The Mind of the Child, Part II: The Development of the Intellect, International Education; Series Edited By William T. Harris, Volume IX.Preyer, William T.
Science
The Mind of the Child, Part II: The Development of the Intellect, International Education; Series Edited By William T. Harris, Volume IX.
Preyer, William T.
Child development; Child psychology
These cases are sufficient to refute some singular assertions, e. g.,
that all the newly-born must see objects reversed, as even a Buffon
("Oeuvres completes," iv, 136; Paris, 1844) thought to be the fact. My
boy, when I had him write, in his fifth year, the ordinary figures after
a copy that I set for him, imitated the most of them, to my surprise,
always in a reversed hand (Spiegelschrift, "mirror-hand"); the 1 and the
4 he continued longest to write thus, though he often made the 4 the
other way, too, whereas he always wrote the 5 correctly. This, however,
was, of course, not owing to imperfect sight, but to incomplete
transformation of the visual idea into the motor idea required for
writing. Other boys, as I am given to understand, do the same thing. For
myself, I found the distinction between "right" and "left" so difficult
in my childhood, that I remember vividly the trouble I had with it.
Singularly enough, Buffon assumed, in 1749, that the neglect of the
double images does not yet take place at the beginning of life.
Johannes Mueller, in 1826, expresses the same view. But, inasmuch as in
the first two or three weeks after the birth of a human being, in
contrast with many animals, nothing at all can as yet be distinctly
seen, it is not allowable to maintain that everything must be seen
double. Rather is it true that everything is seen neither single nor
double, since the very young child perceives, as yet, no forms
(boundary-lines) and no distances, but merely receives impressions of
light, precisely as is the case with the person born blind, in the
period directly after an operation has been performed upon his eyes.
Schopenhauer (in his treatise on "Sight and Colors," first edition,
Leipsic, 1816, p. 14) divined this truth. He says, "If a person who was
looking out upon a wide and beautiful prospect could be in an instant
wholly deprived of his intellect, then nothing of all the view would
remain for him except the sensation of a very manifold reaction of his
retina, which is, as it were, the raw material out of which his
intellect created that view."
The new-born child has, as yet, no intellect, and therefore can not, as
yet, at the beginning, see; he can merely have the sensation of light.
This opinion of mine, derived from observation of the behavior of
newly-born and of very young infants (cf. the first chapter of this
book), seems to me to be practically confirmed in an account given
by Anselm von Feuerbach in his work on Kaspar Hauser (Anspach, 1832,
p. 77).
"In the year 1828, soon after his arrival in Nuremberg, Kaspar
Hauser was to look out at the window in the Vestner Tower,
from which there was a view of a broad and many-colored summer
landscape. Kaspar Hauser turned away; the sight was repugnant
to him. At a later period, long after he had learned to speak,
he gave, when questioned, the following explanation:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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