ES2212: Theorising Early Childhood

On Reason and Rationality

Last updated 02.10.11.

Your first assignment expects you to tackle Locke's and Rousseau's accounts by offering a structured evidence base - a selection of direct quotations from the two texts we are featuring which you think best illustrates their different perspectives on the growth/acquisition/or inheritance of rational thought and action.  But you are also expected to provide commentary and explanation for each of your selected quotations, and to present these within the structure of on overall argument.  The hardest structure to manage will be one in which you refer to both theorists as you build towards a single conclusion.  We therefore advise you to tackle Locke first, and Rousseau second, leaving you to decide if there is to be one conclusion, or two separate ones that relate to each theorist.  As a first essay at Level 5 this will be acceptable.

 

General Over-view

Within the framework of your course as a whole there are two general perspectives available which are not mutually exclusive.  The one you are probably most familiar with is the Marxist one, in which the cultural changes associated with the early modern era (17th & 18th Cent.) are understood as superstructural changes accompanying the socio-economic implications of a growing 'middle class' in Western societies.  To put it in more obviously Marxist terms, we deal with those times when the growing diversity and extent of bourgeois economic power begins to exceed the ability of monarchs and church authorities to control it.

The other general perspective is the Hegelian one in which, rather than focussing on shifts in the balance of material power, our attention turns instead towards changes in the growth of Spirit - in less grand terms - the degree of spiritual autonomy.  This focus brings into sharp relief the Protestant revolution (and catholic resistance to it), and the rise of the citizen.  A more dramatic comment may also help: the period we are studying in the first half of the module begins and ends in social revolution and the beheading of monarchs - the English Civil War and the violent death of Charles I, the French Revolution and the similar demise of Louis 16th., his wife, and much of his court. 

 

Religious Contests and Confusions

In brief, there are two different social traditions: that of the various forms of Protestantism stemming principally from the writings of Martin Luther, and the much older tradition of Catholicism built around the authority of the Pope - based for most of the time in Rome.  (Several names in the Protestant genealogy should be noted - the humanist Erasmus who exercised a considerable influence on Luther's own thinking, and John Calvin - one of the principal architects of Protestantism as an organised religion.)  Locke lived and worked in an England which was dominated by a mild (not to say ambivalent) version of Protestantism - the Church of England - while Rousseau spent most of his life moving from one Catholic country to another, constantly outraging one group of clerics or another.  Of the two men's writings, Locke's was the most easily accommodated within the expected range of social conventions and assumptions of his time.  His success in Restoration England - the England of Charles II - were based on patronage from the wealthy and the well-favoured (as defined largely by the King alone).  Locke's active involvement with the Royal Society - the scientific 'think-tank' of which Charles II graciously agreed to be the principal patron - also entailed that his findings, once presented at this venue, were assumed to be acceptable to the King's way of thinking and therefore carried the monarch's imprimatur.  It should also be remembered that it was Locke's emphasis on empiricism that most excited and informed the work of the Encyclopaedists - see below.

In contrast to this rather cosy arrangement, Rousseau seems always to have been more than ready to take on a self-imposed role of political and religious rebel, falling in and out of friendship with the powerful and the well-known, being exiled from one state after another because of the 'radical' nature of his ideas, and having to reconcile himself to the public burning of his books and the occasional confiscation of his property.  In this respect, it is interesting to compare his personal biography with that of Voltaire - famed author of Candide - see below.  Yet there is a specific complication in Rouuseau's case.  He was initially brought up as a Protestant, but under the influence of his first patron, Madame de Warens, he abjured Protestantism and trained instead for the Catholic priesthood in Turin.  He moved to Paris, became secretary to the French Ambassador at Venice, returned to Paris, and then began a promising career as a musician (once again supported and encouraged by a clever and financially independent woman.  (Refer - in relation to this - to Rousseau's insistence on Sophie's passivity in the last sections of his Émile.).  Only after his career as a musician lost direction did he become involved in the free-thinking intellectual circle called the philosophes - (in English, a group usually called the Encyclopaedists).  It is from this time that his authorship really begins, and at least initially his concerns can only really be understood in terms of this anti-clerical context and the particular enthusiasms of the other Encyclopaedists: principally D' Alembert, Condillac, and Diderot - the Encyclopaedia's long suffering editor (the book took twenty years to compile).  An early part of Rousseau's membership to this group included an extended stay in Geneva, his birthplace, and the re-adoption of Protestantism.  But perhaps more accurately, this re-conversion ought to be described as a rejection of Catholicism, since his writings on the subject is Deistic rather than Protestant.

After returning again to Paris, Rousseau produced most of the books for which he is now remembered, but the increasingly radical nature of his arguments eventually brought him into conflict with public sentiment and, of course, the Church authorities.  He fled Paris, tried to return to Geneva, but was viewed with suspicion and soon exiled again.  He eventually ended up in England where he was befriended by English and Scottish intellectuals, principally David Hume.  However, it should come as no surprise to learn that he ended up by quarrelling violently with most of his former friends and returned to France - living out the remainder of his life in conditions of great poverty.

 

Despite these very different personal circumstances, there are some basic assumptions which both men shared.

Whatever their beliefs in God and His role as creator of all things, they both assumed that there was a fundamental distinction to be made between human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom, and that this difference rested principally on the possession of reason - and the free-will which was also part of this package.  However, Rousseau seems always to have been suspicious of the pathways of action that 'pure' reason could lead to, i.e., he rejected Hobbes' recipes for social harmony.  You will find evidence in his texts that it is feeling, rather than reason, which he most values as a guide to 'natural' action - always allowing that such feelings have not previously been corrupted by misconceived relationships between individuals.  Further proof of this ambivalence about the necessary virtue of logic is provided through his friendship with Hume, who famously indicated that 'reason is, and ought only to be, slave to the passions.'  A crazy and deliberately satirical example of logic being an unsound guide to social action is provided by Swift's 'A Modest Proposal'.

Reason does, however, allow the lives of men and women to be ordered productively, and for Locke in particular, it was reason that gave to all men the capacity - not only to recognise God - but also the ability to follow the dictates of conscience - stimulated either by one's own interpretation of the scriptures or the interpretations offered via the priesthood - so long as these could be demonstrated as being rational.  (N.B. For Rousseau, the voice of conscience was likened to God's voice within us, and as such its reliance on reason was secondary.  In this regard, Rousseau distanced himself from the Encyclopaedists, and the Lockean tradition of the rejection of faith as the final proof of religious experience.  However, like them (and Locke) he was a Deist.)

Failure to acquire or develop a capacity for rational thought was widely believed to leave a child (and subsequently the adult if s/he survived) in a state of bestiality that was, in fact, lower than that of any beast, since a capacity to use language and reason was deemed to be the 'natural' distinguishing characteristic of human beings - according to biblical teaching the principal gift given by God - along with the freedom to choose.

Nevertheless, unlike the angels, human beings were also material beings, and as such they were subject to the coarser impulses of the body.  Their responsibility was therefore to use their reason in such a way as to act rationally - to choose to act in ways that did not demonstrate their slavery to the 'passions' (see Locke's justification for teaching reason to children.)

 

Cultural Context

There are two texts in English which give further insight into the religious scheme of thinking commonly assumed during Locke's life.  The first - closest to Locke in terms of publication date - is John Milton's Paradise Lost, particularly book V in which the archangel Raphael apprises Adam of his true condition, relative to God, the angels, and the rest of creation, as well as warning him of the threat posed by Satan.  If you are not put off by the antique English, I would also recommend looking at Book VIII, because here you get Raphael insisting that Man's reason should only be employed for practical activities, rather than 'idle speculation', and you also get Adam describing his coming into consciousness and discussing with God his need for a partner to end his solitude - and the limits he feels in being only offered for companionship animals which, to use God's own explanation, do not carry His image within themselves.  (For those who want a quick 'fix' - Book 12, lines 30 to 100, give Michael's explanation of the future of Adam's stock after the Flood, including the building of the Tower of Babel and the coming of the first monarch - 'hunter of men' - Nimrod.  Book 9 contains Eve's temptation, so here we get some notion of the assumed differences between the sexes as far as rational action was concerned - you may find this useful if you intend to mention Sophie's education.) http://www.paradiselost.org/

Nearer to Rousseau, in terms of publication date, but written in English, is Alexander Pope's An Essay on Man.  Here, epistles II and III will be found most useful - the first of these describing the state of Man relative to God, the second of Man to Society.  The full texts can be obtained at http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/pope-i.html

In addition, a less high-flown literary experiment, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, which satirises the common pretensions of human reason is revealing of the term's expected domestic and public application  (see part 4 "A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms")  http://mural.uv.es/esase/chap4-1.html

Lawrence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy - is also relevant; and is also a remarkable tour de force.  Less experimental, but also worth noting is Fielding's Tom Jones because of its depiction of the operations of chance and good will, i.e., a perhaps more Rousseau-esque social perspective.  Finally, William Blake, writing after Rousseau and at the start of the Romantic movement, introduces us to Urizen, a mythical figure of conventional custom and reason, which Blake presents as the principal enemy of the imagination.  http://facstaff.uww.edu/hoganj/contents.htm

 

The nearest French equivalent for Rousseau would be the essays of Denis Diderot - an influential source for much of Rousseau's initial ideas (translated extracts of most of the following can be found on the web).  Apart from the Encyclopaedia itself, Diderot gained much influence through his use of the novel form (like Rousseau's Émile); see his Jacques le Fataliste and le neveu de Rameau.  But Diderot also experimented - see his imagined dialogues Le Ręve D' Alembert (D' Alembert's dream - a materialist biophysical fantasy) and imaginary exchanges of letters Le lettre sur les aveugles (letter on the blind - a discussion of Locke's system in relation to the restricted sensations available to the blind) and La Religieuse (the Nun - an imagined exchange of letters between a Nun and her benefactor documenting the cruelty, madness, and sexual perversity she experienced while living in a convent).

As will be clear by now, Locke's epistemology had a major impact on the thinking of the philosophes.  (At the end of these notes, I have appended a small section written by Buffon in 1749 in which he writes in the spirit of Locke, deploring the common fashion of swaddling newborns.)  As a further example there are the writings of  the Abbé de Mureau - otherwise known as Condillac: his l'Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines - is a faithful account of Locke's own Essay, and his Traité des systčmes - attacks at some length the same targets as Locke did in his own Essay.  Condillac's Traité des sensations extends these arguments further and develops Locke's associationist psychology.  And at the back of all of this literary endeavour there is the comic tale told by Europe's principle wit and intellectual gadfly - Voltaire.  His Candide, and in particular his Dr. Pangloss (who believes 'rationally' that everything in the world always happens for the best because the world itself is the best of all possible worlds - a parody of G. W. Leibniz's theorising), became a classic almost as soon as it was published in 1759.  Like Rousseau, Voltaire saw his books burnt, his property confiscated, and was forced to flee from time to time to Holland or England.  Initially Rousseau very much admired Voltaire, but later this enthusiasm was replaced by contempt and the often vicious competition between the two for public regard offers a further dimension for research - see Pearson, R. (2005) Voltaire Almighty London: Bloomsbury; pp. 292-296.  (Candide can be read in English on the web - it's a short read - and since all of you are looking at the Discourse - you may find Voltaire's take on Paris and its corruptions interesting - see chapter 22 at this site.)

http://www.literature.org/authors/voltaire/candide/

 

The Register of the Texts

This is a perhaps unfamiliar topic, but what is being considered here is the precise form of the texts themselves and the intentions of the authors in adopting the forms they did.  For instance, Milton adopts the ancient form of Homeric verse, but uses this classical style and his ostensibly historical and religious subject matter to present an argument for the current significance and necessity of choosing experience over obedience to the law.  Pope, on the other hand, adopts the then modern form of satire to argue for a more traditional estimate of what was called at the time Man's place in the Great Chain of Being.

As far as Locke's work is concerned, one must recognise once again the great significance given to his public acknowledgement of patronage and any dedications which he makes at the start of each text; after that, a record of the vicissitudes of publication is also often revealing.  But the convention of calling something an 'essay' or a set of 'remarks' implies that the author is assuming that the work will find its place in the public arena, which at the time meant a world of texts read, debated, promulgated, or decried by learned authority figures and those deemed to be members of 'polite society'.  Central to this social formation - apart from popular sentiment and generally assumed shared understandings - was the notion of rational debate and discourse.  To become a member of this community one had to be educated, usually have some form of sponsorship or affiliation, and enjoy - at least to some degree - a measure of independent means, i.e., one was not 'in trade'.  This was therefore a community of the rich, the powerful, and the professional, and central to all their dealings was the assumption that practice and conduct could be developed and enhanced through the exercise of reason.

Rousseau's texts also conform to this general expectation, except that we have now to consider the newly formed convention of the novel, and a more long-standing Europe-wide enthusiasm for allegory.  With regards to the first, you should note that Rousseau himself adopted the novel form and explicitly identified Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as a supremely 'educative' text.  This immediately raises questions about our understanding of Émile.  One has the sense that Rousseau is advocating Defoe's novel - not as an instruction manual - but as a demonstration of individual resourcefulness, i.e., as a figure to think with, as an emblem of a particular approach to life.  This is entirely consistent with the general form of literary criticism as the time.  In the case of novels it was expected that they would typically take the form of an object lesson - an edifying tale intended to tighten both the sinews and fortify the mind for greater moral endeavour.  However, remember that Rousseau held an extended friendship with Diderot, and that Diderot, like Swift before him, deliberately played around with this normal expectation of his readers e.g. Swift produced a tale that mocked the then popular accounts of travels to foreign lands, and gave it no apparent final ending or moral lesson; Diderot often featured individuals living as social parasites in scandalous settings.  Note also that the 'fictional' status of the novel made it easier for a writer critical of the status quo to present his ideas through the mouths of his characters and their changing circumstances and therefore avoid an immediate threat of censorship from the authorities.

There is also the convention of allegory.  This is a potentially very large subject, but for now take the following as a starting point:-

  1. once again we are back in the realm of non-literal truth - as is the case for the novel form,

  2. allegory has a specific educational purpose and a particular social function,

  3. in terms of social function, it often serves as one of the few ways a forgotten or discarded aspect of social life can continue to live on in popular representations,

  4. in terms of educational purpose, one is asked to recognise a well-established past truth as being born again in present circumstances - and usually such recognitions are intended to be minatory with respect to the present.

If you review your understanding of Rousseau's intent in Émile I think you will find that it conforms rather closely to these four observations.  Reason and rationality fall victim to a much larger argument for total social change based on a sense of lost relationships - with others, and with nature.  And whereas Locke presents his various comments on the subject as the enlightened commentary of a thinker on a specific subject of interest to all members of a community, he does not call for - or expect - his writings to provoke political or social change, only more enlightened educational practices.

 

Reason and Rationality in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century

Locke provides us with a useful overview.  In summary form, he rejects the significance of syllogistic argument - see below - and deplores the division between faith and reason - increasingly being made in his time by Protestants keen to establish the right of individuals to determine their own beliefs.  Apart from this problem, he identifies the following meanings for the word 'reason':-

the equivalent of 'true and clear' principles,

'clear and fair' deductions from these principles,

and the identified cause of an event or the initial cause in a chain of events, i.e., a final cause.

Some other matters of context are also worth thinking about.

In general writing at the time of Locke's Essay, the distinction between reason and rationality was often poorly expressed - if even recognised.  However, the existing Christian tradition - as incorporated within university curricula - provided one way in which the vagaries of colloquial expression could be set aside.  Within the universities reason was identified explicitly as a capacity for recognising the validity of verbal demonstration and explanation, and as such dealt with formal grammatical structure rather than specific details of content.  Rationality, on the other hand, dealt directly with the ordered manipulation of content itself.  During Locke's lifetime, university curricula continued to expand from a Medieval 'core' of mathematics, logic, theology, and a combination of rhetoric and grammar, so as to incorporate medicine and the law, and the beginnings of modern scientific study under the heading of 'natural' philosophy.

The analytical tradition at the centre of the study of logic during this time largely derived from the writings of Aristotle, and although this had undergone various elaborations over the centuries, it retained much of its original form.  As such, it emphasised the importance of deduction - the identification of the only valid conclusions which could be drawn from premises which had been accepted as true - and this form of logic had very little to say at all about induction - the drawing of general conclusions on the basis of selected specific instances.  It was to this tradition that Locke's writings were initially addressed, and since he took it upon himself to make the case for empiricism in general, and early scientific experimentation in particular, he had much to do.  Arguably, of course, the whole Essay - and the lives of individuals gaining the understanding he depicted - amounted to an exercise in induction.  But in this respect Locke's writing is both confused and often disappointing; the distinction between deduction and induction was never clearly established in his educational commentaries.  In fact, it was left to G. W. Leibniz to suggest the principles which might justify the establishment of scientific fact, i.e., to develop a more formal definition of the criteria for deciding between what was a 'reasonable' prediction and sheer fantasy, etc.

With regard to the syllogism, there is much on the web, but for now consider the following.  A typical Aristotelian syllogism was presented in a form in which a predicate was first ascribed to a group, an individual was identified as a member of that group, leading to the unsurprising conclusion that the predicate should also apply to the individual, e.g.

                                                All A is B                               All Greeks are mortal

                                                C is A                                    Socrates is a Greek

                                                Therefore C is B                     Therefore Socrates is mortal

If you have come across Venn diagrams and sets before now you will realise that these can also be employed as demonstration aids for these logical steps.  Locke is very scathing about syllogisms because he thinks they are useless for making new speculative leaps of insight.  However, ever the politician, he does allow that they may have their uses when it comes to subsequent presentation to an academic audience.  In fact, from our perspective he rather over-states his case; consider the following example where I have used the basic form of the syllogim to structure a controversial argument for animal rights:-

    All A is B       All humans are protected by the U.N. Charter of Human Rights.

    C is like A      The higher primates (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, orang-utangs) have human-like minds and bodies.

    Therefore C should be

     treated as A   Therefore the higher primates should be protected by the U.N. Charter of Human Rights.

Note that the controversy does not arise from the syllogistic form of the argument, but from the substitution of 'is' by 'like' and 'should be treated as'.  Just what kinds of similarity are being claimed by 'like', why is a moral 'should' inserted in the conclusion, and - again' what kinds of similar actions are intended by 'treated as'?

 

Rousseau, writing later than Locke, and in a society where the growth of the professions was further advanced, faced the same problems of definition - but his perceptions were now heightened, not simply through his understanding of rational procedures (professional practices), but by his own appreciation of the work of the Encyclopaedists and their devotion to Locke's accounts of understanding.  Within this context it was possible to take for granted the fact that each of the professional fields demonstrated Man's capacity for reason - and that was enough - the need to make the further point that each of the steps in professional action could be expressed in syllogistic terms seemed less pressing.  My suggestion is, therefore, that Rousseau's references to rationality incorporate a tacit acknowledgement of there being, in effect, multiple logics, rather than differing applications of the single Aristotelian framework; and while it is possible that Locke would have got around to demonstrating the formal structure of syllogistic deduction to one of his notional pupils, Rousseau would never have considered this an appropriate part of Émile's education.

 

From the above, I suggest that selecting your assignment quotes might 'reasonably' involve:

  1. identifying the parts of either text where they appear to be referring to formal reason, as opposed to its rational applications.

  2. establishing if both writers feel that the education of the very young needs to provide for a separate experience of formal reasoning - apart from its rational application in ethics and the other ordered practices of everyday life - even if they say little or nothing about this.

  3. testing to see if both writers assume that all forms of rationality can effectively be bundled together - at least as far as answering initial needs are concerned, i.e., for early education, is there the suggestion of there being separate forms of rationality - perhaps roughly matching the curriculum subjects?

  4. checking to see if the two men differ in the relative significance they give to feelings in their explanations of reason and rationality.

 

Contemporary Uses of the Terms 'Reason' and 'Rationality'

Kant, writing a little later than Rousseau, changed this philosophical map by re-introducing a priori 'ideas', and our own take on reason and rationality is influenced by his assumptions - and their present break-down.  A famous characterisation of our own context in provided by Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.  The following notes are not in complete agreement with Lyotard's arguments, but his central idea - that there is no 'natural' centre or hierarchy to discourse on reason and rationality - is accepted.  This perspective leads onto the following critical responses which have been elaborated by various authors:  

So, what might a contemporary definition of rationality look like?

  1. the term is used when a specific area of human endeavour is said to be governed by a related set of principles which allow us to recognise the validity of correct arguments and propositions expressed within its terms.  This entails that there is common agreement about the field's general objectives, aims, methods, and criteria for validity.

  2. the assumption is that the particular set of principles associated with a specific field of rational enquiry are 'coherent', so that methods, criteria, etc. do not usually generate contradictory outcomes when they are applied.

  3. the simple-minded way of summarising the above is to say that there is an agreed system of rules deriving from agreed principles.

 

Unfortunately, matters are rarely that clear-cut.  In the first place, forms of rationality themselves proliferate, and in at least two distinct ways: under the pressure of ever more refined psychological divisions (cognition, morality, aesthetics, etc.), and under the different cultural pressure of objects themselves being apprehended in multiple ways, according to different rational systems of application developed for diverse purposes.  These differing paradigms by which objects are defined, treated methodically, and subjected to specific criteria, have been called by Wolfgang Welsch the 'radicals' of rationality {Welsch, 1998: 18).  According to this analysis, it is the paradigms which constitute the actuality of rational practice, and the normally recognised forms of rationality - science, the law, geography, etc. are secondary manifestations of these - clusters of associated practices held together by family resemblance.

In addition to these uncertainties, it is also the case that what were once considered separate fields of enquiry have become 'entangled' - to use Welsch's word - with other forms of rational practice so that hybrid practices have developed which depend on there being well-established and recognised links with what were previously disparate paradigms, e.g. criminal investigations increasingly become dominated by medical considerations, etc.  In other words, it appears that rather than rationality being constituted today by separate 'paradigmatic' forms, it would be better to understand it as comprising networks of paradigms.  This is a far messier account than one is used to dealing with in philosophy and initial education, but note - it does not imply that contemporary rationalities are irrational, only that they are complex and resist easy definition.

Reason in the past was, as we have seen, understood as the faculty which underpinned rational action, i.e., it was the content-free, formal source of ultimate rational order and unity.  Because reason does not focus on objects, but instead on the forms of rationality, it is fundamentally different from rationality itself - and this distinction is one we inherit from Kant, 'Reason is never in immediate relation to an object, but only to the understanding' (Kant, 1965).  Clearly, therefore, in view of what has been said about the 'messiness' of contemporary rationality, the traditional notion of reason is no longer fit for purpose - capable of addressing the nature of relationships between diverse forms of rationality.  This presents a major problem for all rational procedures, because most still pay tacit lip-service to the idea that it is reason which offers insight into the supposed unified totalities of thought with which they deal.  In undergraduate chemistry, for example, early Twentieth Century atomic theory is still invoked to explain the different reaction propensities of elements and their compounds, and to make predictions about the likely properties of compounds yet to be synthesized - but the more recent quantum physics begins to complicate these 'traditional' atomic underpinnings.

Welsch argues that in contemporary conditions of rationality this quest for totality and unity simply cannot be sustained.  (In Lyotard's language, reason (formal logic) can no longer provide a master-narrative for all rational endeavour.)   Welsch argues instead for reason to take on a less ambitious role, but one which maintains the distinction between rationality and reason.  To invoke reason is to call for an unlimited capacity for reflection, but if this is defined in such a way as to introduce principles relating to abstract content, then reason simply becomes another form of rationality - a hyper-rationality as Welsch calls it.  Therefore he advocates a different strategy - one he calls 'transversal reasoning':

For a plain language illustration of the kinds of application where Welsch's transversal reason might come to the fore, see Schön, 1986: 254-283 - particularly the second illustration featuring slum clearance.

 

Notes, references, etc.

Kant, I., (1965) Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Kemp Smith, New York: St. Martin's Press, p. 532 f.

Schön, D. 'Generative Metaphor: a Perspective on Problem-Setting in Social Policy' in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Ortony, A., 1986, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 254-283.

Welsch, W. 'Rationality and Reason Today' in Criticism and Defence of Rationality in Contemporary Philosophy, eds. Gordon, D. & Niznik, J., 1998, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 17-31.

From Buffon, 1749, Histoire naturelle générale et particuličre, quoted in Chérer, S., (2009) Ma Dolto Paris: Medium; pp. 257-6, my trans.

(on the sense of touch and manipulation)

In the newborn, the hands remain as useless as those of a foetus, because it is not given the liberty to use them for the first six or seven weeks; the arms being bound tightly along with the rest of the body until the end of this period, and I do not understand the reason for this practice.  It is certain that by so doing one delays the development of an important sense from which all our understandings depends, and one would do better to allow the infant free usage of its hands from the moment of birth; it will acquire much sooner the first notions of the form of things.  And who knows up to what point these first ideas influence later ones?  One man has perhaps a greater understanding than another because, in his earliest infancy, he had greater and earlier use of this sense. When infants are free to use their hands, they do not delay in making great use of them, they try to touch everything that is given to them; one sees them amusing themselves and taking pleasure in manipulating the things that their little hands can hold; they seem to seek to understand the structure of a thing, by methodically touching all of its sides; they amuse themselves in this way, or rather teach themselves about the new object.  And if we think about it, in the rest of life, do we not divert ourselves in any other way when we make or discover anything new?

It is by touch alone that we are able to gain an understanding that is complete and real; it is this sense that corrects all the other senses, the influences of which would be no more than illusions producing errors in our thinking, if touch did not lead our judgement.  But how does this important sense develop?  How do our first understandings reach our soul?  Have we not forgotten all that passed in the shadows of our infancy?  How can we retrieve the first traces of our thinking?  Is there not some transgression in wishing to return that far back? If the matter were less important one would have cause for censure, but it is perhaps more important than anything else, a noble reason for study: and does one not recognise that one must strive every time that one wishes to attain a great objective?        

D.M.B. Oct. 2011.