Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 15.djvu/64

 50 w. H. WINCH: demonstrate to him that he cannot see four, you will need to direct his attention point by point and line by line before you succeed. Above all, the youthful draughtsman refuses per- sistently to narrow down the top of the cube to what he sees, using the term in our sense. It swells up in huge propor- tions, and the boy's justification is " the top is as big as that ". So it is, and again you have to work to the thing as seen and not as known. Again, he sometimes puts in the back edge of the solid cube which he cannot see, and rejoices in the completeness of his drawing. Some pains will be required to show him that he cannot see it, and his justification again is that it is really there. Nor is the unsophisticated adult very much better. A colleague of my own was fond of putting the question, " Draw from memory what a brick looks like ". To the non-psycho- logical the result seems disastrously unexpected. A central oblong with four faces attached, showing one above, one below, one to the right, and one to the left, was far from an uncommon answer. And, when we pass from such glaring errors to the estima- tion of the relative slopes of the perceived lines, we enter on a task which the most able teachers know to be extremely arduous. Indeed, to isolate the sensational contribution to a given perception is very truly the last stage of a long and gradual process. We must be taught to see. The philosophical bearing of this is obvious and important, but my immediate interest lies in the psychological aspect purely. Prof. Sully, for whose work on children's drawings I should like to express my delighted thanks, seems to hold a view with which my own, I fear, is quite inconsistent. He believes, I think, that inaccuracies of the sort I have indicated arise from want of motor co-ordination. The visual image is correct, but the child cannot draw his image ; he has not sufficient power over his movements. This seems to me Prof. Sully's meaning, but I will quote the exact words l : " He (the child) may have the visual image of the human face or the horse which he wishes to depict. This power of visualising shows itself in other ways and can be independently tested, as by asking a child to describe the object verbally. But he has as yet no inkling of how to reproduce his image. That his inability at the outset (italics mine) is due to a want of co-ordination is seen in the fact 1 Studies in Childlwod, p. 387.