4D P8YGH0L00T. 



other place, called 'front,' which is given us by certain sen- 

 sations 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 immedi- 

 ately 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 iis ; and in the next 

 chapter \ire 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 ap- 

 pear at that visual distance are.* 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, lachry- 

 mation, 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 reac- 

 tion 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 with- 

 out first making a movement." His eye gets such an 

 impression now ; so he can only say that the objects are 

 'touching it.' 



"All his language, borrowed from touch, but applied to the objects 

 of his sight, make us think that he perceives differently from ourselves, 



* In reality it probably means only a restless movement of desire, which 

 he might make even after he had become aware of his impotence to touch 

 the object. 



