THE MONTESSORI METHOD - online book

Scientific Methods As Applied To Child Education In "the Children's Houses"

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	222             THE MONTESSORI METHOD
	senses if we are to appreciate harmony. The aesthetic harmony of nature is lost upon him who has coarse senses. The world to him is narrow and barren. In life about us, there exist inexhaustible fonts of aesthetic en­joyment, before which men pass as insensible as the brutes seeking their enjoyment in those sensations which are crude and showy, since they are the only ones accessible to them. Now, from the enjoyment of gross pleasures, vicious habits very often spring. Strong stimuli, indeed, do not render acute, but blunt the senses, so that they require stimuli more and more accentuated and more and more gross. Onanism, so often found among normal children of the lower classes, alcoholism, fondness for watching sen­sual acts of adults — these things represent the enjoyment of those unfortunate ones whose intellectual pleasures are few, and whose senses are blunted and dulled. Such pleasures kill the man within the individual, and call to life the beast. Indeed from the physiological point of view, the im­portance of the education of the senses is evident from an observation of the scheme of the dia­grammatic arc which represents the functions of the nervous system. The external stimulus acts upon the organ of sense, and the impression is trans­mitted along the centripetal way to S—Sense, C—Nerve the nerve centre — the corresponding centre, M—Motor.              . motor impulse is elaborated, and is transmitted along the centrifugal path to the organ of motion, provoking a movement. Although the arc repre­sents diagrammatically the mechanism of reflex spinal