All these facts, and others like them, can easily be described as if our sensations might be induced by circumstances to migrate from their _original locality_ near the brain or near the surface of the body, and to appear farther off; and (under different circumstances) to return again after having migrated. But a little analysis of what happens shows us that this description is inaccurate. _The objectivity with which each of our sensations originally comes to us, the roomy and spatial character which is a primitive part of its content, is not in the first instance relative to any other sensation._ The first time we open our eyes we get an optical object which is _a place_, but which is not yet _placed_ in relation to any other object, nor identified with any place otherwise known. It is a place with which so far we are only _acquainted_. When later we know that this same place is in 'front' of us, that only means that we have learned something _about_ it, namely, that it is _congruent with that_ _other_ place, called 'front,' which is given us by certain sensations of the arm and hand or of the head and body. But at the first moment of our optical experience, even though we already had an acquaintance with our head, hand, and body, we could not possibly know anything about their relations to this new seen object. It could not be immediately located in respect of _them_. How its place agrees with the places which their feelings yield is a matter of which only later experience can inform us; and in the next chapter we shall see with some detail how later experience does this by means of discrimination, association, selection, and other constantly working functions of the mind. When, therefore, the baby grasps at the moon, that does not mean that what he sees fails to give him the sensation which he afterwards knows as distance; it means only that he has not learned at what _tactile or manual distance_ things which appear at that _visual distance_ are.[44] And when a person just operated for cataract gropes close to his face for far-off objects, that only means the same thing. All the ordinary optical signs of differing distances are absent from the poor creature's sensation anyhow. His vision is monocular (only one eye being operated at a time); the lens is gone, and everything is out of focus; he feels photophobia, lachrymation, and other painful resident sensations of the eyeball itself, whose place he has long since learned to know in tactile terms; what wonder, then, that the first tactile reaction which the new sensations provoke should be one associated with the tactile situation of the organ itself? And as for his assertions about the matter, what wonder, again, if, as Prof. Paul Janet says, they are still expressed in the tactile language which is the only one he knows. "_To be touched_ means for him to receive an impression without first making a movement." His eye gets such an impression now;