the ancient scholars conceived the earth to be a sphere, and Columbus
discovered America.
The Problem Which Confronts the Child.—Well it is that the child, starting
his life's journey, cannot see the magnitude of the task before him. Cast amid a
world of objects of whose very existence he is ignorant, and whose meaning and
uses have to be learned by slow and often painful experience, he proceeds step
by step through the senses in his discovery of the objects about him. Yet,
considered again, we ourselves are after all but a step in advance of the child.
Though we are somewhat more familiar with the use of our senses than he, and
know a few more objects about us, yet the knowledge of the wisest of us is at
best pitifully meager compared with the richness of nature. So impossible is it
for us to know all our material environment, that men have taken to becoming
specialists. One man will spend his life in the study of a certain variety of plants,
while there are hundreds of thousands of varieties all about him; another will
study a particular kind of animal life, perhaps too minute to be seen with the
naked eye, while the world is teeming with animal forms which he has not time
in his short day of life to stop to examine; another will study the land forms and
read the earth's history from the rocks and geological strata, but here again
nature's volume is so large that he has time to read but a small fraction of the
whole. Another studies the human body and learns to read from its expressions
the signs of health and sickness, and to prescribe remedies for its ills; but in this
field also he has found it necessary to divide the work, and so we have
specialists for almost every organ of the body.
2. THE NATURE OF PERCEPTION
How a Percept is Formed.—How, then, do we proceed to the discovery of this
world of objects? Let us watch the child and learn the secret from him. Give the
babe a ball, and he applies every sense to it to discover its qualities. He stares at
it, he takes it in his hands and turns it over and around, he lifts it, he strokes it, he
punches it and jabs it, he puts it to his mouth and bites it, he drops it, he throws it
and creeps after it. He leaves no stone unturned to find out what that thing really
is. By means of the qualities which come to him through the avenues of sense,
he constructs the object. And not only does he come to know the ball as a
material object, but he comes to know also its uses. He is forming his own best
definition of a ball in terms of the sensations which he gets from it and the uses
to which he puts it, and all this even before he can name it or is able to recognize
its name when he hears it. How much better his method than the one he will