The Crack in the Cosmic Egg by Joseph Chilton Pearce Page A

concerning these children, until one now

hears this case blithely dismissed as a fraud. No one reading the

original publications, studying the photographs, the diaries, and

the overall picture will dismiss the case, however.

What kind of minds did these feral children have? Jung claimed

that no one is born a tabula rasa, a blank slate. As the body carries

features specifically human yet individually varied, so does the psychic

organism. The psyche preserves an unconscious stratum of elements going

back to the invertebrates and ultimately the protozoa. Jung speaks of

a hypothetical peeling of the collective unconscious, layer by layer,

down to the psychology of the ameoba. We can trace a rough parallel in

the development of the foetus.

As the body must be fed to realize the potential built into the genes

as a blueprint waiting development, so must the mind. Jung used the

term 'archetype' to describe "recurrent impressions made by subjective

reactions." We inherit such ideas as part of our potential mind pattern.

Archetypes, however, are only a kind of readiness to produce over and

again the same mythical ideas. If the readiness is not triggered by a

response or a demand, that particular possibility remains dormant and

even steadily diminishes.

Linguists are intrigued by the readiness with which the infant seizes

a language, if given the referents. The "readiness" of language can

miscarry, as Susanne Langer put it, because of lack of the trigger-response

interplay. If this happens, the world view shaped by that language

miscarries too and never forms. Then participation in that kind of world

is permanently blocked. Leonard Hall writes that our culture and our

reality are not separate phenomena. People of different cultures not

only speak different languages, but inherit different sensory worlds.

Lévi-Strauss uses the term "semantic-universe" to describe our

intellectual-scientific-technological fabric of reality. Jerome Bruner

suggested that language is our most powerful means for performing

"transformations" on the world. We transmute the world's shape by

metaphoric mutations. We recombine our verbal structures in the interest

of new possibilities.

Susanne Langer considered language to be conception and concept the frame

of perception. Thus, for Langer, we live in a "primary world" of reality

that is verbal. The word for a thing helps to arrest an infant's visual

process and focus it on a specific thing. It is the combination of sensory

possibilities, parental focus, and innate drives for ordering, that

organizes the child's visual field. Then the word-thing growth becomes

exponential, growing like a tree at every tip. Grouping, identifying,

correlating, with a constant check with his exemplars, gives the young

child an exciting participation and communion, a defining of self

and world. Langer calls even nature a "language-made affair," made for

understanding, and "prone to collapse into chaos if ideation fails." Fear

of this collapse may be the most potent fear in civilized man.

It is our ideation that shapes our children. We provide an enriched

environment, visual, aural, tactile stimuli to furnish the best supply of

raw materials, but our own background determines what we decide makes up

a "rich environment." And then, quite naturally, we expect our children

to shape this material into a pattern verifying our commitments. We look

for agreement.

A "semantic universe" can be built only on a background of language,

but a considerable input of raw materials of every kind is necessary

to build a language. The mind has to have a world to draw on in order

to organize a world-to-view. In my opening broadside I have emphasized

thinking as the director of percepts, and surely our developed concepts

shape our world. But an initial impingement on perception by a world

"out there," of things and people, enters as the other mirror in the

two-way interaction of development of