The child's mind : its growth and training being a short study of some processes of learning and teaching / by W.E. Urwick.

  • Urwick, W. E. (William Eddowes)
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The child's mind : its growth and training being a short study of some processes of learning and teaching / by W.E. Urwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    58/306 (page 42)
    part of the system is the cell, and the nerve fibres, whether sensory or motor, are to be regarded as off- shoots from it, whose function it is to conduct. The sensory organ is a special pre-adaptation to enable the cell to be fed with stimuli, and the muscles another special pre-adaptation to enable the energy of the cell to be expended in the service of the organism. In the human frame such paths exist in numbers at birth ready to function, and environment supplies them with the needed stimuli. All movements whatsoever must be regarded as a response of the system to these stimuli. Apart from the great vital functions mentioned above, numbers of these are already specific, and adapted to a definite and restricted service—such, for ex- ample, as the contraction and expansion of one set of eye muscles to light, the action of the lips in sucking, of the throat in swallowing, the fingers in clutching, while the apparently random movements of limbs and body are responses to other stimuli, as yet as undifferentiated as are these movements themselves. Every shade of feeling has from the outset its more or less elaborate correlative upon both the motor and sensory side of the system. These lower but fundamental paths are all of them ready to function at the moment of birth, and are pre-adaptations. In the case of the special organs of sense this is only partially the case. They are only very par- tially capable of receiving their stimuli at birth. Touch, the universal sense, is readier than the others,