What Happens with Our Sense Organs Of all the tools with whic | Human Nature

What Happens with Our Sense Organs

Of all the tools with which children attempt to conquer the world, the sense organs play the most important part in determining their essential relationships with the world in which they live. It is through the sense organs that they construct their own cosmic picture. Above all, it is the eye that confronts the environment, since it is primarily the visual world that forces itself upon the attention of every human being and feeds them the main data in their experience. The visual picture of the world in which we live is uniquely significant in that it deals with unchanging images, in contrast with the other sense organs, the ear, the nose, the tongue and the skin, which are sensitive only to temporary stimuli. There are individuals, however, in whom the ear is the predominant organ. Here a fund of information is built up based upon acoustic data. In this case the psyche might be said to have a predominantly auditory pattern.

Less frequently we find individuals in whom motor activity is predominant. Another type is characterized by a keen interest in the stimuli of smell or taste, of which the first group, those more sensitive to smell, is at a relative disadvantage in our civilization. Then there are a number of children in whom the musculature plays the leading role. This group comes into the world characterized by great restlessness, which forces them to constant movement in childhood, and to greater activity in maturity. Such individuals are interested only in activities in which the muscles play the chief role. They exhibit their activity even during sleep, as anyone can verify by observing them restlessly tossing about in their beds. We must class ‘fidgety’ children, whose restlessness is often considered a bad thing, in this category.

In general we can say that virtually every child approaches the world with heightened interest in one particular organ or group of organs, whether these are their sense organs or their musculature. All children construct a picture of the world in which they live from the impressions that their most sensitive organ gathers from their surroundings. Consequently we can only understand human beings when we know what sense organs or groups of organs they approach the world with, because all their relationships are coloured by this fact. We can only interpret their actions and reactions if we first understand the influence their organic defects have had on their attitude to the world – on their cosmic picture – in childhood, and thus on their later development.

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