Items related to Problems of Life and Mind Volume 1
Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 edition. Excerpt: ...and deeper validity than the perceptions and conceptions which arise from individual experiences. Neither observation nor reflection warrants the supposition that the infant, in spite of inheritance, has on entering the world innate ideas of Space, Time, Causation; what is innate, or connate, is the structure which will react under stimulus in certain definite ways; and these reactions will depend on the degree of development which the structure has acquired. The infant whose optical organs are imperfect will never react on the stimulus of light in the same way as another infant whose organs are more developed. At birth no child sees. It usually takes several days before the child makes any movement of the head towards the light, and four or five weeks before he learns to converge the axes of both eyes. But could the infant see at birth, this would not indicate that the perception of Space or of external objects was innate; only that the structure was ready for its function; and how that structure came to be formed would still remain a question. And there is one argument which is decisive. Even if we assume, with the advocates of creation, that the structure was not evolved through modifications impressed on organic substance by successive adaptations of the Organism to the external Medium--that the eye, for example, was created, and not evolved by the action of light upon the sensitive surface--created with all the powers which it is known to manifest,--still there would remain the necessity of this eye being brought into the appropriate relation with the external object; and in the absence of this, in the absence of light to call the energy of the eye into existence, there would be no visual perception, much less an idea of Space. Nor...
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- PublisherTheClassics.us
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 1230406980
- ISBN 13 9781230406985
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages128
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