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of the very mildest order, and a host of would-be poets, philosophers, musicians, and prosers, would never have afflicted mankind with their various melancholy performances.

So far, therefore, for the difficulties and obstacles which blindness entails. We have now to glance at one or two special advantages which it is commonly supposed to confer. Cut off as the blind man is, in a measure, from the rest of the world, and from many channels of light and information open to others, his isolation is said to give him special power and aptitude for the study of abstract things: of philosophy and of mathematics. And the assertion will, to some extent, hold good. A wounded finger will make a man careful in handling edged tools, he will be more skilful than he was; a man who falls and breaks his leg, walks more warily ever after; but neither wound nor fracture is the cause of skill or safety. So with blindness; it must first be regarded as a loss. It isolates a man, no doubt; when he wishes to think, it saves him from the intrusion of external objects and the busy crowd of ideas which wait about on the world of visible things; it may free him from some illusions of the senses, and the snares of outside appearance; he easily becomes abstracted, where a man with sight would often find it hard: so far, therefore, his way towards deep, inward, thought is cleared; wind and tide seem in his favour. But he must know how to manage the sails, and to steer the ship; he must have clear power of thought, and be trained to use it; be able to concentrate his attention on the given idea, and willing to work at it, or his own peculiar world will steal in upon him— the things which he can handle, taste, and hear; the things which feed his appetites, or gratify his passions; his amusements, pleasures, and regrets; his failures, peculiar sorrows, trials, and disappointments. If the blind boy has courage and moral strength to banish these intruders, the doors of Geometry open to him on an oily hinge,' the fatal Pons Asinorum' is easily crossed, and the silent domains of metaphysical speculation invite and gratify his careful, inquisitive approach. So acutely has this been felt in every age, and so favourite has the dogma become, that more than one philosopher is said to have plunged himself into darkness for the very purpose of more intense, abstract thought. We can readily believe that Malebranche may, with this object have closed his shutters against the daylight; that Bourdaloue preached eloquently, or Diderot reasoned acutely, with his eyes shut; this might happen to

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* Guillié, in his 'Essays,' amusingly says of Blacklock, 'In England he is considered a great poet.'

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ordinary mortals such as 'Jones' at Clapham thinking out his Sunday sermon, or 'Robinson' in Capel Court speculating on the possible contingencies of settling day. Shutters are readily unclosed, eyes are easily opened. But when we read that Democritus, of Abdera, put out his eyes for the purpose of philosophizing, we begin to doubt. In the first place, Democritus was hardly the man to cut himself totally off from all the sights of folly, show, and care, that he rejoiced to laugh at, though a poet has said of him—

'ad ridendum curas et inania mundi Splenis Democritus non satis unus habet.'

An hour's darkness he might have chuckled over, but a lifetime is a totally different thing.† Cicero, who is always dragged in as a witness on this point, says nothing to corroborate such a view. His words are: Democritus impediri etiam animi aciem aspectu oculorum arbitrabatur;'‡ clearly meaning nothing more than that Democritus, like any other Abderite philosopher of his day, now and then put up his shutters in the blazing weather, or perhaps dreamed for an hour with his eyes closed. Next we have Diodotus, the Stoic, who, when he became blind, is said to have applied himself to mathematics with greater success than ever, and become famous as a teacher; but this was simply because he worked harder in the darkness than in the light. Every year may have given acuteness to his inner sight, keenness to his touch, and possibly eloquence to his words, not in consequence of his blindness, but in spite of it. So, also, Tiheckius, of Thorndorf, who taught medicine and philosophy with success for thirteen years at Tubingen, and becoming blind in the fourteenth year, is said to have refused the help of an oculist who offered to restore his sight. Perhaps he knew the oculist to be an impostor, and his sight once gone to be irrecoverable; in any case, he was a humourist, and we can quite believe him when he said, 'he had seen many things in his life which he would rather not have seen, and on some occasions had even wished that he were deaf.' Which of us, if he spoke truthfully, would not agree with the philosopher of Tubingen? But this is a very different thing from fancying that loss of sight gave him increased skill or wisdom in healing the bodies or minds of his fellow men. The truth is, he was doctor

*Guillié, quoting Diderot, p. 53.

† Milton, who only knew half its bitterness, calls it
'To live a life half-dead, a living death.'

Tusc. Disp.,' v. 39.

-Samson Agonistes, 39.

enough

enough to know that his loss was irreparable, and philosopher enough to make the best of it. It was in much the same spirit that De Puiseaux used to say, 'that he was always meeting with seeing persons of inferior intelligence to himself.'

Nor must it be forgotten that the darkness which isolates the blind man, and saves him from the intrusion of unwelcome images, tends also to narrow the vision which it concentrates. He rarely, if ever, takes a broad view of things. If he thinks intently on any given point, he is apt to forget, or fails to see, some one other of equal weight and close at hand. This makes him one-sided, and ready to hug his own judgment to the very death; slow to receive the opinion of others, captious as well as cautious, a temper which easily hardens into narrow prejudice. These are heavy drawbacks to the supposed advantages of ready abstraction and aptitude for metaphysics. Nor are they to be wondered at, when we consider from what infinite sources of beauty, grace, and truth the blind man is cut off. To him are unknown all the countless evidences of an Almighty hand which speak to us from earth, sea, and sky; the smooth and immeasurable expanse of summer seas, the silent grandeur of the blue sky above, with all its wealth of palaces and towers of fleecy cloud, the golden glory of morning, the gorgeous dying splendour of setting suns, the soft haze of twilight, the solemn watches of starlit night, the living, speaking beauty of the wide-spread landscape,* the flowing sweep of the everlasting hills, the proud, calm, majesty of snow-clad mountains, the green and purple outline of the forest, the beauty of waving corn, and the grace of flowers, of sloping valley, and of winding stream,

'And all the thousand sights that crown this earth with joy.' No description can paint these things for the blind man more than words can paint music for the deaf mute. But even above all these, is the loss to him of all the infinite grace and beauty of the human face. Who shall tell him of the tender love that beams from a mother's eye, or the rippling sunshine that lights up the face of a happy, laughing, child? The rosy brightness

*The youth restored to sight by Cheselden, when brought to a wide prospect of hill and dale, called it a new kind of seeing.'-Philosoph. Trans.

Nothing, indeed, can be more striking or solemn than the first sight of a mountainous country to one used to the sleepy flatness of the plain. The abruptness and audacity of the whole scene, the swelling magnitude of nature, the appearances of convulsion, the magnificent disorder and ruin, astonish a feeling mind; filling it with grand images, rousing its dormant life, and telling those made orators and poets that it is time to fulfil the noble purpose of their birth.'— Sydney Smith, Lectures, p. 89.

But to this touching appeal, and to the whole world of kindred associations, the blind man is actually dead.

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of the lips that kiss him, of the cheek which offers a ruddy welcome at his coming, the saucy smile of a dimpled chin, or the rapture of sudden joy that beams from every feature? To him all this beauty and all this joy are but a darkened, dreary, blank. And though he may be unconscious of the greatness of his loss, it is hard to exaggerate the gain

'Since light so necessary is to life,
Nay almost life itself—'*

which light brings to the rest of the world. It is a loss which, unless he be roused out of the gloom, and taught to find light in it—in tenebris servare fidem-may well shatter or dwarf his whole mental and spiritual powers, and not seldom points the way to doubt, distrust, or denial of Him to whom darkness and light are both alike. It is said to have been so in the case of more than one famous blind man. When Saunderson lay dying he sent for a clergyman, one Dr. Holmes, who seems, however, to have brought him little comfort; so far at least as Diderot's manifestly imperfect account tells what really passed. As death drew nigh, the great shadow which had darkened all the sick man's life grew deeper and darker. He began to doubt, once more, the existence of his Creator. 'If,' said he, 'you would have me believe in God, I must feel him.' 'Touch then your own frame,' was the reply, 'and find God there in His noble handiwork.' 'All this,' said the dying mathematician, 'may be very well for you, but it is not so for me; what relation is there between his handiwork and God? You call everything you cannot understand a wonder, and therefore divine. I myself am a wonder; people come from all parts of England to see me. Every phenomenon, you say, is from God. Why not have a little less pride, and a little more philosophy in your talk and reasoning?' To this thrust the worthy Doctor seems to have made no adequate reply, but proceeds to set before him the examples of Newton, Leibnitz, and Clarke, men of profound thought and acute reason, who were nevertheless believers in Christianity. "This, replied Saunderson, 'is strong evidence, but not strong enough for me; the testimony of Newton cannot be to me what all Nature is to Newton;' a remark which appears to have closed that part of the conversation. But the patient again rallied, and returning to his old vein of thought, rambled off to discuss the present state of the world. 'It is,' said he, I will allow, at present what you describe it to be, a world of order and method, in which certain laws and order hold good and prevail;

*Samson Agonistes,' 90.

but,

but, as to the most primitive times, the first beings who then lived may have been utter monsters, without the higher functions, nay, without stomachs, and the universe about them a mere chaos. There are informous things enough in the world even now. For example, I have no eyes; what had either you or I done to God, that one of us should have that organ, and the other be without it?' As he uttered these sad words, an earnest, solemn, and deep concern spread over his whole face, as if the terrible problem that had haunted him all his life long and received no solution, to the very last was to be unsolved by the dying man. He had, as yet, drawn neither hope nor comfort from the Master's words: 'neither hath this man sinned nor his parents; and though he had found for his hand a great and worthy work, had never learned to do it to a greater glory than his own. As he grew weaker, his thoughts became more confused, and his words less coherent. He spoke only at intervals, but once again rambled back to the cloudland of doubt, 'The world eternal? so it seems to you, as you are eternal to the insect.' Again, after a silence-Time, matter, space, are but a point. I am going whither we must all go. Let there be no lamentation or mourning; it is a pain to me.' And then, last of all, came the yet sadder cry of agony, God of Newton, give me light!' as the shadows were all coming to an end, and the great mystery of life was about to be unlocked in the things unseen and eternal. We must hope that his last despairing cry to the Being, of whose existence he just before seemed to doubt, was heard in the very climax of his need.

The whole picture, even in the words of sneering Diderot, from which we have mainly condensed it, is full of touching interest; and though it may perhaps exaggerate the weary clouds which beset the death-bed of the blind man, it may be taken as a type of what to some degree befalls him if not well-trained in early youth. The world is too much with' him; and though 'heaven,' too, 'lies round about him in his infancy,' he is unconscious of it. But once rouse him from this unconsciousness, once convince him that he has his place in the world, and that He who gives to kings and beggars alike their place and work, has given work, a place, and ability to him, and the whole scene begins to change. Light begins to steal in,† and the youth who once fancied that life was but a dreary blank,

*Unbelief of God is rather in the lip than in the heart of man.'-BACON.
The sense of Power is freedom, warmth, and light;
The sense of Weakness, gloom and chains and blight.
The sense of Power is Life's immortal breath;
The sense of Weakness is the touch of death.'-FRASER.

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