A Life of One's Own by Milner Marion Blackett

Author:Milner, Marion Blackett.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

8

Discovering that thought can

be blind

I went to work upon this boat the most like a fool that ever man did who had any of his senses awake. I pleased myself with the design without determining whether I was ever able to undertake it; not but that the difficulty of launching my boat came often into my head; but I put a stop to my own inquiries into it by this foolish answer which I gave myself – ‘Let me first make it, I'll warrant that I'll find some way or other to get it along when it is done’.

This was a most preposterous method; but the eagerness of my fancy prevailed, and to work I went and felled a cedar-tree.

Daniel Defoe

I had now discovered certain facts about the way my mind behaved. I had come to the conclusion that what mattered most to me seemed to depend on my powers of perceiving, and that these were, to some extent, under my own control. But the greatest obstacle in the way which was continually preventing me from being fully responsive to my surroundings seemed to be fear of difficulty. I thought then that my next task must be to look for reasons why I was always expecting things to be difficult, distrusting my own ability, fearing the criticisms of others

At first I did not find any more help in scientific explanations than I had done before. I had of course heard a lot of talk which purported to explain such attitudes in terms of current psychological doctrine – ‘unconscious guilt feelings’, ‘inferiority complex’, and the like. But though I understood that it was all supposed to be due to situations of my early childhood, I did not see how to apply such explanations to the particular problem which I had in hand. So I had floundered on, still blindly, until several years after I had begun to keep a diary – until, in fact, I was introduced to some experimental studies which eventually shed a flood of light on all my observations, although it took me many years to grasp their full implications.

The experiments dealt with the question of how children think. As far as I could understand it, the central discovery seemed to be that a most crucial step in the mental development of a child is learning how to distinguish between thoughts and things. It appeared that, at first, mental happenings must be indistinguishable from physical ones, for a child is not born knowing that what goes on in his own mind has not the same sort of independent existence as what goes on around him. He does not know that a feeling in his own mind is only his feeling, he has no means of telling, for instance, that the whole world is not darkened with his misery; for he cannot know, until he has laboriously experimented, which of the things he is aware of is part of himself, which is independent. Neither does he know that his

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