(2) The power to appeal to the imagination.  Emotion can be aroused by showing the objects which excite emotion.  Imagination is this power to see and show things in the concrete.  Curry says, “Whenever the soul comes vividly in contact with any fact, truth, etc., whenever it takes them home to itself with more than common intensity, out of that meeting of the soul and its object there arises a thrill of joy, a glow of feeling.  It is the faculty that can create ideal presence.”  When through imagination we select spontaneously from the elements of experience and combine into new wholes, we call it creative imagination.—­Thecreative imagination will be viewed here as it appears in action in the creative return given by the child to his fairy tales.—­When we emphasize a similarity seen in mere external or accidental relations or follow suggestions not of an essential nature in the object, we call it fancy.  Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, vol.  I, part III, Of the Imaginative Faculty, would distinguish three classes of the imagination:—­

(a) The associative imagination.  This is the power of imagination by which we call into association other images that tend to produce the same or allied emotion.  When this association has no common ground of emotion it is fancy.  The test for the associative imagination, which has the power to combine ideas to form a conception, is that if one part is taken away the rest of the combination goes to pieces.  It requires intense simplicity, harmony, and absolute truth.  Andersen’s Fairy Tales are a perfect drill for the associative imagination.  Literature parallels life and what is presented calls up individual experience.  Any child will feel a thrill of kinship with the experiences given in The Tin Soldier—­a little boy’s birthday, the opening of the box, the counting of the soldiers, and the setting of them upon the table.  And because here Andersen has transformed this usual experience with a vivacity and charm, the tale ranks high as a tale of imagination. Little Ida’s Flowers and Thumbelina are tales of pure fancy.  Grimm’s The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean and The Spindle, the Shuttle, and the Needle rank in the same class, as also do the Norse The Doll i’ the Grass and the English Tom Thumb.

(b) The penetrative imagination.  This power of imagination shows the real character of a thing and describes it by its spiritual effects.  It sees the heart and inner nature of things.  Through fancy the child cannot reach this central viewpoint since fancy deals only with externals.  Through the exercise of this power the child develops insight, intuition, and a perception of spiritual values, and gains a love of the ideal truth and a perpetual thirst for it.  He develops genuineness, one of the chief virtues of originality.  He will tend not to have respect for sayings or opinions but will seek the truth, be governed by its laws, and hold a passion for perfection.  This power of imagination makes of him a continual seeker, “a pilgrim upon earth.”  Through the penetrative imagination the child forgets himself and enters into the things about him, into the doings of Three Pigs or the adventures of Henny Penny.