HELEN KELLER. 71 



HELEN KELLER: A PSYCHOLOGICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY.* 



By Professor JOSEPH JASTROW, 



UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN. 



rpHE interest in the story of Helen Keller is many sided. To the 

 -'- public at large the personal interest naturally dominates; for 

 the story of the development, in spite of seemingly impassable curtail- 

 ments of experience, of a bright child into an intellectual young 

 woman forms an intensely interesting and deeply human document. 

 As an experiment in education the account is most valuable; at one 

 point it reinforces principles already advocated upon other varieties 

 of evidence; at another it opposes a narrow overvaluation of method 

 or theory; at many others it illuminates the profound significance of 

 the essentials, and throws into relief the secondary values of the ways 

 and means of a real education. For the psychologist the narrative is 

 no less important. It contributes notably to the interpretation of the 

 role of sensation in the building up of intellectual acquisitions; it 

 furnishes pertinent illustrations of the delicate interlacing of the 

 strands of experience — throughout conditioned by natural endowment 

 — in the composite pattern of the mental texture. 



Born June 27, 1880, at Tuscumbia, Alabama, of good ancestry, 

 the child was deprived by a serious illness that befell her at the age 

 of eighteen months, of both sight and hearing. Taste and smell re- 

 mained normal, and her physical health continued to be excellent. At 

 the time of her illness, the child had already sjjoken a few words, 

 one of which — 'wah-wah' for 'water' — may have been retained through 

 the illness and the sightless and silent years that followed. Miss Kel- 

 ler believes that something remains to her of the glimpses of the 

 world during her first months of life. 'If we have once seen,' she 

 cites, 'the day is ours, and what the day has shown.' One must not 

 underestimate the value of such continuity of experience as is possible 

 even at so tender an age; yet it may be said that practically her men- 

 tal life began anew amid her altered and restricted environment. 



The five years before the 'light of the world' was brought to her 

 are suggestive of the spontaneous ingenuit}^ of the child under such 



*'The story of My Life,' by Helen Keller Avith her letters (1887-1901), 

 and letters of her teacher Anne Mansfield Sullivan, supplemented by John 

 Albert Macy. New York, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1903, pp. 441, 8vo. The illus- 

 trations we owe to the courtesy of the Volta Bureau, Washington, D. C, and 

 of Messrs. Doubleday Page & Co. 



