=Dangers of Neglecting the Senses.=--The former neglect of an adequate exercise of the senses during the early education of the child was evidently unpedagogical for various reasons. As already noted, other forms of acquiring knowledge, such as constructive imagination, induction, and deduction, must rest primarily upon the acquisitions of sense perception. Moreover, it is during the early years of life that the plasticity and retentive power of the nervous system will enable the various sense impressions to be recorded for the future use of the mind. Further, the senses themselves during these early years show what may be termed a hunger for contact with the world of concrete objects, and a corresponding distaste for more abstract types of experience.
=Learning Through all the Senses.=--In recognizing that the process of sense perception constitutes a learning process, or is one of the modes by which man enters into new experience, the teacher should further understand that the same object may be interpreted through different senses. For example, when a child studies a new bird, he may note its form and colour through the eye, he may recognize the feeling and the outline through muscular and touch sensations, he may discover its song through the ear, and may give muscular expression to its form in painting or modelling. In the same way, in learning a figure or letter, he may see its form through the eye, hear its sound through the ear, make the sound and trace the form by calling various muscles into play, and thus secure a number of muscular sensations relative to the figure or letter. Since all these various experiences will be co-ordinated and retained within the nervous system, the child will not only know the object better, but will also be able to recall more easily any items of knowledge concerning it, on account of the larger number of connections established within the nervous system. One chief fact to be kept in mind by the teacher, therefore, in using the method of sense perception, is to have the pupil study the object through as many different senses as possible, and especially through those senses in which his power of discrimination and recall seems greatest.