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Tustin's evocative conceptualizations of autistic states escort us to the outer reaches, and thereby to the foundations, of human experience. Far reaches, because she asks us to imagine what it is like to live in a world in which the ordinary foundations and signposts have gone missing. We would indeed feel 'up in the air', 'unrooted', 'spinning endlessly', 'floating weightlessly'; to feel human again, we must 'come down to earth'. But the return journey requires the attention of a skilled, imaginative and steadfast escort since we must encounter the same primeval terrors, dread and sickness of heart from which we fled upwards and outwards in the first place. As one recovering autistic child remarked, 'It's such a worry being a human being'. Tustin states grimly, 'In these children the human spirit has been well-nigh extinguished'. All the mundane steps of daily life are worrisome for the autistic individual because the dimensions of space and time which underpin our commonsense world are not, and have never become, 'second nature'. They have to be learned or found as the unordinary, solipsistic, self-generated—autistic—protections drop off like a dessicated skin or brittle shell.
Kant might have felt vindicated by Tustin's phenomenological account of what he described as the 'a priori principles of knowledge'—namely 'space and time'. Kant said 'although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience'. There are absolute universal modes of knowledge—the pure intuitions of space and time—which we do not derive immediately from our own experience but from a universal rule which is 'borrowed by us from experience'. Thus, Kant says, 'we would say of a man who undermined the foundations of his house, that he might have known a priori that it would fall, that is, that he need not have waited for the experience of its actual falling. But still he could not know this completely a priori. For he had first to learn