Page:First steps in mental growth (1906).djvu/71

partly visual and partly motor? The answer to these questions will be, at best, conjectural. But it is the writer's opinion that, at first, the request for pencil and paper to make so and so was merely an expression of the child's desire to scribble imitatively and did not mean that he wanted, as an older person might, to "draw," i.e., represent by lines the figure named.

Somewhat later the child does image, roughly, the things he names, and he wants to transfer his images to paper. But his drawing is merely a tangle of marks, bearing no resemblance to the thing he sets out to draw. And the question is, why doesn't he produce something bearing some resemblance to his mental copy? An answer to this question is found, in the main, in the single consideration that the child lacks the ability to draw what he images; coördination between the hand and eye is lacking. The child, it is said, is not practiced in drawing, in the use of the pencil,—does not know how to go about transferring his mental images to paper; there is imperfect coördination between the imaging and the physical activities involved in copying images. So when the little child is given pencil and paper and asked to draw a given thing it turns out that he is unable to manage the image and the necessary hand-movements at the same time, to bring the image and the hand into the relation of guide and guided.

Another fact which should be taken into account in explaining the child's failure in transferring his images to paper is that frequently, soon after the child begins marking, he becomes absorbed in the pencil and the marking and the image fades. Even as late as R.'s thirtieth month, it was evident from his calmness in the presence of the most unlikely performances that his images soon disappeared; at any rate, that they failed to direct his hand-movements. And it was often noticed, as the drawing proceeded, that he frequently changed his mind as to