 Preface to The World I Live In The essays in the poem in this book appeared originally in the Century Magazine. The essays under the titles a chat about the hand, sense, and sensibility, and my dreams. Mr. Gilder suggested the articles, and I thank him for his kind interest and encouragement. But he must also accept the responsibility which goes with my gratitude, for it is owing to his wish and that of other editors that I talk so much about myself. Every book is, in a sense, autobiographical, but while other self-recording creatures are permitted at least to seem to change the subject, apparently nobody cares what I think of the tariff, the conservation of our natural resources, or the conflicts which revolve about the name of Dreyfus. If I offer to reform the education system of the world, my editorial friends say, that is interesting, but will you please tell us what idea you had of goodness and beauty when you were six years old? First, they ask me to tell the life of the child who is mother to the woman. Then they make me my own daughter and ask for an account of grown-up sensations. Finally I am requested to write about my dreams, and thus I become an anachronical grandmother, for it is the special privilege of old age to relate dreams. The editors are so kind that they are no doubt right in thinking that nothing I have to say about the affairs of the universe would be interesting. But until they give me opportunity to write about matters that are not me, the world must go on uninstructed and unreformed, and I can only do my best with the one small subject upon which I am allowed to discourse. In The Chant of Darkness I did not intend to set up as a poet. I thought I was writing prose, except for the magnificent passage from Job which I was paraphrasing. But this part seemed to my friends to separate itself from the exposition, and I made it into a kind of poem. End of preface. CHAPTER I I have just touched my dog. He was rolling on the grass, with pleasure in every muscle and limb. I wanted to catch a picture of him in my fingers, and I touched him as lightly as I would cobwebs. But lo, his fat body revolved, stiffened, and solidified into an upright position, and his tongue gave my hand a lick. He pressed close to me, as if he were feigned to crowd himself into my hand. He loved it with his tail, with his paw, with his tongue. If he could speak, I believe he would say with me that paradise is attained by touch, for in touch is all love and intelligence. This small incident started me on a chat about hands, and if my chat is fortunate I have to thank my dog-star. In any case, it is pleasant to have something to talk about that no one else has monopolized. It is like making a new path in the trackless woods, blazing the trail where no foot has pressed before. I am glad to take you by the hand and lead you along an untrodden way into a world where the hand is supreme. But at the very outset we encounter a difficulty. You are so accustomed to light. I fear you will stumble when I try to guide you through the land of darkness and silence. The blind are not supposed to be the best of guides. Still, though I cannot warrant not to lose you, I promise that you shall not be led into fire or water or fallen to a deep pit. If you will follow me patiently, you will find that there is a sound so fine, nothing lives twisted in silence, and that there is more mint in things than meets the eye. My hand is to me what your hearing and sight together are to you. In large measure we travel the same highways, read the same books, speak the same language, yet our experiences are different. All my comings and goings turn on the hand as on a pivot. It is the hand that binds me to the world of men and women. The hand is my feeler with which I reach through isolation and darkness and seize every pleasure, every activity that my fingers encounter. With the dropping of a little word from another's hand into mine, a slight flutter of the fingers began the intelligence, the joy, the fullness of my life. Like Job I feel as if a hand had made me, fashioned me together round about and molded my very soul. In all my experiences and thoughts I am conscious of a hand. Whatever moves me, whatever thrills me, is as a hand that touches me in the dark, and that touches my reality. You might as well say that a sight which makes you glad, or a blow which brings the stinging tears to your eyes, is unreal as to say that those impressions are unreal which I have accumulated by means of touch. The delicate tremble of a butterfly's wing in my hand, the soft petals of violets curling in the cool folds of their leaves, or lifting sweetly out of the meadowgrass, the clear, firm outline of face and limb, the smooth arch of a horse's neck and the velvety touch of his nose. All these and a thousand resultant combinations which take shape in my mind constitute my world. Things make the world we live in, and impressions furnish ideas. My world is built of touch sensations, devoid of physical color and sound. But without color and sound it breathes and throbs with life. Every object is associated in my mind with taxual qualities, which combined in countless ways gives me a sense of power, of beauty, or of incongruity, for with my hands I can feel the comic as well as the beautiful in the outward appearance of things. Remember that you, dependent on your sight, do not realize how many things are tangible. All palpable things are mobile or rigid, solid or liquid, big or small, warm or cold. And these qualities are variously modified. The coolness of a water lily rounding into bloom is different from the coolness of an evening wind in summer, and different again from the coolness of the rain that soaks into the hearts of growing things and gives them life and body. The velvet of the rose is not that of a ripe peach or of a baby's dimple cheek. The hardness of the rock is to the hardness of wood, what a man's deep base is to a woman's voice when it is low. What I call beauty I find in certain combinations of all these qualities, and is largely derived from the flow of curved and straight lines which is over all things. What does the straight line mean to you, I think you will all ask? It means several things. It symbolizes duty. It seems to have the quality of inexorableness that duty has. When I have something to do that must not be set aside, I feel as if I were going forward in a straight line, bound to arrive somewhere, or go on forever without swerving to the right or to the left. That is what it means. To escape this moralizing you should ask, how does the straight line feel? It feels, as I suppose it looks, straight, a dull thought drawn out endlessly. Elegance to the touch resides not in straight lines, but in unstraight lines, or in many curved and straight lines together. They appear and disappear, are now deep, now shallow, now broken off or lengthened or swelling. They rise and sink beneath my fingers, they are full of sudden starts and pauses, and their varieties inexhaustible and wonderful. So you see, I am not shut out from the region of the beautiful, though my hand cannot perceive the brilliant colors in the sunset or on the mountain, or reach into the blue depths of the sky. Physics tells me that I am well off in a world which I am told, knows neither cold nor sound, but is deep in terms of size, shape, and inherent qualities, for at least every object appears to my fingers standing solidly right side up, and is not an inverted image on the retina, which I understand, your brain is at infinite, though unconscious labor to set back on its feet. A tangible object passes complete into my brain with the warmth of life upon it, and occupies the same place that it does in space. For without egotism, the mind is as large as the universe. When I think of hills, I think of the upward strength I tread upon. When water is the object of my thought, I feel the cool shock of the plunge and the quick yielding of the waves that crisp and curl and ripple about my body, the pleasing changes of rough and smooth, compliant and rigid, curved and straight in the bark and branches of a tree give the truth to my hand. The immovable rock, with its juts and warped surface, bends beneath my fingers into all manners of grooves and hollows. The bulge of a watermelon and the puffed-up rotundities of squash that sprout, bud, and ripen in that strange garden planted, somewhere behind my fingertips are the ludicrous in my tactual memory and imagination. My fingers are tickled to delight by the soft ripple of a baby's laugh and find amusement in the lusty crow of the barnyard autocrat. Once I had a pet rooster that used to perch on my knee and stretch his neck and crow. A bird in my hand was then worth two in the barnyard. My fingers cannot, of course, get the impression of a large hole at a glance, but I feel the parts and my mind puts them together. I move around my house, touching object after object in order, before I can form an idea of the entire house. In other people's houses I can touch only what is shown to me. The chief objects of interest, carvings on the wall, or a curious architectural feature, exhibited like the family album. Therefore a house with which I am not familiar has for me at first no general effect or harmony of detail. It is not a complete conception, but a collection of object impressions which, as they come to me, are disconnected and isolated. But my mind is full of associations, sensations, theories, and with them it constructs the house. The process reminds me of the building of Solomon's Temple, where was neither saw nor hammer nor any tool while the stones were being laid one upon another. The silent worker is imagination, which decrees reality out of chaos. Without imagination what a poor thing my world would be. My garden would be a silent patch of earth strewn with sticks of a variety of shapes and smells. But when the eye of my mind is open to its beauty, the bare ground brightens beneath my feet, and the hedgerow bursts into the leaf, and the roastery shakes its fragrance everywhere. I know how budding trees look, and I enter into the amorous joy of the mating birds, and this is the miracle of imagination. Twofold is this miracle, when through my fingers my imagination reaches forth and meets the imagination of an artist, which he has embodied in a sculptured form. Although compared with the life-warm, mobile face of a friend, the marble is cold and pulseless and unresponsive, yet it is beautiful to my hand. Its flowing curves and bendings are a real pleasure. Only breath is wanting, but under the spell of the imagination the marble thrills and becomes the divine reality of the ideal. Imagination puts a sentiment into every line and curve, and the statue in my touch is indeed the goddess herself, who breathes and moves and enchants. It is true, however, that some sculptures, even recognized masterpieces, do not please my hand. When I touch what there is of the winged victory it reminds me at first of a headless, limbless dream that flies towards me in an unrestful sleep. The garments of the victory thrust stiffly out behind, and do not resemble garments that I have felt flying, fluttering, folding, spreading in the wind. But imagination fulfills these imperfections, and straightway the victory becomes a powerful and spirited figure with a sweep of sea winds in her robe and the splendor of conquest in her wings. I find in a beautiful statue perfection of bodily form, the qualities of balance and completeness. The manurva, hung with a web of poetical illusion, gives me a sense of exhilaration that is almost physical, and I like the luxuriant, wavy hair of Bacchus and Apollo, and the wreath of Ivy so suggestive of pagan holidays. So imagination crowns the experience of my hands, and they learned their cunning from the wise hand of another, which, itself guided by imagination, led me safely in paths that I knew not, made darkness light before me, and made crooked ways straight. CHAPTER II. THE HANDS OF OTHERS. The warmth and protectiveness of the hand are most home felt to me, who have always looked to it for aid and joy. I understand perfectly how the psalmist can lift up his voice with strength and gladness, singing. I put my trust in the Lord at all times, and his hand shall uphold me, and I shall dwell in safety. In the strength of the human hand, too, there is something divine. I am told that the glance of a beloved eye thrills one from a distance, but there is no guidance to the touch of a beloved hand. Even the letters I receive are, kind letters that betray the hearts' deep history, in which we fill the presence of a hand. It is interesting to observe the differences in the hands of people. They show all kinds of vitality, energy, stillness, and cordiality. I never realized how living the hand is until I saw those chill plaster images in Mr. Hutton's collection of castes. The hand I know in life has the fullness of blood in its veins, and is elastic with spirit. How different, dear Mr. Hutton's hands was, from its dull and sensate image. To me the cast lacks the very form of the hand. Of the many casts in Mr. Hutton's collection I did not recognize any, not even my own. But a loving hand I never forget. I remember in my fingers the large hands of Bishop Brooks, brimful of tenderness and a strong man's joy. If you were deaf and blind, and could have held Mr. Jefferson's hand, you would have seen in it a face and heard a kind voice unlike any other you have known. Mark Twain's hand is full of whimsies and the drollest humours, and while you hold it the drollery changes to sympathy and championship. I am told that the words I have just written do not describe the hands of my friends, but merely endow them with the kindly human qualities which I know they possess, and which language conveys in abstract words. The criticism implies that I am not giving the primary truth of what I feel, but how otherwise do descriptions in books I read written by men who can see render the visible look of a face. I read that a face is strong, gentle, that it is full of patience, of intellect, that it is fine, sweet, noble, beautiful. Have I not the same right to use these words in describing what I feel as you have in describing what you see? They express truly what I feel in the hand. I am seldom conscious of physical qualities, and I do not remember whether the fingers of a hand are short or long, or the skin is moist or dry. No more can you, without conscious effort, recall the details of a face even when you have seen it many times. If you do recall the features and say that an eye is blue, a chin sharp, a nose short, or a cheek sunken, I fancy that you do not succeed well in giving the impression of the person. Not so well as when you interpret at once to the heart the essential moral qualities of the face. It's humor, gravity, sadness, spirituality. If I should tell you in physical terms how a hand feels, you would be no wiser for my account than a blind man to whom you describe the face in detail. Remember that when a blind man recovers his sight he does not recognize the commonest things that has been familiar to his touch, the dearest face intimate to his fingers, and it does not help him at all that things and people have been described to him again and again. So you who are untrained of touch do not recognize a hand by the grasp, and so too any description I might give would fail to make you acquainted with a friendly hand which my fingers have often folded about, and which my affection translates to my memory. I cannot describe hands under any class or type. There is no democracy of hands. Some hands tell me that they do everything with a maximum of bustle and noise. Other hands are fidgety and unadvised, with nervous, fussy fingers which indicate a nature sensitive to the little pricks of daily life. Sometimes I recognize with foreboding the kindly but stupid hand of one who tells with many words, news, that is no news. I have met a bishop with a jocos hand, a humorist with a hand of lead and gravity, a man of pretentious valor with a timorous hand, and a quiet, apologetic man with a fist of iron. When I was a little girl I was taken to see a woman who was blind and paralyzed. I shall never forget how she held out her small, trembling hand and pressed sympathy into mine. My eyes fill with tears as I think of her. The weariness, pain, darkness, and sweet patience were all to be felt in her thin, wasted, groping, loving hand. Few people who do not know me will understand, I think, how much I get of the mood of a friend who is engaged in oral conversation with somebody else. My hand follows his motions. I touch his hand, his arm, his face. I can tell when he is full of glee over a good joke, which has not been repeated to me, or when he is telling a lively story. One of my friends is rather aggressive, and his hand always announces the coming of a dispute. By his impatient jerk I know he has an argument ready for someone. I have felt him start as a sudden recollection or a new idea shot through his mind. I have felt grief in his hand. I have felt his soul wrap itself in darkness majestically as in a garment. Another friend has positive, emphatic hands which show great pertinacity of opinion. She is the only person I know who emphasizes her spelled words and accents them as she emphasizes and accents her spoken words when I read her lips. I like this varied emphasis better than the monotonous pound of unmodulated people who hammer their meaning into my palm. Some hands, when they clasp yours, beam and bubble over with cladness. They throb and expand with life. Strangers have clasped my hand like that of a long lost sister. Other people shake hands with me as if with the fear that I may do them mischief. Such persons hold out civil fingertips which they permit you to touch, and in the moment of contact they retreat, and inwardly you hope that you will not be called upon again to take that hand of doormouse faller. Maybe token's a prudish mind, ungracious pride, and not seldom mistrust. It is the antipode of the hand of those who have large, lovable natures. The handshake of some people makes you think of accident and sudden death. Contrast this ill-boating hand with a quick, skillful, quiet hand of a nurse whom I remember with affection because she took the best care of my teacher. I have clasped the hands of some rich people that spin not and toil not, and yet are not beautiful. Beneath their soft, smooth roundness, what a chaos of undeveloped character. I am sure there is no hand comparable to the physician's impatient skill, merciful gentleness, and splendid certainty. No wonder that Ruskin finds in the sure strokes of the surgeon the perfection of control and delicate precision for the artist to emulate. If the physician is a man of great nature there will be healing for the spirit in his touch. This magic touch of well-being was in the hand of a dear friend of mine who was our doctor in sickness and health. His happy cordial spirit did his patients good, whether they needed medicine or not. As there are many beauties of the face, so the beauties of the hand are many. Touch has its ecstasies. The hands of people of strong individuality and sensitiveness are wonderfully mobile. In a glance of their fingertips they express many shades of thought. Now and again I touch a fine, graceful, supple-wristed hand which spells with the same beauty and distinction that you must see in the handwriting of some highly cultivated people. I wish you could see how prettily little children's spell in my hand. They are wildflowers of humanity, and their finger motions wildflowers of speech. All this is my private science of palmistry, and when I tell your fortune it is by no mysterious intuition or gypsy witchcraft, but by natural, explicable recognition of the embossed character in your hand. Not only is the hand as easy to recognize as the face, but it reveals its secrets more openly and unconsciously. People control their countenances, but the hand is under no such restraint. It relaxes and becomes listless when the spirit is low and ejected, the muscles tighten when the mind is excited or the heart glad, and permanent qualities stand written on it all the time. End of Chapter 2 Chapter 3 of The World I Live In This Libervox recording is in the public domain. The World I Live In by Helen Keller Chapter 3 The Hand of the Race Take in your sentry dictionary, or if you are blind, ask your teacher to do it for you, and learn how many idioms are made on the idea of hand, and how many words are formed from the Latin root manus. Enough words to name all the essential affairs of life. Hand, with quotations and compounds, occupies twenty-four columns, eight pages of this dictionary. The hand is defined as the organ of apprehension. Now perfectly the definition fits my case in both senses of the word apprehend. With my hand I seize and hold all that I find in the three worlds, physical, intellectual, and spiritual. Think how man has regarded the world in terms of the hand. All life is divided between what lies on one hand and on the other. The products of skill are manufacturers. The conduct of affairs is management. He seems to be the record, alas for our chronicles of war, of the maneuvers of armies. But the history of peace, too, the narrative of labor in the field, the forest, and the vineyard, is written in the victorious sign-manual, the sign of the hand that has conquered the wilderness. The laborer himself is called a hand. In manacle and manumission we read the story of human slavery and freedom. The minor idioms are myriad. But I will not recall too many, lest you cry, hands off. I cannot desist, however, from this word game until I have set down a few. Whatever is not one's own by first possession is second hand. That is what I am told my knowledge is. But my well-meaning friends come to my defense, and, not with content with endowing me with the natural first hand knowledge which is rightfully mine, ascribed to me a pretty natural sixth sense and credit to miracles and heaven-sent compensations, all that I have won and discovered with my good right hand, and with my left hand, too, for with that I read, and it is as true and honorable as the other. By what half-development of human power has the left hand been neglected? When we arrive at the acme of civilization shall we not all be ambidextrous, and in our hand-to-hand contests against difficulties shall we not be doubly triumphant? It occurs to me, by the way, that when my teacher was training my unreclaimed spirit, her struggle against the powers of darkness, with the stout arm of discipline and the light of the manual alphabet, was in two senses a hand-to-hand conflict. No essay would be complete without quotations from Shakespeare. In the field which, in the presumption of my youth, I thought was my own, he has reaped before me. In almost every play there are passages where the hand plays a part. Lady Macbeth's heart-broken soliloquy over her little hand, from which all the perfumes of Arabia will not wash the stain, is the most pitiful moment in the tragedy. Mark Antony rewards Scaris, the bravest of his soldiers, by asking Cleopatra to give him her hand. Commend unto his lips thy favouring hand. In a different mood he is enraged because Therias, whom he despises, has presumed to kiss the hand of the queen, my play-fellow, the kingly sill of high hearts. When Cleopatra is threatened with the humiliation of gracing Caesar's triumph, she snatches a dagger exclaiming, I will trust my resolution and my good hands. With the same swift instinct Cassius trusts to his hands when he stabs Caesar. Speak, Hans, for me. Let me kiss your hand, says the blind Gloucester to Lear. Let me wipe it first, replies the broken old king. It smells of mortality. How charged is this single touch with sad meaning? How it opens our eyes to the fearful purging Lear has undergone? To learn that royalty is no defense against ingratitude and cruelty. Caesar's exclamation about his son. Did I but live to see thee in my touch? I'd say I had eyes again. Is as true to a pulse within me as the grief he fills? The ghost in Hamlet recites the wrongs from which springs the tragedy. Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother's hand, at once of life, of crown, of queen dispatched. How that passage in Othello stops our breath, that passage full of bitter double intention in which Othello's suspicion tips the evil, what he says about Desdemona's hand. And she in innocence answers only the innocent meaning of his words. For twist that hand that gave away my heart. Not all Shakespeare's great passages about the hand are tragic. Remember the light play of words in Romeo and Juliet, where the dialogue, flying nimbly back and forth, weaves a pretty sonnet about the hand. And who knows the hand, if not the lover? The touch of the hand is in every chapter of the Bible. Why you could almost rewrite Exodus as the story of the hand. Everything is done by the hand of the Lord and of Moses. The oppression of the Hebrews is translated thus. The hand of Pharaoh was heavy upon the Hebrews. Their departure out of the land is told in these vivid words. The Lord brought the children of Israel out of the house of bondage with a strong hand and a stretched-out arm. At the stretching out of the hand of Moses the waters of the Red Sea part and stand all on a heap. When the Lord lifts his hand in anger, thousands perish in the wilderness. Every act, every decree in the history of Israel, as indeed in the history of the human race, is sanctioned by the hand. Is it not used in the great moments of swearing, blessing, cursing, smiting, agreeing, marrying, building, destroying? It sacredness is in the law that no sacrifice is valid unless the sacrifice or lay his hand upon the head of the victim. The congregation lay their hands on the heads of those who are sentenced to death. How terrible the dumb condemnation of their hands must be to the condemned! When Moses builds the altar on Mount Sinai, he is commanded to use no tool but rear it with his own hands. Earth, sea, sky, man, and all lower animals are holy unto the Lord because he has formed them with his hand. When the psalmist considers the heavens and the earth, he exclaims, What is man, O Lord, that thou art mindful of him? For thou hast made him to have a dominion over the works of thy hands. The supplicating gesture of the hand always accompanies the spoken prayer, and with clean hands goes the pure heart. Christ comforted and blessed and healed and wrought many miracles with his hands. He touched the eyes of the blind, and they were opened. When Jairus sought him, overwhelmed with grief, Jesus went and laid his hands on the ruler's daughter, and she awoke from her sleep of death to her father's love. You also remember how he healed the crooked woman. He said to her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity, and he laid his hands on her, and immediately she was made straight, and she glorified God. Look where we will. We find the hand in time and history, working, building, inventing, bringing civilization out of barbarism. The hand symbolizes power and the excellence of work. The mechanic's hand, the minister of elemental forces, the hand that hues, saws, cuts, builds, is useful in the world equally with a delicate hand that paints a wildflower or molds a Grecian urn, or the hand of a statesman that writes a law. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee. Blessed be the hand. Thrice, blessed be the hands that work. CHAPTER IV Some months ago, in a newspaper which announced the publication of the Matilda Ziegler magazine for the Blind, appeared the following paragraph. Many poems and stories must be omitted because they deal with sight. Mansions to moonbeams, rainbows, starlight, clouds, and beautiful scenery may not be printed because they serve to emphasize the blind man's sense of his affliction. That is to say, I may not talk about beautiful mansions and gardens because I am poor. I may not read about Paris and the West Indies because I cannot visit them in their territorial reality. I may not dream of heaven because it is possible that I may never go there. Yet a venturesome spirit impels me to use words of sight and sound, whose meaning I can guess only from analogy and fancy. This hazardous game is half the delight, the frolic of daily life. I glow as I read of splendors which the eye alone can survey. Illusions to moonbeams and clouds do not emphasize the sense of my affliction. They carry my soul beyond affliction's narrow actuality. Critics delight to tell us what we cannot do. They assume that blindness and deafness sever us completely from the things which the seeing and the hearing enjoy, and hence they assert we have no moral right to talk about beauty, the skies, mountains, the song of birds and colors. They declare that the very sensations we have from the sense of touch are vicarious, as though our friends felt the sun for us. They deny a priori what they have not seen and I have felt. Some brave doubters have gone so far even as to deny my existence. In order, therefore, that I may know that I exist, I resort to Des Cartes' method. I think, therefore, I am. Thus I am metaphysically established, and I throw upon the doubters the burden of proving my nonexistence. When we consider how little has been found out about the mind, is it not amazing that any one should presume to define what one can know or cannot know? I admit that there are innumerable marvels in the visible universe unguessed by me. Likewise, O confident critic, there are a myriad sensations perceived by me of which you cannot dream. Necessity gives to the eye a precious power of seeing, and in the same way it gives a precious power a feeling to the whole body. Sometimes it seems as if the very substance of my flesh were so many eyes looking out at will upon a world new created every day. The silence and darkness which are said to shut me in, open my door most hospitably to countless sensations that distract, inform, admonish, and amuse. With my three trusty guides, touch, smell, and taste, I make many excursions into the borderland of experience, which is inside of the city of light. Nature accommodates itself to every man's necessity. If the eye is maimed, so that it does not see the beautyous face of day, the touch becomes more poignant and discriminating. Nature proceeds through practice to strengthen and augment the remaining senses. For this reason the blind often hear with greater ease and distinctness than other people. The sense of smell becomes almost a new faculty to penetrate the tangle and vagueness of things. Thus, according to an immutable law, the senses assist and reinforce one another. It is not for me to say whether we see best with the hand or the eye. I only know that the world I see with my fingers is alive, ready, and satisfying. Touch brings the blind, many sweet certainties which are more fortunate fellows miss, because their sense of touch is uncultivated. When they look at things, they put their hands in their pockets. No doubt that is one reason why their knowledge is often so vague, inaccurate, and useless. It is probable, too, that our knowledge of phenomena beyond the reach of the hand is equally imperfect. But at all events we behold them through a golden mist of fantasy. There is nothing, however, misty or uncertain about what we can touch. Through the sense of touch I know the face of friends, the illimitable variety of straight and curved lines, all surfaces, the exuberance of the soil, the delicate shapes of flowers, the noble forms of trees, and the range of mighty winds. Besides objects, surfaces, and atmospherical changes I perceive countless vibrations. I derive much knowledge of everyday matter from the jars and jolts which are to be felt everywhere in the house. Footsteps I discover vary tactually according to the age, the sex, and the manners of the walker. It is impossible to mistake a child's pattern for the tread of a grown person. The step of the young man, strong and free, differs from the heavy, sedate tread of the middle-aged, and from the step of the old man, whose feet drag along the floor, or beaded with slow, faltering accents. On a bare floor a girl walks with a rapid elastic rhythm which is quite distinct from the graver step of the elderly woman. I have laughed over the creek of new shoes and the clatter of a stout maid performing a jig in the kitchen. One day in the dining-room of an hotel a tactual dissonance arrested my attention. I sat still and listened with my feet. I found that two waders were walking back and forth, but not with the same gate. A band was playing, and I could feel the music waves along the floor. One of the waders walked in time to the band, graceful and light, while the other disregarded the music and rushed from table to table to the beat of some discord in his own mind. Their steps reminded me of a spirited war-steed, harnessed with a cart-horse. Often footsteps reveal in some measure the character and the mood of the walker. I feel in them firmness and indecision, hurry and deliberation, activity and laziness, fatigue, carelessness, timidity, anger and sorrow. I am most conscious of these moods and traits and persons with whom I am familiar. Footsteps are frequently interrupted by certain jars and jerks, so that I know when one kneels, kicks, shakes something, sits down, or gets up. Thus I follow to some extent the actions of people about me and the changes of their postures. Just now a thick, soft patter of bare, padded feet and a slight jolt told me that my dog had jumped on the chair to look out of the window. I do not, however, allow him to go uninvestigated, for occasionally I feel the same motion and find him not on the chair but trespassing on the sofa. When a carpenter works in the house or in the bar nearby, I know by the slanting, up and down, toothed vibration and the ringing concussion of blow upon blow that he is sawing or hammering. If I am near enough, a certain vibration, traveling back and forth along a wooden surface, brings me to the information that he is using a plane. A slight flutter on the rug tells me that a breeze has blown my papers off the table. A round thump is a signal that a pencil has rolled on the floor. If a book falls, it gives a flat thud. A wooden wrap on the balustrade announces that dinner is ready. Many of these vibrations are obliterated out of doors. On a lawn or the road I can feel only running, stamping, and the rumble of wheels. By placing my hand on a person's lips and throat I gain an idea of many specific vibrations and interpret them. A boy's chuckle, a man's whew of surprise, the hum of annoyance or perplexity, the moan of pain, a scream, a whisper, a rasp, a sob, a choke, and a gasp. The utterances of animals, though wordless, are eloquent to me. The cat's purr, its mew, its angry, jerky, scolding spit. The dog's bow-wow of warning or of joyous welcome, its yelp of despair and its contented snore. The cow's moo, a monkey's chatter, the snort of a horse, the lion's roar, and the terrible snarl of the tiger. Perhaps I ought to add, for the benefit of the critics and doubters who may peruse this essay, that with my own hands I have felt all these sounds. From my childhood to the present day I have availed myself to every opportunity to visit zoological gardens, menageries, and the circus, and all the animals except the tiger have talked into my hand. I have touched the tiger only in a museum, where he is as harmless as a lamb. I have, however, heard him talk by putting my hand on the bars of his cage. I have touched several lions in the flesh and felt them roar royally, like a cataract over rocks. To continue I know the plop of liquid in a pitcher, so if I spill my milk I have not the excuse of ignorance. I am also familiar with the pop of a cork, the sputter of a flame, the tick-tack of the clock, the metallic swing of the windmill, the labored rise and fall of the pump, the voluminous spurt of the hose, the deceptive tap of the breeze at door and window, and many other vibrations past computing. There are taxual vibrations which do not belong to skin touch. They penetrate the skin, the nerves, the bones, like pain, heat, and cold. The beat of a drum smites me through from the chest to the shoulder blades. The den of the train, the bridge, and grinding machinery retains its old man-of-the-sea grip upon me long after its cause has been left behind. If vibration and motion combine in my touch for any length of time, the earth seems to run away while I stand still. When I step off the train the platform whirls round and I find it difficult to walk steadily. Every atom of my body is a vibroscope, but my sensations are not infallible. I reach out and my fingers meet something furry which jumps about, gathers itself together as if to spring and acts like an animal. I pause a moment for caution. I touch it again more firmly and find it is a fur coat fluttering and flapping in the wind. To me, as to you, the earth seems motionless and the sun appears to move for the rays of the afternoon withdraw more and more as they touch my face until the air becomes cool. From this I understand how it is that the shore seems to recede as you sell away from it. Hence I feel no incredulity when you say that parallel lines appear to converge and the earth and sky to meet. My few senses long ago revealed to me their imperfections and deceptivity. Not only are the senses deceptive, but numerous usages in our language indicate that people who have five senses find it difficult to keep their functions distinct. I understand that we hear views, see tones, taste, music. I am told that voices have color. Tact, which I have supposed to be a matter of nice perception, turns out to be a matter of taste. Judging from the large use of the word, taste appears to be the most important of all the senses. Taste governs the great and small conventions of life. Certainly the language of the senses is full of contradictions and my fellows who have five doors to their house are not more surely at home in themselves than I. May I not, then, be excused if this account of my sensations lacks precision? End of Chapter 4 Chapter 5 The Finer Vibrations I have spoken of the numerous jars and jolts which daily minister to my faculties. The loftier and grander vibrations which appeal to my emotions are varied and abundant. I listen with awe to the roll of the thunder and the muffled avalanche of sound when the sea flings itself upon the shore. And I love the instrument by which all the diapasins of the ocean are caught and released in surging floods. The many-voiced organ. If music could be seen I could point where the organ notes go as they rise and fall, climb up and up, rock and sway, now loud and deep, now high and stormy, anon soft and solemn, with lighter vibrations interspersed between and running across them. I should say that organ music fills to an ecstasy the act of feeling. There is tangible delight in other instruments, too. The violin seems beautifully alive as it responds to the lightest wish of the master. The distinction between its notes is more delicate than between the notes of the piano. I enjoy the music of the piano most when I touch the instrument. If I keep my hand on the piano case I detect tiny quavers, returns of melody, and the hush that follows. This explains to me how sound can die away to the listening ear. How thin and clear and thinner, clearer, farther going, oh sweet and far from cliff and scar, the horns of Elfland faintly blowing. I am able to follow the dominant spirit and mood of the music. I catch the joyous dance as it bounds over the keys, the slow dirge, the reverie. I thrill to the fiery sweep of notes crossed by thunderous tones in the valkyrie, where Wotan kindles the dread flames that guard the sleeping broon-hilled. How wonderful is the instrument on which a great musician sings with his hands. I have never succeeded in distinguishing one composition from another. I think this is impossible, but the concentration and strain upon my attention would be so great that I doubt if the pleasure derived would be commensurate to the effort. Nor can I distinguish easily a tune that is sunk, but by placing my hand on another's throat and cheek I enjoy the changes of the voice. I know when it is low or high, clear or muffled, sad or cheery. The thin quavering sensation of an old voice differs in my touch from the sensation of a young voice. A Southerner's drawl is quite unlike the Yankee twang. Sometimes the flow and ebb of a voice is so enchanting that my fingers quiver with exquisite pleasure, even if I do not understand a word that is spoken. On the other hand I am exceedingly sensitive to the harshness of noises like grinding, scraping, and the horse-creak of rusty locks. Fog whistles are my vibratory nightmares. I have stood near a bridge in process of construction, and felt the tactual den, the rattle of heavy masses of stone, the roll of loosened earth, the rumble of engines, the dumping of dirt-cars, the triple-blows of Vulcan hammers. I can also smell the fire-pots, the tar and cement. So I have a vivid idea of mighty labours in still and stone, and I believe that I am acquainted with all the fiendish noises which can be made by man or machinery. The whack of heavy falling bodies, the sudden shivering splinter of chopped logs, the crystal shatter of pounded ice, the crash of a tree hurled to the earth by a hurricane, the irrational, persistent chaos of noise made by switching freight trains, the explosion of gas, the blasting of stone, and the terrific grinding of rock upon rock which precedes the collapse. All these have been in my touch experience, and contribute to my idea of bedlam, of a battle, a waterspout, an earthquake, and other enormous accumulations of sound. Touch brings me into contact with the traffic and manifold activity of the city. Besides the bustles and crowding of people and the nondescript grading and electric howling of street-cars, I am conscious of exhalations from many different kinds of shops, from automobiles, drays, horses, fruit stands, and many varieties of smoke. Odour's strange and musty, the air sharp and dusty, with lime and with sand that no one can stand. Make the street impassable, the people irascible, until everyone cries as he trembling goes, with the sight of his eyes and the scent of his nose. Quite stopped, or at least much diminished. Gracious, when will the city be finished? The city is interesting, but the tactual silence of the country is always most welcome after the den of town and the irritating concussions of the train. How noiseless and undisturbing are the demolition, the repairs and the alterations of nature. With no sound of hammer or saw or stone severed from stone, but a music of rustles and ripe thumps on the grass come the fluttering leaves and mellow fruits which the wind tumbles all day from the branches. Silently all droops, all withers, all is poured back into the earth that it may recreate. All sleeps, while the busy architects of day and night plie their silent work elsewhere. The same serenity reigns when all at once the soil yields up a newly wrought creation. Softly the ocean of grass, moss, and flowers roll surge upon surge across the earth. Curtains of foliage drape the bare branches. Great trees make ready in their sturdy hearts to receive again birds which occupy their spacious chambers to the south and west. Nay, there is no place so lowly that it may not lodge some happy creature. The meadowbrook undoes its icy fetters with rippling notes, gargles, and runs free. And all this is wrought in less than two months to the music of nature's orchestra in the midst of balmy incense. The thousand soft voices of the earth have truly found their way to me, the small rustle and tufts of grass, the silky swish of leaves, the buzz of insects, the hum of bees and blossoms I have plucked, the flutter of a bird's wings after his bath, and the slender rippling vibration of water running over pebbles. Once having been felt, these loved voices rustle, buzz, hum, flutter and ripple in my thought forever, an undying part of happy memories. Between my experience and the experiences of others there is no gulf of mute space which I may not bridge, for I have endlessly varied, instructive contacts with all the world, with life, with the atmosphere whose radiant activity it folds us all. The thrilling energy of the all-incasing air is warm and rapturous. Heat waves and sound waves play upon my face in infinite variety and combination, until I am able to surmise what must be the myriad sounds that my senseless ears have not heard. The air varies in different regions, at different seasons of the year, and even different hours of the day. The odorous, fresh sea breezes are distinct from the fitful breezes along riverbanks, which are humid and freighted with inland smells. The bracing, light, dry air of the mountains can never be mistaken for the pungent salt air of the ocean. The air of winter is dense, hard, compressed. In the spring it has new vitality. It is light, mobile, and laden with a thousand palpitating odours from earth, grass, and sprouting leaves. The air of midsummer is dense, saturated or dry and burning, as if it came from a furnace. When a cool breeze brushes the sultry stillness, it brings fewer odours than in May, and frequently the odor of a coming tempest. The avalanche of coolness which sweeps through the low-hanging air bears little resemblance to the stinging coolness of winter. The rain of winter is raw, without odor and dismal. The rain of spring is brisk, fragrant, charged with life-giving warmth. I welcome it delightedly as it visits the earth, enriches the streams, waters the hills abundantly, makes the furrow soft with showers for the seed, elicits a perfume which I cannot breathe deep enough. The spring rain is beautiful, impartial, lovable. With pearly drops it washes every leaf on tree and bush, ministers equally to salutary herbs and noxious growths, searches out every living thing that needs its beneficence. The senses assist and reinforce each other to such an extent that I am not sure whether touch or smell tells me the most about the world. Everywhere the river of touch is joined by the brooks of odor and perception. Each season has its distinctive odors. The spring is earthy and full of sap, July is rich with the odor of ripening grain and hay. As the season advances a crisp, dry, mature odor predominates, and goldenrod, tansy, and everlasting's mark the onward march of the year. In autumn soft alluring scents fill the air, floating from thicket, grass, flower, and tree, and they tell me of time and change, of death, and life's renewal, desire, and its fulfilment. CHAPTER 6 Smell the Fallen Angel For some inexplicable reason the sense of smell does not hold the high position it deserves among its sisters. There is something of the Fallen Angel about it. When it woos us with woodland scents and beguiles us with the fragrance of lovely gardens, it is admitted frankly to our discourse, but when it gives us warning of something noxious in our vicinity it is treated as if the demon had got the upper hand of the angel and is relegated to outer darkness, punished for its faithful service. It is most difficult to keep the true significance of words when one discusses the prejudices of mankind, and I find it hard to give an account of odor perceptions which shall be at once dignified and truthful. In my experience smell is most important, and I find that there is high authority for the nobility of the sense which we have neglected and disparaged. It is recorded that the Lord commanded that incense be burnt before him continually with a sweet savor. I doubt if there is any sensation arising from sight more delightful than the odors which filter through the sun-warmed, wind-tossed branches, or the tide of scents which swells, subsides, rises again, wave on wave, filling the wide world with invisible sweetness. A whiff of the universe makes a stream of worlds we have never seen, recalls in a flash entire epics of our dearest experience. I never smell daisies without living over again the ecstatic mornings that my teacher and I spent wandering in the fields. While I learn new words and the names of things, smell is a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived. The odor of fruits waves me to my southern home, to my childish frolics in the peach orchard. Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening grainfields far away. The faintest whiff from a meadow where the new-mon hay lies in the hot sun displaces the here and the now. I am back again in the old red barn. My little friends and I are playing in the hay-mow. A huge mow it is, packed with crisp, sweet hay, from the top of which the smallest child can reach the straining rafters. In their stalls beneath are the farm animals. Here is Jerry, unresponsive, un-beautiful Jerry, crunching his oats like a true pessimist, resolved to find his feed not good, at least not so good as it ought to be. Again I touch brownie, eager, grateful, little brownie, ready to leave the juiciest fodder for a pat, straining his beautiful slender neck for a caress. Nearby stands Lady Bell, with sweet moist mouth, lazily extracting the sealed-up cordial from Timothy and Clover, and dreaming of deep-june pastures and murmurous streams. The sense of smell has told me of a coming storm hours before there was any sign of it visible. I notice first a throb of expectancy, a slight quiver, a concentration in my nostrils. As the storm draws nearer, my nostrils dilate the better to receive the flood of earth-outers which seem to multiply and extend, until I feel the splash of rain against my cheek. As the tempest departs, receding farther and farther, the odors fade, becoming fainter and fainter, and die away beyond the bar of space. I know by smell the kind of house we enter. I have recognized an old-fashioned country house because it has several layers of odors, left by a succession of families, of plants, perfumes, and draperies. In the evening quiet there are fewer vibrations than in the daytime, and then I rely more largely upon smell. The sulfuric scent of a match tells me that the lamps are being lighted. Later I note the wavering trail of odor that flits about and disappears. It is the curfew signal. The lights are out for the night. Out of doors I am aware by smell and touch of the ground we tread and the places we pass. Sometimes when there is no wind, the odors are so grouped that I know the character of the country, and can place a hayfield, a country store, a garden, a barn, a grove of pines, a farmhouse with the windows open. The other day I went to walk toward a familiar wood. Suddenly a disturbing odor made me pause into smay. Then followed a peculiar, measured jar, followed by dull heavy thunder. I understood the odor and the jar only too well. The trees were being cut down. We climbed the stone wall to the left. It borders the wood which I have loved so long that it seems to be my peculiar possession. But today an unfamiliar rush of air and an unwanted burst of sun told me that my tree-friends were gone. The place was empty, like a deserted dwelling. I stretched out my hand, where once stood the steadfast pines, great, beautiful, sweet. My hand touched raw, moist stumps. All about lay broken branches, like the antlers of stricken deer. The fragrant, piled-up sawdust, swirled and tumbled about me. An unreasoning resentment flashed through me at this ruthless destruction of the beauty that I love. But there is no anger, no resentment in nature. The air is equally charged with odors of life and of destruction. For death equally with growth, forever ministers to all conquering life. The sun shines as ever and the winds riot through the newly open spaces. I know that a new forest will spring where the old one stood, as beautiful, as beneficent. Touch sensations are permanent and definite. Odors deviate and are fugitive, changing in their shades, degrees and location. There is something else in odor which gives me a sense of distance. I call it horizon. The line where odor and fancy meet at the farthest limit of scent. Smell gives me more idea than touch or taste of the manner in which sight and hearing probably discharge their functions. Touch seems to reside in the object touched, because there is a contact of surfaces. In smell there is no notion of relievo, and odors seem to reside not in the object smelt, but in the organ. Since I smell a tree at a distance it is comprehensible to me that a person sees it without touching it. I am not puzzled over the fact that he receives it as an image on his retina without relievo, since my smell perceives the tree as a thin sphere with no fullness or content. By themselves odors suggest nothing. I must learn by association to judge from them of distance, of place, and of the actions or the surroundings which are the usual occasions for them. Just as I am told people judge from color, light, and sound. From exhalations I learn much about people. I often know the work they are engaged in. The odors of wood, iron, paint, and drugs cling to the garment of those that work in them. Thus I can distinguish the carpenter from the ironworker, the artist from the mason or the chemist. When a person passes quickly from one place to another I get a scent impression of where he has been. The kitchen, the garden, or the sick room. I gain pleasurable ideas of freshness and good taste from the odors of soap, toilet water, clean garments, woolen and silk stuffs, and gloves. I have not indeed the all-knowing scent of the hound or the wild animal. None but the hot and the blind need fear my skill in pursuit, for there are other things besides water, stale trails, confusing cross-tracks to put me at fault. Nevertheless human odors are as varied and capable of recognition as hands and faces. The dear odors of those I love are so definite, so unmistakable, that nothing can quite obliterate them. If many years should elapse before I saw an intimate friend again I think I should recognize his odor instantly in the heart of Africa, as promptly as would my brother that barks. Once long ago in a crowded railway station a lady kissed me as she hurried by. I had not touched even her dress, but she left a scent with her kiss which gave me a glimpse of her. The years are many since she kissed me, yet her odor is fresh in my memory. It is difficult to put into words the thing itself, the elusive person odor. There seems to be no adequate vocabulary of smells, and I must fall back on approximate phrase in metaphor. Some people have a vague unsubstantial odor that floats about, mocking every effort to identify it. It is the will of the wisp of my effective experience. Sometimes I meet one who lacks a distinctive person scent, and I seldom find such a one lively or entertaining. On the other hand, one who has a pungent odor often possesses great vitality, energy, and vigor of mind. Masculine exhalations are as a rule stronger, more vivid, more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as a fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all things strong and beautiful and joyous, and gives me a sense of physical happiness. I wonder if others observe that all infants have the same scent, pure, simple, undecipherable as their dormant personality. It is not until the age of six or seven that they begin to have perceptible individual odors. These develop and mature along with their mental and bodily powers. What I have written about smell, especially person smell, will perhaps be regarded as the abnormal sentiment of one who can have no idea of the world of reality and beauty which the eye perceives. There are people who are color-blind, people who are tone-deaf. Most people are smell-blind and deaf. We should not condemn a musical composition on the testimony of an ear which cannot distinguish one chord from another, or judge a picture by the verdict of a color-blind critic. The sensations of smell which cheer, inform, and broaden my life are not less pleasant merely because some critic who treads the wide, bright pathway of the eye has not cultivated his affective sense. Without the shy, fugitive, often unobserved sensations and the certainties which taste, smell, and touch give me, I should be obliged to take my conception of the universe wholly from others. I should light the alchemy by which I now infuse into my world, light, color, and the protean spark. The sensuous reality which interthreads and supports all the groupings of my imagination would be shattered. The solid earth would melt under my feet and disperse itself in space. The objects dear to my hands would become formless, dead things, and I should walk among them as a monk in visible ghosts. CHAPTER VII. RELATIVE VALUES OF THE SENCES. I was once without the sense of smell and taste for several days. It seemed incredible, this utter detachment from odors, to breathe the air in and observe never a single scent. The feeling was probably similar, though less in degree, to that of one who first loses sight and cannot but expect to see the light again any day, any minute. I knew I should smell again some time. Still, after the wonder had passed off, a loneliness crept over me as vast as the air whose myriad odors I missed. The multitudinous subtle delights that smell makes mine became for a time wistful memories. When I recovered the lost sense, my heart bounded with gladness. It is a fine, dramatic touch that Hans Andersen gives the story of Kay and Gerda in the passage about flowers. Kay, whom the wicked magician's glass had blinded to human love, rushes away fiercely from home when he discovers that the roses have lost their sweetness. The loss of smell for a few days gave me a clearer idea than I had ever had, what it is to be blinded suddenly, helplessly. With a little stretch of the imagination I knew then what it must be when the great curtain shuts out suddenly the light of day, the stars, and the firmament itself. I see the blind man's eyes strain for the light as he fearfully tries to walk his old rounds, until the unchanging blank that everywhere spreads before him stamps the reality of the dark upon his consciousness. My temporary loss of smell proved to me, too, that the absence of his sense need not dull the mental faculties and does not distort one's view of the world. And so I reason that blindness and deafness need not pervert the inner order of the intellect. I know that if there are no odors for me I should still possess a considerable part of the world. In my classification of the senses, smell is a little the ears inferior, and touch is a great deal the eyes superior. I find that great artists and philosophers agree with me in this. Deteros says, Je trouvais que de tous les sons, L'Aurélia était le plus superficiel, L'Aurélia, le plus orgulia, L'Odora, le plus voluptu, le gout, le plus superstitieux, et le plus inconstant, le touché, le plus profond, et le plus philosoph. Translated, I found that of the senses, the eye is the most superficial, the ear the most arrogant, smell the most voluptuous, taste the most superstitious and fickle, touch the most profound and the most philosophical. A friend whom I have never seen sends me a quotation from Simon's Renaissance in Italy. Lorenzo Giberti, after describing a piece of antique sculpture he saw in Rome, adds, to express the perfection of learning, mastery and art displayed in it is beyond the power of language. Its more exquisite beauties could not be discovered by the sight but only by the touch of the hand passed over it. Of another classic marble at Padua he says, this statue, when the Christian faith triumphed, was hidden in that place by some gentle soul, who seeing it so perfect, fashioned with art so wonderful and with such power of genius, and being moved to reverent pity caused a sepulcher of bricks to be built, and therewithin buried the statue and covered it with a broad slab of stone, that it might not in any way be injured. It has very many sweet beauties which the eyes alone can comprehend not, either by strong or tempered light. Only the hand, by touching them, finds them out. Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of the sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens. Inhale great drafts of space. Wonder, wonder at the wind's unwearyed activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul from the tactual sonorities of a thousand branches and tumbling waters. How can the world be shriveled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch, is faithful to its service? I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose between the sense of light and that of touch, I would not part with the warm, endearing contact of human hands, or the wealth of form, the nobility and fullness that press into my palms. 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, and 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. If we were better far to sell forever in the night of blindness, with dense and feeling and mind, than to be thus content with a 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 things that count, service, friendship, humor, 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, as we pass, and as we pass, God make it the desert to blossom like the rose. We, too, go into 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 color, light, physiognominy, 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 a strain of forcing out thoughts about dark, musicless, colorless, detached substance, it recovers its elasticity as soon as I resort to the powers of another mind which commands light, harmony, color. 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, grace. 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 color, 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 ring 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 in hearing. They break away from the sense-mornings, rise on strong, telling wings of spirit far above our misty hills and darkened valleys into the region of light, music, intellect. What I hath seen the glories of New Jerusalem. What ear hath heard the music of the spheres, the steps of 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 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. CHAPTER IX According to all art, all nature, all coherent human thought, we know that order, proportion, form are essential elements of beauty. Now order, proportion, and form are palpable to the touch. But beauty and rhythm are deeper than sense. They are like love and faith. They spring out of a spiritual process only slightly dependent upon sensations. Order, proportion, form cannot generate in the mind the abstract idea of beauty, unless there is already a soul intelligence to breathe life into the elements. Many persons, having perfect eyes, are blind to their perceptions. Many persons, having perfect ears, are emotionally deaf. Yet these are the very ones who dare to set limits to the vision of those who, lacking a sense or two, have will, soul, passion, imagination. Faith is a mockery if it teaches us not that we may construct a world unspeakably more complete and beautiful than the material world. And I too may construct my better world, for I am a child of God, an inheritor of a fragment of the mind that created all worlds. There is a consonance of all things, a blending of all that we know about the material world and the spiritual. It consists for me of all the impressions, vibrations, heat, cold, taste, smell, and the sensations which these convey to the mind, infinitely combined, interwoven with associated ideas and acquired knowledge. No thoughtful person will believe that what I said about the meaning of footsteps is strictly true of mere jolts and jars. It is an array of the spiritual in certain natural elements, tactual beats, and an acquired knowledge of physical habits and moral traits of highly organized human beings. What would odors signify if they were not associated with the time of the year, the place I live in, and the people I know? The result of such a blending is sometimes a discordant trying of strings far removed from a melody, very far from a symphony. For the benefit of those who must be reassured, I must say that I have felt a musician tuning his violin, that I have read about a symphony, and so have a fair intellectual perception of my metaphor. But with training and experience the faculties gather up the stray notes and combine them into a full, harmonious whole. If a person who accomplishes this task is peculiarly gifted, we call him a poet. The blind and the deaf are not great poets, it is true. Yet now and again you find one deaf and blind who has attained his royal kingdom of beauty. I have a little volume of poems by a deaf blind lady, Madame Bertha Galleron. Her poetry is versatility of thought. Now it is tender and sweet, now full of tragic passion and the sternness of destiny. Victor Hugo called her La Grande Voyant. She has written several plays, two of which have been acted in Paris. The French Academy has crowned her work. The infinite wonders of the universe are revealed to us in exact measure, as we are capable of receiving them. The keenness of our vision depends not on how much we can see, but on how much we feel. Nor yet does mere knowledge create beauty. Nature sings her most exquisite songs to those who love her. She does not unfold her secrets to those who come only to gratify their desire of analysis, to gather facts, but to those who see in her manifold phenomena, suggestions of lofty, delicate sentiments. Am I to be denied the use of such adjectives as freshness, and sparkle, dark, and gloomy? I have walked in the fields at early morning. I have felt a rose-bush laden with dew and fragrance. I have felt the curves and grace of my kitten at play. I have known the sweet shy ways of little children. I have known the sad opposites of all these. I ghastly touch picture. Remember, I have sometimes traveled over a dusty road as far as my feet could go. At a sudden turn I have stepped upon starved, ignoble weeds, and reached out my hands. I have touched a fair tree out of which a parasite had taken the life like a vampire. I have touched a pretty bird whose soft wings hung limp, whose little heart beat no more. I have wept over the feebleness and deformity of a child, lame or born blind, or worse still, mindless. If I had the genius of Thompson, I too could depict a city of dreadful night from mere touch sensations. From contrast so irreconcilable, can we fail to form an idea of beauty and know surely when we meet with loveliness? Here is a sonnet eloquent of a blind man's power of vision. The Mountain to the Pine Thou tall, majestic monarch of the wood, Thou standest where no wild vines dare to creep. Men call thee old, and say that thou hast stood a century upon my rugged steep. Yet unto me thy life is but a day, when I recall the things that I have seen. The forest monarchs that have passed away upon the spot where first I saw thy green, for I am older than the age of man, or all the living things that crawl or creep, or birds of air or creatures of the deep. I was the first dim outline of God's plan. Only the waters of the restless sea and the infinite stars in heaven are old to me. I am glad my friend Mr. Stedman knew that poem while he was making his analogy. For knowing it, so fine a poet and critic could not fail to give it a place in his treasure-house of American poetry. The poet, Mr. Clarence Hawks, has been blind since childhood, yet he finds in nature hints of combinations for his mental pictures. Out of the knowledge and impressions that come to him he constructs a masterpiece which hangs upon the walls of his thought, and into the poet's house come all the true spirits of the world. It was a rare poet who thought of the mountain as the first dim outline of God's plan. That is the real wonder of the poem, and not that a blind man should speak so confidently of sky and sea. Our ideas of the sky are an accumulation of touch glimpses, literary illusions, and the observations of others, with an emotional blending of all. My face feels only a tiny portion of the atmosphere, but I go through continuous space and feel the air at every point, every instant. I have been told about the distances from our Earth to the Sun, to the other planets, and to the fixed stars. I multiply a thousand times the utmost height and width that my touch compasses, and thus I gain a deep sense of the sky's immensity. Move me along constantly over water, water, nothing but water, and you give me the solitude, the vastness of ocean which fills the eye. I have been in a little sailboat on the sea, when the rising tide swept it toward the shore. May I not understand the poet's figure? The green of spring overflows the Earth like a tide. I have felt the flame of the candle-blow and flutter in the breeze. May I not then say? Myriads of fireflies flit hither and thither in the dew-wet grass like little fluttering tapers. Combine the endless space of air, the Sun's warmth, the clouds that are described to my understanding spirit, the frequent breaking through the soil of a brook, or the expanse of the wind-ruffled lake, the tactual undulation of the hills, which I recall when I am far away from them, the towering trees upon trees as I walk by them, the bearings that I try to keep all others tell me the directions of the various points of the scenery, and you will begin to feel sure of my mental landscape. The utmost bound to which my thought will go with clearness is the horizon of my mind. From this horizon I imagine the one which the eye marks. Touch cannot bridge distance. It is fit only for the contact of surfaces. But thought leaps the chasm. For this reason I am able to use words descriptive of objects distant from my senses. I have felt the rongery of the infant's tender form. I can apply this perception to the landscape and to the far off hills. CHAPTER X I HAVE NOT TOUCHED THE OUTLINE OF A STAR NOR THE GLORY OF THE MOON, BUT I BELIEVE THAT GOD HAS SET TWO LIGHTS IN MIND, THE GREATER TO RULE BY DAY AND THE LESSER BY NIGHT, AND BY THEM I KNOW THAT I AM ABLE TO NAVIGATE MY LIFE BARK, AS CERTAIN OF REACHING THE HAVEN AS HE WHO STEERS BY THE NORTH STAR. Perhaps my sun shines not as shores. The colors that glorify my world, the blue of the sky, the green of the fields, may not correspond exactly with those you delight in, but they are none the less color to me. The sun does not shine for my physical eyes, nor does the lightning flash, nor do the trees turn green in the spring. But they have not therefore ceased to exist, any more than the landscape is annihilated when you turn your back on it. I understand how scarlet can differ from crimson, because I know that the smell of an orange is not the smell of a grapefruit. I can also conceive that colors have shades, and guess what shades are. In smell and taste there are varieties not broad enough to be fundamental, so I call them shades. There are half a dozen roses near me. They all have the unmistakable rose scent, yet my nose tells me that they are not the same. The American beauty is distinct from the Jacques Minot and the La France. Odors in certain grasses fade as really to my scents as certain colors do to yours in the sun. The freshness of a flower in my hand is analogous to the freshness I taste in an apple newly picked. I make use of analogies like these to enlarge my conceptions of colors. Some analogies which I draw between qualities in surface and vibration, taste and smell, are drawn by others between sight, hearing and touch. This fact encourages me to persevere, to try and bridge the gap between the eye and the hand. Certainly I get far enough to sympathize with the delight that my kind feel in beauty they see and harmony they hear. This bond between humanity and me is worth keeping, even if the idea on which I base it prove erroneous. Sweet beautiful vibrations exist for my touch, even though they travel through other substances than air to reach me. So I imagine sweet delightful sounds and the artistic arrangement of them which is called music, and I remember that they travel through the air to the ear conveying impressions somewhat like mine. I also know what tones are, since they are perceptible tactually in a voice. Now heat varies greatly in the sun, in the fire, in the hands, and in the fur of animals. Indeed, there is such a thing for me as a cold sun. So I think of the varieties of light that touch the eye, cold and warm, vivid and dim, soft and glaring, but always light, and I imagine their passage through the air to an extensive sense, instead of to a narrow one like touch. From the experience I have had with voices I guess how the eye distinguishes shades in the midst of light. While I read the lips of a woman whose voice is soprano, I note a low tone or a glad tone in the midst of a high flowing voice. When I feel my cheeks hot, I know that I am red. I have talked so much and read so much about colors that through no will of my own I attach meanings to them, just as all people attain certain meanings to abstract terms like hope, idealism, monotheism, intellect, which cannot be represented truly by visible objects, but which are understood from analogies between immaterial concepts and the ideas they awaken of external things. The force of an association drives me to say that white is exalted and pure, green is exuberant, red suggests love or shame or strength. Without the color or its equivalent, life to me would be dark, barren, a vast blackness. Thus, through an inner law of completeness, my thoughts are not permitted to remain colorless. It strains my mind to separate color and sound from objects. Since my education began, I have always had things described to me with their colors and sounds by one with keen senses and a fine feeling for the significant. Therefore I habitually think of things as colored and resonant. Habit accounts for part. The soul-sense accounts for another part. The brain with its five-sense construction asserts its right and accounts for the rest. Inclusive of all, the unity of the world demands that color be kept in it, whether I have cognizance of it or not. Rather than be shut out, I take part in it by discussing it, imagining it, happy in the happiness of those near me who gaze at the lovely hues of the sunset or the rainbow. My hand has its share in this multiple knowledge, but it must never be forgotten that with the fingers I see only a very small portion of a surface, and that I must pass my hand continually over it before my touch grasps the whole. It is still more important, however, to remember that my imagination is not tethered to certain points, locations, and distances. It puts all the parts together simultaneously, as if it saw or knew instead of feeling them. Though I feel only a small part of my horse at a time, my horse is nervous and does not submit to manual explorations. Yet, because I have many times felt hawk, nose, hoof, and mane, I can see the steeds of Phoebus Apollo coursing the heavens. With such a power active it is impossible that my thought should be vague, indistinct. It must needs be potent, definite. This is really a corollary of the philosophical truth that the real world exists only for the mind. That is to say, I can never touch the world in its entirety. Indeed, I touch less of it than the portion than others see or hear. But all creatures, all objects, pass into my brain entire and occupy the same extent there that they do in material space. I declare that for me, branched thoughts, instead of pines, wave, sway, rustle, make musical the ridges of mountains rising summit upon summit. Mention arose too far away for me to smell it. Straightway ascent stills into my nostril, a form presses against my palm in all its dilating softness, with rounded petals, slightly curled edges, curving stem, leaves drooping. When I would feign view the world as a whole, it rushes into vision. Man, beast, bird, reptile, fly, sky, ocean, mountains, plane, rock, pebble. The warmth of life, the reality of creation is overall. The throb of human hands, glossiness of fur, life windings of long bodies, poignant, buzzing of insects, the ruggedness of the steeps as I climbed them, the liquid mobility and boom of waves upon the rocks. Strange to say, try as I may, I cannot force my touch to pervade this universe in all directions. The moment I try, the whole vanishes, only small objects or narrow portions of a surface, mere touch signs, a chaos of things scattered at random, remain. No thrill, no delight is excited thereby. Restore to the artistic, comprehensive internal sense its rightful domain, and you give me joy which best proves the reality. CHAPTER XI. Before my teacher came to me I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was no world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew ought, or that I lived or acted or desired. I had neither will nor intellect. I was carried along to objects and acts by a certain blind natural impetus. I had a mind which caused me to feel anger, satisfaction, desire. These two facts led those about me to suppose that I willed and thought. I can remember all this, not because I knew that it was so, but because I have tactual memory. It enables me to remember that I never contracted my forehead in the act of thinking. I never viewed anything beforehand or chose it. I also recall tactually the fact that never in a start of the body or a heartbeat did I feel that I loved or cared for anything. My inner life then was a blank without past, present or future, without hope or anticipation, without wonder or joy or faith. It was not night, it was not day, but vacancy absorbing space and fixedness without a place. There were no stars, no earth, no time, no check, no change, no good, no crime. My dormant being had no idea of God or immortality, no fear of death. I remember also, through touch, that I had a power of association. I felt tactual jars like the stamp of a foot, the opening of a window or its closing, the slam of a door. After repeatedly smelling rain and feeling the discomfort of wetness, I acted like those about me. I ran to shut the window. But that was not thought in any sense. It was the same kind of association that makes animals take shelter from the rain. From the same instinct of aping others I folded the clothes that came from the laundry and put mine away, fed the turkeys, sewed bead-eyes on my doll's face and did many other things of which I have the tactual remembrance. When I wanted anything I liked, ice cream, for instance, of which I was very fond. I had a delicious taste on my tongue, which, by the way, I never have now. And in my hand I felt the turning of the freezer. I made the sign and my mother knew I wanted ice cream. I thought and desired in my fingers. If I had made a man I should certainly have put the brain and soul in his fingertips. From reminiscences like these I conclude that it is the opening of the two faculties, freedom of will or choice and rationality, or the power of thinking from one thing to another, which makes it possible to come into being first as a child, afterwards as a man. Since I had no power of thought I did not compare one mental state with another, so I was not conscious of any change or process going on in my brain when my teacher began to instruct me. I merely felt keen delight in obtaining more easily what I wanted by means of the finger motions she taught me. I thought only of objects and only objects I wanted. It was the turning of the freezer on a larger scale. When I learned the meaning of I and me and found that I was something, I began to think. Then consciousness first existed for me. Thus it was not the sense of touch that brought me knowledge. It was the awakening of my soul that first rendered my senses to their value, their cognizance of objects, names, qualities and properties. Thought made me conscious of love, joy, and all the emotions. I was eager to know, then to understand. Afterwards to reflect on what I knew and understood, and the blind impetus which had before driven me hither and thither at the dictates of my sensations, vanished forever. I cannot represent more clearly than anyone else the gradual and subtle changes from first impressions to abstract ideas, but I know that my physical ideas, that is, ideas derived from material objects, appear to me first an idea similar to those of touch. Instantly they pass into intellectual meanings. Afterward the meaning finds expression in what is called inner speech. When I was a child my inner speech was inner spelling, although I am even now frequently caught spelling to myself on my fingers, yet I talked to myself too, with my lips. And it is true that when I first learned to speak, my mind discarded the finger symbols and began to articulate. However, when I try to recall what someone has said to me, I am conscious of a hand spelling into mine. It has often been asked what were my earliest impressions of the world in which I found myself, but one who thinks at all of his first impressions knows what a riddle this is. Our impressions grow and change unnoticed, so that what we suppose we thought as children may be quite different from what we actually experienced in our childhood. I only know that after my education began the world which came within my reach was all alive. I spelled to my blocks and my dogs. I sympathized with plants when the flowers were picked, because I thought it hurt them, and that they grieved for their lost blossoms. It was two years before I could be made to believe that my dogs did not understand what I said, and I always apologized to them when I ran into or stepped on them. As my experiences broadened and deepened, the indeterminate, poetic feelings of childhood began to fix themselves in definite thoughts. Nature, the world I could touch, was folded and filled with myself. I am inclined to believe those philosophers who declare that we know nothing but our own feelings and ideas. With a little ingenious reasoning, one may see in the material world simply a mirror, an image of permanent mental sensations. In either sphere, self-knowledge is the condition and the limit of our consciousness. That is why perhaps many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves and find nothing, therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either. However that may be, I came later to look for an image of my emotions and sensations in others. I had to learn the outward signs of inward feelings. The start of fear, the suppressed, controlled intensity of pain, the beat of happy muscles in others had to be perceived and compared with my own experiences before I could trace them back to the intangible soul of another. Groping, uncertain, I at last found my identity and after seeing my thoughts and feelings repeated in others, I gradually constructed my world of men and of God. As I read and study, I find that this is what the rest of the race has done. Man looks within himself and in time finds the measure and the meaning of the universe. CHAPTER XII. THE LARGER SANCTIONS So in the midst of life, eager, imperious life, the deaf blind child, fettered to the bear-rock of circumstance, spider-like, sends out gossamer threads of thought into the measureless void that surrounds him. Patently 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. 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, color, song which have been transmitted through the language he has taught, for the chambers of the mind are ready to receive that language. The brain of the race is so permeated with color that it dies 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. Find 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 emitted all words of seeing, hearing, color, 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. So 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 mind'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 skeptic 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 umble 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 heated him, the sweet visaged earth would vanish into nothing, and I should hold in my hand not 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 meager senses demand of harshal 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 homogenous 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, colors, 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 need 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? Yay, 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 color 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 stalls. 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. 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.