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
"'When I looked toward the window it always seemed to me as if
a shutter had been put up close before my eyes, and that upon
this shutter a colorer had wiped off his brushes of different
colors, white, blue, green, yellow, and red, all in motley
confusion. Individual things, as I now see them, I could not,
at that time, perceive and distinguish upon it; it was
absolutely hideous to look upon.'"
By this, as well as by the experiences with persons born blind and
afterward surgically treated, it is clearly demonstrated that colors
and degrees of brightness are severally apprehended before forms and
distances can be perceived. The case must be the same with the normal
human child in the first weeks after birth.
After discrimination of the luminous sensations, the boundary-lines of
bright plane surfaces are next clearly discerned; then come forms, and,
last of all, the distances of these.
With reference to this progress of the normal infant in learning to see,
the accounts of persons born blind and afterward surgically treated are
again of great value. After the famous question put by Molyneux to
Locke, whether an intelligent person, blind from birth, would be able
immediately after an operation to distinguish a sphere from a cube by
means of the eye alone, had been answered in the negative, the opinion
was accepted as satisfactory that such a person learns the distinction
only by means of the sense of touch. Thus, the perception of difference
would come later, after the sight of different forms, only by means of
the tactual memory.
In truth, however, very many forms are discerned as different purely by
means of the eye, without the possibility of aid from any other sense.
Phenomena exclusively optical, which, like the rainbow, can not be
apprehended by touch or by hearing, are distinctly perceived by the
child at a very early period. Without touching, the different forms of
objects would be perceived by means of sight alone, and that even by a
child unable to touch, through movements of the eyes and head, changes
of bodily position, of attitude and posture, and through practice in
accommodation and in the observation of differences of brightness.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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