is also illustrated in the common statement that what one gets from an art exhibit
or a concert depends on what he brings to it. He who brings no knowledge, no
memory, no images from other pictures or music will secure but relatively
barren percepts, consisting of little besides the mere sensory elements. Truly, "to
him that hath shall be given" in the realm of perception.
The Accuracy of Percepts Depends on Experience.—We must perceive
objects through our motor response to them as well as in terms of sensations.
The boy who has his knowledge of a tennis racket from looking at one in a store
window, or indeed from handling one and looking it over in his room, can never
know a tennis racket as does the boy who plays with it on the court. Objects get
their significance not alone from their qualities, but even more from their use as
related to our own activities.
Like the child, we must get our knowledge of objects, if we are to get it well,
from the objects themselves at first hand, and not second hand through
descriptions of them by others. The fact that there is so much of the material
world about us that we can never hope to learn it all, has made it necessary to put
down in books many of the things which have been discovered concerning
nature. This necessity has, I fear, led many away from nature itself to books—
away from the living reality of things to the dead embalming cases of words, in
whose empty forms we see so little of the significance which resides in the
things themselves. We are in danger of being satisfied with the forms of
knowledge without its substance—with definitions contained in words instead of
in qualities and uses.
Not Definitions, But First-hand Contact.—In like manner we come to know
distance, form and size. If we have never become acquainted with a mile by
actually walking a mile, running a mile, riding a bicycle a mile, driving a horse a
mile, or traveling a mile on a train, we might listen for a long time to someone
tell how far a mile is, or state the distance from Chicago to Denver, without
knowing much about it in any way except word definitions. In order to
understand a mile, we must come to know it in as many ways as possible
through sense activities of our own. Although many children have learned that it
is 25,000 miles around the earth, probably no one who has not encircled the
globe has any reasonably accurate notion just how far this is. For words cannot
take the place of perceptions in giving us knowledge. In the case of shorter
distances, the same rule holds. The eye must be assisted by experience of the
muscles and tendons and joints in actually covering distance, and learn to
associate these sensations with those of the eye before the eye alone can be able