asked me how I had taught Helen adjectives and the names of
abstract ideas like goodness and happiness. These same questions
had been asked me a hundred times by the learned doctors. It
seems strange that people should marvel at what is really so
simple. Why, it is as easy to teach the name of an idea, if it is
clearly formulated in the child's mind, as to teach the name of
an object. It would indeed be a herculean task to teach the words
if the ideas did not already exist in the child's mind. If his
experiences and observations hadn't led him to the concepts,
SMALL, LARGE, GOOD, BAD, SWEET, SOUR, he would have nothing to
attach the word-tags to.

I, little ignorant I, found myself explaining to the wise men of
the East and the West such simple things as these: If you give a
child something sweet, and he wags his tongue and smacks his lips
and looks pleased, he has a very definite sensation; and if,
every time he has this experience, he hears the word SWEET, or
has it spelled into his hand, he will quickly adopt this
arbitrary sign for his sensation. Likewise, if you put a bit of
lemon on his tongue, he puckers up his lips and tries to spit it
out; and after he has had this experience a few times, if you
offer him a lemon, he shuts his mouth and makes faces, clearly
indicating that he remembers the unpleasant sensation. You label
it SOUR, and he adopts your symbol. If you had called these
sensations respectively BLACK and WHITE, he would have adopted
them as readily; but he would mean by BLACK and WHITE the same
things that he means by SWEET and SOUR. In the same way the child
learns from many experiences to differentiate his feelings, and
we name them for him--GOOD, BAD, GENTLE, ROUGH, HAPPY, SAD. It is
not the word, but the capacity to experience the sensation that