Miniature Summary and Analysis

Philosophers and psychologists ignore the miniature worlds and objects in fairy tales. Ironically, these fantasy images have some objectivity from a degree of shared phenomenological similarity. If an observer allows himself to pass a threshold of absurdity, the inversion of perspective occurs in which small things imagined take us back to childhood when familiarity with and reality of toys returns. If one accepts representation as a way of communicating images to one another and that imagination is a basic faculty, then logic alone cannot define large and small.

The man with a magnifying glass and his imagination are different from the laboratory worker who is required to use the tenets of scientific observation in his examination. The first view of any phenomenon under a magnifying glass opens the miniature world to a new world view. It becomes a miniature universe with...