SO, in the midst of life, eager, imperious life, the deaf-blind child, to the bare rock of circumstance, spider-like, sends out threads of thought into the measureless void that surrounds him. Patiently he explores the dark, until he builds up a knowledge of the world he lives in, and his soul meets the beauty of the world, where the sun shines always, and the birds sing. To the blind child the dark is . In it he finds nothing extraordinary or terrible. It is his familiar world; even the groping from place to place, the halting steps, the upon others, do not seem strange to him. He does not know how many pleasures the dark shuts out from him. Not until he weighs his life in the scale of others' experience does he realize what it is to live forever in the dark. But the knowledge that teaches him this bitterness also brings its consolation—spiritual light, the promise of the day that shall be. The blind child—the deaf-blind child—has inherited the mind of seeing and hearing ancestors—a mind measured to five senses. Therefore he must be influenced, even if it be unknown to himself, by the light, colour, song which have been transmitted through the language he is taught, for the of the mind are ready to receive that language. The brain of the race is so with colour that it dyes even the speech of the blind. Every object I think of is stained with the 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 different from the sunlit, 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 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 . 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 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 . 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 me. The manner in which my imagination perceives absent things enables me to see how glasses can magnify things, bring them nearer, or remove them farther.
 
Deny me this correspondence, this internal sense, confine me to the fragmentary, incoherent touch-world, and lo, I become as a bat which wanders about on the wing. Suppose I omitted all words of seeing, hearing, colour, light, landscape, the thousand phenomena, instruments and beauties connected with them. I should suffer a great of the wonder and delight in knowledge; also—more dreadful loss—my emotions would be blunted, so that I could not be touched by things unseen.
 
Has anything arisen to disprove the adequacy of correspondence? Has any of the blind man's brain been opened and found empty? Has any psychologist explored the mind of the sightless and been able to say, "There is no sensation here"?
 
I tread the solid earth; I breathe the

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