This volume is about the development of human thinking that stretches beyond the ordinary boundaries of reality. Various new research initiatives have emerged in the past decade exploring such matters as children's thinking about imaginary beings, magic, and the supernatural. The purpose of this volume is to capture something of the larger spirit of these efforts. Here we identify three recurrent themes: going beyond the possible; beyond scientific rationality; and shaping the metaphysical.

Going Beyond the Possible

In many ways, this new work offers a counterpoint to research on the development of children's domain-specific knowledge about the ordinary nature of things. In acquiring an intuitive understanding of the physical, biological, or psychological domains, even young children recognize that there are constraints on what can happen. However, once such constraints are acknowledged, children are in a position to think about the violation of those very same constraints – to contemplate the impossible. In the words of William James (1902/1990), knowledge of the constraints of the “given world” brings into consideration the realm of “something more.” Thus, many of the chapters consider the ways that children define and construct ideas about the supernatural, magical, or metaphysical against a background understanding of what is natural (see chapters by Boyer & Walker, Chinn & Brewer, Evans, Harris, Johnson, Rosengren & Hickling, Shrader, and Woolley). From this standpoint, thinking beyond the ordinary boundaries of understanding is considered to be a developmental achievement rather than a primitive form of confusion.