330 IDEALISM AND COMMON SENSE 



external world, but there are good reasons for believing that his 

 intuitions cover but a very small portion, if any portion, of his total 

 mental field. He is emphatically a creature who learns. When I was 

 born, a flood of new, and strange, and doubtless incomprehensible 

 feelings beat upon me. Probably, for example, the walls of my room 

 were not conceived, as they were later when my education was well 

 advanced, as material things having extension and other properties ; 

 they were only patches of light and shade, and were not even thought 

 of as such. The nurse consisted only in similar patches. Her 

 movements resulted in changing patches which were not dis- 

 tinguished from the changes caused by the purposeless movements 

 of my own eyes. Probably the sounds she made as well as the 

 feelings that came from my skin and other organs were not 

 differentiated, were not understood, in any way. 



558. But gradually my wonderful faculty of memory did its 

 work. By means of it I stored impressions in my mind, and learned 

 with ever-increasing power to link them together. 1 And this link- 

 ing was performed, not merely by recording likenesses and 

 differences, coexistences and sequences, but also by processes of 

 inference which were none the less real because at first rudimentary, 

 and of only gradual growth in scope and accuracy. In this way 

 groups of feelings gained coherence, and linked themselves to other 

 groups. Thus, at length, I gathered the notion that certain 

 patches of light and shade proceeded from a permanent material 

 wall were properties of the wall. Thereupon all the feelings 

 successively excited by the wall began to fall into their places, like 

 pieces in a well-designed mosaic. Though the patches changed 

 when my position was changed, or when there was more or less 

 light, or when the direction of the light was changed, or when the 

 nurse moved about, yet I began to connect all such changes not 

 with changes in the wall, but with changes in my position, and so 

 forth. Another vast group of feelings linked themselves together 

 in the notion of a material nurse, and cohered notwithstanding even 

 greater changes in her. An even vaster group were gathered in 

 the notion of a body, consisting of head, trunk, and limbs, which 

 I came to regard as peculiarly mine, which was I, and from which 

 I derived some feelings (e.g. ' physical ' pain and pleasure) that were 

 unlike those excited by all other bodies. 



559. Here then is the point I wish to emphasize the truth that 

 / have been able to classify by feelings, and become a rational 

 being) only because from early infancy I have referred them to 



1 See 666. 



