Book written by Henry Maudsley, first published 1867.
PART I, Chapter IX in On Memory and Imagination
PART II, Chapter II is On the Insanity of Early Life
about imagination and insanity in early childhood:
"The precocious imagination of childhood should always be restrained as an actual danger, not fostered as a wonderful evidence of talent, and the child should be solicited to regular intercourse with the realities of nature, so that by continued internal adaptation to external impressions there may be laid up in the mind stores of material, and that, by an orderly training, this may be moulded into true forms, according to which a rightly developed imagination may hereafter work in true and sober harmony with nature.
The difference between fancy and imagination, as Coleridge has very aptly remarked, corresponds with the difference between delirium and mania. The fancy brings together images which have no natural connexion, but are yoked together by means of some accidental coincidence; while the imagination combines images seemingly unlike their essential relations, and gives unity to variety. Now the precocious imagination of a child, which sometimes delights foolish parents, cannot possibly be anything more than lying fancy; and this, for exactly the same reason as it has already been shown that insanity of children must be a delirium, and cannot be a mania." (pp. 271, 272)
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about imagination and…
about imagination and insanity in early childhood:
"The precocious imagination of childhood should always be restrained as an actual danger, not fostered as a wonderful evidence of talent, and the child should be solicited to regular intercourse with the realities of nature, so that by continued internal adaptation to external impressions there may be laid up in the mind stores of material, and that, by an orderly training, this may be moulded into true forms, according to which a rightly developed imagination may hereafter work in true and sober harmony with nature.
The difference between fancy and imagination, as Coleridge has very aptly remarked, corresponds with the difference between delirium and mania. The fancy brings together images which have no natural connexion, but are yoked together by means of some accidental coincidence; while the imagination combines images seemingly unlike their essential relations, and gives unity to variety. Now the precocious imagination of a child, which sometimes delights foolish parents, cannot possibly be anything more than lying fancy; and this, for exactly the same reason as it has already been shown that insanity of children must be a delirium, and cannot be a mania." (pp. 271, 272)