tions and correspondences. I
observe, I feel, I think, I imagine. I associate the countless varied
impressions, experiences, concepts. Out of these materials Fancy, the
cunning artisan of the brain, welds an image which the sceptic would
deny me, because I cannot see with my physical eyes the changeful,
lovely face of my thought-child. He would break the mind's mirror. This
spirit-vandal would humble my soul and force me to bite the dust of
material things. While I champ the bit of circumstance, he scourges and
goads me with the spur of fact. If I heeded him, the sweet-visaged earth
would vanish into nothing, and I should hold in my hand nought but an
aimless, soulless lump of dead matter. But although the body physical is
rooted alive to the Promethean rock, the spirit-proud huntress of the
air will still pursue the shining, open highways of the universe.

Blindness has no limiting effect upon mental vision. My intellectual
horizon is infinitely wide. The universe it encircles is immeasurable.
Would they who bid me keep within the narrow bound of my meagre senses
demand of Herschel that he roof his stellar universe and give us back
Plato's solid firmament of glassy spheres? Would they command Darwin
from the grave and bid him blot out his geological time, give us back a
paltry few thousand years? Oh, the supercilious doubters! They ever
strive to clip the upward daring wings of the spirit.

A person deprived of one or more senses is not, as many seem to think,
turned out into a trackless wilderness without landmark or guide. The
blind man carries with him into his dark environment all the faculties
essential to the apprehension of the visible world whose door is closed
behind him. He finds his surroundings everywhere homogeneous with those
of the sunlit world; for there is an inexhaustible ocean of likenesses
between the world within, and the world without, and these likenesses,
these correspondences, he finds equal to every exigency his life offers.

The necessity of some such thing as correspondence or symbolism appears
more and more urgent as we consider the duties that religion and
philosophy enjoin upon us.

The blind are expected to read the Bible as a means of attaining
spiritual happiness. Now, the Bible is filled throughout with references
to clouds, stars, colours, and beauty, and often the mention of these is
essential to the meaning of the parable or the message in which they
occur. Here one must needs s