that the eye is regarded by many Africans less as a 
     receiving organ than as an instrument of the will, the ear 
     being the main receiving organ.

     Carothers reiterates that the Westerner depends on a 
high degree of visual shaping of spatiotemporal relations 
without which it is impossible to have the mechanistic sense of 
causal relations so necessary to the order of our lives. But the 
quite different assumptions of native perceptual life have led 
him to ask (p. 311) what has been the possible role of written 
words in shifting habits of perception from the auditory to 
visual stress: 

     When words are written, they become, of course, a part 
     of the visual world. Like most of the elements of the 
     visual world, they become static things and lose, as such,