tina just does not go into him. His unconsciousness is
filled with a strong, dark, vague prescience of a powerful presence, a
two-eyed, four-legged, long-maned presence looming imminent.

And to _force_ the boy to see a correct one-eyed horse-profile is just
like pasting a placard in front of his vision. It simply kills his
inward seeing. We don't _want_ him to see a proper horse. The child is
_not_ a little camera. He is a small vital organism which has direct
dynamic _rapport_ with the objects of the outer universe. He
perceives from his breast and his abdomen, with deep-sunken realism,
the elemental nature of the creature. So that to this day a Noah's Ark
tree is more real than a Corot tree or a Constable tree: and a flat
Noah's Ark cow has a deeper vital reality than even a Cuyp cow.

The mode of vision is not one and final. The mode of vision is
manifold. And the optical image is a mere vibrating blur to a
child--and, indeed, to a passionate adult. In this vibrating blur the
soul sees its own true correspondent. It sees, in a cow, horns and
squareness, and a long tail. It sees, for a horse, a mane, and a long
face, round nose, and four legs. And in each case a darkly vital
presence. Now horns and squareness and a long thin ox-tail, these are
the fearful and wonderful elements of the cow-form, which the dynamic
soul perfectly perceives. The ideal-image is just outside nature, for
a child--something false. In a picture, a child wants elemental
recognition, and not correctness or expression, or least of all, what
we call understanding. The child distorts inevitably and dynamically.
But the dynamic abstraction is more than mental. If a huge eye sits in
the middle of the cheek, in a child's drawing, this shows that the
deep dynamic consciousness of the eye, its relative exaggeration, is
the life-truth, even if it is a scientific falsehood.

On the other hand, what on earth is the good of saying to a child,
"The world is a flattened sphere, like an orange." It is simply
pernicious. You had much better say the world is a poached egg in a
frying pan. _That_ might have some dynamic meaning. The only thing
about the flattened orange is that the child just sees this orange
disporting itself in blue air, and never bothers to associate it with
the earth he treads on. And yet it would be so much better for the
mass of mankind if they never heard of the flattened sphere. They
should never be told that the earth is round. It onl