Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/63

PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF PLAY. 49 le can see it though he knows he cannot, or that he simply lixes up, or rather fails to separate, what he knows from rhat he sees. I take it that the first solution is not a correct ^count of the child's mental state, and that the second is mch nearer the truth. Yet I think it is the former that mst be given on associationist principles, and the old diffi- culties arise concerning the relations between perception and lagination, which have been already dealt with. Again, as Prof. Sully points out, the child when left to himself is " for the most part oblivious of dress ". 1 " Even when he grows sophisticated and attempts clothes, he still shows his primitive respect for the natural frame. A well-known an- thropologist tells me that his little boy on watching his mother draw a lady insisted on her putting in the legs before shading in the petticoats." In General Pitt-Kivers' collection there is a drawing by a boy of ten which, in clothing the gure, naively indicates the limbs through the covering. ?his agrees with what Von Steinen tells us of the way the Brazilian Indians drew him and his companions. I venture to reiterate the explanation suggested above, hen dealing with Perception and Imagination. These are lot cases of vivid imagination overlaying or underlying cer- tain actual sight sensations. The object seen is a complex ^suiting from past sensations, both tactual and visual, as fell as from the present sensation. The child knows the )bject to be such and such, and draws what he knows and lot what he sees, or images. The purity and truth of early >erception is a myth which has been fostered : 1. By supposing that children see what we see without our miptations to error. 2. By the physical explanation of vision which gives the ime retinal image for all. 3. By the need of philosophy for some unchanging mental lement common to all. I was first led to the opinions expressed above by teaching lodel drawing to a class of boys about ten and eleven years )f age. At this age one might have supposed that the disso- ciation of the present sensation from the rest of the complex, /hich is the object perceived, would have gone a long way. Jut what are the facts ? The outstanding conclusion is that le child must laboriously be taught to distinguish what he from what he knows. Suppose he can see three faces of a cube, he may draw you four without the least compunction. And if you want to 1 Studies in Childhood, Prof. Sully, p. 371. 4