Section 2-2 of PoF makes me think of one of my favorite movies, The Miracle Worker.  In it, Patty Duke plays Helen Keller as a child, before she established a thinking relation to the world.

Blind, deaf and wild, Helen was considered unteachable until Annie Sullivan, played by Anne Bancroft, took charge of her.  Helen's material senses of sight and hearing, that would have allowed her to grasp the relation between words and the sense-perceptible world, were absent.  Annie had to try to make other senses, such as touch and taste, take their place.

It was a grueling battle between them, because Helen experienced her teacher as the person who thwarted her at every turn, and there was no way for Annie to communicate her real intent to the angry girl.

Unlike Helen's parents and the other adults around her, Annie refused to let herself feel pity for the child.  It was only through Annie's apparent harshness, her apparently unloving relation to the child, that Helen in a moment of extreme stress was able to break through to the insight that the hand sign for water stood for the stuff that was pouring out of the wellpump.

The reason this section of PoF reminds me of this film is that, in order for Helen to break open the closed book of the world, she had to be taught to use the limited material senses that were still available to her, for the purpose of learning words and their relationship to things.  A purely spiritual relationship was not enough.  

Although Helen had full stature as a spiritual human being before Annie Sullivan came into her life, that didn't suffice to make her a functioning human being in the material world. For that, she had to learn how to connect her percepts with concepts.