the poets have taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. the only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. we differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond our senses.
it is more difficult to teach ignorance to think than to teach an intelligent blind man to see the grandeur of niagara. i have walked with people whose eyes are full of light, but who see nothing in wood, sea, or sky, nothing in city streets, nothing in books. what a witless masquerade is this seeing! it were better far to sail forever in the night of blindness, with sense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with the mere act of seeing. they have the sunset, the morning skies, the purple of distant hills, yet their souls voyage through this enchanted world with a barren stare.
the calamity of the blind is immense, irreparable. but it does not take away our share of the things that count—service, friendship, humour, imagination, wisdom. it is the secret inner will that controls one's fate. we are capable of willing to be good, of loving and being loved, of thinking to the end that we may be wiser. we possess these spirit-born forces equally with all god's children. therefore we, too, see the lightnings and hear the thunders of sinai. we, too, march through the wilderness and the solitary place that shall be glad for us, and as we pass, god maketh the desert to blossom like the rose. we, too, go in unto the promised land to possess the treasures of the spirit, the unseen permanence of life and nature.
the blind man of spirit faces the unknown and grapples with it, and what else does the world of seeing men do? he has imagination, sympathy, humanity, and these ineradicable existences compel him to share by a sort of proxy in a sense he has not. when he meets terms of colour, light, physiognomy, he guesses, divines, puzzles out their meaning by analogies drawn from the senses he has. i naturally tend to think, reason, draw inferences as if i had five senses instead of three. this tendency is beyond my control; it is involuntary, habitual, instinctive. i cannot compel my mind to say "i feel" instead of "i see" or "i hear." the word "feel" proves on examination to be no less a convention than "see" and "hear" when i seek for words accurately to describe the outward things that affect my three bodily senses. when a man loses a leg, his brain persists in impelling him to use what he has not and yet feels to be there. can it be that the brain is so constituted that it will continue the activity which animates the sight and the hearing, after the eye and the ear have been destroyed?
it might seem that the five senses would work intelligently together only when resident in the same body. yet when two or three are left unaided, they reach out for their complements in another body, and find that they yoke easily with the borrowed team. when my hand aches from overtouching, i find relief in the sight of another. when my mind lags, wearied with the strain of forcing out thoughts about dark, musicless, colourless, detached substance, it recovers its elasticity as soon as i resort to the powers of another mind which commands light, harmony, colour. now, if the five senses will not remain disassociated, the life of the deaf-blind cannot be severed from the life of the seeing, hearing race.
the deaf-blind person may be plunged and replunged like schiller's diver into seas of the unknown. but, unlike the doomed hero, he returns triumphant, grasping the priceless truth that his mind is not crippled, not limited to the infirmity of his senses. the world of the eye and the ear becomes to him a subject of fateful interest. he seizes every word of sight and hearing because his sensations compel it. light and colour, of which he has no tactual evidence, he studies fearlessly, believing that all humanly knowable truth is open to him. he is in a position similar to that of the astronomer who, firm, patient, watches a star night after night for many years and feels rewarded if he discovers a single fact about it. the man deaf-blind to ordinary outward things, and the man deaf-blind to the immeasurable universe, are both limited by time and space; but they have made a compact to wring service from their limitations.
the bulk of the world's knowledge is an imaginary construction. history is but a mode of imagining, of making us see civilizations that no longer appear upon the earth. some of the most significant discoveries in modern science owe their origin to the imagination of men who had neither accurate knowledge nor exact instruments to demonstrate their beliefs. if astronomy had not kept always in advance of the telescope, no one would ever have thought a telescope worth making. what great invention has not existed in the inventor's mind long before he gave it tangible shape?
a more splendid example of imaginative knowledge is the unity with which philosophers start their study of the world. they can never perceive the world in its entire reality. yet their imagination, with its magnificent allowance for error, its power of treating uncertainty as negligible, has pointed the way for empirical knowledge.
in their highest creative moments the great poet, the great musician cease to use the crude instruments of sight and hearing. they break away from their sense-moorings, rise on strong, compelling wings of spirit far above our misty hills and darkened valleys into the region of light, music, intellect.
what eye hath seen the glories of the new jerusalem? what ear hath heard the music of the spheres, the steps of[111] time, the strokes of chance, the blows of death? men have not heard with their physical sense the tumult of sweet voices above the hills of judea nor seen the heavenly vision; but millions have listened to that spiritual message through many ages.
our blindness changes not a whit the course of inner realities. of us it is as true as it is of the seeing that the most beautiful world is always entered through the imagination. if you wish to be something that you are not,—something fine, noble, good,—you shut your eyes, and for one dreamy moment you are that which you long to be.