RELIGION AND THE CHILD

to the full significance of those conceptions when the age of religion at last arrives. But are we, it may be asked, to leave the child's restless, inquisitive, imaginative brain without any food during all those early years? By no means. Even admitting that, as it has been said, at the early stage religious training is the supreme art of standing out of Nature's way, it is still not hard to find what, in this matter, the way of Nature is. The life of the individual recapitulates the life of the race, and there can be no better imaginative food for the child than that which was found good in the childhood of the race. The child who is deprived of fairy tales invents them for himself,—for he must have them for the needs of his psychic growth just as there is reason to believe he must have sugar for his metabolic growth,—but he usually invents them badly.¹⁷ The savage sees the world almost exactly as the civilized child sees it, as the magnified image of himself and his own environment; but he sees it with an added poetic charm, a delightful and accomplished inventiveness which the child is incapable of. The myths and legends of primitive peoples—for instance, those of the British Columbian Indians, so carefully reproduced by Boas in German and Hill Tout in English—are one in their precision and their extravagance with the stories of children, but with a finer inventiveness. It was, I believe, many years ago pointed out by Ziller that fairy-tales ought to play a very important part in the education of young children, and since then B. Hartmann, Stanley Hall and many others of the most conspicuous educational authorities have emphasized the same point. Fairy tales are but the final and transformed versions of primitive myths, creative legends, stories of old gods. In purer and less transformed versions the myths and legends of primitive peoples are often scarcely less adapted to the child's mind.