The Senses and the Mind

by Anonymous

All our senses require training and education; they are taught, even as we are taught language. It is some time before the infant sees distinctly, or forms any idea of size, proportion, or distance; long before it hears accurately, and understands a word of speech; longer still before it discriminates between musical notes; it is long before delicious odours are relished, and long before there is much distinction of flavour in food, for instinct directs the infant to its mother's breast, and for many a year sweet viands are chiefly acceptable. Habit, exercise, practice, then improve the power and acuteness of the senses, but simple feeling is blunted by habit and exercise.

It is, we think, Mr. Lane who tells us, that in Egypt and elsewhere, persons who have hoarded wealth are in the habit of inflicting the bastinado on themselves, increasing the number of strokes by degrees, in order to inure themselves to a mode of extortion of which they are constantly in dread. They hope to be able to weary out their tormentors, or convince them by endurance of their poverty, and so preserve their bags of gold and silver. Idolatrous devotees in India accustom themselves to self-inflicted torture, and feel much less than we might suppose; nay, even in our own country, in times of spiritual darkness, when by mortification and penance men hoped to merit heaven, how many have worn a shirt of horsehair till custom had made it no hardship! The ancient Britons bore, almost unclothed, the severities of winter; and we have read a story, but where we cannot recollect, to the following purport:—A North American Indian was asked, how, nearly naked as he was, he bore with such ease the summer's heat and the winter's cold; he asked the inquirer, how his face, exposed to the weather, endured the changes. My face, said the white man, is hardened to it; and I, retorted the red man, am face all over.

We have said it is long before an infant is in the full use of its bodily senses: now with regard to feeling the infant is acutely sensitive; but who ever saw a child of a few months old examine the qualities of objects by the touch? it cannot even manipulate; it cannot use its hands; it has to learn the art of touch, and to improve by practice and the exercise of the mind. For example, some persons will pass a piece of silk or cloth between their fingers, and tell you its quality; and so with respect to other things; this is the result of attention and exercise.

No one is born without the organization necessary for the development of the sense of touch, for if the arms and hands be deficient, some other part, as the lips or tongue, will take up the function, and this alone shows what education effects; but if a person be born deaf, or blind, or incapable of taste and smell, (which latter appears to be very rare, if, indeed, the case ever occur,) no other part can supply the loss; but the loss, as far as the sight at least is concerned, is partly compensated for by the elevation of the sense of touch; and in this we see the immediate bearing of these two senses on each other.

The boy born blind, upon whom Cheselden so successfully operated, believed, when first he saw, that the objects touched his eyes, as the things which he felt touched his skin; consequently he had no idea of distance. "He did not know the form of any object, nor could he distinguish one object from another, however different their figure or size might be; when objects were shown to him which he had known formerly by the touch, he looked at them with attention, and observed them carefully, in order to know them again; but as he had too many objects to retain at once, he forgot the greater part of them, and when he first learned, as he said, to see and to know objects, he forgot a thousand for one that he recollected. It was two months before he discovered that pictures represented solid bodies; until that time he had considered them as planes and surfaces differently coloured, and diversified by a variety of shades; but when he began to conceive that these pictures represented solid bodies, in touching the canvass of a picture with his hand he expected to find something in reality solid upon it, and he was much astonished when, on touching those parts which seemed round and unequal, he found them flat and smooth like the rest. He asked which was the sense that deceived him—the sight or the touch. There was shown to him a little portrait of his father, which was in the case of his mother's watch; he said that he knew very well that it was the resemblance of his father, but he asked with great astonishment how it was possible for so large a visage to be kept in so small a space, as that appeared to him as impossible as that a bushel could be contained in a pint."[22]

[22] Phil. Trans., 1728.

In the Philosophical Transactions of 1826 will be found the account of a case by Mr. Wardrop, which is very interesting; it is that of an intelligent female of mature age, who was born blind; in her infancy, operations were performed on both of her eyes, but they failed, one eye being irrecoverably destroyed, and the other useless from closure of the pupil; on this eye Mr. Wardrop successfully operated: but it was not with joy that objects for the first time were perceived; she was confused by the appearance of a new world, now for the first time opened to her sense of sight; hitherto she had known it only through the sense of touch, and touch and sight had still to be reconciled. "On the sixth day, she said that she saw better than she had done on any preceding day, but I cannot tell (said she) what I do see; I am quite stupid. She seemed, indeed, bewildered from not being able to combine the knowledge acquired by the senses of sight and touch, and felt disappointed in not having the power of distinguishing at once by her eye, objects which she could so readily distinguish from one another by feeling them.

"The next day, on examining with the eye the tea-cups and saucers, and being asked what they were—I don't know, she replied; they look very queer to me, but I can tell in a minute when I touch them. So with an orange which was lying before her, she could make nothing of it until she actually touched it. When the experiment was made of giving her a silver pencil-case and a large key to examine with her hands, she discriminated and knew each distinctly; but when they were placed on the table side by side, though she distinguished each with her eye, yet she could not tell which was the pencil-case and which the key.

"In six weeks after the operation, she returned home. At this period, she had learned a great deal; she had acquired a pretty accurate notion of colours, but with regard to forms and distance she was still very ignorant. She had also great difficulty in directing her eye to an object, so that when she attempted to look at anything she turned her head in various directions, until her eye caught the object of which it was in search. She still entertained, however, the same hope, which she expressed soon after the operation, that when she got home, her knowledge of external things would be more accurate and intelligible, and that when she came to look at those objects which had been so long familiar to her touch, the confusion which the multiplicity of external objects now caused would in a great measure subside."