"When undeveloped mind expresses itself, it tends to enumerate all of its possessions. A scene in a primitive drama must take the same time that would be required for the events to transpire in actual life; the epic belongs to early peoples; early histories all begin with the creation of man.
As mind advances, effectiveness in expression is secured by economising the attention of the observer or listener. Strength is thus secured for more intensive appreciation; and we even derive an added pleasure from the skill used in condensation. We admire art for art's sake. [...]
Every civilization is filled with thousands of symbols; and the child who grows up in their midst comes to understand, or at least to accept them, at their current value. When one approaches a new civilization, he always makes the mistake of reading too much or too little into what he sees and hears. This is mainly due to the fact that he does not know the exchange value of the social, business, artistic and religious symbols in circulation. As mere men and women, we are much alike. We all have the same primitive hungers for food and drink, for love, worship, admiration and power. It is the difficulty in seeing these primitive realities through the symbols in current use that separates the people of different civilizations. [...]
In children's drawings, so great is their tendency to use a sign rather than represent the thing itself, that one is constantly tempted to say young children draw from their own minds and not from the impressions thay have just gained through the sense of sight or touch. A series of irregular marks on paper often serves to body forth a whole story as told by an infant. [...]
The third picture was drawn by a boy of nine to illustrate the story of Hanns-Guck-in-die-Luft in the Struwwelpeter. It is the story of Careless Johnny who looks at the sun instead of his path and so falls over a dog, and afterward into the river, where three fishes watch his mishap. The moon and starts have no part in the story; they are suggested by the sun. The picture is a hieroglyphic made up to stand for the story. It would require the same kind of skillful guessing to unravel it that would be required in deciphering a record painted on a buffalo skin by a Blackfoot Indian. The difference would lie in the fact that the Indian's symbols have developed slowly through many generations until each has a fixed value in the tribe, while the child's symbols have developed in a few minutes, in an individual mind, and have little permanent significance. The fact remains, however, that both are moving along the same line of growth.
Some day we shall learn how to use this beginning time when children naturally tend to develop a phonetic alphabet through picture symbols. We shall learn how to make the child's love for drawing lead directly into writing; and we shall thus bring drawing into its true place as an art of expression" (pp. 75-77).