with idle fancy and unsubstantial hope."[1]

[Footnote 1: Dewey: _How We Think_, p. 2.]

This play of the imagination is most uncontrolled and
spontaneous in childhood, which is often characteristically
defined as the period of make-believe or fancy. It is this
capacity which enables the child to use chairs as locomotives,
sticks as rifles, and wheelbarrows as automobiles. As we
grow older we tend to discipline this vagrant dreaming, and to
draw only those suggestions from objects which tally with the
workaday world we live in. We stop playing with our imagination
and put our minds to work. But in adult life desire
for the play of the mind, like the desire for the play of the
body, persists. The endeavor of education is not to crush but
to control it.

Imagination, used here in the sense of random mental
activity, may be controlled in two ways, both significant for
human welfare. When it is controlled with reference to some
emotional theme, as in fiction, drama, and poetry, it has no
reference necessarily to actual objects or events; it is
concerned only with producing the effect of emotional congruity
between incidents, objects, forms, or sounds. A great novel
does not pretend to be a literal transcript of experience, nor
a portrait of an actual person. When random mental activity
is thus controlled, it is "imagination," in the popular sense,
the sense in which poets, painters, and dramatists are called
imaginative artists.

Imagination controlled with reference to facts produces
genuine reflection and science. To put it in another way, no
matter how complicated thinking becomes, no matter how
suggestions are examined and regulated with reference to the
facts at hand, new ideas, theories, and hypotheses occur to
the thinker precisely by this upshoot of irresponsible fancies
and suggestions. This free and fertile play of the imagination
is what characterizes the original thinker more than any
other single fact. Suggestions arise, as it were, willy-nilly,
depending on an individual's inheritance, his past experience,
his social position, all at the moment uncontrollable features
of his situation. We can, through scientific method, examine
and regulate suggestions once they arise, but their appearance
is in a sense casual and unpredictable, like the fancies in a
daydream. The greatest scientific discoveries have been made in
a sudden "flash of imagination," as when to the mind of Darwin,
after twenty years' pain