birth of a human being, in
contrast with many animals, nothing at all can as yet be distinctly
seen, it is not allowable to maintain that everything must be seen
double. Rather is it true that everything is seen neither single nor
double, since the very young child perceives, as yet, no forms
(boundary-lines) and no distances, but merely receives impressions of
light, precisely as is the case with the person born blind, in the
period directly after an operation has been performed upon his eyes.

Schopenhauer (in his treatise on "Sight and Colors," first edition,
Leipsic, 1816, p. 14) divined this truth. He says, "If a person who was
looking out upon a wide and beautiful prospect could be in an instant
wholly deprived of his intellect, then nothing of all the view would
remain for him except the sensation of a very manifold reaction of his
retina, which is, as it were, the raw material out of which his
intellect created that view."

The new-born child has, as yet, no intellect, and therefore can not, as
yet, at the beginning, see; he can merely have the sensation of light.

This opinion of mine, derived from observation of the behavior of
newly-born and of very young infants (cf. the first chapter of this
book), seems to me to be practically confirmed in an account given
by Anselm von Feuerbach in his work on Kaspar Hauser (Anspach, 1832,
p. 77).

"In the year 1828, soon after his arrival in Nuremberg, Kaspar
Hauser was to look out at the window in the Vestner Tower,
from which there was a view of a broad and many-colored summer
landscape. Kaspar Hauser turned away; the sight was repugnant
to him. At a later period, long after he had learned to speak,
he gave, when questioned, the following explanation:

"'When I looked toward the window it always seemed to me as if
a shutter had been put up close before my eyes, and that upon
this shutter a colorer had wiped off his brushes of different
colors, white, blue, green, yellow, and red, all in motley
confusion. Individual things, as I now see them, I could not,
at that time, perceive and distinguish upon it; it was
absolutely hideous to look upon.'"

By this, as well as by the experiences with persons born blind and
afterward surgically treated, it is clearly demonstrated that colors
and degrees of brightness are severally apprehended before forms and
distances can be perceived. The case must be the same with the norm