experiments, that the second sensation, so far as his experience goes,
always follows the first, he gradually passes from belief into
certainty, or knowledge, that the second always will, or must, follow
the first.
A similar transition is going on at the same time in the infant’s mind—I
mean the transition from belief to certainty—in regard to thousands of
other propositions besides the one we have selected, “this inkstand is
hard.” Every single case of such transition facilitates the transition
in other cases, by making the child feel that, if he is to get on in the
world and make his way through it without incurring the constant pains
and penalties of Nature, he must not disregard these juxtapositions, or
pairs of sensations, (which, when he grows older, he will, if ever he
becomes an educated man, call “cause” and “effect”), but must take them
to heart and remember them; when the first of a familiar pair comes, he
must be prepared to find the second immediately following. Not
unfrequently the child’s limited experience associates together in his
mind sensations that Nature has not associated; as, for example, when he
infers that a clock must tick because he has never yet in his life seen
a clock that has stopped. In this and other cases the child has
afterwards to dissociate what he had too hastily joined together, and to
correct his conclusions by wider experience. But, on the whole, the
transition from belief to certainty, in any one case, is facilitated by
the great majority of similar cases in which the same transition is
going on with results that are confirmed by his own experience and by
that of his elders. What helps the transition, in each case, is its
general success; it _works_: it helps the child to move more and more
confidently in the world without subjecting himself to the punishments
which Nature has attached to ignorance.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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