; we get good training for the imagination from reading
"Hiawatha," but so can we from reading the history of the primitive
Indian tribes. The pictures in "Snowbound" are full of suggestion for
the imagination: but so is the history of the Puritans in New England.
But even with the best of models before us, it is not enough to follow
others' building. We must construct stories for ourselves, must work out
plots for our own stories; we must have time to meditate and plan and
build, not idly in the daydream, but purposefully, and then make our
images real by _carrying them out in activity_, if they are of such a
character that this is possible; we must build our ideals and work to
them in the common course of our everyday life; we must think for
ourselves instead of forever following the thinking of others; we must
_initiate_ as well as imitate.

5. PROBLEMS FOR OBSERVATION AND INTROSPECTION

1. Explain the cause and the remedy in the case of such errors as the
following:

Children who defined mountain as land 1,000 or more feet in height
said that the factory smokestack was higher than the mountain
because it "went straight up" and the mountain did not.

Children often think of the horizon as fastened to the earth.

Islands are thought of as floating on the water.

2. How would you stimulate the imagination of a child who does not seem
to picture or make real the descriptions in reading, geography, etc.? Is
it possible that such inability may come from an insufficient basis in
observation, and hence in images?

3. Classify the school subjects, including domestic science and manual
training, as to their ability to train (1) reproductive and (2) creative
imagination.

4. Do you ever skip the descriptive parts of a book