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MAN'S MIRACLE

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MAN'S MIRACLE

THE STORY OF HELEN KELLER AND
HER EUROPEAN SISTERS FROM THE
FRENCH OF GERARD HARRY

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ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK:
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE AND COMPANY

1913

THE NEW YORK

public imi

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PREFACE

Letter from Madame Georgette Leblanc-Maeterlinck to

Monsieur Gerard Harry.

My Dear Friend,

You are doing a noble work by presenting the
public with a new aspect of Helen Keller, the American
blind and deaf mute.

I know your generous enthusiasm for this myster-
ious heroine, and how conscientiously you have worked
at collecting the necessary information, and I feel
assured, that your; book will, deal with every aspect of
this wonderful.- problem, .and -the vital questions which
it raises. • *;.* :»v

It seems grea;t' preemption on my part to send you
even these few lines, a^d, \ should not have ventured

• ••> •«' at ,,» „

to reply to your friendly request had not circumstances
enabled me to mark your work with this seal, "I have
seen Helen Keller." In her presence, my pity for her
fled, ashamed — I went to Wrentham filled with dis-
tress and sadness, and I found, instead of an object for
compassion, a queen of a great and beautiful kingdom.
There was no need to wait for a friendship to grow
between us ; an instinctive mutual sympathy sprang
up at once, and I shed tears of admiration as I pierced
the darkness that hides from our eyes the glories of the
soul within.

I felt bewildered at first, at this light amid the
darkness : as her soft fingers gathered the words from
my lips, my mind seemed to lose its way, and I was
conscious that in the apparent tomb of death, a life

existed, more brilliant, more intense and beautiful
than most of those we see round us.

However, I will not burden the opening of your
book with personal memories, which I hope, moreover,
to relate another day.

My chief impression is this — Helen's personality is
so great, her mind is so well-balanced, so strong and
sane, her intelligence so fine, that the problem is
reversed. We need desire no longer to be understood,
we must try to understand. We must learn to read
and know the enigma she presents to us, and we chafe
at the moral blindness which keeps us from realizing
human conditions so different from our own. Helen
may have been afflicted almost from birth, yet, by her
courage and strength, she has become a different
creature. • • • ■

Her life, indeed, seems to me a: great lesson and it
has been passed in a world so full of mystery that we
may well call it an abnormal one;

Helen has created for herself her relations with
the universe : she has adapted herself to it, and to the
circumstances of her life, in her own way. She has
only travelled through a very small space of interior
light and yet she seems to be the result of a century
of patience.

Unwearying as nature, as the drop of water
hollowing the rock, as the ivy that covers the ruins
with eternal spring, her life is a symbol of the labour
of humanity, scaling the barriers of ignorance, as it
travels onward towards the light.

GfaljpZ£ 'fata** 0<uZ^JZsft

V

CONTENTS

/. — The Metamorphosis of Hellen Keller. Her origin.

THE OMNISCIENCE OF A BLIND AND DEAF MUTE— THE
PROBLEMS SHE PRESENTS— THE WAYS AND METHODS
OF THE MIRACLE— THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THE SENSES
IN ABNORMAL AND NORMAL PERSONS— THE CON-
CEPTION OF DISTANCE, OF SOUNDS, OF RHYTHM, OF
DANCING, OF COLOUR, OF PLASTIC ART IN A GIRL
DEPRIVED OF SIGHT, HEARING, AND SPEECH.

//. — The Course of the Torch 33

THE EARLY SOURCES OF THE MIRACLE— FROM GREEK
DANCES TO THE LANGUAGE OF MIMICRY AND TOUCH—
THE PATHWAY AND VIEW OF PROGRESS IN THE PAST
AND THE FUTURE— THE CASE OF ALEXIS DECRAMER
AT BRUGES— PRIESTS AND LAYMEN AS PERFORMERS
OF MIRACLES— THE RESPECTIVE FUNCTIONS OF THE
TWO SEXES IN THE REGENERATION OF THE TRIPLY
AFFLICTED.

///. — Whence comes the Light? 51

PRIMITIVE MAN AND BLIND AND DEAF MUTES—
THE DIFFERENCES IN THEIR EVOLUTION— THE PROOF
OF HUMAN SPIRITUALITY— THE EFFECTS OF HEREDITY
SHOWN— THE IDEA OF THE DIVINE IN THE TRIPLY
AFFLICTED -A TRAGIC EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF LAURA
BRIDGMAN, AND WHAT IT TEACHES— THE RELIGIOUS
CONCEPT AS COMPARED WITH HUMAN ENERGY.

IV. — The Worship of Life 78

A DREAM OF IMMORTALITY— THE REVELATION OF
DEATH TO BLIND AND DEAF MUTES— THE VALUE
OF EXISTENCE— HOW TO TEACH IT IN SCHOOLS— THE
OPTIMISM OF HUMANITY'S OUTCASTS— ITS CAUSES-
HELEN KELLER'S PRIVILEGES— THE MORAL INFLUENCE
OF HER EXAMPLE.

V. — Other Lessons, or other Pathways 97

A SOCIETY OF THE AMBIDEXTROUS— THE CULTIVATION
OF THE SENSES OF TOUCH AND SMELL : ITS RESULTS-
HELEN KELLER, THOUGHT READER AND PALMIST-
NIGHT AND DAY IN EDUCATION— THE INFINITESIMAL
VB3RATIONS IN THE AIR— AN EXTRAORDINARY EX-
ERCISE OF MEMORY: ITS DRAMATIC CONSEQUENCES
AND ITS MORAL— THE MYSTERIES OF SLEEP AND
DREAMS IN NORMAL AND ABNORMAL PERSONS— THE
SIXTH SENSE— THE HISTORY OF HUMAN LANGUAGE.

VI. — With the Children of the Miracle . . . . 128

THE VISITS OF MADAME GEORGETTE LEBLANC-MAETER-
LINCK TO HELEN KELLER— THE VISIT OF THE AUTHOR
TO MARIE AND MARTHE HEURTIN— THE DIFFERENCES
OF THE EDUCATION AT BOSTON AND LARNAY— CHARITY
IN TWO LATITUDES.

VII. — From the Crow } s Nest 167

THE LIMITS OF THE PRESENT STUDY— LESSONS IN
ALTRUISM AND FORESIGHT— MAN 'S RIGHTS AND MAN'S
DUTY— THE SYMBOL OF THE EVOLUTION OF THE HELEN
KELLERS AND MARIE HEURTINS— THE TRIPLY AFFLICTED
AND THE SYSTEMS OF MM. BERGSON AND SCHURE—
GOD AND MAN— CONCLUSION.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Opposite
Page

Helen Keller, Mme. Georgette Leblanc-
Maeterlinck and Mr. Macy, with books
in Latin, French and English, printed
in raised type for helen keller's use 16

Wrentham Cottage, Helen Keller's residence

near Boston 78

Mr. Macy, Helen Keller and Mrs. Georgette

Leblanc-Maeterlinck 128

Marthe Heurtin writing on the blackboard . 148

Marie and Marthe Heurtin playing dominoes . 148

Copy of letter in French printed in raised type 196

V

CHAPTER I
4-

The Metamorphosis of Helen Keller

Her Origin

THE OMNISCIENCE OF A BLIND AND DEAF MUTE. THE
PROBLEMS SHE PRESENTS. THE WAYS AND METHODS OF
THE MIRACLE. THE RELATIVE VALUE OF THE SENSES
IN ABNORMAL AND NORMAL PERSONS. THE CONCEPTION
OF DISTANCE, OF SOUNDS, OF RHYTHM, OF DANCING,
OF COLOUR, OF PLASTIC ART IN A GIRL DEPRIVED OF
SIGHT, HEARING, AND SPEECH.

As I write the first lines of this book, I feel
that many volumes might be filled in exhausting
its vital and intensely interesting subject. The case
of Helen Keller, the blind, deaf and dumb American
girl, who has attained to the highest degree of under-
standing and culture, is a subject containing a thou-
sand different points of interest to the imagination,
and the interest is increased and the horizon widened,
as I propose to consider not only her case, but also
others of the same nature, and of equal interest.

Mark Twain, the great humourist, who between
two jests, often made true and serious state-

2 MAN'S MIRACLE

ments, said one day : "The nineteenth century
has produced two exceptional individuals — Napoleon
and Helen Keller." An English traveller, Mr.
J. Hodder Williams, wrote : ' ' The United States
possesses two of the world's wonders — Helen
Keller and the Falls of Niagara." But neither
of these writers has attempted to penetrate into
the mysteries of this transformation of a miserable
fraction of humanity (a hundred times more im-
perfect than Victor Hugo's fantastic Quasimodo)
into a well-educated woman, graduate of a uni-
versity, who has gained a thorough knowledge of
algebra and mathematics, and an acquaintance with
astronomy, Latin and Greek ; who is able to read
Moliere and Anatole France, and express herself in
their language — and has mastered Gcethe, Schiller
and Heine in German, and Shakespeare, Kipling
and Wells in English. She writes on philosophy,
psychology and poetry — she visits museums, ex-
hibitions and theatres, carrying away from them
impressions almost as vivid as yours or mine, and
also (no doubt with a further capability in the future)
is able to take part in various games and amuse-
ments, as she can draw, speak on her fingers, sew,

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 3

embroider, row, ride on horseback, ride a tandem
bicycle, play chess and cards, and shows in thought
and conversation a greater intelligence on the
general questions of life, than three-quarters of the
normal men and women we meet.

One might well have told this wonderful story of
her regeneration in the form of a fairy tale after the
manner of Perrault : " There was once upon a time a
little girl enclosed in profound darkness, more isolated
from the world than the smallest insect, for she could
neither hear, nor speak, nor see, and by some miracle
she came to see, to hear and to speak, to understand,
to feel, to think, as well as the most perfectly educated
people in the world." But, Helen Keller, now
thirty-two years of age, has written this fairy
story herself, in two books, which have been trans-
lated, and are well-known in France, and these
productions are in themselves sufficient proofs
of the degree to which natural incapacity and ignor-
ance have been overcome by training. This pheno-
menon has so far only been regarded as a
sensational marvel, but it should interest us not
merely from this point of view. Reduced to the
proportions of an exceptional accident, it would

A I

4 MAN'S MIRACLE

deserve no more attention than an earthquake,
considered apart from its primary cause, or its
final consequences.

What I propose, is to indicate the multitude of ideas,
hopes, conjectures and doubts — suggested by this
new Helen, as beautiful mentally, as was she of
the Iliad in outward appearance. It is a story
containing, perhaps, the solution of many enigmas,
unguessed until now, and the answer to some of
those questions asked in all time, beginning with this
one: "What is the limit of human perfection, and
up to what point may our will correct and overcome
hostile nature?"

Before entering this wilderness of speculation, it
would be advisable to describe the methods which
rescued Helen Keller from impenetrable darkness,
and we will therefore consult her personal narrative
and the complementary notes of her teacher, Miss
Anna Sullivan.

Our heroine came of a Swiss family, which had
emigrated two centuries before to the United States.
She was born in June, 1880, in an idyllic cottage at
Tuscumbia, a tiny town in the State of Alabama.
One of her ancestors was a teacher of the deaf and

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 5

dumb at Zurich, a coincidence which she notices
herself, adding : " It is true that there is hardly a
king who has not numbered a slave amongst his
ancestors, or a slave who has not descended from
some king." One of her great grandparents was aide-,
de-camp to La Fayette during that great general's
service in the American War of Independence.
She was born of the second marriage of a rich
and intelligent country gentleman, with a woman
much younger than himself, but of an equal social
position, and the child seemed exempt, at her
birth, from any of those hereditary taints, which
explain, according to modern science, so much that
is abnormal. At nineteen months, she was a perfectly
sound, healthy baby. Then came a sudden and
terrible accident. She was attacked by a cerebral
and stomachic congestion, and some weeks later she
recovered bodily health, but was left, as if by the
hands of an executioner, deprived of sight, hearing
and speech; a creature inferior to the lowest and
most helpless animal.

At this point a problem arises, which I shall briefly
note at the moment, returning to it later. "Are
the intelligence, consciousness and faculty of affec-

6 MAN'S MIRACLE

tion already formed in a child of nineteen months?
During this short period of normal existence, had
little Helen's memory been indelibly impressed with
the apprehension of light, with the sounds which in
her baby fashion she had tried to imitate, with the
attitudes and gestures of the persons who had passed
before her eyes?' Whether the answers to these
questions are in the affirmative or negative, they
open up wonderful and interesting points of view for
conjecture on the origin and organisation of the
human race. Let us first consult Helen Keller her-
self. She naturally asked herself this question before
any other — Whether any ray of understanding had
penetrated her mind before she was enveloped in that
great darkness and silence? She appealed also to
her parents' memories, but her enquiry resulted only
in suppositions, contradictions, misgivings. She
expresses truthfully her own doubts on the subject.
^ ' ' When I try to remember my first impressions, I see
reality and fiction are confused in the uncertainty
separating the past from the present. One is apt to
describe one's former sensations by means of one's
present imagination." She writes that up to the age
of seven she had no "soul," that she existed auto-

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 7

matically without consciousness of her "ego" — with-
out aim, though t, will, hope, desire, faith, or law,
without a suspicion of the past or the future — in a
kind of chaos which defies all description, and
which Descartes would no doubt have qualified
as complete nullity by the test of his criterion: "I
think, therefore, I am." At another time, however,
she suggests that her illness may not have destroyed
all the developments of her early existence.

The brief glimpse she had had of light and space,
filled with movement and sound, was not altogether
eclipsed. She must have felt the presence of other
beings coming and going between the obstacles
surrounding her, as she would cling constantly to her
mother's skirts for safety. Her sense of smell guided
her amongst the flowers in the garden, and awoke in
her some vague memory of form and colour. By her
sense of touch, she soon learnt to fold and arrange
clean linen, and to distinguish her own, while her
lips tried to articulate, as before the catastrophe, the
syllable wa (the first of water), and when she was
hungry, she would make the gesture of cutting bread
into slices and spreading them with butter — possible
survivals of a period of sight and observation. She

8 MAN'S MIRACLE

hesitates, however, to vouch for the accuracy of her
retrospection. Perhaps, the truth lies halfway between
her conception of the fact, and its actual existence.
No doubt she had a confused memory of a former
and better condition, with the distinctive desire to re-
conquer it, for she would grope desperately through
the darkness and emptiness, searching for something,
touching the moving lips of her father and mother,
learning, or remembering, that they communicated
their ideas by other means than signs ; trying to utter
sounds, and beating the air with frantic movements of
fist and foot in her revolt against her helplessness,
just as a miner, entombed by an accident, strikes
here, there, and anywhere with his pickaxe, hoping
that some sound may penetrate to one who will
save him from his misery.

It was this manifestation of the rebellion of Helen
Keller against her affliction which decided her fate.
Her parents dared not hope anything for this little
living corpse. They only saw in her revolt, the
exuberance of the wild plant, or the impulses
of the animal. Their tenderness for her was
manifested in ministering to her physical needs, and
out of pity they abstained from thwarting the capri-

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 9

cious desires of this poor little animal, born of their
flesh for their affliction and hers. Perhaps Mrs.
Keller remembered having read of a visit made in
1842 by Charles Dickens to the Blind Institute at
Boston, when the popular English author was aston-
ished by the results of an educational experiment, of
Dr. Samuel Howe, on the deaf, dumb, and blind girl,
Laura Bridgman (*) But even if Laura still lived, Dr.
Howe had been dead for some time, taking with him
the secret of his miracle. The incredulity of Helen's
father made him regard the renewing of destroyed
senses as a Utopian impossibility, while his affection
for her made him dread the separation necessary for
such an experiment. But Helen's instinctive and
determined aspiration towards the light, shown by
her attacks of rage and revolt, decided the doubts,
the agony, and the scepticism of her parents. She
was six years old when they consulted an eminent
oculist at Baltimore, who pronounced her blindness
incurable, but advised a visit to the great physician
and expert in acoustics, Graham Bell, who was a
reputed specialist for deaf mutes, as well as being the

(*) The description of this visit occurs in a panegyric on the
United States, called "American Notes," an apology in some
measure for his violently satirical novel, Martin Chuzzlcwit.

10 MAN'S MIRACLE

inventor of the telephone and photophone. Graham
Bell strongly advised the Kellers to go to the Perkins'
Institute at Boston, where the system of Dr. Samuel
Howe, the instructor of Laura Bridgman, was con-
tinued according to his tradition ; there they would,
perhaps, find a wonder-worker to save Helen from
her misery. A few months later there arrived at
Tuscumbia, Miss Anna Sullivan, the young woman
who was to renew and surpass Dr. Howe's achieve-
ment. She had herself been a witness of his system,
having lived at the Institute with Laura Bridgman,
first, as a patient for a temporary affection of her
eyes, and on her recovery, as a teacher of the blind.

One cannot think, without a shudder, of the gigantic
nature of the task set before this missionary of twenty-
one years. It was in truth a superhuman one, that of
creating a world out of the chaos where lay the sad
vestige of humanity called Helen Keller. One's
imagination goes back to the Creation, described in
Genesis, where everything was formed out of nothing —
omnia ex nihilo.

Miss Sullivan set to work with tranquil courage,
as soon as she saw the poor victim, who little knew
that she had met her Providence.

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 1 1

She recognised at once that the wounded and
ferocious animal in Helen must first be overcome,
before the good angel could be awakened.

So far, only her bodily strength had been deve-
loped, combined with a blind and violent self-will,
encouraged by her parents' pity and indulgence; and
unless constrained by superior physical force, she
rebelled against every lesson and duty. There was
at first a succession of physical struggles, which left
Miss Sullivan panting and exhausted, shaken by
nervous tears, and depressed by uncertainty. But by
degrees Helen submitted, and began to take pleasure
in the game which her unknown friend played with
her fingers on the palm of her hand — tracing such
words as Cake y or Doll, and making her answer in
turn. Thus, one of the two senses left to her (the
senses of touch and smell) was employed in a manner
whose ultimate utility she could not guess at, but
which at the moment satisfied her ardent desire
for action.

By means of touching a cake, or a doll, immediately
after, or before, the tracing of the name on her
hand, she arrived at divining a relation between
these objects and their signs, and at learning to spell

12 MAN'S MIRACLE

in Miss Sullivan's hand, one or other of the substan-
tives, each time that she wanted a sweetmeat, or a
plaything. What a difference there is between this
method of communication and the usual pantomime
of deaf mutes! For a person afflicted with blindness,
in addition to the lack of speech and hearing, obvi-
ously some other system was required, than that
invented, or perfected, by the Abbe de l'Epee for
deaf mutes, whose gestures could be emphasized and
supplemented by facial expression. No doubt, before
their education was attempted, Laura Bridgman,
Helen Keller, and Marie Heurtin (the blind and
deaf and dumb French girl, whom I shall mention
later) had made use of those instinctive means of
expression for the necessary demands of nature,
such as are practised even by dumb animals. But
with these triply afflicted children, this rudimen-
tary form of language is merely a monologue,
with no method of reply, and is extremely
limited.

The stroke of genius in Miss Sullivan's system of
education is the invention of a manual dialogue,
which places the blind and deaf mute in complete
correspondence with normal humanity. It is what a

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 13

bridge thrown across a river is to a man without a
boat, and who cannot swim. ^

Dr. Samuel Howe was the first person to apply
the principle of this discovery in the case of Laura
Bridgman. He worked, however, at the beginning, in
a slightly different manner from Miss Sullivan. He
explained to his pupil the equivalence of objects and
words by making her touch successively the objects,
and cards bearing their names in relief (*). Helen
Keller's teacher simplified the master's method in
one way, by eliminating the intermediary figure of
language, and complicated it in another, by extend-
ing rapidly and indefinitely the manual vocabulary
she had invented, to the point of tracing in her
pupil's hand entire phrases, without stopping to
consider whether they were understood or not. I
believe I am giving a true interpretation of her
system by saying that it was founded on a boundless
confidence in the power of resistance of mental
faculties to the worst accidents of nature. She had

(1. ) He describes how he tried to intensify Laura's deadened
senses, and to arouse cerebral impressions by electricity and
galvanism, but with only moderate success. A galvanic circle
having been made by the pressure of metal on the mucous
membrane of the nose and the tongue, affected nothing in her,
but the sense of taste.

14 MAN'S MIRACLE

noticed, as have we all, that children, long before
they learn the alphabet and grammar, understand
the general meaning of a phrase, or a conversation,
while they are quite incapable of pronouncing the
words, or, still less, of analysing them in detail.
The sense is understood by a habit of ear, or observa-
tion of facial expression, and also by the mysterious
intuition they bring with them on first awakening
to life. In the case of Helen Keller, the hand, after
growing sensitive, would take the place of the eye
and ear, and the throat and lips would in time re-
produce the whole language, provided that the
intuitive sense secreted in every human being from
its cradle (and this, Miss Sullivan never doubted) had
survived the terrible disaster to the principal senses.
Acting on this conviction, Helen's teacher spoke
directly to her hand, as fully as she would have
spoken with her lips to normal children, with the
firm belief that something would be understood, and
one day, every-thing.

In the end this audacious faith was justified. But
at what a cost — what efforts, what patience, what
ingenuity were needed for its attainment ! We admire
the genius of men who tunnel through mountains, or

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 15

belts of land, for the passage of railways or ships.
But this achievement was the searching for light
through the opaque, measureless, darkness of the
blind, deaf and dumb! We call those men heroes
who work for days and nights in the rescue of some
unfortunates entombed in a mine, straining their
ears for some feeble response to their shouts for help,
but what of this woman's constant watch through
weeks, months, years, the tension of every nerve, the
search through darkness for a hidden intelligence,
an intelligence, perhaps, vanished for ever, but
which, even if existing, was wandering vaguely in
gloom and silence, far from laughter, from song,
from tears, from every interpretation of life !

At the end of some months Helen had learnt about
sixty words, corresponding to tangible objects. She
had learnt them, however, as parrots, or performing
dogs learn, without understanding their sense in the
universal system of expression. To give an example
of this beginning of her education. Suppose one
were to put in the hand of a new-born child, ten,
twenty, fifty grains of sand, would they give him
the faintest conception of the desert, or of the
Himalayas, of which they are atoms?

16 MAN'S MIRACLE

In order, therefore, that Helen's brain might make
a decisive advance towards the light, she had now to
be made to understand that the words she had learnt
mechanically were only like the dust of a distant
mountain, from whose summit she would see the world.
She must be brought to say to herself (for by what
possible means could it else be revealed to her?)
" These words are only the fragments of a great
language which defines all things, according to a
general law, and this law, when I have learnt its
secret, will put wings to my mind, by which I can
fly from darkness, and reach the most dazzling light."
Until this truth had sprung spontaneously from her
mind, all the words she had accumulated were like
so many pearls cast before swine. One day, this
truth suddenly gushed forth, literally as well as
figuratively, as the water from a fountain. All
Miss Sullivan's efforts had failed to make her pupil
understand the difference between a liquid and a
cup, between the contents, and that which holds
them. One morning she held Helen's hand under
a fountain of water, at the same time writing on
her palm the word water. She then placed in it a
mug full of water, writing the word mug. Suddenly,

Helen Keller between Mme. Georgette Leblanc-
Maeterlinck and Mr. Macy, who married Miss Sullivan,
the instructress of the celebrated blind deaf-mute.

The bookshelves in the photograph contain works specially
printed and published in raised type for Helen Keller's use.
These include many of the classics in Latin, French, German
and English, which this blind and deaf girl has in every sense
completely mastered and understood.

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 17

Helen went red and pale by turns, trembled, and
seemed transported with delight, as the statue of
Galatea suddenly animated by the love of Pygmalion,
or as a blind man, who, by the stroke of some
magic wand, sees all at once the sun and the blue sky.
The thick veil was rent. Eureka! Out of chaos
a sudden light dazzled Helen's consciousness, and
made clear to her that every word corresponds with
some object; that in future she could ask for every-
thing, obtain, listen, understand by an exchange of
systematic signs with the unknown person near her.
Half mad with joy, she began to touch everything,
and ask the name of everything, beginning with
that mysterious stranger, who answered by means of
touch, " Teacher." Helen responded by the usual
human expression, that is, by caresses and kisses,
as if to say, " Now I know. You are my deliverer,
come take me by the hand and lead me from
prison.' ' Miss Sullivan's heart was ready to burst
with joy. She shed happy tears; tears worthy
of being enshrined in a royal jewel case, for no
diamonds from India, or Africa, are as precious as
those drops, the fruit of such noble pride and such
rare charity.

B

18 MAN'S MIRACLE

Thus Helen had the key which would open to
her the doors of understanding — a relative under-
standing, it is true. She could know, in future, every-
thing about the objects she could touch, but how
should she be taught a conception of abstract things,
or of sentiments, ideas, the chief factors, although
invisible and impalpable, of all actions, and of all
human history? This second stage of her education
seemed checked by still more formidable obstacles
than the first. When her teacher tried to make
Helen understand the word " Love/' she wanted to
touch the object, and when she was told it was not
an object she could touch, she asked if it was the
scent of flowers, or the warmth of the sun.

Miss Sullivan says that when one day Helen
seemed puzzled, she tried to give the child the
idea of abstract things by writing on her forehead
the word " think." She supposes that immediately
the young girl's imagination grasped a connection
between her mental state at the moment and the
explanation that was given her, and that she repre-
sented to herself, from that time, the immaterial
idea — thought — making use of that idea by a series of
i ctorious efforts, to include by degrees everything that

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 19

cannot be touched. It is more probable that as soon as
the mechanism of reflection was set loose by the reve-
lation of the conventional link existing between con-
crete objects, and their corresponding words, Helen
began of her own accord to define her own mental
sensations, such as tenderness, irritation, satisfaction,
doubt, pride, by analogies borrowed from physical
things. In translating love by perfume of flowers,
or warmth of the sun, she already showed an approxi-
mate intelligence of the feelings of admiration,
pleasure, well-being, of which love is at once the
factor, and the consequence. Later, extending her
conception of love far beyond its reality, as the imagin-
ation of a blind person may enhance the beauty of a
spectacle denied to him, she ingenuously wrote that
"Love is that which we all feel for others." What
is very striking, however, is that at the present time,
when she is at the maturity of her knowledge and
judgment, she makes use, in her literary compositions,
of an extraordinary wealth of metaphor. For example,
a whole chapter of "The World I live in" is devoted
to reducing all her ideas to visible and tangible objects.
They are presented in the form of personages, charm-
ing or grave, noble, frivolous, or grotesque, passing

b 1

20 MAN'S MIRACLE

before the eyes and disappearing in complete dis-
order, with no apparent effort for discipline or
arrangement.

It is a most picturesque example of mental in-
coherence; a survival from a primitive society, thus
repeating itself in an individual of incomplete organ-
ization. Helen possessed only a small vocabulary
limited to the definition of natural objects. In ex-
pressing her developing emotions, and the things she
began to be aware of in the spiritual world, she was
forced to make use of material images, and to invent
what are called figures of speech. Even at our own
standard of civilization, orators and writers are wont
to clothe and give bodily form to their abstract
statements in order to make their meaning clear.
How natural it is, therefore, that such methods
should be employed by a being, whose means of
communication with the world are exclusively limited
to the sense of touch.

Helen Keller was now an intelligent human being,
open to all knowledge to be gained through the
language of touch. The rest of her education, after
these long and painful years of initiation, followed as
logically from its beginning, as the harvest follows the

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 21

sowing, or as the modern printing press completes
the first invention of Caxton. It was now relatively
easy to teach her the ordinary alphabet, to train her
to read successively the school manuals, and after-
wards the masterpieces of literature in Braille char-
acters, some of which were already in existence for
the use of the blind, while many others were printed
in raised characters expressly for her use by Miss .
Sullivan's collaborators. Along with the explanations
which her devouring curiosity obtained from her
teacher, she drew from her reading an encyclopaedic
knowledge, and filled her mental vision, hitherto a
blank, with a complete panorama of the world. It
was only another step in advance, to learn languages,
dead and living, to acquire ideas of science, in spite
of deaf ears and blind eyes. If obstacles arose to
stop her progress, they came from without, and she
herself overcame them. Thus, objections were made
to her competing for a degree at the University with
those who had the normal use of their eyes. Since
she could neither hear the questions of the examiners,
nor answer orally, she would be obliged to make use
of an intermediary in the person of Miss Sullivan or
some other, who would communicate the question on

22 MAN'S MIRACLE

her hand, when she would reply in writing. The
University authorities, fearing that this complicated
process might lead to an unfair advantage, or at any
rate to suspicion, hesitated before admitting her to the
examination, but were in the end obliged to yield, at
seeing the despair of a student so illtreated by fate,
and so splendidly resolved to conquer it.

When this difficulty was over, Helen was stimulated
to another ambition, viz., to become independent of
an intermediary by assimilating the spoken word.
She became more eager than ever to learn by her
hand the mechanism of the vocal chords of others, and
the movement of the lips in emitting sounds and
phrases. The utility of this exercise for those who are
only deaf and dumb has often been questioned. This
question seems absurd, if we only consider two con-
tingencies amongst a thousand others. A person thus
afflicted might be lost in the dark, when passers-by
would be quite unable to understand his signs — or,
again, the cry of " Help ! Fire!" might save him
from a burning room. It is asserted, however, with
more reason, that deaf mutes can scarcely be taught to
talk intelligibly, as, up to the present time, all efforts
have only resulted in very defective articulation on

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 23

one monotonous note, with false inflections, and an into-
nation very harsh and unpleasant to the ear. At the
outset, any attempt on the part of Helen Keller
seemed doomed to failure, deprived as she was by
blindness, of the suggestive expression of faces, and
the movement of the lips of those with whom she so
desired to converse. Still, if complete victory has
not yet rewarded her heroic efforts, it is not far off.
Helen can speak, and her speech is quite distinct to
those who live with her, and listen attentively. She
has spoken in public, and has been understood by
many, and no doubt she will find one day, a way of
proving, like Demosthenes and his pebble, that the
perseverance of an ardent will may finally overcome
the worst physical defects. I am about to suggest
what seems like a paradox, viz., that the wonderful
acuteness of her sense of touch may eventually lead
her to this victory. One of the reasons of the difficulty
of phonetic language with these afflicted people is,
that not hearing themselves speak, they cannot know
the effect produced by their words, nor can they
enforce their meaning by those modulations of tone
which are natural to us. Now, Helen Keller has at
the tips of her fingers, not only sharp eyes, but ears,

24 MAN'S MIRACLE

open to the faintest sound. To quote from her own
expression, she is a veritable vibroscope, a faithful
echo of the slightest vibration in the air, to the point
of having acquired the sense of rhythm by the
vibration in space, of sounds from the human throat,
from an instrument of music, or from a tool. It was
doubted whether she could catch the time of a waltz,
or polka, but she has more than once dispelled these
doubts by dancing in perfect time to an orchestra, by
the vibrations in the air communicated to her fingers
and the movements of her feet. Through the organ
of touch, by means of which she could perceive the
murmur of water, or the flutter of a bird's wings
after a bath, of a plane or a saw, she has made dis-
coveries yet unknown to acousticians, and reached
results which were at first contested, so impossible
did they seem. For example, a distinguished French
writer, professor of the Faculty of Letters at Poitiers,
M. Louis Arnould (author of the interesting biography
of the blind and deaf mute, Marie Heurtin), suspected
that Helen Keller had employed the help of a third
person, when in describing a hunt, she declared that
she was awakened by the " noise of the butt ends of
guns " and " the heavy tramp of the huntsmen," and

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 25

also spoke of the ( ' whinny ing of the horses," and
"the furious barking of dogs." These sensations, how-
ever, of which M. Arnould thought her incapable,
would not have astonished Graham Bell, who was
married to a deaf mute, nor Edison, a deaf man, both
aware by experiment of the extreme sensibility of the
vibrations of the ether, men whose researches led to
the invention of the telephone and wireless telegraphy.
The truth, attested by these expert witnesses, is that
the most infinitesimal sound has its corresponding
vibration in the ether ; the nervous system, as it were,
of space. Bring these vibrations into contact with a
hand ceaselessly on the alert, with a hand, moreover,
in which are collected and condensed almost all the
human faculties; no wonder that they should be
communicated to this hand as easily as a flutter of
air to the ear of a woman fanning herself. Sceptics
forget also that nature, as if in remorse for her own
injustice, never weakens or deadens a sense without
increasing in proportion the intensity of another, a
fact proved by the extreme acuteness of the sense of
hearing in the blind. The sense of touch in the
normal person is far less acute than in a Helen Keller ;
it is distracted by a crowd of visual and auditive

26 MAN'S MIRACLE

impressions. We neglect in our wealth of sensations
many treasures placed almost in our hands. (*)

Let us suppose that each of our four principal
receptive faculties ( 2 ) corresponds to the value of 5 —
total 20. The cruel fate which only gave Helen two,
touch and scent, doubled the power of those two,
by the "law of organic equilibrium," suggested by
Geoff roy Saint Hilaire, so that they represent 20.
There is, therefore, between her and us only a differ-
ence of distribution. The material of our faculties
is twice as extensive but twice as thin, the material
of hers is twice as restricted but twice as thick. We
disperse our faculties and our means of hearing — Helen
Keller concentrates hers ; and the natural acuteness
with which her sensations seem to be provided, and
which her infirmities have caused her to develop to
the extreme limits of possibility, are sufficient ex-
planation of her ability to perceive, without ears, the
movement of leaves, or the humming of a bee, by
means of the immense keyboard of space under her

(*) According to a picturesque expression of Helen Keller:
"We keep our hands in our pockets."

( 2 ) Except that of taste, and nothing in Helen Keller's history-
shows any difference of intensity between the sensations of her
palate and ours.

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 27

exceptionally sensitive fingers. We may hope that
she will arrive at assimilating by the same means
the whole gamut of intonations in human speech. ( 1 )
One or two further statements of fact remain to be
set down before the conclusion of this explanatory
chapter. The biographer of Marie Heurtin, a man
of faith of the school of St. Thomas, who believes,
however, in a God Whom he has not seen, but Whom
he pictures to himself, doubts the sincerity of certain
passages in Helen Keller's books, where she describes
a snowy landscape. He does not realise that by
means of riding and walking, by journeys, by conver-
sations with a cultivated teacher of an eloquence
as great as her pupil's curiosity, Helen came to
represent to herself lines, shapes, and aspects of
places, as completely as if she had seen them with her
eyes, just as we come to imagine quite easily, and
even to describe graphically, countries which we have
never visited. No doubt our eyes have helped us by
points of likeness and terms of comparison. But
in the young American the highly developed senses
of touch and scent, placed equal aids at her disposi-

(*) In Chapter VI. of this book, the reader will find this pre-
vision re-inforced, and be prepared for new marvels.

28 MAN'S MIRACLE

tion. For example, by the olfactory sense, that
servant of the evening (for in the evening, in a rural
district, the noises of the day subside, and the sense
of touch has not so many offices to fulfil), Helen
Keller learnt the ideas of distance and perspective.
When she ceased to use her fingers, she perceived
through her nose. From judging whether a certain
scent was near or far off, she imagined a certain
horizon composed of perfume or imperceptible vapours.
By an analogy, the attributes of odours made her
understand that the normal individual can be aware
of objects without touching them, just as she became
sensible of the presence of things and persons by the
sole indication of her nostrils. It followed that her
olfactory sense, twice as sensitive as ours, revealing
subtle aromas of which we know nothing, and giving
her delights undreamt of by us, was used by her as a
measure is used by a surveyor, a compass by a sailor,
a hound by a huntsman or a detective. Hence she
calls smell "the fallen angel" of the senses, a sense
so despised, neglected, and unjustly condemned by
us for some of its sins, that we forget its many
precious services. One domain seemed closed to her,
that of colour . The proverb which declares it inex-

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 29

orably forbidden to the blind, has never been con-
tradicted. Helen Keller, however, has entered it to
a certain extent. She was taught the theory of the
spectrum, and every object was presented to her with
a description of its colour. Working, according to
her rule, by analogy, she formed an idea of colours
by thinking of a variety of scents and flavours. The
difference between the scent of an orange and a
bunch of grapes, or a peach, suggested to her the
difference between black and white, red and green.
Through this, she deduced the gradation of tones, the
scale of shades, and she never thought of any object
without instinctively clothing it with the chromatic
elements of the rainbow. ( x ) Her brain had created,
as it were, a painter's palette, where green was
synonymous with freshness, red with strength and
violence, white with truth and purity, and so on.
Perhaps the colours of her imagination do not exactly
correspond with truth. But does absolute truth exist
even in the prism? We, who can see more clearly
(but of whom many, without knowing it, are afflicted

( x ) Laura Bridgman's biographer relates that she, who was
intellectually very inferior to Helen, had a false idea of colours,
for she declared one day that she wished she had pink eyes and
blue hair.

3 o MAN'S MIRACLE

with Daltonism) are not always agreed as to the
nature of a colour. The proverb says: De gustibus
et coloribus non est disputandum; and who knows
whether Helen Keller's conjectures do not give an
added beauty to the positive reflections of the iris ?

Be that as it may, the reader is now fully acquainted
with the marvellous progress made by this little
blind, deaf, and dumb girl of Tuscumbia, through
dark pathways to radiant light. A progress so won-
derful as to be almost fantastic. The first time I was
told of this miracle, I remembered a gruesome story
which gave me, when I heard it, a perfect nightmare.
The story is of a famous physician, who, in the pitiless
curiosity of science, bribes some poor wretch on the
pretext of giving him a painless death in exchange
for the price of his corpse. He simply gives him an
anaesthetic and removes the covering of the brain " to
see what happens when the king of creation is
reduced to a purely bestial state." Deprived of all
reasoning power, the victim of this frightful experi-
ment manifests an inordinate appetite and an irre-
pressible desire to exert by violence his strength,
unnaturally increased by inaction and over-feeding.
Bound and made helpless by the cruel scientist, the

THE METAMORPHOSIS OF HELEN KELLER 31

man-animal finally bursts his chains, and crushes the
physician to death, without even suspecting that
he is destroying his torturer. We see, in Helen
Keller's case, a metamorphosis in the contrary sense,
the conversion of a little animal into an intellectual,
sentient human being. Think of the condition of quad-
rupeds whose eyes reflect all that appears on their
horizon, who have organs for observing, for shielding
them from danger, who know when they are caressed,
or ill-treated, whom we can lead, or domesticate, and
whose slightest actions are governed by a certain
instinct; let us lower our eyes to the tiniest insects
that creep, they are also endowed with organs equally
acute for seeing, for knowing what they do, what
results will follow on the smallest contraction of their
minute antennae ; and now compare this sum of animal
capabilities with the condition of a little child, so afflic-
ted that she can know nothing of time or its flight, of
space and its divisions, of the sun, of other beings, or
other things! Think of the little morsel of human
flesh, enclosed in a sort of tomb, with just enough
space to move in, and enough air to breathe — think of
this wretched deformity which education has trans-
formed into a highly cultured woman, endowed with

32 MAN'S MIRACLE

infinite sensibilities! Up to the present time, those
who have not disbelieved in this prodigy have con-
tented themselves with merely mentioning her in
terms of admiration. The time has now come when
we can learn from her case, lessons of life and counsels
of wisdom, as we taste the juice of some rare fruit to
discover its aroma and flavour.

CHAPTER II
The Course of the Torch

THE EARLY SOURCES OF THE MIRACLE. FROM GREEK
DANCES TO THE LANGUAGE OF MIMICRY AND TOUCH.
THE PATHWAY AND VIEW OF PROGRESS IN THE PAST
AND THE FUTURE. THE CASE OF ALEXIS DECRAMER
AT BRUGES. PRIESTS AND LAYMEN AS PERFORMERS
OF MIRACLES. THE RESPECTIVE FUNCTIONS OF THE
TWO SEXES IN THE REGENERATION OF THE TRIPLY
AFFLICTED.

The first truth apparent from the case we have
been considering is this: that every human effort,
however individual or isolated it may have been, is
the germ of a progress destined to become universal.
No step in its advance was, or is, or will be useless.
It clears a way for all the world to follow. A striking
proof of this fact is afforded by tracing back to their
sources the successive inventions which made possible
the liberation of such victims as Laura Bridgman,
Helen Keller, Marie Heurtin, and others. I have
investigated these sources and found the following.

Long before the birth of Christ we note the

creation of the dance with gesticulation, the chore-

c

34 MAN'S MIRACLE

graphic pantomime by the pagans of Athens and
Rome. It was a purely aesthetic exhibition for the
pleasure of the eye and the exercise of the imagina-
tion. In the middle ages there was still no suggestion
of a useful or humanitarian application of such
exercises. Afflicted persons, the ricketty, the
crippled, the deformed, were allowed to die, or were
even killed, being treated as incurable, or considered
superstitiously, to be damned, but towards the end
of the fifteenth century a light began to dawn.
Erasmus advocated the possibility of helping the
blind, by supplying the want of sight through the
cultivation of the other senses. A century later, the
Spanish Benedictine, Pedro de Ponce, who had
seen the pantomimes of the ancient Grasco-Latin
civilisation imported across the Pyrenees, con-
ceived the idea of a language by signs, which
would furnish the deaf and dumb with a means
of communication between themselves and society.
The spectacle of a pagan amusement inspired a
Catholic monk, after 1,500 years, to invent a rudi-
mentary instrument of conversation for those who
could neither speak nor hear. A fellow-country-
man of the monk, M. Paul Bonet, wrote a book

THE COURSE OF THE TORCH 35

to spread and make as popular as possible this
discovery, which the Abbe de PEpee perfected in
the eighteenth century, and practically applied in
the institute he founded for these unfortunate people,
hitherto treated as pariahs, or parasites to be elimin-
ated. He was followed by the humble French
teacher, Valentin Haiiy, who was profoundly touched
by what he had seen at the Abbe de PEpee's
institute, and who set to work eagerly at the syste-
matic and complete education of the blind by a
combination of the Abb6's method with the new
discovery of geographical maps and musical notation
in relief.

It seems that in the eighteenth century — a century
with a frivolous reputation, in spite of the life behind
its artificiality — humanity (and France in the fore-
front) became aware of her powers of redemption, and
of the extraordinary victories she was to gain
eventually over nature. The very materialistic Abbe
Condillac, tutor to the grandson of Louis XV., pub-
lished his Traite des Sensations, and by means of his
imaginary man-statue showed how persons reduced
to the single sense of touch might come to share all

the sensations of normal creatures. His statements at

ci

36 MAN'S MIRACLE

first disgusted many of his contemporaries, as they
seemed unorthodox ; others smiled at the apparently
unreasonable paradox. But others again, began to
think profoundly. Diderot, while allowing that blind
and deaf mutes were condemned so far to perpetual
imbecility, admitted the possibility of teaching them
by means of a language of touch. And the Abbe de
l'Epee enthusiastically asked for some child, deprived
from the age of two or three, of sight, hearing, and
speech, on whom to practise his new methods. His
appeal was not responded to, owing to the want of
publicity which to-day transports such a request in a
few hours from one end of the world to another — and
also owing to the lack of a subject. The cases of
such triple mutilation were then as rare as medical
science was imperfect, since the diseases which occa-
sioned them, nearly always ended in death, no doubt
before their symptoms were recognised as any other
than those of ordinary fatal illness. Later, however,
that is a century and a-half ago, the highest intellec-
tual and philanthropic persons in Paris were filled
with the ambition to undertake and succeed in this
task. And we shall see by how straight and unde-
viating a way these successive suggestions, starting

THE COURSE OF THE TORCH 37

from the first pre-Christian dance, pursued their
journey through Spain and France to the new world,
to culminate in the realization of the most audacious
dreams.

In 1 801, sometime after the death of the Abbe
de Condillac, of Diderot, of the Abbe de l'Epee, and
a little while before that of Valentine Haiiy, there was
born in the United States, Samuel Howe, the future
physician and founder of the Perkins Institute at
Boston. As a young man, Howe was excited by the
romantic accounts of Lord Byron's participation in
the insurrection of Greece, and departed for Europe.
He fought during ten years, first for the Greeks and
then for the Poles, inspired, like them, by the love of
liberty. During his adventures he met one of his
compatriots, Dr. John Fisher, who had lately come
from Paris, enthusiastic over the immense good done
by the institutions of the Abbe de l'Epee for the
deaf and dumb, and of Valentine Haiiy for the blind.
After exerting himself to the utmost for the Greek
and Polish victims of oppression and conquest, Samuel
Howe studied the French methods related by Dr.
Fisher, in view of a crusade in the United States j
this time to free the victims of despotic nature. He

38 MAN'S MIRACLE

brought with him to Boston the torch passed on by
Pedro de Ponce, the Abbe de l'Epee, and de Haiiy,
and with the help of the munificent millionaire,
Perkins, he founded the institute for the blind, where
he improved still further the system initiated in Paris.
However, the amelioration of the state of the blind
was not sufficient for him. He ardently desired, after
the example of the Abbe de l'Epee, to measure his
strength against the triple and terrible obstacles of
blindness, deafness, and dumbness, by combining the
various methods applied to the blind.

He was told that a similar experiment in another
American institute on an afflicted girl called Julia
Brace, had failed, but instead of being discouraged,
he seemed to draw from this defeat a new stimulus
to energy. He heard from a medical report of a
girl of seven years old at Hannover (in new Hamp-
shire), Laura Bridgman, who could neither see, hear,
nor speak ; after a severe attack of scarlatina, at the
age of two and a half, she had even lost the sense of
smell. He went to Hannover and took the child
from her parents to Boston, where, by degrees, he
made of her a woman less accomplished, it is true,
than Helen Keller, but sufficiently remarkable,

THE COURSE OF THE TORCH 39

allowing for her circumstances, to astonish everyone
who saw her, (0 amongst others, men like Charles
Dickens, the poet Longfellow, and the Hungarian
patriot Kossuth.

Let us marvel at each link in the chain. It was
at this same institute of Dr. Howe's that a young
woman of the name of Anna Sullivan, suffering from
accidental blindness, came to be cured. While re-
covering her sight, she witnessed the last phases of
Laura Bridgman's evolution from the state of an
animal to the dignity of a human being. She noted
every detail and learnt every secret, and being told
that there existed, at a farm in Alabama, another
Laura Bridgman called Helen Keller, whose parents
wished that her " resurrection ' should take place at
her home, she left the Institute Perkins, to fly to her
rescue, taking with her Laura's last doll, which was
to be the first doll, and, indeed, the first aid in the
education of her little sister in distress, Helen Keller.

Helen's teacher, in a book she has written, denies

(1) About the same time in Belgium (1837-1838), the Institute
for the Deaf and Dumb at Bruges, directed by the Abbe Carton,
received a child of nine; deaf, dumb and almost blind, Anna
Temmerman, who was taught to read, to write in Flemish, and
to knit, which at that time was considered wonderful.

40 MAN'S MIRACLE

that she was inspired by any kind of enthusiasm. She
says she was simply impelled by circumstances, which
obliged her to earn her living. But the actual paths
in which destiny leads us are of no consequence.

It seems as if a kind of logical fatality had traced
this path, trodden through the centuries from the old
Graeco-Latin civilization to the young and budding
civilization of the United States, by a gigantic idea.
There is no shadow of doubt that the mind has its
magnetic currents, and its roads leading as certainly
to their goal, as the great roads opened by Caesar's
soldiers to his conquests, or the lines of steel by
which in our modern age we transport ourselves and
our belongings from one end of the world to the other.
The great and small telepathic roads we leave
behind us are not the only roads the eye perceives.
We catch glimpses of others, extending and multi-
plying into the future, we know not to what
sublime end. The various efforts which have
culminated in the re-creation of such beings as Laura
Bridgman, Helen Keller and Marie Heurtin, were
accomplished without any deviation or pause in their
order, to their desired end. Thanks to the railway,
the Morse code of telegraphy, to wireless telegraphy

THE COURSE OF THE TORCH 41

(perhaps to-morrow to aviation), thanks also to a
publicity, astounding in its rapidity, and to a feeling,
hitherto unknown, of human solidarity, we find our-
selves on the eve of an era of inter-communication and
universal co-operation, where separate energies work
together and mingle, attacking problems in a unified
mass, with a thousand times more chance than hitherto,
of solving them, and, moreover, of solving them in
a space of time which seems, in comparison with the
groping methods of past centuries, like a flash of
lightning. Every new research, every discovery
leading to ultimate good, or improvement, now and
for the future, circulates almost instantaneously from
mouth to mouth, from people to people, from hemi-
sphere to hemisphere, exciting all the emulation
and activity existing in competent intelligence, or
passionate interest. In the human struggle against
nature, a holy alliance of formidable discipline has
been substituted for the guerilla warfare of primitive
peoples. And since, in the past, no effort has been
sterile, even if effected by some obscure wills operating
almost in the dark, without any co-operation, and in
spite of discouraging scepticism, or active opposition,
what may we not expect from the gigantic united

42 MAN'S MIRACLE

movement of a society, knowing it can, and will,
accomplish anything.

For Helen Keller's use, all the books of study and
all the classics in dead and living languages which her
insatiable thirst for knowledge demanded, have been
copied, or printed in relief. She has placed this
rare library, which cost thousands of dollars, at the
disposition of others afflicted like herself, and she
has become the life and soul of an official commission
to perfect still further the system of teaching the
disinherited. Her example and her efforts have
inspired other Miss Sullivans for other Helen Kellers.
As I have already said, she has reversed the funereal
gloom of her own past, and analysed herself retro-
spectively, to benefit unhappy beings still waiting to
emerge from what has been her own torture. She,
who has come from the darkest night, holds the torch
which had enlightened her on the way, for the use
of others. These will again hold it aloft for the
benefit of others to-morrow, and after to-morrow, and
so on, until science, becoming bolder, will reach the
root of the black evil, and make the return impossible.
The answer has already been given to the first
question raised by such a case as Helen Keller's.

THE COURSE OF THE TORCH 43

There is no limit set to our perfectibility, since from
such a human zero, such a sum of knowledge, emotion
and vitality has been made.

In the appendix to this book, there will be found
an unedited and quite recent document showing how
apt is the epithet, human zero, applied to a blind and
deaf mute. The document relates to a boy of fifteen,
Alexis Decramer, a victim of this triple calamity,
who for eight years has defeated the efforts made for
his education by Canon Naeghels, Director of the
Institute for the Deaf and Dumb and Blind at
Bruges. These cases of triple infirmity are, for
some unknown reason, more frequent in women than
in men, and these latter, when so afflicted, are more
rebellious (this is a fresh mystery to fathom) than the
feminine element, towards efforts for awakening their
dormant faculties. As will be seen in the appendix,
Canon Naeghels has been unsuccessful during eight
years of effort in drawing Alexis Decramer out of a
state of almost complete brutishness. But, no doubt,
time and perseverance and natural intuition will do
more or less, sooner or later, what they have done

44 MAN'S MIRACLE

for Marie Heurtin, under difficulties as great in
principle. In every case, all that has been realized
is to be realized again, and everything is possible by
education. Laura Bridgman, Marie Heurtin and
Helen Keller are proofs of this.

Side by side with this truth is another, subsidiary
and not less encouraging. There is also, no limit
to our means, to our instruments of perfection. Here
I am touching on a delicate point, where I run the risk
of wounding some honest convictions. Those who
hold these convictions, being Christians, will have
the charity to forgive me for stating a fact of such
general interest, that I cannot keep silence merely
for the sake of some individual susceptibility. The
ecclesiastical belief that religious souls alone are
capable of the abnegation and angelic perseverance
necessary for the salvation of the leper, or disinherited
of the race, is contradicted by the cases of Laura
Bridgman and Helen Keller, or, if you will, by the
labours of Dr. Howe, Miss Sullivan and their
collaborators. Because the first educational efforts
for the blind and deaf mutes were undertaken by
ecclesiastics (with the exception of Valentin Haiiy),
and as Marie Heurtin was rescued and educated

THE COURSE OF THE TORCH 45

by a noble woman in a religious habit (I) , they assert
that only those who have renounced the joys of this
world have sufficient self-sacrifice and moral strength
to undertake tasks so heroic, and often painful. Miss
Sullivan, however, and the greater number of those
noble souls in America who spend their energy in
making the lives of those unfortunate creatures toler-
able, nay, almost enviable, belong to the laity.
Although many of them have strong religious feelings
(this is quite natural in the New World, where
questions of faith are not argued, or even suggested) (2)
they have not thought it necessary to take vows, or
exile themselves from society, in order to undertake
the hard and painful labour of making the dumb to
speak, the deaf to hear, and the blind, in some measure,
to see. They have accepted this overwhelming task

(1) Sister Sainte Marguerite, of the Congregation of the Sceurs
de la Sagessc, at Larnay, was legitimately rewarded, in spite of
her reluctance, with the Monty on prize, and by a panegyric from
Ferdinand Brunetiere (1889). She also received one of the three
civic crowns of the Societe d 'encouragement an bien.

(2) I do not mean to say that the United States is free from
religious controversy, but that in the New World the controversy
is not between belief and free-thought, or downright atheism, as
in the Old World, where the question asked is, "Does any
Divine power exist ?"

46 MAN'S MIRACLE

quite simply, firstly, to earn an honest living, and
secondly, to satisfy a passion for doing good. More
than one of them has married, brought up children, and
become a useful member of society. (I) The renuncia-
tion of all personal interest, and the sole desire to
please God, Who is the Giver of infinite rewards, are
therefore not indispensable for a sister-of -charity.

I have no wish to detract by the value of a hair
from the merit of those who, in order to heal and
console others, think it necessary to go into exile and
keep their eyes constantly fixed on an approving
crucifix. Still less, would I seem to discourage those
thousands living in religious orders, from works
which benefit mankind, whatever their secret motive.
I hope that monks and nuns will continue to give
themselves to these works, noble and ennobling, and
even to receive all honour and praise for them.
They could not employ their time more ideally — there
will never be too many of us to counteract the
innumerable outrages against nature. But it is
precisely for that reason that the most exalted forms

(i) To mention Miss Sullivan only, who for the last seven or
eight years has been the wife of Mr. Macy, who helps her in
making the life of her pupil ever brighter.

THE COURSE OF THE TORCH 47

of charity should not be attributed solely to an order
of persons who claim the monopoly for themselves.
With the evolution of philosophical and sociological
ideas, we may safely predict an era when religious
vocations will become more and more rare. They
are extinct in almost every country where Roman
Catholicism has been supplanted by other forms of
religion, or by doubt, or unbelief. And in such cases
what would become of sick, crippled, and insane people
if their salvation depended only on the religious
orders? The answer is given us by such cases as
Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller — i.e. } that personal
immolation is not the sine qua non for the relief of
distress. This is re-assuring for modern society,
which seems to desire, whether rightly or wrongly,
an organisation founded on the sole moral standpoint
of "doing good for good's sake." If there are no
more hands sprinkled with holy water, there will be
found others, no doubt increasing in number, to seize
the sacred fire, and pass it on from one country and
one generation to another.

This is perhaps the moment to regard the subject
from the point of view of the Feminist movement.

48 MAN'S MIRACLE

At this time of agitation (sometimes excessive) in
favour of the rights of women, it is, perhaps, hardly
to the point to quote such examples as Miss Sullivan
or Sister Sainte Marguerite, to complete the down-
fall of the old prejudice of the inferiority of one sex.
At the same time, the transformation of an animal
into an exceptionally educated and sensitive human
being, seems to imply a higher capacity, mental
strength, elevation of character, and all manner of
virtues than existed in the reigns of Maria Theresa or
Catherine of Russia. If Jeanne D'Arc, Jeanne
Hachette, the demoiselles de Fernig, were living
examples of the most magnificent exaltation of
patriotic heroism of which women are capable, Miss
Sullivan, Sister Sainte Marguerite, and their fellow-
workers, are surely at the height of what the spirit of
sacrifice and noble perseverance can do in the combat
against the cruelty of fate. If I am not mistaken, the
American women owe their exceptional powers of
teaching, to the long War of Secession, when,
since all the able-bodied men were fighting, they
were substituted as professors in every branch
of scholarship, to preserve the younger minds
from ignorance while their elders were being

THE COURSE OF THE TORCH 49

drowned in blood. No doubt, were English, French,
or Belgian women placed in similar circumstances,
they would also show the same brilliant aptitudes.
One point also needs explanation : the title of the
present book does not imply that to men is due
the principal credit for the regeneration of which it
tells; the title, "Man's Miracle/' is used in a strictly
generic sense, as woman has had as great a share as
her partner in these marvellous efforts, perhaps because
she is a mother in two senses of the word — a mother
to create, and a mother to re-create the deformed
creature. Be that as it may, the respective parts
played by the sexes are divided in the work of
re-creation of these poor creatures. With a few ex-
ceptions, the man has theorised, and the woman has
put the theory into practice. No doubt she is
organically more gifted than the man for the painful
and delicate task, requiring patience and ingenuity,
for the sustained and noble suffering which must of
necessity be incurred in the relief of persistent disease,
or the regeneration of the abnormal, or the cultivation
of their faculties. When the Feminist movement is
accomplished, and when the excesses of its demands
shall have been reduced to the proportions sanctioned

D

50 MAN'S MIRACLE

by wisdom, it will no doubt contribute not so much to
political agitation, and much more to the chain of
generous hands employed in the diffusion of light by
the circulation of the allegorical torch.

CHAPTER III
Whence Comes the Light?

PRIAIITIVE MAN AND BLIND AND DEAF MUTES. THE
DIFFERENCE IN THEIR EVOLUTION. THE PROOF OF
HUMAN SPIRITUALITY. THE EFFECTS OF HEREDITY
SHOWN. THE IDEA OF THE DIVINE IN THE TRIPLY
AFFLICTED. A TRAGIC EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF LAURA

BRIDGMAN AND WHAT IT TEACHES. THE RELIGIOUS

CONCEPT COMPARED WITH HUMAN ENERGY.

We have so far merely touched on the conse-
quences, or possibilities, which the mind can conceive
in considering the magnificent evolution of such
miserable human outcasts. How many perspectives
may still be unimagined? Before, however, extend-
ing our study in these directions, it would be well to
go rather fully into another question — a question
which is raised on the threshold of these marvellous
experiences — the most perplexing and difficult of all,
which for centuries has troubled every school of
philosophy and faith. What light do the cases of
Laura Bridgman, Helen Keller, and Marie Heurtin
throw on the question of the origin of our nature ?

D I

52 MAN'S MIRACLE

Do we come into the world with innate, indestructible
gifts, which may explain the progress of the age of
flint to that of radium, and from what source do they
come ? From ourselves ? From a tacit imperious law
of nature, or from the unknown power proclaimed by
the religions, which has made us superior to the rest
of creation.

No scientific system has yet answered this question
in a conclusive form. We have now before us three
human beings capable of helping us. Before any
efforts were made to awaken their understanding,
they were as rudimentary, as imperfect, as limited in
their means of inter-communication as the most
distant of our ancestors in the cave, or the forest.
It is as if we had among us, not fossils, but human
specimens of that age, though strangely out of date.
Why has science not been employed in searching, in
the story of their enlightenment, for the very history
of all human evolution ? Who, better than they, could
tell us from whence proceeded the spark which has
grown and led to our present stage of active and
intellectual power ?

M. Arnould, the biographer of Marie Heurtin, does
not hesitate in his answer to the problem. Accord-

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 53

ing to him, such phenomena show, by conclusive
evidence, not only our own spirituality, but the exist-
ence of a Supreme Being Who rules our destinies.
When he is not himself affirming this belief, he
reproduces, in victorious tones, the writings of
others who affirm it.

Far be it from me to engage personally in such a
debate; I am not sufficiently a believer to dare to
agree with M. Arnould and his co-religionists, nor
sufficiently learned to dare to prove them wrong.
Their categoric religious faith does not prevent my
believing in their sincerity, although it has, without
doubt, created in them a prejudiced state of mind
which is bound to lead them to their conclusions, as
fatally as the credo of materialism leads to the pole
of negation . Moreover, nothing is more cruel (although
such cruelty may appear necessary in some cases)
than to seek to destroy intimate convictions which
give security and happiness to uneasy minds. My
only desire is to try to extract from these resurrec-
tions of living corpses, the maximum of absolute
truth which they seem to teach, clearing my mind of
all prejudice of sect, or school, even though I may

54 MAN'S MIRACLE

appear sometimes to disagree with all the sects and
schools put together.

To begin with, it is important to remember that the
wonderful evolution of Laura Bridgman and Helen
Keller would prove no certain conclusions if their
cases had not been compared with that of Marie
Heurtin, born at Vertou (Loire Inferieure), in 1885,
who was rescued from her sad condition, as we have
already seen, by the Sisters of La Sagesse, at Larnay.
The two former children having seen, heard and
spoken as children speak, the first-named to the age
of twenty-six months, the second to nineteen months,
their teachers might be justified in thinking that their
astonishing ultimate results were due to a simple
awakening of a precocious memory. Marie Heurtin,
however, was blind, deaf, and dumb from birth, and
had been suffered by her parents, poor and ignorant
people, to remain in this deplorable condition to the
age of ten years. She, therefore, brings the desired
proof to the statement of this fact — i.e., the simultaneous
birth of the powers of the body, and of an intelli-
gence and consciousness apparently far above them,
and defying all her limitations. In Marie Heurtin's
case there was no personal memory possible of speech,

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 55

or sound, or any visible organization of life, She
existed in dark night and silence, which completely,
and apparently irrevocably, cut her off from the world.
Ten years later Sister Sainte Marguerite, of Larnay,
undertook to reveal the world to this outcast of
humanity, who responded to her efforts and seconded
them with ardour. One is, therefore, bound to believe
that when this poor child drew her first breath she
was endowed with an unquenchable spirit and brain,
which, as soon as she came in contact with the indis-
pensable awakening power, enabled her to represent
to herself what her eyes had never seen, or ever
would see, what her ears had never once heard, or
would ever hear. St. Thomas Aquinas himself

would have found the evidence conclusive. He
would have proclaimed that ten thousand years of

effort could never awaken a conscience, thought, or
language in any species of quadruped, and that, there-
fore, consciousness exists, a -priori, in us, since it can
be illumined and born in the most obtuse of our race.
Doubt is no longer possible. Beings of our species,
even the lowest in intelligence, wear an intellectual
royal crown in a world filled with inferior creatures.
Even supposing that the theory of automatism

56 MAN'S MIRACLE

in animals is false, and that the brains of a dog, a
cat, a horse, contain a spark of understanding which
may one day be kindled — this spark must be fanned
by our hands, and the beast will owe his mental eleva-
tion to men — to men who have discovered and lit, in
the Laura Bridgmans, the Helen Kellers, the Marie
Heurtins, those inert masses of flesh and blood, the
hidden source of living light, the little lamp set so
far from the electric current. No doubt science and
simple observation have discovered long ago this
royal heritage of mankind, but they have never pro-
duced more striking proofs than this one.

The difference in the respective results obtained in
the treatment of Marie Heurtin, and the pupils of
Dr. Howe and Miss Sullivan, places us in possession of
another fact, not until now sufficiently insisted on, but
not less valuable.

The education of Marie Heurtin is far from having
produced results as varied and rich as that of Laura
Bridgman or Helen Keller. Marie Heurtin has
learnt to speak and listen by her fingers, to express
her thoughts in writing, and to acquire an idea of
things in general, extraordinary indeed, considering
her early condition. At the same time, those persons

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? $7

who have compared her with Helen Keller say that
there is as great a difference between them, as be-
tween the ordinary peasant-girl, taught in primary
schools, and the exceptionally gifted product of a
university education. Marie Heurtin's biographer
tells us, it is true, that Sister Sainte Marguerite made
no effort to turn her into an intellectual prodigy, or
to take the daughter of a working man out of her
class. But by the light of the experience gained
from the education of Laura Bridgman and Helen
Keller, we may safely conclude that if the natural
gifts of the interesting French girl had been of a
superior calibre, they could not have been stinted
by any limitation set by either good or evil intention.
We have seen that Helen Keller owed the wonderful
eclecticism of her knowledge not only to a great
natural power of absorption, seconded by boundless
devotion, but also to her avidity for knowledge ; a
disposition of mind expressed by the immortal cry
of Goethe: "Light! Light! more Light!" The
same qualities are also shown by Laura Bridgman.
She learnt many more things than Marie Heurtin —
many less than Helen Keller — but she learnt every-
thing she had the desire and will to learn. She was

58 MAN'S MIRACLE

only limited by her own fatigue, not by the resources
or patience of her teachers.

We can only conclude that the germ of understand-
ing, which we are now certain is contained in all human
embryos, varies in power and in quality, according
to the power and quality of the producer of this germ,
that is, the parents. In other words, the mental or
spiritual fluid is transmitted with the physical, in pro-
portion to its intensity in the progenitors. This theory
is the most radical triumph of heredity. It is proved
almost mathematically in such typical individuals as
Laura Bridgman, Helen Keller, and Marie Heurtin.
Laura's father was a well-to-do, healthy farmer,
married to a woman of scrofulous constitution. Both
were of superior intellectual status to the parents of
Marie Heurtin, but greatly inferior to those of Helen
Keller. (l) Laura Bridgman inherited the physical
taint from her mother, but also a certain intellectual
power and a leaning to piety from her father, who
was a "pillar" of the Baptist church. Her teacher,
Dr. Howe, who was a firm religious believer, hoped

(i) This is proved by the fact that at one time they thought
seriously of exhibiting their child for money, as a phenomenon
in Barnum's show, and were only prevented from doing so by the
opposition of Dr. Howe.

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 59

much from her education, and its partial failure drew
from him the remark, u that he had not reckoned
sufficiently on hereditary influences."

Helen came of a better stock, both physically
and mentally. Her triple infirmity resulted from
an accident, and not from any hereditary taint.
Though the loss of her three principal senses would
have led one to believe that her development, in
comparison with that of her parents, would be either
stationary or retrograde when once she regained
full consciousness, the spiritual germ in her nature is
so strong that she has actually outstripped them.
Marie Heurtin, on the other hand, who was sup-
posed to be an idiot up to the age of ten years, was
severely handicapped by her parentage. She was the
offspring of cousins, who had nine children, of whom
three were deaf and dumb, two were blind, one
ricketty, and one died in infancy. Thus only two of
the children were quite normal. The humble and
unfortunate parents of these miserable beings were
honest, decent people, but quite ignorant and unedu-
cated. M. Arnould will have universal sympathy
when he says that the education of the blind and
deaf mute issued from this pitiable family is one of

60 MAN'S MIRACLE

the greatest achievements of the end of the 19th
century. But the extent of this education was much
more limited than in the case of Laura Bridgman,
and infinitely more so than in that of Helen Keller,
on account of hereditary influence. A comparison
between these cases establishes, beyond doubt, that
in the first, the natural subconscious light transmitted
by the father and mother was weak, in the second it
was meagre, in the third exceptionally powerful and
radiant, obeying a rigorous law governing all of
these cases.

A consideration presents itself here. What use
will be made of these facts by the theorists who hold
the irresponsibility of criminals through the fact of
atavism? Perhaps a use that may easily grow into
abuse, unless they bear in mind that the law of
heredity acts in two ways. If all criminals are
indiscriminately excused because their genealogy
reveals insanity or alcoholism, all merit is also
withdrawn from the best and greatest men whose
progenitors may have been the flower of humanity.
I venture to suggest a fairer theory. Society, the
antithesis of Ugolino, readily devours the fair fame
of its fathers, in order to secure indulgence for pos-

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 61

terity. The past is made the scapegoat. But its
legacy to us is not always one of debts; very often
it bequeathes us a certain capital. If we make it
responsible for our faults and crimes, must we not, on
the other hand, credit it with our first impulses
towards righteous, honourable, and brilliant exploits?
You say that your errors must be imputed to the
indelible mark left by an ancestor. Perhaps — but it
is also certain that side by side with this mark, your
ancestor has left another; the indelible faculty of
understanding and determining the extent and con-
sequence of your actions. Which of these two marks
has made the deepest impression on you? This, I
think, is a consideration for the criminologists, if they
desire to weigh the different degrees of free-will
among the living, and the responsibility of the dead.
Above all, the principal consideration which arises
from what I have called " Man's Miracle" is the use
to be made of the light thrown on this mystery
of heredity from the point of view of puericulture,
or what the physiologists begin to name ante-natal
culture. From the moment that it is proved that no
creature, however miserable, comes into the world
without the essential element of spirituality, there

62 MAN'S MIRACLE

need be no despair, even for the most unpromising
subject. The useless stocks in the human harvest are
reduced to almost nothing, provided that we work
systematically at the cultivation of even the poorest
specimens. The teachers who have made of these
wretched little blind and deaf mutes what they have
ultimately become, need not fear any bounds to
their ambition. Guided by their own discoveries,
they may dare to do all they dream of, knowing that
they inherit the talisman which each generation
passes on to the next, and which no malevolence of

nature can destroy, if they are resolute in holding it.

*

The sole possible objection is that, made from the
religious point of view. If all our efforts and our
actions are subordinate to a divine will, it is this will
which has permitted, we know not why, the accom-
plishment of our work, and which, for reasons
equally inscrutable, may ordain that it fail to-
morrow. 1 must be excused from enumerating the
interminable array of facts, which, in the annals of
human progress, protest against such a presumption.
Such a recital would give to the present work a
polemical character which I do not desire. I will,

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 63

therefore, be content with examining, as subjectively
as possible, this human miracle which we are asked
to consider as superhuman.

Let us suppose for an instant, that the germ of
consciousness, or sub-consciousness, which has de-
veloped in such a triumphant fashion in our blind and
deaf mutes, has been secreted in them by a super-
natural and occult power. It must have remained
for ever sterile, without the intervention of Provi-
dences in flesh and blood. As long as these did not
present themselves, the afflicted children must have
remained in that condition. Laura Bridgman,
Helen Keller, and Marie Heurtin were in a completely
brutish state, the first to the age of nine years, the
second to seven, and the third (with the outward
appearance of a " monster") to ten years, that is,
until the one was discovered and treated as a being
capable of redemption by Dr. Howe, the second till
she was confided to the care of Miss Sullivan, and the
third till she was taken to the Sisters of La Sagesse,
at Larnay, by her despairing parents. All these
children would have vegetated up to their last hour
in the tragedy of their night, without the help
of these three fearless and purely terrestrial

64 MAN'S MIRACLE

wills, encouraged by a century - and - a - half of
struggle, often successful, against difficulties less
insurmountable but almost as impossible in appear-
ance. This is beyond all controversy ; the little
lamp which lay useless in the consciences of Laura,
Helen, and Marie was condemned never to be re-lit,
had not men and women suspected its existence, and
set themselves resolutely to make a pathway towards
it, to re-light it, and make it capable of fulfilling its
divine office.

We must admit that at the root of these generous
enterprises (I have mentioned it before) we usually
trace the charity of priests, whose vocation leads
them in search of the relief of distress, and it must
follow, if we study the systems of theologians, not
only that their results are those of faith, the lever
with which to move mountains, but further, that this
is absolutely fixed, and that the scientific auxiliaries
are mechanically obeying a heavenly inspiration. It
is possible that these hypothetical systems may go
to the subjects themselves for new proofs. Marie
Heurtin has formally manifested her faith in a super-
human Providence, which only subjected her to the
trial of darkness and silence in order to make her

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 65

enjoy later the delight of celestial concerts and
infinite light, and Laura Bridgman expressed senti-
ments as piously as did her father before falling into
a state of superstitious bigotry, which even her
instructor, the devout Dr. Howe, deplored. Helen
Keller accepted and preserved the idea of the Divine
in spite of her mental communication with positivist
philosophers. Are not these evidences specially
worthy of credit from the very reason of their im-
perfection, and the consideration that religious faith
must respond to reality, since it is found, under one
form or another, in the instinct of the most primitive
people, or in the most uncultivated individuals?

Truth forces me to say that facts (I am only con-
cerned with these) categorically contradict this inter-
pretation. First, it is evident that, even if the three
afflicted children had kept, during their time of
darkness, the light of conscience which guided them
to a fuller life, their saviours found in them no
idea at all of a supernatural power. They were
quite ignorant, on the contrary, that life comes to an
inexorable end, and they were so far from having any
suspicion of what is meant by death (without which
the idea of a divine power and future destiny would

E

66 MAN'S MIRACLE

never arise) that the revelation of this melancholy
end to existence aroused in each of them by turn a
cry of despair and of tragic revolt, of which I shall
speak later in touching on another order of ideas.
Further: when heaven was mentioned, Laura Bridg-
man ; atavistically pre-disposed to belief, asked a
number of questions: "What is heaven made of —
wood or iron ? " " Has it a door ? " " How do we
know that God lives there ? ' The puzzled governess,
who replied to the last question, ' ' We know that by
a book," received, it appeared, a sharp reprimand.
The constitution of the convent was used as an
analogy (I learnt this from M. Arnould's work) to
make Marie Heurtin understand the idea of an in-
visible supreme head of creation. Thus, above the
pupils were the Sisters, above the Sisters, the Lady
Abbess, above the Abbess, the Bishop, above the
Bishop, the head of all the Bishops, viz., the Pope,
above the Pope, the Sovereign Lord. Further still,
when she was asked who had made the sun, she
replied, without hesitation, "The baker." The
answer resulted from very simple logic. She had
been taken to a bakery and had been taught the
manner of making bread. She had felt the heat of

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 67

the oven, and very naturally the blind girl, who was
only aware of the existence of the sun by its heat,
pictured to herself the sun as a movable oven, made
by human hands. If her teacher had confirmed this
belief, the child would have thought to this day that
the sun, which lights and warms us, was the work
of a man who makes hot rolls. It was necessary to
tell her that it was made by divine power before she
believed it in her turn. The letter from Canon
Naeghels, at the end of this volume, to which I have
already alluded, is still more suggestive. It states
in the frankest terms the doubts felt and expressed
by a high dignitary of the church on any idea being
existent in the blind and deaf mute, Alexis Decramer,
of a divinity. "We do not know what is taking
place in these souls, ' ' Nous ne savons fas ce qui se
passe dans ces times! "

As to Helen Keller, a creature endowed with far
greater mental capacity, her initiation into the dogmas
of faith excited in her a violent opposition, to judge
from the questions she showered on her teacher, the
same questions one often findpon the lips of normal
children. " If God created the world and men, who
created God?" "If death is necessary, as you say,

e 1

68 MAN'S MIRACLE

to prevent the world from becoming over-peopled,
why does not God, Who you say is all-powerful,
create other worlds where people can go on living in-
definitely ?"

I will not insist further. It is quite clear that the
idea of a world regulated by a power and a super-
human will, had never arisen spontaneously in the
minds of the three girls whose mental past we have
been considering. It was an artificial grafting, the
work of patient educative toil, destined to a complete
success. Naturally, these girls, originally so incapable
of knowing and judging for themselves, could hardly
have done otherwise than impose silence on their
own doubts and hesitations, and accept with humble
deference the versions of our origin and our end, put
before them by their generous benefactors and con-
firmed with all the authority of a palpable Providence.
I hope I shall not be misunderstood. I do not wish
to find any fault with Dr. Howe, or the Sisters of
La Sagesse (least of all with them) for having im-
posed these views on their pupils. I could be
persuaded quite easily that in the hypothesis of the
non-existence of God, it is precisely for such victims
of life that this aspect of things might be invented.

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 69

What illusions, what comforting fairy tales would,
nay, ought not to be made, in order to present some
striking example of justice, some full and beautiful
future reward for such pathetically unfortunate
souls !

Here I will introduce an episode in the life of
Laura Bridgman, discreetly related by some wit-
nesses of her evolution. In consequence of some
disastrous indiscretion of her governess, or companion,
Laura, at twenty years of age, became aware of the
physiological attraction between the sexes. She
assured herself by questioning others, and by touch,
that she was pretty, and from that time she was
haunted by the dream of marriage. She went so far,
that one night she was discovered trying on a
wedding dress, made for one of the governesses, and
left, as a temporary arrangement, in the young girl's
room. Very soon this aspiration towards mutual
love, perhaps towards maternity, showed itself in a
heart-rending incident. Her teacher, Miss Wright,
was engaged to a young missionary, Mr. Bond, who,
naturally in his visits to his fiancee, showed a special
kindness to her pupil. Laura misunderstood his feel-

70 MAN'S MIRACLE

ings of compassion — she persuaded herself that she
had inspired Mr. Bond with a passion that she re-
turned, and that it was her hand to which he aspired.
When her secret was discovered, and she had been
undeceived, she turned pale, then sobbed, and her
trembling fingers traced in Miss Wright's hand this
touching question, " Then, am I not beautiful ?" She
felt all the torture of helpless love, and all the pangs
of jealousy. They were obliged to tell her every-
thing — that she was not like other women, but a
creature apart, whose race must be extinguished, not
perpetuated, for fear of bringing into the world other
outcasts to be a menace to the human race.

A young actress, to whom, last winter, I related
this painful moral operation, exclaimed, " What a
tragedy! It ought to be played on the stage."

An iEschylus, or a Sophocles, could have written it.
As for us, we live in an age when humanity has
carried to its remotest limits the courage to look our-
selves in the face, and to probe misery and suffering to
their lowest depths. But there are many materialists
who would say, viewing such a spectacle of desolation,
that they could find no fault with religious education

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 71

for having falsified realities in order to hold up to
Laura Bridgman a paradise rich in every joy at the
end of her earthly torment.

This brings us back to the heart of our subject.
From whatever source comes the spark of spirituality,
without which the evolution of the Bridgmans, the
Kellers and the Heurtins would have been impossible;
it is certainly present in all of us by the workings of
a law of infallible succession. I have shown, in this
history of our blind deaf mutes, one of the two
reasons by which we believe that the spark was
always there, and that its attribution to a super-
human power is only a later invention made by man
to satisfy his craving for immortality and to console
him for his immediate misery. But I willingly
confess that I am not as certain as are the partisans
of the other hypothesis as to the origin of the
human race, and in order to be able to deny, as they
think they are authorised to affirm, one ought to have
witnessed the making of our prototype. I did not
do so. Did they ?

In spite of the giant strides made by deductive

cience, we are still faced by a mystery, round which

two conjectures are equally and fearfully posed.

72 MAN'S MIRACLE

The important thing is to determine which of the
two is the more advantageous to the progress of
society on the firm ground of our planet.

If we concede to believers the possibility of an
invisible God, they, on their side, ought to concede
to unbelievers the genius of man who has known how
to find Him, to admire and adore Him, in conceiving
His infinite majesty from the limited space and
conditions of existence and time, rigorously deter-
mined by geographical boundaries and the planks of
a coffin. Imagine, amongst the most intelligent of
insects, an ant, who, from its ant-hill, and with its
absurdly microscopic powers of appreciation, could
measure the height of Mont Blanc and the time to be
taken in its ascent. It would have accomplished a
feat very inferior to that of a man, the prisoner
of a narrowly bounded world and a brief existence,
who can conceive a space without beginning or
end, and an eternity filled by an omniscient and
omnipotent spirit. Is it not admissible, if the logic
of what Maeterlinck calls " naked reason" is worth
anything, that the imagination, which is capable
of having dreamed, attempted and realized the
liberation of blind and deaf mutes, is also capable,

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 73

in its aspirations towards better and more beautiful
things, of having invented the hidden Being placed
so high above itself and everything else ? Or again,
setting aside this premeditation, it would not be
astonishing if the concept which man takes for a God
is simply the shadow which he himself projects
before his own path in his victorious way through life.
The question put in this form may irritate to the
point of indignation those whose conviction is fixed
in the opposite belief. At certain moments, however,
their own hypothesis makes of the human being,
illuminated from above, the lieutenant, the terrestrial
alter ego of a supreme and limitless power. Is it
better that man, for the sake of his ulterior conquests,
should know or proudly believe himself the master
of the universe, or that he should consider himself, in
all humility, as a simple recipient of power which can
be withdrawn at will? That is the real question.
Evidently, there must be different solutions according
to the diverse individuals and mentalities which make
up humanity. But all things considered, the general
opinion might well be in favour of the first of these
two attitudes, since it would be more conducive to
action. And, once more, to set aside all prejudice in

74 MAN'S MIRACLE

favour of any particular creed, does it not seem that
the confidence of human beings in their own methods
will more surely facilitate the success of their enter-
prises, than a feeling of subordination and dependence
on an unknown force? Whatever they do, or are,
religious systems imply a sort of docile fatalism,
susceptible of paralyzing the enterprise and energy
of those who accept them without reserve. For
every fifty, hundred, or ten thousand priests, monks,
or lay-Christians who struggle with conviction against
the ills of nature, how many others of goodwill are
not discouraged at the sight of some great distress, by
this tendency to resignation turned into a virtue by
pious books? One can scarcely imagine Job en-
deavouring, by the aid of natation or aviation, to
escape from the natural element to which he believed
himself tied by a supreme decree. What would he
have done before such cases as those of Helen Keller
and Marie Heurtin, but fold his arms, bow his head,
and signify his submission by an Arabic version of
"Fiat voluntas tua/"

A Dutch philosopher, who paid a visit some years
ago to Marie Heurtin, repeated a remark made by
her, which he called " consoling for human nature,"

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 75

without appearing to suspect the dangerous counsel
of surrender which it contains. Someone had
offered to take the poor girl to Lourdes to implore
the Virgin to restore her sight. She replied with the
firmest conviction, putting her fingers over her eyes,
" No, I would rather remain as I am. I would rather
not see here on earth, and see more clearly the light up
there." It does not matter whether we believe or not
in the miraculous virtue of Notre-Dame de Lourdes.
The real meaning of this speech, of the education
which inspired it, and the approbation which it called
forth in pious minds, is in the principle of the inertia
which opposes all effort and all progress. The misery,
ignorance, and suffering of the world are presented as
the necessary means to an infinite future happiness.
That this remark should have delighted a Dutch
philosopher (influenced, perhaps, by the wonderful-
effects which his illustrious compatriot, Rembrandt,
made of the contrasts of shadow and light) is very
astonishing, showing a strange confusion between the
canons of purely plastic aesthetics and the rules of
the conduct of life in regard to the unknown. If we
subscribed in a general way to this method of facing
the trials of existence, the entire world would come

;6 MAN'S MIRACLE

to a standstill in the midst of its struggle against its
imperfections and distress, and surrender to its fate,
like the personage of the Bible, on the dunghill
of the land of Uz. There is hardly any reason,
however, for such fear in the future. There seems,
on the contrary, less tendency to turn the other cheek
meekly to the buffets of fortune, and a greater in-
clination to meet and defy them, with a manly deter-
mination to conquer them. The victorious re-con-
stitutions of blind and deaf mutes bring a new elo-
quence and new arguments to prove the Tightness of
this attitude.

We might go still further on the pathway of
prevision. If anyone were disposed to predict the
day when man will succeed in delaying indefinitely
the hour of his death, such miracles would assuredly
strengthen his hope. Most certainly this day will
never dawn if we persist in believing that our destiny
is in the hands of an arbiter who has inflexibly
assigned its actual frontier. But it may come, if
man will attribute to himself the virtue of his guiding
star, and will attain to an absolute faith in his own
resources for struggling without hesitation against
any obstacle, physical or moral, which limits his field

WHENCE COMES THE LIGHT? 77

and his horizon. Simply by conjuring up this future,
we seem to hear the clarion cry calling trembling
and rejuvenated souls to the battle against death
itself.

CHAPTER IV

The Worship of Life

a dream of immortality. the revelation of death
to blind and deaf mutes. the value of
existence. how to teach it in schools. the
optimism of humanity's outcasts. its cause6.
helen keller's privileges, the moral influence
of her example.

Time alone will determine whether the conclusion
in the preceding chapter is absurdly ambitious. But
we can already rely confidently on the influence
which the lesson of our blind and deaf mutes' lives
may have on our general attitude in regard to life,
when once this lesson is widely and methodically
spread abroad. If we criticise, as minutely as
I myself have done, all the writings concerning
Laura Bridgman, Helen Keller, and Marie Heurtin,
we shall be convinced that even for the most deplor-
ably afflicted creatures, life is the most inestimable
treasure. Remembering Hamlet's soliloquy, and
asking the question, "Is life worth living?" — Laura
Bridgman, Helen Keller, and Marie Heurtin have

Wrentham Cottage, presented to HELEN KELLER
by the town of Boston.

THE WORSHIP OF LIFE 79

replied "yes!" without hesitation, and with a greater
authority than any other to be found in the world.
But at what period of life? When their martyrdom
had been relieved by education and by all it
brought of comfort and joy ? No, before that : from
the hour — when they were very young — when they
were first told of death.

I have related earlier — promising to return to the
subject — that this revelation revolted them. The
mere idea of growing old, of having wrinkles, of
ceasing to be like herself, exasperated Marie Heurtin
intensely, so said her biographer, when first the
information was suggested to her by making her feel
the lines on the face of an old woman. This poor
girl, deprived of the most elementary conditions of
happiness, protested vehemently, and declared that
she would struggle against this degradation. The
proofs of death — revealed to her in the same manner,
i.e., in making her touch an ice-cold corpse — filled
her with horror. It was also the case with Laura
Bridgman. She came near to death herself on
learning that she would never meet again one of her
little sisters, who had gone to the place from whence
no one returns. Helen Keller felt precisely the same.

80 MAN'S MIRACLE

The "news" crushed her. Her stupefaction only
gave way to the most cruel bitterness. She appeared
to doubt the God Whose existence was affirmed to
her, for she could not understand that He could
create with the inflexible intention of destroying.
We are, therefore, completely in the right when we
conclude that the idea of death is not transmitted
from one to another of us with the physical and
spiritual sap. The light of our little interior lamp
does not shine as far as the tomb. It is life which it
promises to us. In our innocence we confidently
expect immortality from the dawning of our life, as
soon as our eyes are open.

In the case of normal children, the destruction
of this instinctive and dear illusion comes gently,
slowly, almost imperceptibly. The truth comes by
degrees, and we go down to meet it by little stages
and gentle descents. Our ears are familiarised with
the name of the intruder, by whispers, before hearing
it spoken out loud. We hear, first vaguely, then more
openly, of dear departed ones. We are shown
their portraits, all that remain of them. We have
seen black processions, solemn and silent; we learn
by half-spoken sentences what they convey, and

THE WORSHIP OF LIFE 81

where they are going: or we have seen on pale and
beloved faces the strange signs of trouble, and the
mute anguish of our older friends have prepared us
for the agony. Since the certainty of a common
destiny has gradually penetrated our very being, we
feel no shock. We seem always to have known it.
The surprise and horror of the blind and deaf mutes
who had not been prepared by any spectacles or
confidences, or gradual impressions, prove that we
deceive ourselves, or that we are born with a tacit
conviction that our life will be prolonged to an
indefinite limit.

We can imagine the torture of the first conscient
being who, believing that he has come into a world
where he will always remain, is confronted suddenly
with the terrible truth. If such a being existed in a
cavern of pre-historic creatures, before even the
glacial age, and was disabused without previous
warning, he would be, without doubt, the greatest
martyr of all ages. As a matter of fact he did exist,
he exists still : he is found among the blind and deaf
mutes in their first step from the darkness of ignor-
ance. Here, again, we need the genius of the great

F

82 MAN'S MIRACLE

Greek tragedians to paint their disenchantment and
horror of mind. The Laura Bridgmans, the Helen
Kellers, and the Marie Heurtins have felt this fall
from their dearest dreams to the fearful and humili-
ating reality. By a reversal of the original plan of
evolution, it seemed to them, when they were snatched
from their non-existence, that they issued from a
passing death to enter an infinite life. And the
overwhelming truth, towards which life itself has
led us, with all kinds of preparation and softening
palliatives, rose suddenly before them in all its horror,
as, through a rift in the mist, a rock comes into sight
on which the ship must break. To Laura, Helen and
Marie the final ultimatum came without prelude,
with the shock of thunder. They felt the whole
edifice of confidence, of the godlike and glorious
security on which in their innocence they unsuspect-
ingly relied, crumble away at once.

It would seem that up to that time the terrible
idea had been withheld from them by some supreme
justice intent on compensating them by a rare
privilege. One may ask if it is not our duty to keep
this privilege intact, and to keep silence on the
abominable destiny which will shatter their beautiful

THE WORSHIP OF LIFE 83

dreams. But, on reflection, we shall see the im-
possibility of this charitable deceit — for we can learn
nothing of the secrets of life without coming in con-
tact with its funereal wall. How, for instance, could
Helen Keller have been instructed in the history of
ancient civilizations and their decay had she not been
taken, to begin with, amongst the cypresses and the
eloquent melancholy of the cemetery.

In any case, truths of kindness and mercy may
be found in the cries and tears which the fatal
revelation drew from these unfortunate children.
Life seems to have so much sweetness, so high a
value, even for the most meanly gifted of beings,
that they rebel with all their force at the prospect
of losing it.

In theory the grim announcement should have
come as an unhoped for message of deliverance to
these unhappy ones. As a practical result we see
them convulsed with terror and despair. One could
not possibly have a more striking example of the fact,
that life, the most sacred treasure for us all, has the
right to the most absolute respect. Helen and Marie
are able to proclaim it more insistently than any
living beings. However insignificant is the insect

FI

84 MAN'S MIRACLE

which we crush in carelessness, or for a mere whim,
we are destroying something palpitating with life,
and which merely by being alive enjoys a measure
of well-being stronger than all its suffering.

If these profound truths were clearly and incisively
taught to children when their minds are receptive
and malleable enough to receive every impression,
whether good or evil, they would incite childhood,
and afterwards adult humanity, to shun a thousand
cruel sports in which they engage. Societies for the
protection of animals, or humanitarian lecturers, work
by fits and starts at teaching this worship of life in
all its visible forms. At the turnings of certain roads
we often see notices exhorting us to treat with
kindness the lower animals ; those called higher
we have already domesticated and made useful, or
sociable, for our own comfort or amusement. But we
must all feel that in placing systematically and
despotically at the root of our teaching, the principle
of respect due to this essential, precious, and
dominant thing called life, we shall eventually reach
every person who is not originally perverted, and

THE WORSHIP OF LIFE 85

all malignant and cruel actions will gradually grow
more and more rare.

We will not discuss here, the modern tendency in
cultured people to exclude the religious element
from educational programmes in order to reserve to
young consciences their free choice in coming to
maturity. Let us loyally recognize this fact — that
even with the most convinced reformers there is a
sense of uneasiness, more or less acknowledged,
of the perilous consequences which may follow
from a rigidly neutral system of education, a system
so impartial that it seems to aim at imprinting no
definite mark that might hamper their future independ-
ence. The morality which accompanies religious
instruction may seem narrow, incomplete, and of in-
sufficient purity, since in preaching virtue it makes an
appeal to the fear of punishment or the hope of reward,
both, by reason of their eternity, utterly disproportion-
ate to the ignoble, or noble, actions of our short exis-
tence. Nevertheless, it is a morality, and we can
only supplant it by something equivalent, or better,
by reverting to the ideal of a simple instilling of facts
whose trend and meaning the mind, as it grows older,
will gradually discover for itself.

86 MAN'S MIRACLE

Perhaps in studying such subjects as this one
before us now, we may arrive at a solution of this
delicate and urgent question. Let us analyze ourselves
a little more closely, instead of lingering in the nebu-
lous regions of abstract theory.

Though a teacher at first despairs of making an
indolent or naturally dull pupil understand elementary
instruction, he would be able to shame such pupils
and incite them to further efforts by telling them to
what a degree of knowledge, by means of strength
of will and application, these poor children have
attained, deprived from their birth, or soon afterwards,
of sight, hearing and speech. And the teacher, stimu-
lated by these striking examples, would himself be
spurred on. No difficulty which the education of a
normal child might present would seem insurmount-
able nor continue to baffle him if he had always
present in his mind the miracles worked on the deaf,
the dumb and the blind by the ardent perseverance
and ingenuity of the Abbes de l'Epee, the Valentin
Hauys, the Dr. Howes, the Miss Sullivans, the
Sister Sainte Marguerites in the intellectual world.
Similar attempts to stimulate rivalry have been prac-
tised with success in the physical and sporting worlds

THE WORSHIP OF LIFE 87

by the constant publication of " records." These
inducements have always been instinctively used by
children themselves, who, endeavouring for amuse-
ment to jump as far as possible, draw a line on the
ground marking the extreme point attained by the
longest previous jump, trying to reach it in their turn,
and to exceed it if they can.

This may seem to have little to do with morality,
I think that it can be introduced in this manner in the
most unbiassed forms of instruction, by the periodic
insistence in schools on actions and fine qualities,
which seem to be contagious simply from their
intrinsic worth, confirmed by the sanction of society.
Every element of this system of education designed
to awaken and develop (apart from all philosophic
doctrine) aspirations towards good, and re-act against
the instinct of evil, has existed around us for some
time without receiving much attention. To quote
only a few examples: the systems called Monty on
in France, Nobel in Norway, Bastin in Belgium,
Carnegie in the United States, and other State
organisations have instituted judges of courage, of
devotion, of abnegation, of altruism in every form,

88 MAN'S MIRACLE

judges who reward good actions, either obscure or
striking, as repressive magistrates condemn bad
actions. This is a permanent competition open
to all the virtues, in which the most sincere par-
ticipate without being aware of it, as these have
acted from natural disinterestedness to satisfy their
simple and high conception of duty towards their
neighbour. The judge makes a discourse, sometimes
superfluous, but always of a high order of merit,
where the praise of the most meritorious actions
is often pronounced (at the French Academy, for
instance) by masters of thought, of style, or psy-
chological analysis. In these annals of Christianity,
as it were, will be found among many other merited
panegyrics, the account and glorification of the marvel
accomplished by a sister of the congregation of
Larnay, in the metamorphosis of the unhappy little
blind and deaf mute, Marie Heurtin. How easy
it would be to circulate regularly in the primary
schools and the colleges this list of honours, with
an abridged account of these really practical courses
of morality, whether they are given to the pupils
without commentary, or, in oral or written form, to
stimulate the reflections that may be found there.

THE WORSHIP OF LIFE 89

Those persons who do not know what to substitute
for Catholicism, will ask what manual of dogma is
equal to such a persuasive code of human duty, what
acta sanctorum will have such a healthy influence on
young minds as this touching record of admirable
facts and actions accomplished, not in bygone
epochs, by historic or legendary persons, but here,
to-day, in the neighbouring town or village, often
by humble individuals who do not dream of any
kind of canonisation while living so nobly their daily
life.

No doubt some isolated attempts of this kind have
been set on foot, but they ought to be systemised;
they will improve automatically, for they only repre-
sent the feeble embryos of a method devoted to the
renewing of culture — by which is meant the moral
regeneration of a decadent society.

But — I do not hesitate to repeat myself in such a
cause — it is the veneration, the worship of life,
which, above all, must spring from the stories of
the Bridgmans, the Kellers, the Heurtins. Once
thoroughly impregnated with the idea of the sacred
inviolability of the right to live up to the natural
term, our minds will acquire, naturally, by the logical

90 MAN'S MIRACLE

sequence of ideas, respect for material property, which
is the essential condition of every existence. Take,
for example, before his adolescence, one of these recent
bandits who believes he can justify his thefts and crimes
by his right to live. Unless he was absolutely pre-
destined to crime by his nature (born of atavistic
fatality) such a psychic preparation would have the
effect of restraining his desires and criminal tenden-
cies. For he would have learnt to understand that
the right to life is "bilateral" — nay "unilateral"; that
there is no such thing as the egoistic monopoly of an
individual, but a universal inheritance extending from
the poorest to the richest, from the old man to the
newly-born, from the most perfect creature to the
most deformed, to all, in fact, who draw breath, and
fight against the idea of destruction — to such an
extent has the attachment to existence taken root
even in the most meanly-equipped of human beings.

Further, the study of the lives of our blind and
deaf mutes will instil in many persons, that philo-
sophic disposition which makes for happiness in
many unfortunate creatures in spite of their suffering.
We have seen how Laura Bridgman, Helen Keller

THE WORSHIP OF LIFE 91

and Marie Heurtin fought against the idea of the
suppression of their existence, so impossible to
endure as it seems to us. When this idea had
become solidly established they accustomed them-
selves to it, as do we all, and by degrees they
became interested in the thousand immediate pre-
occupations which hang successive curtains between
to-day and the inexorable to-morrow. Then they
grew to appreciate life more subtly, if not more
fully, than those to whom fate has refused nothing.
All their biographers agree in seeing in them a
gradual growth of joy, gaiety and rare optimism.
Helen, the most sensitive, intelligent and explicit of
the three, who is capable of analysing her sensations,
and many of ours, with the accuracy of a chemist,
and to express them with the power of a painter,
has told us the reason. She considered that certain
of her infirmities were real privileges which made
her more contented, in many ways, than most normal
individuals. These infirmities helped her, by the
intense concentration of her faculties, to educate
herself more completely than integral persons, whose
sight is spread over many objects at a time, and
who learn superficially, since with their eyes and^ears

92 MAN'S MIRACLE

they learn too fast, with too little effort, and with
what one may call a tl deplorable facility." ( l )

When the greater part of elementary knowledge
had been acquired despite so many initial difficulties,
what must have been the pride and delight of these
pariahs of nature when they counted over the new
treasures in their minds, like a beggar, who by dint
of work, courage or genius, has climbed the first
steps on the ladder of fortune.

The memory of the species of hell from which these
condemned beings had emerged, made by contrast, a
paradise of their new condition, the reverse of that
experienced by the soul in the Christian legend who
came to life again in the world and its struggles, and

( 1 ) From this point of view the case of Helen Keller has
reminded me more than once of the invisible chess player who,
hidden in the interior of the so-called automatic machine of
Vaucanson, was able to beat almost any one who played with
him. Isolated in front of the reflector of the chess board, he
was able to concentrate and direct all his faculties on his game,
and triumph without difficulty over his adversary who played
standing outside, under the eyes of the spectators, in the midst
of whispers and all the attendant noises. No doubt only a first-
rate chess player could win every time, even behind the shelter,
but his adversary, waiting outside, needed to be infinitely his
superior to beat him. This may serve to explain in part, how
Helen Keller, as a student at a University, gave a proof of more
knowledge, and carried away with her more distinctions and
diplomas than any of her companions provided with sight,
hearing and speech. Her attention was not dispersed, was never
turned from the point it was fixed on by exterior circumstances.

THE WORSHIP OF LIFE 93

whose eyes retained the reflection of the dazzling
mysteries seen beyond this life. In the place of
the senses destroyed, they drew on the senses
remaining to them, employed them in a different
manner from ours, and obtained from them ecstasies
of which we are ignorant ( : ).

There are things of course which blind and deaf
mutes can never positively assimilate, which they can
only in some measure imagine, and others which they
can well do without, being painful without being
indispensable. It follows that they make images for
themselves, beautiful pictures more wonderful than
nature, and that, on the other hand, many of the ugly
and painful sides of life escape them. The sun of
their imagination has no spots.

They are relatively in the condition of a monk in
his cell, of an intellectual being enclosed in a prison,
of a contemplative fakir in his voluntary solitude.
Deeply meditative, thrown back on themselves, they
live a personal life, more profound and intimate

(1) Helen Keller, in speaking of her olfactory sense, declares
that she doubts whether any pleasures from the eye are more
delicious than the scent which came to her, "the exhalation of
the foliage, warmed by the sun, and wafted by the wind, in
a sea of perfumes which advances, retires, and returns wave on
wave, filling the world with an invisible sweetness."

94 MAN'S MIRACLE

than the immense majority among us, with the
advantage of being able to create a radiant con-
ception of all that lives and moves outside of their
circle of shadow.

Thus, far from pitying herself, Hellen Keller at
times considers herself a subject for envy. She feels
all the beauty of the illusions which flower in such
darkness, and she understands the reasons which
made the blind man of M. Clemenceau in Le Voile
du Bonheur ask for his blindness again — for she
writes in her letter: "The most beautiful world is
the world we enter by the door of imagination. If
you aspire to be something you are not, something
infinitely noble, or infinitely good, you may shut
your eyes, and during the moment of dreaming by
voluntary blindness, you become the person of your
ideal."

Would not a single example of this kind, trans-
mitted from brain to brain, suffice to make perfectly
clear the entire significance of the worship of life?
Not only would it unveil for the disinherited the
energies slumbering in us which may make existence
less hard, but it would teach the most desperate that

THE WORSHIP OF LIFE 95

there is no harshness of destiny which has not its
compensation, on condition that we search for it — in
short, that life, under whatever aspect it presents
itself, may seem delightful, if we adapt ourselves
resolutely to make it smile.

If it is thought that I exaggerate the future moral
influence of the examples of the blind and deaf mutes,
I will relate a personal experience.

Since I became interested in these phenomena,
that is, since they came to my notice, I have never
mentioned them in any surroundings without exciting
immediate and intense interest. Exclamations of
surprise, first of incredulity, then of delight, have
always occurred. Other subjects of conversation
have been abruptly stopped, and all ears have given
attention in order to lose nothing. I have been
assailed with questions to which it was not always
possible to reply ex abrupto. Children, leaving their
play, have come up to me, their eyes wide open,
their hands touching me with coaxing gestures, to
learn, as if it were a fairy tale, other details of the
marvellous story. Doctors, professors, have begged
me to give them means of finding out all the facts
possible. I was asked to give a recital of this

96 MAN'S MIRACLE

touching story in a fashionable drawing room,
between two programmes of music, singing or danc-
ing, and in this frivolous society I saw young men
and women, the reverse of sentimental, with tears in
their eyes at this story of "man's miracle," at
the mere suggestion of the lessons which it teaches
and I judge, therefore, that these lessons will find
most imaginations ready to welcome and absorb
them.

CHAPTER V
Other Lessons or Other Pathways

A SOCIETY OF THE AMBIDEXTROUS. THE CULTIVATION
OF THE SENSES OF TOUCH AND SMELL : ITS RESULTS.
HELEN KELLER, THOUGHT-READER AND PALMIST.
NIGHT AND DAY IN EDUCATION. THE INFINITESIMAL
VIBRATIONS IN THE AIR. AN EXTRAORDINARY EXERCISE
OF MEMORY. ITS DRAMATIC CONSEQUENCES AND ITS
MORAL. THE MYSTERIES OF SLEEP AND DREAMS IN
NORMAL AND ABNORMAL PERSONS. THE SIXTH SENSE.
THE HISTORY OF HUMAN LANGUAGE.

Up to the present we have only glanced at the
general consequences arising from these transfor-
mations of our subjects from a state of animalism to
intelligent and cultivated beings.

It is high time that we descended from the general
to the particular, and enquired what direction a study
of these exceptional existences might give to certain
sciences, or to researches of a speculative character.

It would be doing an injustice to such women as
Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller to treat them
simply as curious and passive examples of spiritual

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98 MAN'S MIRACLE

anatomy. They have — especially the second-named
(as has already been noticed) — an instinct for educa-
ting others, that instinct of proselytism or imental
propagation which we may find, if we search for it,
in nearly everyone, side by side with the physical
law for the perpetuation of the race. Laura Bridgman
was no sooner initiated in the language of touch
than she began to teach it to her mother, to create
between them the same link which had been formed
between the pupil and her teachers, Dr. Howe
and Miss Wright — and later, she helped Dr. Howe,
with enthusiasm and success, to communicate the
magic secret to a little boy, Oliver Caswell, also
a blind and deaf mute, and treated, like her, at the
Perkins Institute at Boston. Helen Keller had no
sooner learnt to spell words on her fingers, than one
evening this delicious picture was seen. Helen was
lying on the carpet near her dog, Bell, holding one of
his paws in her hand, and trying to talk to him by
this method, supposing he could be educated in the
same manner as herself. Who knows whether this
childish and touching fancy may not one day be veri-
fied in some degree, when a series of Buffons may
devote themselves to the development of the inferior

OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 99

species in the animal world, as they have devoted
themselves to the daughters and sons of night (l) .
But the indirect means by which the example of the
blind and deaf mutes may enrich the sources of pro-
gress, promises to be yet more considerable.

Let us take for example the marvellous results which
have come from the constant exercise of the two senses
— touch and smell. They give us an idea of the
extreme sensitiveness of our means of perception,
provided that we try to use them seriously and
appreciate their value. Everyone knows that a
school of physiologists has for long exhorted nurses
and mothers to train an ambidextrous society by accus-
toming children from infancy to use their two hands
indifferently. They appear to have preached to deaf
ears, although the simultaneous training of the right

(1) One of my neighbours has an intelligent little griffon
who understands perfectly a great number of words, and often
certain phrases. They say to him, for instance, " Call your master
and tell him that dinner is ready." He goes at once to his
master's study door and barks significantly, and if this does not
produce the desired effect, he rushes into the study and repeats
his barking, either furiously, or with an appealing inflexion, until
he has been obeyed. This is, perhaps, less striking as an anecdote
than the proofs of intelligence given by the dog of Montargis,
or the performances of learned dogs, but it is a significant
addition to a thousand other facts showing the influence of a
methodical and persistent education on the canine race, and,
perhaps, eventually on other kinds of animals.

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100 MAN'S MIRACLE

and left hands ought to be quite easy, as, according
to them, we are born ambidextrous, and have only our
own want of foresight, our own negligence, to thank
for the incapacity of half of our two tools of manipu-
lation. As a fact, normal society wastes, by want of
use, 50 out of 100 of one of its powers, or at least
30 or 35 out of 100, if it is true (contrary to what
some specialists affirm) that the left side of the body
is slightly inferior from well-known primary causes.
Helen Keller, naturally inclined by her condition to
think on such subjects, was astonished at the neglect of
a part of our natural forces. It is assuredly a para-
doxical fact that we are accustomed to treat the right
hand as our only authorised servant, qualified and
worthy of confidence, to the point of considering as
abnormal, almost as deformed, a " left-handed " person
who can make use equally of the right and the left.

But this phenomenon is still more striking if we
examine the parts assigned to certain of our senses,
considering that which they play in the activity of
incomplete individuals. No doubt it is easier to train
two senses than five, since a great part of the force
and, perhaps, all the properties of the three atrophied
senses pass into the two survivors. But still, what

OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 101

experience have we to show that if we exact from
each of our five faculties what is demanded of the
two last faculties of the blind and deaf mutes, we
shall not obtain a much richer return from them than
the present?

Helen Keller assures us that there are many-
tangible things that persons who see are not aware
of, and that contact with them, which they disdain,
reveals a quantity of things they ignore. She can
distinguish the different variety of flowers by their
tissue, and can make an abstraction of their form and
scent — that one is of a quality of velvet, another of
satin, another of silk or gauze, and so on. ( J )

What gardener, even the most expert, has ever
thought of this mode of discernment, and why is he
deprived of it? Simply because he has only learnt
to make use of his eyes, or his sense of smell, for
recognising and classifying the members of the vast
floral family.

Take a blind person who plays in one of th