so, in the midst of life, eager, imperious life, the deaf-blind child, fettered to the bare rock of circumstance, spider-like, sends out gossamer threads of thought into the measureless void that surrounds him. patiently he explores the dark, until he builds up a knowledge of the world he lives in, and his soul meets the beauty of the world, where the sun shines always, and the birds sing. to the blind child the dark is kindly. in it he finds nothing extraordinary or terrible. it is his familiar world; even the groping from place to place, the halting steps, the dependence upon others, do not seem strange to him. he does not know how many countless pleasures the dark shuts out from him. not until he weighs his life in the scale of others' experience does he realize what it is to live forever in the dark. but the knowledge that teaches him this bitterness also brings its consolation—spiritual light, the promise of the day that shall be.
the blind child—the deaf-blind child—has inherited the mind of seeing and hearing ancestors—a mind measured to five senses. therefore he must be influenced, even if it be unknown to himself, by the light, colour, song which have been transmitted through the language he is taught, for the chambers of the mind are ready to receive that language. the brain of the race is so permeated with colour that it dyes even the speech of the blind. every object i think of is stained with the hue that belongs to it by association and memory. the experience of the deaf-blind person, in a world of seeing, hearing people, is like that of a sailor on an island where the inhabitants speak a language unknown to him, whose life is unlike that he has lived. he is one, they are many; there is no chance of compromise. he must learn to see with their eyes, to hear with their ears, to think their thoughts, to follow their ideals.
if the dark, silent world which surrounds him were essentially different from the sunlit, resonant world, it would be incomprehensible to his kind, and could never be discussed. if his feelings and sensations were fundamentally different from those of others, they would be inconceivable except to those who had similar sensations and feelings. if the mental consciousness of the deaf-blind person were absolutely dissimilar to that of his fellows, he would have no means of imagining what they think. since the mind of the sightless is essentially the same as that of the seeing in that it admits of no lack, it must supply some sort of equivalent for missing physical sensations. it must perceive a likeness between things outward and things inward, a correspondence between the seen and the unseen. i make use of such a correspondence in many relations, and no matter how far i pursue it to things i cannot see, it does not break under the test.
as a working hypothesis, correspondence is adequate to all life, through the whole range of phenomena. the flash of thought and its swiftness explain the lightning flash and the sweep of a comet through the heavens. my mental sky opens to me the vast celestial spaces, and i proceed to fill them with the images of my spiritual stars. i recognize truth by the clearness and guidance that it gives my thought, and, knowing what that clearness is, i can imagine what light is to the eye. it is not a convention of language, but a forcible feeling of the reality, that at times makes me start when i say, "oh, i see my mistake!" or "how dark, cheerless is his life!" i know these are metaphors. still, i must prove with them, since there is nothing in our language to replace them. deaf-blind metaphors to correspond do not exist and are not necessary. because i can understand the word "reflect" figuratively, a mirror has never perplexed me. the manner in which my imagination perceives absent things enables me to see how glasses can magnify things, bring them nearer, or remove them farther.
deny me this correspondence, this internal sense, confine me to the fragmentary, incoherent touch-world, and lo, i become as a bat which wanders about on the wing. suppose i omitted all words of seeing, hearing, colour, light, landscape, the thousand phenomena, instruments and beauties connected with them. i should suffer a great diminution of the wonder and delight in attaining knowledge; also—more dreadful loss—my emotions would be blunted, so that i could not be touched by things unseen.
has anything arisen to disprove the adequacy of correspondence? has any chamber of the blind man's brain been opened and found empty? has any psychologist explored the mind of the sightless and been able to say, "there is no sensation here"?
i tread the solid earth; i breathe the scented air. out of these two experiences i form numberless associations and correspondences. i observe, i feel, i think, i imagine. i associate the countless varied impressions, experiences, concepts. out of these materials fancy, the cunning artisan of the brain, welds an image which the sceptic would deny me, because i cannot see with my physical eyes the changeful, lovely face of my thought-child. he would break the mind's mirror. this spirit-vandal would humble my soul and force me to bite the dust of material things. while i champ the bit of circumstance, he scourges and goads me with the spur of fact. if i heeded him, the sweet-visaged earth would vanish into nothing, and i should hold in my hand nought but an aimless, soulless lump of dead matter. but although the body physical is rooted alive to the promethean rock, the spirit-proud huntress of the air will still pursue the shining, open highways of the universe.
blindness has no limiting effect upon mental vision. my intellectual horizon is infinitely wide. the universe it encircles is immeasurable. would they who bid me keep within the narrow bound of my meagre senses demand of herschel that he roof his stellar universe and give us back plato's solid firmament of glassy spheres? would they command darwin from the grave and bid him blot out his geological time, give us back a paltry few thousand years? oh, the supercilious doubters! they ever strive to clip the upward daring wings of the spirit.
a person deprived of one or more senses is not, as many seem to think, turned out into a trackless wilderness without landmark or guide. the blind man carries with him into his dark environment all the faculties essential to the apprehension of the visible world whose door is closed behind him. he finds his surroundings everywhere homogeneous with those of the sunlit world; for there is an inexhaustible ocean of likenesses between the world within, and the world without, and these likenesses, these correspondences, he finds equal to every exigency his life offers.
the necessity of some such thing as correspondence or symbolism appears more and more urgent as we consider the duties that religion and philosophy enjoin upon us.
the blind are expected to read the bible as a means of attaining spiritual happiness. now, the bible is filled throughout with references to clouds, stars, colours, and beauty, and often the mention of these is essential to the meaning of the parable or the message in which they occur. here one must needs see the inconsistency of people who believe in the bible, and yet deny us a right to talk about what we do not see, and for that matter what they do not see, either. who shall forbid my heart to sing: "yea, he did fly upon the wings of the wind. he made darkness his secret place; his pavilion round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the skies"?
philosophy constantly points out the untrustworthiness of the five senses and the important work of reason which corrects the errors of sight and reveals its illusions. if we cannot depend on five senses, how much less may we rely on three! what ground have we for discarding light, sound, and colour as an integral part of our world? how are we to know that they have ceased to exist for us? we must take their reality for granted, even as the philosopher assumes the reality of the world without being able to see it physically as a whole.
ancient philosophy offers an argument which seems still valid. there is in the blind as in the seeing an absolute which gives truth to what we know to be true, order to what is orderly, beauty to the beautiful, touchableness to what is tangible. if this is granted, it follows that this absolute is not imperfect, incomplete, partial. it must needs go beyond the limited evidence of our sensations, and also give light to what is invisible, music to the musical that silence dulls. thus mind itself compels us to acknowledge that we are in a world of intellectual order, beauty, and harmony. the essences, or absolutes of these ideas, necessarily dispel their opposites which belong with evil, disorder and discord.[165] thus deafness and blindness do not exist in the immaterial mind, which is philosophically the real world, but are banished with the perishable material senses. reality, of which visible things are the symbol, shines before my mind. while i walk about my chamber with unsteady steps, my spirit sweeps skyward on eagle wings and looks out with unquenchable vision upon the world of eternal beauty.