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This is a very suggestive paper which will well repay study in the original.
The author deals first with the extreme importance of visual imagery in children, an aspect of the infantile psyche which, he thinks, has received inadequate attention at the hands of child psychologists. These images, he holds, are connected with emotions, and their essential function is 'to serve as a substitutive or imaginative relief of feeling in lieu of real gratification'; their purpose is 'to realise an unfulfilled desire'. It is to be regretted that this important thesis, which is stated rather dogmatically, should not have been developed and illustrated more fully. In the early years of life images are 'projected' and seen with hallucinatory vividness. 'Younger children at any rate never doubt that they are seeing real objects, and even fairly old children, though they may seek to explain them away as imaginary, can by no means altogether dispossess themselves of the feeling that they are real'. The same may happen to many adults under stress of feeling and may occur habitually in the insane.
These hallucinations tend to constitute the 'psychic reality' of the child, as distinguished from the 'objective reality' of the adult, which arises from the stimulation of the sensory capacities externally via the sense organs (as distinguished from their stimulation from within in the case of hallucination). The one kind of reality gradually gives place to the other; the conflict between the two constitutes one of the most important problems that have to be dealt with in the course of mental development and itself affords a considerable stimulus to intellectual progress.