MENTAL DEVELOPMENT 467 



asked, How could these areas of the brain be utilised when cut 

 off from the external world by interruption to the transmitter ? 

 The kinaesthetic sense (or sense of movement) is the sense 

 which contributes to every other sense ; it is especially 

 associated with vision and touch, but also with hearing in the 

 movements of the lips and tongue in the production of articulate 

 sounds. Now this kinaesthetic sense and the tactile sense were 

 not interrupted in the cases of Laura Bridgeman and Helen 

 Keller. The innate potentialities of the brains of these two 

 remarkable beings must have been of the best, and the greatest 

 credit is due to that pioneer Dr. Gridley Howe for finding his 

 way to Laura Bridgeman's intelligence through her finger tips. 

 His plan was to teach her by raised types and then by the 

 manual alphabet. 



One of the most interesting psychological studies that I know 

 of is The Story of My Life, by Helen Keller. She was evidently 

 a precocious child, for at six months she could utter articulate 

 sounds ; even three months after the illness which made her 

 blind and deaf she uttered the word " water." She walked at 

 one year, and as she says, " During the first nineteen months of 

 my life I had caught glimpses of broad green fields which the 

 darkness that followed could not utterly blot out." In the first 

 months after her illness she says : " My hands felt every object 

 and observed every motion and in this way I learned to know 

 many things," and she indicated her wants by gesture language 

 encouraged by her mother. She lived a normal life on a farm 

 sans sight and hearing, but was wonderfully intelligent and 

 exercised reason in her actions. She was always happy when 

 she could keep her mind and fingers busy. Systematic teaching 

 by Ann Mansfield Sullivan was commenced when she was 

 seven, the system being the association of tactile-motor verbal 

 symbols made with the finger in the palm of the hand with the 

 tactile-motor impression of objects. Everything had a name 

 and each name gave birth to a new thought. She remarks : " At 

 the first I was only a little mass of possibilities ; it was my 

 teacher who unfolded and developed them." At the age of ten 

 she learned to speak. She was taught by a Miss Fuller, and the 

 method, in Helen Keller's own words, was this : " She passed 

 my hand lightly over her face and let me feel the position of the 

 tongue and lips when she made a sound." In reading her 

 teacher's speech she was dependent on her fingers, she placed 



