the child-imagination, we
may distinguish four principal stages, without assigning them,
otherwise, a rigorous chronological order.

1. The first stage consists of the passage from passive to creative
imagination. Its history would be long were we to include all the hybrid
forms that are made up partly of memories, partly of new groupings,
being at the same time repetition and construction. Even in the adult,
they are very frequent. I know a person who is always afraid of being
smothered, and for this reason urgently asks that in his coffin his
shirt be not tight at the neck: this odd prepossession of the mind
belongs neither to memory nor to imagination. This particular case
illustrates in a very clear form the nature of the first flights of the
mind attempting to exercise its imaginative powers. Without enumerating
other facts of this kind, it is more desirable to follow the
imagination's development, limiting ourselves to two forms of the
psychic life--perception and illusion. The necessary presence of the
image in these two forms has been so often proven by contemporary
psychology that a few words to recall this to mind will be sufficient.

There seems to be a radical difference between perception, which seizes
reality, and imagination. Nevertheless, it is generally admitted that in
order to rise above sensation to perception, there must be a synthesis
of images. To put it more simply, two elements are required--one, coming
from without, the physiological stimulus acting on the nerves and the
sensory centers, which becomes translated in consciousness through the
vague state that goes by the name "sensation"; the other, coming from
within, adds to the sensations present appropriate images, remnants of
former experiences. So that perception requires an apprenticeship; we
must feel, then imperfectly perceive, in order to finally perceive well.
The sensory datum is only a fraction of the total fact; and in the
operation we call "perceiving," that is, apprehending an object
directly, a part only of the object is represented.

This, however, does not go beyond reproductive imagination. The decisive
step is taken in illusion. We know that illusion has as a basis and
support a modification of the external senses which are metamorphosed,
amplified by an immediate construction of the mind: a branch of a tree
becomes a serpent, a distant noise seems the music of an orchestra.
Illusion has as broad a field as perception, sin