“The tenderest touch”: Children’s Senses

This chapter proposes that in the works of some figures associated with the Royal Society, children are thought to have specific sensory and mental characteristics which make them consummate empiricists. In particular, I suggest, aspects of children’s perceptual and cognitive experience which were, in the rationalist philosophy associated with René Descartes, considered as barriers to the acquisition of truth—namely their intense sensory impressionability, their receptive memories, and their inability to engage in high-level abstract reasoning—could be advantages in the context of a methodological programme which professed to value first-hand experience above all else, and which shrunk from theoretical conjecture, premature systematization, and dogma. For all that, the distinction is not as clear-cut as we might be inclined to think: aspects of Descartes’ thought also imply that, in some regards, infancy is an epistemologically privileged state. The final part of the chapter considers how ideas about the benefits of a childlike disposition endured into the eighteenth century in the work of the “common sense philosopher” Thomas Reid.