e blind is immense, irreparable. But it does not take
away our share of the things that count--service, friendship, humour,
imagination, wisdom. It is the secret inner will that controls one's
fate. We are capable of willing to be good, of loving and being loved,
of thinking to the end that we may be wiser. We possess these
spirit-born forces equally with all God's children. Therefore we, too,
see the lightnings and hear the thunders of Sinai. We, too, march
through the wilderness and the solitary place that shall be glad for us,
and as we pass, God maketh the desert to blossom like the rose. We, too,
go in unto the Promised Land to possess the treasures of the spirit, the
unseen permanence of life and nature.

The blind man of spirit faces the unknown and grapples with it, and what
else does the world of seeing men do? He has imagination, sympathy,
humanity, and these ineradicable existences compel him to share by a
sort of proxy in a sense he has not. When he meets terms of colour,
light, physiognomy, he guesses, divines, puzzles out their meaning by
analogies drawn from the senses he has. I naturally tend to think,
reason, draw inferences as if I had five senses instead of three. This
tendency is beyond my control; it is involuntary, habitual, instinctive.
I cannot compel my mind to say "I feel" instead of "I see" or "I hear."
The word "feel" proves on examination to be no less a convention than
"see" and "hear" when I seek for words accurately to describe the
outward things that affect my three bodily senses. When a man loses a
leg, his brain persists in impelling him to use what he has not and yet
feels to be there. Can it be that the brain is so constituted that it
will continue the activity which animates the sight and the hearing,
after the eye and the ear have been destroyed?

It might seem that the five senses would work intelligently together
only when resident in the same body. Yet when two or three are left
unaided, they reach out for their complements in another body, and find
that they yoke easily with the borrowed team. When my hand aches from
overtouching, I find relief in the sight of another. When my mind lags,
wearied with the strain of forcing out thoughts about dark, musicless,
colourless, detached substance, it recovers its elasticity as soon as I
resort to the powers of another mind which commands light, harmony,
colour. Now, if the five senses will not remain disassociated, the life
of the deaf