United States or Latvia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The way in which our spatial conceptions are ever extended and built up out of the data of action is also well illustrated in the case of the blind, and to this also M. Villey devotes an interesting chapter under the title La conquête des représentations spatiales. This is effected in their case by the high development of what we must call active touch.
Indeed, the idea divests itself of the great bulk of the tactual details by which it was apprehended, whilst the muscular sensations which accompanied the act of palpation never seek to be joined with the idea. This divestiture of sensation proceeds to such an extent that there is nothing left beyond what M. Villey calls the pure form.
Undoubtedly, so far as we are aware, the most valuable contribution to this aspect of the discussion is to be found in a little volume recently published in Paris under the title Le Monde des Aveugles. The author, M. Pierre Villey, is himself blind.
M. Villey quotes Diderot as affirming that the blind cannot imagine. According to Diderot, images require colour, and colour being totally wanting to the blind the nature of their imagination was to him inconceivable. The common opinion, says M. Villey, is entirely with Diderot. It does not believe that the blind can have images of the objects around him.
The sensitiveness of the skin varies at different places from the tongue downwards. Palpation by the fingers marks a further stage. The blind also, we are told, largely employ the feet in walking as a source of locative data. To the concepts reached by such palpation with the hand, M. Villey gives the name of Manual Space.
They did this in the old days, when men used stone instead of iron, because the top of a hill was a good place to hold against enemies; and so now, these 73,426 years after, they find the same advantage catching them again to their hurt. And so things go the round. Anyway Villey the Dry is a fort, and there my four brothers were going.
All that the Mind of the vident ordinarily grasps and utilises in his discursive employment of the idea of any physical thing is what we have ventured to call its dynamic significance. And the very careful analysis which M. Villey has made of the mental conceptions of the blind clearly shows that in their case he has reached exactly the same conclusion.
There must therefore be some common measure by means of which a community is established between the spatial conceptions of the blind and those of the vident. M. Villey concludes and clearly shows that the common medium is to be found in the fact that our spatial conceptions are fundamentally based upon and are expressive of the discoveries of our exertional activity.
The present writer has been in correspondence with M. Villey, whose conclusions remarkably confirm the view for which this essay contends, and he finds that M. Villey recognises the truth of that view.
The universal diffusion of sunlight is also a determining factor. The matter becomes still clearer when we contrast the experience of vident men with what we have been able to learn of the experiences of the blind. Nowhere have we found this aspect of the question discussed with the same clearness and ability as by M. Pierre Villey in his recently published essay, Le Monde des Aveugles Part III.
Word Of The Day