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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
AS^On, L.FNOX AND
TIL'D N FOUNDATIONS
R 1913 ,
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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.
Gi
a q h
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 those
games which consist in seeking for some hidden
d) Following the same idea Helen Keller expresses the
difference existing between the hardness of rock and that of
wood. " The one is to the other what the male bass voice is to
the contralto."
102 MAN'S MIRACLE
object without any other direction than the sound of
a piano, graduated according as the seeker is near or
far from the object. While the people who can see,
hesitate more or less and sometimes give up the
search, the blind person, at the first indications of
the piano, goes straight to the invisible object. Could
we not train our hearing to the same degree of acute-
ness, if we deliberately made use of it, as the blind
person does instinctively ?
To return to the cultivation of touch: we scarcely
ever find critics who, in appreciating the merits of
statuary, appeal to a sense other than sight — that
is to the most superficial of all, according to the
testimony formulated by Diderot in his " Lettre sur
les Aveugles." u The eye is enough ! " cry the author-
ised arbiters of plastic art. Now, Helen Keller, that
rare human document, whom we must always consult
in such matters, is not satisfied by merely believing
the word of the Italian artist, Lorenzo Ghiberti, who
said of an admirable antique marble: "Its most
exquisite beauties cannot be perceived by the sight,
but by the most minute manual inspection." She
uses her own experience in analyzing the aesthetic
qualities of a Venus de Milo, by feeling the voluptuous
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 103
curves with her hands, and describes thus, after the
same criterion, the Victory of Samothrace : " headless
goddess, who, under my fingers, and with the help of
my imagination, becomes an incarnate and living
power, swept by the sea-winds, containing in her
wings all the splendour of conquest." She makes us
feel how much these masterpieces of marble or bronze
have still to reveal to the normal being who will not
limit himself exclusively to their lineal appearance,
but who, with a hand constantly helping him, will
explore their surfaces, their folds, the secrets of their
substance.
But Miss Sullivan's (or rather Mrs. Macy's)
pupil has still other reasons, as we shall see, for
assuring us that if a fairy were to ask her to choose
between the gift of sight and that of touch, she would
choose the latter.
The intensity of her manual perceptions gives her
the aptitudes of a thought reader who can guess at
your actual emotions by the slightest trembling of
your hands, and can seize, by the most uncon-
scious tremor, the illumination of the thought which
has just crossed your mind. Further still, the
104 MAN'S MIRACLE
pressure of a hand, gives her a prompt and complete
idea of the character of its owner, of his mental
worth, his habits, and often of his profession. There
are hands which reveal goodness, self-importance,
or stupidity, or which express indifference, or joy, or
foretell grief and disaster. And for our blind and
deaf mute, they are all faces which show their secrets,
and show them much more clearly than physiognomies
proper by which we alone can judge, since dissimu-
lation is easy to our faces, while our hands, which we
do not control, speak without reticence by the degree
of their temperature and their elasticity, and the
irrepressible play of their nerves and muscles.
U I am a palmist in my own way," cries Helen
Keller. " I will tell you your fortune, but my way has
nothing in common with necromancy."
It appears then, as if a scientific combination, more
or less exact, might be made between palmistry and
the chiromancy which has always been considered as
a childish superstition, or charlatanism. The differ-
ence between Helen Keller's instinctive appreciation
and the arbitrary system of an Anaxagoras, or a
Desbarolles, is immediately apparent. These made
their deductions solely from the conformation
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 105
and dimensions of the hand and the lines of
the palm. They were only concerned with visible
matter, with the body of our " executive' organs.
Helen Keller, in agreement with the doctor who
confirmed her physiological diagnosis of pulsation,
interprets the manifestations of interior life. She
reads, one may say, the movements of the mind
without reference to its exterior aspect, of which she,
by her affliction, has only an imperfect idea. With
her, manual thought-reading (relative of course, for
she has no pretentions to infallibility) is a pheno-
menon of positive telepathy. The fluid which travels
from our brains to our extremities comes into contact
with hers, and gives her, by a magnetism of great
purity, information, approximately correct, on our
state of mind, or our general inclinations, on the
impulses which we obey, and will continue to obey in
all time, if our organic inclinations do not vary at
such or such moments of our career. All this by the
extreme sensibility which her own hand owes to
its education and its incessant activity. Why can-
not the organs of touch in normal individuals, by
the same application, become physiognomists as
clairvoyant as this triply afflicted girl's ? Should we
106 MAN'S MIRACLE
not employ for the government of events and persons,
anything which promises, or guarantees, a quicker
and more profound knowledge of individuals between
each other?
Certain tours de force which have perplexed us, or
made us sceptic, may already be explained by the
unexpected results of Helen Keller's tactile powers.
Cumberland, the thought-reader, who came over from
America some years ago, sought for and found with
bandaged eyes any object hidden by a person who
touched his hand during the search. He was,
perhaps, less a skilful conjuror, than a sincere
diviner, who worked by the help of touch, interpreted
with the same jealous care as that of our blind and
deaf mutes and strengthened by the momentary
abdication of sight.
A recent event shows that in certain circles we are
beginning to see the use which can be made of the
faculty of discerning, through touch, the objects
amongst which we move. The Minister of Arts and
Sciences in Belgium conceived the idea of
assembling at Brussels a meeting of the principal
schoolmasters of the country and abroad, for the
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 107
exchange, publicly and comparatively, of their views
on the improvements introduced in methods of
teaching. Two statements were made which con-
firmed all the scientific research and educative efforts
mentioned in this book. The first was by
M. Claparede, professor at the University of Geneva.
The substance of what he said was this : " Let us
try not only to teach abnormal children, but to
study them themselves, for even their deficiencies may
give useful indications for the instruction of normal
individuals. A malady discovered in the dissections
of the brain may show what is left of one function
when the others have been amputated or suspended."
M. Van Biervliet, professor at the University of
Ghent, says: "In examining the senses in children,
particularly those of sight and hearing, teachers and
parents may gain useful ideas, many experiments
might be made outside the school, in the family
circle, i.e., to handle an object with shut eyes, or to
draw one without having seen it."
That is to say that, by the voluntary suppression
of the gift of sight, one may learn the degree of
acuteness of the child's other senses, and develop to
a great degree a sense generally neglected up till now.
108 MAN'S MIRACLE
This proposition was practically realised by Helen
Keller in her university studies. Not being able to see
or repeat identically the geometrical figures traced on
the board, she drew them on a cushion with wire
threads, either rectangular or bent, thus substituting
tangibility for visuality.
Thus the professors declare the secular fault of
an education, which has up till now not taken into
account the daily conditions of life, which pre-supposes
that we are obliged, at all hours of the day or night and
wherever we are, to go and come, to see and feel as if
in full light, and this by the sole use of our eyes — our
eyes condemned in so many circumstances to suspend
their service.
Others more capable than I, may perhaps, go
further and suggest other experiments for scientific
advancement through analysis of the peculiar apti-
tudes which those may have who can see, speak,
read, and listen solely by the use of their hands.
The study of aerial waves and their conducting power
has already resulted in marvellous inventions, which
the careful examination of Helen Keller, and those
like her, may help in extending still further. A
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 109
woman without ears or eyes, who can tell only by
the sense of touch that a bee has flown in the room,
or that there is produced in space something that we
cannot perceive, but which warns her of an approach-
ing storm — does not this woman seem to have been
created expressly, to help us to fathom, more pro-
foundly than we have done as yet, the mysteries of
the ambient air? In the vibrations of the ether felt
by her fingers there must be a collection of infini-
tesimal movements which escape the least trained of
our senses, and whose discovery would be a new and
considerable acquisition for science. These invisible
and almost imperceptible currents can be felt by
Helen's hand, and she must be able to teach us to
feel them and to use them to their remotest limits.
Others, perhaps, have already thought of this.
Her celebrated compatriots, Graham Bell and Edison,
have known Helen Keller from the first phases of her
education and are keenly interested in her. The
gradual stages of her education have not been without
interest to the great aviators of her country, the
Brothers Wright. With Graham Bell, in 1893, she
visited the exhibition at Chicago, "a true tangible
kaleidoscope," and later the Falls of Niagara. She
no MAN'S MIRACLE
frequented the laboratory of this great physician,
and on the sands of Bras d'Or helped him in his
experiments on the dirigibility of kites, by which he
tried to understand the laws which would govern the
future aerial ship. Who can tell what influence the
manifestations of her tactile receptivity have not had
on the inventor of the telephone and so many other
vehicles of sound, and how far they will also influence
other minds working at the solution of the most
difficult problems of to-day and to-morrow?
This problem leads us to an episode in the exist-
ence of Helen Keller which all those who study
the mechanism of the memory will find singularly
suggestive. The frequency with which the cells
of our brains will store ideas, words and phrases
which are produced much later almost intact, has
not yet found an explanation. The man who suc-
ceeds in solving the enigma will perhaps discover,
at the same time, a sure method of supplementing
a weak and defective memory by artificial means.
He might be helped by recalling the following fact,
well-known to those who have read the American
girl's biography :
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS ill
At the end of 1890, before her eleventh year,
Helen had been very much struck by a description
her governess had given her of the rich coloring of
nature in autumn. She wrote in Braille, composing
a little story called King Frost, and was encouraged
by Miss Sullivan to dedicate it to M. Agnonos, Dr.
Howe's successor at the Perkins Institute.
"The good King Frost sent one day to his old
and excellent friend Santa Claus, his troop of joyous
little fairies, carrying heavy vases and jugs full of
gold pieces and rubies to distribute to young
children. The little fairies quickly grew tired, and,
besides, they were fonder of play than of work, and
so they soon forgot King Frost's express command,
' Make haste ! no playing truant ! '
" They therefore stopped in a great forest to rest
and gather nuts. For fear of thieves they began to
climb the highest trees to place their precious vases
in safety, while they gathered their nuts and played
at hide and seek. But they had forgotten His
Majesty, King Sun — all-powerful at mid-day. This
rival and opponent of King Frost soon found out the
vases of gold and precious stones amongst the leaves.
He began, with spiteful pleasure, to melt them with
112 MAN'S MIRACLE
the heat of his rays. Soon, from all sides, there
came pouring down streams of liquid, staining with
gold and purple the green of the leaves. The little
fairies at last became aware of the drops of iridescent
rain falling on their noses. Seized with panic at this
unexpected result of their disobedience, they fled,
hiding in the deepest undergrowth to escape the
anger of King Frost. Uneasy at the long absence
of his servants, he went to look for them in the
forest, marked the disaster at once, and guessing the
cause, filled the wood with the burst of his fury.
But just then a troop of children arrived, who, on
seeing the leaves so sumptuously coloured, cried out
in their delight, clapped their hands, and began to
pluck the leaves, to take back those marvellous
bouquets to their homes. This spectacle pacified
King Frost. He said to himself that his treasures
were not wasted since they gave so much happiness,
even in the liquid state. And from that time his
favourite game has been to paint the leaves in autumn.
' If they are not made of gold and rubies, of what,
I ask myself, are they made? What do you think ? ' "
Such is, roughly, the poetic little story which
Helen Keller dedicated as a birthday gift to the
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 113
Director of the Perkins Institute. M. Agnonos was
so touched by it that he had it printed and
published in one of the bulletins of the Institute.
But the joy of the little girl and her governess were
of short duration. They were told one day that
King Frost was simply a repetition, with a few
variations, of Frost Fairies, a fragment of a collection
of stories published before Helen Keller's birth by
the American authoress, Margaret Canby, called
Birdie and his Friends, and which was now out
of print. Helen Keller was thus formally accused
of barefaced plagiarism, connived at by Miss
Sullivan, who was supposed to exaggerate as far as
possible in the eyes of the public the wonderful
results of her teaching. She was filled with despair,
bewilderment and shame, and her tears flowed un-
ceasingly. Miss Margaret Canby herself tried to
console her and assure her that her version was
superior to the original conception, Helen's being
more concise, and showing here and there beauties
of expression which were missing in the original
fairy story. But things were not allowed to rest.
M. Agnonos had the little girl brought before a
tribunal of masters who could draw from her
H
114 MAN'S MIRACLE
nothing but this declaration: " I swear that I do
not remember ever having read Miss Canby's story,
and that my copy, since it is a copy, is as inexplicable
as it was involuntary." On her side Helen and Miss
Sullivan, helped by Graham Bell, moved heaven and
earth to try to discover in what way Miss Canby's
story could have reached the child's consciousness,
and become imprinted on it so deeply and at the
same time so unconsciously ( J ).
At the end of some months the facts came to light.
Helen had spent a part of the summer of 1888, at
Brewster, with a friend of her family, Mrs. Hopkins.
This lady remembered certain days when she had
amused the child by reading stories and legends.
Was the Frost Fairies among them ? Mrs. Hopkins
did not remember, but this hypothesis was a likely
one, as there was no other explanation possible
for the annoying occurrence. In any case, the
scrupulous integrity and modesty of Miss Sullivan
(1) If the child had read the story herself, it goes without
saying that she could only have done so from a copy printed
in relief, as were all the books for her use, or existing at the
Perkins Institute for the blind. It was proved at the
enquiry that Margaret Canby's story had never been printed
in this form.
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 1 15
having a -priori put her complicity out of the ques-
tion (*), Helen's good faith was now equally beyond
a doubt. It remains for us to discover how the simple
affiliation of ideas, suggested by an accidental con-
versation on the splendours of autumn, had mechanic-
ally revived at the end of three years, and from
beneath a layer of forgetfulness the relatively com-
plicated story had grown. We do not yet know.
The incident brings us to the threshold of memories,
or to the threshold of the subconscious.
The incident is more curious from the fact that at
the time when Helen was told the history of The
Frost Fairies by the intermediary of another's
fingers she was only eight years old, that is, reckoned
by the calendar, but scarcely two years old by mental
existence. When one remembers that up to her
seventh year she was in almost a savage state, un-
educated, ignorant of all meaning of words, of ideas,
of the sensations they represent, and that she had
hardly lived for more than four years in effective
possession of her faculties when she produced
a literary composition reflecting, as a mirror reflects,
(i)Miss Sullivan was always most diffident about any
publicity made of her miracle.
HI
1 16 MAN'S MIRACLE
a story heard more than thirty months before, that is
at the very beginning of her thinking life. Even
supposing that in writing King Frost she had com-
mitted by fraud a theft coldly premeditated, as do
some writers ripe in years, but not in scruples, we
should still have a proof of the remarkable feats of
which memory is capable, even in the first phase
of its activity.
But, since all suspicion of conscious imitation is
set aside, there still remains the fact that the human
brain, although its development may have been
retarded by circumstances as terrible as blindness,
deafness and aphasia, receives from infancy indelible
impressions which may remain for long, or for ever,
unawakened, but only need an opportunity for them
to awaken out of their torpor and come to life again,
dragged from the bottom of some dim drawer of the
memory, like a treasure long forgotten or mislaid.
Helen Keller's is an extreme case. One can
scarcely compare it with the antithesis, i.e., with the
phenomenon of total loss of memory, where an
individual, who has a perfect lucidity of mind and a
perfect capacity for the present time and the future,
has forgotten all his antecedents, from what country
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 117
or town he came, what he did, even the name he has
borne since his birth, and which he has pronounced,
or heard pronounced, every day. This complete
paralysis of the sources of memory is a phenomenon
equally extreme, but less rare than one would think.
During the last twenty years there have been,
N 1 ^ especially in England, sufficient examples to inspire
a well-known writer with a curious subject for romance,
in which he paints the abyss that the loss of memory
may create in the midst of a human life. The com-
parison of these cerebral accidents, so diametrically
opposed, is not made, merely to instil in our minds an
attitude of indulgence, or reserve, towards certain
apparent plagiarisms which are only pure auto-
matic reflexes. Let us probe the case to the bottom
and it will help us to penetrate down to the general
cause of memory, its weakness, its loss, and regulate,
perfect and protect the mechanism, at once so simple
and fragile, of the intellectual clock where our know-
ledge is so faithfully registered.
A step further, and beyond the region of memory,
we enter that of its near neighbours — sleep and
dreams, which, according to some physiologists, are
only an unconscious prolonging of memory, working
118 MAN'S MIRACLE
this time without the help of our will. And here,
again, what resources are open in the future for the
scientist who endeavours to learn how the chimeric
images of the night appear to those who know nothing
of the realities of daylight !
Helen has told us that in the early times of her
education many scientific men questioned her as to
the nature of her dreams. This astonished her. She
could not understand what interest they could have
for them. She understands so well to-day, that she
has devoted two chapters in one of her books to this
subject. They have an anecdotal rather than a
speculative character, and for this reason they offer
solid grounds of study to physiologists and psycho-
logists. We may judge by a few examples :
During her sleep she once thought that she held a
little child in her arms, during an insurrection, and
that she cried out vehemently, "imploring the
soldiers not to massacre the Jews." She was living,
in her dream, in the terrible scenes of insurrection in
India, and the drama of the French Revolution, a
reflex of readings which had excited her imagination
the evening before. One evening she heard a sug-
gestion that the countries of temperate climates might
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 119
be invaded by arctic ice. She dreamed afterwards
that the ocean was frozen over, and blockaded by ice
in the middle of summer, and that all navigation
between the East and the West v/as suspended, and
that the birds, perished with cold, came into all the
houses to find shelter. Charming illusions, grotes-
quely impossible spectacles, nightmares, accompanied
by terrible falls into space, hallucinations, when she
struggled with an overwhelming feeling of helpless-
ness against blind and unpitying forces — everything
that the imagination, after it has broken the bonds of
reason, conjures up of delicious, hideous, or absurd
fantasies in normal beings, all passed through the
brain of this blind and deaf mute during her sleep.
In the analysis of her fugitive nocturnal sensations
we find all of our own, even to the impression which
the remembrance of a dream leaves behind it, even to
the feeling of deception which we all experience on
waking from a dream interrupted by our return to
consciousness just at the most interesting moment,
like the breaking off of a story to be continued in the
next number of a magazine. In her truthfulness and
clear-sightedness Helen Keller says she cannot always
guarantee the fidelity of her remembrance of a dream,
120 MAN'S MIRACLE
since, with the best faith in the world, the person
awakened inevitably brings to the vague creations of
sleep the corrections demanded by reason, always
opposed as it is to the wild incoherence of a mind
separated from the will, " flying before the wind like
a ship without rudder or compass." Here, again,
what a striking likeness between her and us !
But this likeness, in certain cases, goes further
still. During her dreams Helen hardly ever has to
feel her way. She comes and goes without a guide,
across the most crowded streets under the most difficult
conditions. She is sufficient to herself. She listens,
she speaks, she is spoken to, without the help of the
language of fingers. It seems to her as if she bathes
in a sea of dazzling light, which she compares to a
wonderful jewel, a pearl "made of dew and fire,
where the soft whiteness of the lily mingles with
the shades of a thousand roses/ ' And she expresses
her delight at being so enriched if only during a
brief sleep; "for then," she says, "my soul puts
on its winged sandals and joins the multitude of
the blessed."
This blind and deaf mute thus brings us a fresh and
profoundly touching proof of the sublime supremacy
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 121
of mind over matter. She sleeps. Her body is inert, or
reduced to the minimum of movement, and that move-
ment purely mechanical. The sense of smell is only
awake in her in a passive degree. The sense of
touch, her indispensable and inseparable factotum,
is in the same state of passivity, and as she has not
the use of her eyes (and the visual sense — every
specialist agrees in this — plays the principal part
amongst the mysterious servants of dreams), the sleep
of Helen ought to be, according to all logical reason-
ing, a sort of catalepsy, a total unconsciousness,
almost like death. But, on the contrary, it opens all
the doors of life which, waking, are closed to her.
The fragmentary human being of an hour ago has
now become, by the magic of repose, a complete
creature, who can walk unaided, who is bathed in
light, who, seeing, hearing and acting, assists in all
the events of the universe produced by her dreams.
When her mutilated body is inert and powerless, her
spiritual self breaks its last bondage, arises and
soars, free, radiant, intoxicated, above the flesh.
Surely a life's work might well be spent in the
elucidation of this amazing phenomenon? Whole
volumes have been devoted to the visions of opium
122 MAN'S MIRACLE
or hashish smokers, to be explained by the ex-
citation of the nerves which it produces. A pro-
found study of the dreams of a Helen Keller, or a
Marie Heurtin, is a hundred times more justifiable —
especially as this strange physiological and psychical
state is almost unexplored, at least with us. One
knows that in the Far East it has been systematically
sifted and partially understood by medical science
from a pathological point of view, which, through
direct observation, has more or less accurately
established the relations existing between dreams,
the action of the heart and the four other principal
organs. But there might be a further extension of
these investigations, if, for instance, a certain number
of experimental subjects were to communicate to
medical men and psychologists their adventures in the
land of dreams, and the circumstances in which they
were placed the evening before.
We hardly take into account the fact that the
condition of sleep in many individuals occupies nearly
half their life, and with all of us a third of it, owing
to tacit laws deciding that the day is divided into
three portions of eight hours, one of which is devoted
to absolute repose for the renewing of our life by a
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 123
periodic suspension of its powers. To treat as a
negligible quantity a fraction of our existence so
important and so enigmatic, is a mistake which
science and human consciousness will no doubt
rectify. What useful assistance in gaining an
insight into the unknown might be afforded by
brains so quick and so communicative as those of
this American girl, whose peculiar circumstances fit
her for an intimate analysis of her sensations and ours?
The sleep of Laura Bridgman is also full of
dreams, since, after being told of these phenomena,
she questioned a companion about her dreams and
related her own. Laura avowed, before Helen
Keller did, to have seen during her dreams what was
invisible to her in the daytime. Her teachers, without
directly contradicting her, received this information
with reserve, and attributed it to a possible confusion
of the senses and their respective functions. If
Laura had had the faculty of introspection and
eloquence of expression of Helen Keller she would,
no doubt, have been able to convince them of the
reality of a fact attested by the latter in a quite
undeniable manner. (1)
(i) We shall see in the following chapter that I had occasion
to question Marie Heurtinon her dreams, and that her reply was
most interesting.
124 MAN'S MIRACLE
In any case, Dr. Howe assigned to Laura Bridgman
what the ' ' Brownism ' system has qualified as a
sixth sense ; the sense of muscular resistance which
made her able to guide herself with surprising ease.
In spite of her blindness, she would go straight to a
window, or door, without hesitation or feeling her way,
and stop at once at the desired destination without
running against any obstacle, and she could also
establish the relative position of objects with almost
mathematical accuracy. This sense of dirigibility
may be that which is assigned (not yet quite categoric-
ally) to certain animals, bats especially, whose precise
nocturnal evolutions have inspired an inventor (after
a close study of these animals) with the idea of an
apparatus for automatically guiding ships in the fog,
so as to avoid the smallest obstacles. Did this sense
of direction in Laura arise from the permanent and
highly developed sense of touch ; and might it not
become usual to all "outcasts of humanity" who are
deprived of sight and hearing, and who could cultivate
to a great degree all the forces which instinct and our
organization have given us? This sense seems much
less accentuated in Helen Keller, whose movements
seem to lack confidence, perhaps because being
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 125
infinitely more intellectual than Laura, she has trained
herself to extract from her gift of touch the maximum
of mental fruit and not the maximum of physical
properties.
It might perhaps have been found in a perfect state
in Marie Heurtin if it had been methodically cul-
tivated, and why, in her case again, should we not
find the key to infinitely useful discoveries?
1 can only suggest, in passing, the possibilities that
the evolution of these three afflicted girls offer to
philologists employed in searching out the sources of
human language.
One can see, as living answers to these questions,
primitive beings, seeking to express themselves
otherwise than by signs or cries, and arriving by
degrees at the oral designation of purely tangible
objects, to the expression of non-material ideas and
sentiments, under the form of images, materialising
abstract things. It might be shown that Helen
Keller, Laura Bridgman and Marie Heurtin, reduced
as they were to the senses of touch and scent, exactly
repeated the operation by which prehistoric man laid
the first stone of our marvellous verbal edifice.
126 MAN'S MIRACLE
It is quite certain that the more frequently and
more profoundly we study the abnormal cases of
humanity, the better chance we shall have of gleaning
some ideas which, if not original, have never got
beyond the stage of theory and have been given up
for want of practical proof. The set-back which one
of the worst individual misfortunes may have on collec-
tive well-being is almost sufficient to explain or wipe
away certain strange and cruel caprices of fate. In the
moral order of things humanity is presented to us as
benefitting by the drama of Golgotha. It is true that
the Crucifixion, which has had such a striking effect on
the imagination of the greater part of humanity, has
done more for the propaganda of Christian morality
than the most eloquent exhortations of rhetoric. In
the physical, psychic and philosophic order of things
one might be tempted to regard these blind and deaf
mutes as victims specially designed to show us, at the
price of their personal suffering, an inexhaustible series
of mysteries, and to illumine little by little the dark
recesses from which they have come by the help of
the unsuspected revelations which they offer to our
ignorance. (I)
(i) I should be sincerely grieved if certain fanatical experi-
OTHER LESSONS OR OTHER PATHWAYS 127
Perhaps the mission assigned to these sons and
daughters of the night, is that of bringing volun-
tarily, or involuntarily, into evidence the threads
which unite all the things of creation. Thus
considered, the sufferings of one martyr may some-
times reveal an appreciable amount of progress, the
sight of a new pathway of the universe towards a
better future. To extract from this sum of misery a
sum ten thousand times stronger of power for good,
would be, in any case, a second miraculous victory
of man over the hostile forces which surround him,
and which sow snares in his pathway to happiness.
menters, those, for instance, who practice vivisection, should
interpret this remark as an encouragement to their "well-inten-
tioned " atrocities. I do not mean that martyrs should be created
in cold blood in any degree of life, but only that a benefit to the
general good, might be drawn from those who exist — and that
they themselves — (the case, I think, of Helen Keller) — might find
some consolation in the knowledge of their utility to the human
race.
CHAPTER VI
With the Children of the Miracle
THE VISITS OF MADAME GEORGETTE LEBLANOMAETER-
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.
Before bringing my conclusions to an end I will
introduce a kind of parenthesis which will bring
home to my readers what science and charity have
done to lighten, or rather to heal, these cases of
extreme misery.
An account of the visits made by Madame
Georgette Leblanc-Maeterlinck to Helen Keller in
America, and by the author of this book to Marie
and Marthe Heurtin in Poitou, should, logically, have
appeared at the beginning of these pages. But the
demonstration which it was their object to make, and
the results they hoped to show, are better taken in
this rational order. For it is natural that the proof
should follow and not precede the proposition. Now
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 129
that all has been told of the results obtained by the
teachers of the blind and deaf mutes, incredulity will
no doubt be felt, especially by those readers who have
heard for the first time of these cases. It is, there-
fore, essential to produce direct evidence to establish
the truth of the facts related.
I have been warned of this necessity — as a first
paper on Helen Keller which I published a few
years ago at Brussells, brought a smile of incredulity
to some lips. In spite of the literature already
existing that pretended to confirm the facts, there
was a small proportion of intelligent people who on
a priori grounds deemed it absolutely incredible that
the innumerable obstacles in her path should be over-
come and result in a mass of such wide and varied
knowledge. Without going so far as to say that
Helen Keller was a myth, one writer hazarded the
remark that a blind and deaf mute, described as a
sort of Pica delta Mirandola in petticoats, was only
the product of the habitual gross exaggeration of the
compatriots of Barnum, and that the Europeans
who accepted this extraordinary tale of her trans-
formation were the dupes of a poetic fancy.
My earnest wish to go to the United States and
1
130 MAN'S MIRACLE
see the truth for myself having been disappointed
for many reasons, I was delighted by the news that
Mme. Georgette Le Blanc Maeterlinck would take
advantage of her projected journey to Boston in the
beginning of 1912, to pay a visit to Miss Sullivan's
pupil. No one was better able to judge of the truth
than this great artist, so observant, so thoughtful,
and of such acute intelligence and quick sensibility.
She had been prepared for her visit by the paper to
which I have alluded, and of which the author of
La Vie des Abeilles had said, that it opened up the
most bewildering perspectives he had ever known.
Madame Maeterlinck had been a fortnight in
Boston when I received a cablegram, signed by her,
as follows: "I have just left Helen Keller, and am
perfectly enchanted." Almost at the time this book
appeared, she proposed to publish in America an
account of the three afternoons she had spent with
Helen Keller at Wrentham Villa, some 50 miles from
Boston, where the remarkable blind and deaf mute
lives with Mr. and Mrs. Macy (formerly Miss
Sullivan).
Mme. Maeterlinck was the first Frenchwoman
Helen Keller had met. For this modern miracle had
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 131
escaped the eyes of Jules Huret and Paul Bourget
during their travels across the Atlantic, from which
they brought back such interesting observations.
M. Louis Arnould, whom I have mentioned more
than once, was the only writer in our tongue who
had met Helen Keller at Wrentham, one day in the
winter of 1907. His interview lasted for three
quarters of an hour, when he conversed orally with
the young woman in French, and came away with
the impression " of a remarkable intelligence, saved
from pedantry by an overflowing gaiety and joy of
life."
The account which Mme. Georgette Leblanc
Maeterlinck gave me personally is naturally richer
in detail and more precise. Helen Keller, it
appears, was prepared for the arrival in America of
the great interpreter of Pel leas and Melisande. For
she reads, or rather has read to her, the daily papers
to satisfy her craving for knowledge and her desire
to participate in the life around her. When she
heard that Madame Maeterlinck wished to come
and visit her, she offered to spare her the trouble and
to go herself to Boston. The offer was declined.
It was infinitely preferable to see the celebrated
11
132 MAN'S MIRACLE
blind and deaf mute in her own surroundings and
in the atmosphere in which her every-day life is
passed.
When the visitor alighted from a motor car before
the pretty rustic cottage, she walked down a garden
full of shrubs, where the trees here and there, at the
turn of a pathway for instance, were linked together
with ropes. She learnt afterwards that the ropes
were used as marks for Helen on the frequent strolls
she took without any companion, walking fast,
hardly feeling her way, and only using these artificial
guides to avoid wandering out of the garden into the
country. The villa was pretty and comfortable,
without being encumbered with much furniture, and
Mme. Maeterlinck soon found herself in the presence
of a charming girl, who ran up to her and
embraced her warmly. She was at first agreeably
surprised at being face to face with a being so
abnormal, and yet so like normal people: at being in
the presence of a martyr whom one would suppose
so different from ourselves, and whom one finds on
near approach so very similar. A few minutes of
close attention altered this first impression to a very
painful one. Mme. Maeterlinck became aware that
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 133
the clear and frank expression with which she had
welcomed her was the fixed and rigid stare of a sphinx.
Helen's eyes were globes of painted glass, hiding the
poor empty blind orbits under an appearance of life
and brilliancy. And her speech — (for Helen had
spoken to Mme. Maeterlinck vocally and in French) —
was artificial and forced, and struck her as infinitely
pathetic. " With her/' said Mme. Maeterlinck to me,
" I seemed to enter a gloom, where I could hardly
breathe. I was so much oppressed that I brought
away no distinct impressions, except at my second
visit, when I had become accustomed to these pain-
ful conditions."
The blind and deaf mute, no doubt, felt nothing of
the painful emotions that she aroused in her visitor.
Her ardent exuberance bore witness, on the contrary,
to the joy of a heroic nature in surmounting the for-
midable difficulties she feft herself capable of over-
coming, one by one, by force of will. But her very
expansiveness, and the work she had imposed on her-
self, displayed the tragic state of tension of a will
engaged in almost superhuman effort, and excited in
her visitor the kind of distress which agitates us on
seeing the effort of a tight-rope walker tottering
134 MAN'S MIRACLE
over empty space — or to give Mme. Maeterlinck's
own words, "It was like the struggle of a prisoner
hurling himself against a barred door."
But these feelings disappeared as if by enchantment
as soon as the visitor to Wrentham Cottage begarf to
speak with Helen through the intermediaries of Mr.
and Mrs. Macy, who traced in the girl's hand the
words and questions of the European artist, and
translated the replies to her. All the physical short-
comings vanished under the charm of her wonderful
intellect. The first conversations were on a variety
of subjects, which proved not only the high degree
of culture of the blind girl, but what Mme.
Maeterlinck termed "her wonderful intelligence, "
for she draws from every subject that she has
mastered the most ingenious and often the most
interesting ideas. Though her consciousness be
enclosed in hermetically sealed walls, she gives out,
through the narrow bars of her prison, light as plenti-
ful and as bright as she has received. The princi-
pal conversations between Helen Keller and Mme.
Maeterlinck were type-written by her secretary, and
bear a better witness to this than I can do. It is
enough to say here that the little animal, without
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 135
speech, without vision, without ears, whose educa-
tion Miss Sullivan undertook twenty-five years
before, appeared to a refined European to be one
of the best educated and one of the most thoughtful
and thoroughly fascinating specimens of humanity
which civilisation can produce. She conversed with
her visitor on familiar or abstruse topics with the
same facility, the same power of comprehension
and analysis, with the same passion for knowledge,
and with the youthful, joyous enthusiasm of those
entering on a life where each day is a new source of
wonder. She expressed her views — very advanced,
on the future of the rights of women and on political
and economic Socialism. It goes without saying that,
in comparing the philosophers and poets of America
with those of Europe, she dwelt on the works of
Maurice Maeterlinck. She recited from memory
entire passages of the " Blue Bird," making remarks
which showed how she had understood the most
subtle pieces of symbolism. The visitor was con-
vinced before the end of the first interview that
Helen had not exaggerated in her books the
divining power of her hand. "After pressing my
hand some few times,' ' said Mme. Maeterlinck,
136 • MAN'S MIRACLE
" Helen told me the principal traits of my character,
more exactly than many of my oldest friends."
The tone of her voice is still harsh and somewhat
hollow, but the expression of her thoughts is always
neat, wonderfully full of imagery, and infinitely
poetical, without the least affectation, coming spon-
taneously from a sincere and impulsive nature. This
"mute" girl speaks very slowly, with an interval
between each syllable, but her diction is clear and
perfectly intelligible. She is not much encouraged to
use the oral mode of communication, firstly, for fear
of exhausting her, and, secondly, because the language
of touch is much more rapid. But it is never she,
who refuses. On the contrary, all the time she can
spare from her numerous studies, she devotes to prac-
tising her voice, as she nobly longs to give lectures
on the most useful subjects to relieve cases of dis-
tress she knows of, or miseries from which she has
herself been preserved. U)
At the second visit Mme. Georgette Leblanc found
her seated before her writing machine composing an
article on "The Lower Depths: My unhappy brothers,"
d) This ambition is already partly fulfilled. Helen Keller has
lately addressed astonished audiences, who have applauded her.
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 137
an article which has since been printed, and whose
frankly socialistic tendencies made a great stir in
America; a sensation not unexpected, however, coming
from one of nature's disinherited, who, by merely
passing her hand over her artificial eyes, her deaf ears,
or her throat, in revolt against its inertia, had con-
ceived an immense pity for all the inequalities which
the injustice of nature or the social organism have
made in "the lower depths," as so many obstacles in
the ascent to the first stages of a happy life. ( J )
The work at the writing machine in which Mme.
Maeterlinck found Helen absorbed, was her occupation
every morning after she had dressed herself without
help, and absorbed the essential part of the daily
papers. When she is not writing or receiving visits
she corresponds with her friends, or with publishers,
or with the Institutes for the deaf and dumb, or the
blind, of which she is the inspectress and the inde-
(1) Helen Keller might doubtless have simply given herself as
an example of the magic possibilities of personal energy in men
and women afflicted by fate at the beginning of their lives by
saying: " See what I came from, and where my will has brought
me." But she must have felt too deeply how greatly her libera-
tion was due to the tender pity and devotion of others, not to
understand the help which sympathy brings to individual energy;
or to refrain from saying to the favourites of destiny: "Give
help to these unfortunate people," and to the unfortunate: "Do
not lose courage ! You have more inherent strength than you
think,"
138 MAN'S MIRACLE
fatigable and profoundly judicious adviser — for who
could have as intimate an acquaintance with infir-
maty as she ? In the afternoon she reads in her
library, storing up all the ideas possible, both
philosophic or aesthetic, or she enjoys her poets,
Latin, English, French or German. Then she
walks in the garden, or goes for excursions with
Mr. and Mrs. Macy, and for her recreation at the
end of the day she plays cards, or practices her
vocal chords to achieve the conquest of speech.
The last visit of Mme. Georgette Leblanc to her
American friend, to whom she was to remain always
invisible, was the occasion of a particularly signifi-
cant experience. The eminent artiste had said
good-bye to Helen Keller without a thought of re-
turning. She intended to sail three days later for
Europe. But the disaster of the Titanic and other
unforseen circumstances made her determine to post-
pone her departure for a week, and she returned
unexpectedly to Wrentham and went to see Helen
without being announced. Mrs. Macy's pupil had
scarcely passed her fingers over her face, and pressed
her hand, than she started with astonishment and
delight. Tears of pleasure overflowed the artificial
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 139
eyes, and she exclaimed : "Mae — ter — linck! Mad —
ame Mae — ter — linck!' It would be impossible to
find a better example of this gift of vision and
memory contained in her touch. Mme. Maeterlinck
was profoundly moved even when, last spring, in the
peace of the Villa des Abeilles, at Nice, she gave
me an account of this last interview, and all the
astonishment and admiration she had felt in the
presence of this second Galatea.
Since this visit, Helen Keller has provided her
observers with new subjects for wonder. She sang
before an Otological Congress, organized by the
Medical School of Harvard: sang, that is gave cut
modulated and melodious sounds which have always
seemed impossible to the deaf and dumb. She has
also carried on several telephonic conversations with
people who imagined they were speaking to Mrs.
Macy, the words being so clear and free from hesi-
tation. Here again, we seem to border on the in-
credible, but no doubt more than one of my readers
will have understood how such an apparently im-
possible thing could be accomplished. Let him
picture to himself the blind and deaf mute, now a
perfect mistress of speech, putting a question to the
140 MAN'S MIRACLE
transmitter, while her teacher, with the receiver at
her ear, communicates the answer of the distant and
invisible interlocutor to Helen's hand. Helen is thus
informed of the reply and can continue her conversa-
tion with her distant friend. It seems to me that
one's admiration for humanity which makes such an
experiment possible must be sensibly increased.
Let us now leave America and convey ourselves
to Poitou, to Notre-Dame de Larnay, to the French
girl, Marie Heurtin, who was a blind and deaf mute
from birth. I went there, one sunny day in last
September, by an express train which, at every
stopping place after we had passed Tours, took on
board or discharged officers taking part in the great
manoeuvres on the plain of Poitou.
The plain of Larnay was a practice ground for
artillery, which was perhaps the destination of some
of these officers. Did the authorities select the
neighbourhood of an establishment for the deaf and
dumb on purpose, I wonder? If not, it was happily
ordered by chance. From the station of Poitiers to
Larnay there are 4 kilometers of dusty road, climbing
upwards, and if one is. in a hurry one must needs
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 141
drive both ways, through fields of grass or crops,
bordered by lines of high poplars. This information
is for the benefit of those scientific persons who
would attempt the pilgrimage of 320 kilometers from
Paris to a real miracle school. A complaint is
made, not without reason, of the extreme rarity of
the visits of physiologists or philosophers to Larnay,
with the remark that Diderot, in his time, would have
travelled by diligence from Paris to St. Petersburg
to see one blind deaf mute who had been endowed
with the means of communication with the outside
world. But, at least, the religious institution which
has thus endowed Marie Heurtin and which is now
endeavouring to do the same for her sister, Mar the,
has been spared the application of the law on asso-
ciations and congregations, on account of the magnifi-
cent services rendered to humanity for more than
three quarters of a century. Scientific professors,
drawn here by a praiseworthy curiosity, should first
of all inform themselves as to the cases of Laura
Bridgman and Helen Keller, since the comparison be-
tween them and those treated at Larnay is instructive.
"When I entered the gateway and crossed the court
of the Poitevin institution, and approached the white
142 MAN'S MIRACLE
buildings, with slate roofs surmounted by a fine
chapel spire, where hundreds of blind and deaf and
dumb children are being educated, I tried to pre-
pare myself for disillusion; for I knew that I should
most certainly not meet such an accomplished woman
as Helen Keller, in whom Mme. Maeterlinck had
found an intellectual equal.
Marie Heurtin had had the disadvantage of never
having seen or heard anything for one moment since
her birth. She had lived in an absolutely savage
state up to the age of ten years, had inherited the
taint of conjugal consanguinity, and her parents,
though honest, were very poor and almost illiterate.
She could not, therefore, have hoped to approach
the condition of the brilliant American who had
inherited such talent at her birth and had enjoyed
the additional advantage of a costly education. I
simply expected to find that the humble daughter of
the cooper of Vertou confirmed what her biographer
had related, and, for my part, to be a witness of the
powers latent in the most degraded beings on the
earth, and which the genius and goodness of
men are capable of raising from the depths of
their squalor.
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 143
Before I saw Marie Heurtin, the superior of
Notre-Dame de Larnay told me two things which I
did not know. Sister Sainte Marguerite, Marie's
teacher, had died two years before, and since then,
the institution had taken little Marthe Heurtin, aged
now ten years, who had also come into the world, like
her sister, deaf, dumb and blind, and who, it was
hoped, could be educated like her. I was, then, to be
introduced to the miraculous education in two stages
— to the education when finished, and to the educa-
tion just beginning. The astonishing results were
revealed to me as soon as the very simple and
dignified superior had introduced me into the little
schoolroom reserved for Marie and Marthe, for their
new teacher (whose modesty and a recent conven-
tual regulation forbids mention of her name), and for
an assistant who is simply deaf and dumb, and replies
on her fingers to any signs made to her by the triply
afflicted. As I entered, the two young girls, who
knew of my approach by the vibrations of the atmos-
phere, came up to me, taking my hands in theirs
with a kind of feverish joy and seeming to ask them
questions, stopping now and then to make an expres-
sive sign to the deaf and dumb assistant, after which
144 MAN'S MIRACLE
they returned to complete by touch their acquain-
tance with the newcomer.
What struck me most was the wonderful vitality of
their brains, particularly in the case of the younger
girl. They overflowed with curiosity, and were
eager to communicate with the immense "unknown,"
of which I represented at the moment a small fragment,
in their little corner of the great philanthropic asylum.
I felt a kind of vague humiliation when I con-
sidered that they could make themselves understood
by certain expressive gestures, such as that of smoking
a cigarette or a pipe, while I possessed no form of
language which could help me to communicate with
their blank vision, their closed ears. I was for them
an absolute stranger, and yet at the end of a few
minutes, by the aid of their agile fingers, as inde-
f atigably active and alive as the eyes and ears of nor-
mal people, they had arrived at a completer and truer
idea of my personality than 1 could have had of theirs,
had I not previously been told of their misfortune.
Marie guessed my age with absolute accuracy by the
shape of my hand, and she summed up my psychic
disposition by one adjective, which, doubtless, was
to the analysis of a being like Helen Keller what
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 145
the drawing of a little child is to the finished work
of an artist, but still, was none the less a striking
proof of divination on the part of a young girl bereft
of any means of direct perception.
Her little sister, with a piece of chalk in her hand,
went straight to a black board hanging on a wall,
laid her left hand on it horizontally, and guided her
right hand by it, to keep as straight a line as
possible. She wrote in the letters of our alphabet, in
absolutely clear writing, the words : " Bonjour, mon-
sieur, je suis tres contente de vous saluer," then
" Monsieur est grand, monsieur est mince." Even
admitting that these phrases might have been sug-
gested by the teacher, they are still a wonderful
mechanical performance on the part of a child, less
equipped some months earlier than a chicken in a
farmyard to express anything in the world. But I can
affirm that the action, and all that it implies of acqui-
sition and reflection, were entirely spontaneous.
Other experiments followed. In a frame hanging
on the wall were tiny reproductions in wood, metal, or
in fabric, of utensils, animals, and objects of all kinds,
to teach the little beginner the form of things in
general ; and near it, in raised metal, were maps in
K
146 MAN'S MIRACLE
relief, of France, Europe, and the two hemispheres.
I asked Marie to point out to me a series of countries,
or towns, changing suddenly from one to another.
After placing her finger first on Paris, her hand touched
successively, without hesitation, every place I had
mentioned, and she showed me also, in Loire- 1 n-
ferieure, the situation of her native village.
The younger girl opened a cupboard and took from
it a pair of stockings she had knitted, and put them
into my hand with the eager desire to be compli-
mented. The elder sat before the window, and,
having fixed a thread, began to make a fishing-net,
destined for sale with many other products made at the
Larnay Institution to a contractor of marine stores. U)
And I thought of a recent definition explaining the
superiority of man over animals. Man toils unceas-
ingly beyond his necessities. Abstract or concrete,
he bends it to his will. Matter, even his dreams, are
as clay in his hands and he makes them minister to
his present or future needs, ( 2 ) or his most fleeting
(i) Notre Dame de Larnay educates among its deaf mutes many-
basket makers, and from the blind, who have cultivated their
fineness of ear, it prepares many musicians, especially organists,
piano tuners, &c.
(2) For example, the Chinese begins to make his coffin when he
is quite Aoung. One may object that the hymenopteron that
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 147
fancies ; whereby he has become lord of the world —
over the ants, the bees, the spiders, and the beavers,
those busy builders whose never varying work is
dictated by the needs of the moment and formed from
inert subject-matter.
Marie continued her work, showing an ambidextrous
faculty; a natural gift, no doubt, to anyone who
depends entirely on the sense of touch, but which
faculty, I repeat, might be imparted to normal human
beings by encouraging early practice. She sat before
a typewriter (a machine which she had learnt to use
in less than an hour), and produced with very little
hesitation a sentence which was dictated to her.
With the help of another machine she produced some
lines in Ballu writing, where the letters are formed
by projecting points, which exactly trace the outline
of the letters. Then she repeated the same signs on
the -pointing machine of the Braille system, which
paralyses his victim shows a kind of foresight when he maims
his prey and makes it helpless without killing it, in order to have
fresh meat for a future meal; and it may also be said that the ju
jutsu of the Japanese athletes is only an imitation of this anatomical
operation. But even if men have borrowed something from the
hymenoptera, the reverse is not the case. Animals have only
imitated the most rudimentary movements of man, and have
apparently never penetrated into the motive of his gestures.
K I
148 MAN'S MIRACLE
produces combinations in relief, similar to a text
with our alphabet, which the blind can read with
their fingers. This last work, and the manufacture
of fishing-nets, is Marie's principal occupation.
Each word, each phrase, each chapter of a book
which she thus transposes integrally is dictated on
the fingers. The books are made, not only for her
companions in misfortune, but also for the numerous
afflicted persons in the superior condition, that is — only
deprived of sight. The creation of a whole library
of these white books, which circulate the thoughts of
authors amongst the blind by the simple raising of
paper, is largely the work of this poor girl, condemned
by nature to an isolation and a uselessness as absolute
as that of an animal born on a desert and unapproach-
able rock. One is disposed to think of this double
process as very slow and very laborious — this trans-
mission of a text by manual signs, and the repro-
duction of the same text by the imprinting on the
leaves of a copy book. It is, however, as rapid as
oral dictation for type-writing or manuscript to a
normal secretary. The touch of the blind and deaf
mute is as quickly receptive as our ears. They
absorb a word, part of a sentence, and often an entire
MARTHE HEURTIN writing on the blackboard.
Marie and Marthe HEURTIN playing dominoes.
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 149
phrase, if it is written or spoken all at once, without
losing time by separating it orthographically, letter
by letter ; for instance — they understand as a whole
these five syllables, "Je vous remercie' without
mentally spelling the letters " J-e v-o-u-s/' &c. Besides
(Helen Keller has explained to us) people deprived
of sight and hearing perceive at once, without
dividing mentally, the same phrase fingered on the
hand, just as our sense of hearing takes in a melodic
theme without being pre-occupied by the successive
notes making up the whole.
I did not hear Marie speak orally, and I believe
I am right in saying that it is a painful means of
expression for her, and that it has been generally
thought almost impossible and by no means necessary
for the deaf and dumb : at the present time its utility
is being recognised, not only to make possible
a communication between the afflicted and the
normal who do not know the language of the
fingers, (I) but also for developing the respiratory
organs, which are apt to become dangerously atro-
phied by want of employment. On the other hand,
( J ) I have read of a case of atrophy in which the patient
had a glove made, containing in the palm, an alphabet in relief
150 MAN'S MIRACLE
I heard the efforts of little Marthe (more ambitious
than her sister) to conquer her natural lack of vocal
power. She read aloud to me two or three fables
printed in a white book, while I followed the text in
ordinary print. Instead of the usual vocal sounds, it
was a kind of laborious gurgle much like the sound
of a liquid falling from a bottle with the cork only
partly removed. This succession of formless and yet
uniform noises had more the effect of a gargle in the
throat than of the action of the vocal chords. Although
I followed with extreme attention the text before
me, it was at first impossible to find even an
approximate echo of the meaning in what I heard :
it was almost terrifying in its effort to convey a
meaning while remaining incoherent. If I had not
feared discouraging this cruelly earnest attempt,
I should have put my hand over the heroic little
mouth, and asked her to stop, as much for her sake as
with its translation into the ordinary alphabet, so that anyone
could converse manually with him. Another went about with
a little picture of the two alphabets in relief, side by side, with
the same object. These are ingenious inventions which
should generally be used, as also a little object invented in
England to be used in an assembly of the deaf, dumb and
blind for communicating to them the words of a lecturer, a
preacher, or a professor.
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 151
for mine. But the child went on and on undeterred,
and at last I was able to seize a word or two more
clearly articulated. It made me think of feeble little
birds who had somehow escaped from their cage that
had been left open for a moment, and I seemed to
catch a glimpse of the day when others would learn
to copy them and follow them out, until the whole
flock of words would take wing for liberty and space,
I then understood the immense struggle that Helen
Keller had been engaged in for years, with the
difficulties of speech, the magnitude of her victory,
and the glory of those who had helped her. And
at the same time I felt confidence in the ultimate
success of this gracious child of ten years whose
voice fought with such energetic resolution against
the gag that choked it. Whether, like her elder,
the American girl, she succeeds in tearing off the
last shreds of the terrible obstacle, or not, she will
succeed in any case in overcoming the greater part
of her fatality, and will have given us, like Helen
Keller, an example of courage far more important
than the actual result.
I had neither the time nor the intention to question
Marie on the subject of her general instruction.
152 MAN'S MIRACLE
I had been sufficiently informed before my arrival
at Larnay as to its general scope : some knowledge
of geography and arithmetic, a small amount of
history, a general idea of the chief elements of
organisation of the physical world, and, above all, the
knowledge of all that a careful religious educa-
tion implies. Her teacher, in reply to one of my
questions, told me that the sense of direction,
so developed in Laura Bridgman, is almost absent
in the elder of the two blind and deaf mutes at
Larnay. She can only walk without feeling her way,
in the parts of the Institute which are quite familiar
to her, where she meets objects of contact which she
knows well. I asked the young girl to tell me some-
thing about her dreams, as they might be interesting
to compare with those of Helen Keller. She said
she dreamed very often, and related one of her
nocturnal visions to me. She thought she was
walking towards Poitiers, which she often did, with
some companions and Sister Sainte Marguerite. At
the turn of the road was a church. They went in,
but the church was full of armed soldiers who were
evidently filled with the worst intentions. Marie
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 153
was much frightened and woke at that moment with
a start. (I)
Did she see the troop of soldiers, their uniforms,
their bayonets, their faces ?
" No," she answered. " Sister Sainte Marguerite,
speaking to my hand, told me they were there, after
telling me in the same way that we were going into
the house of God." Then to confirm decisively
what she said, she went to her writing machine and
rapidly composed these words — " I never see with
my eyes when I dream. — Signed, Marie Heurtin."
Does it follow from this, that Helen Keller, whom
we have seen in possession, during her sleep, of all
the normal faculties, is gifted with a higher power of
inventive imagination, is a creator in fact of what
she can guess ? or is it that her nineteen months of
infancy and complete existence left traces of light,
sound, movement and rumours of life, an indelible
memory which reconstitutes objects and events
mechanically, automatically, when the body is at rest?
If science can decide this question, what light it will
(1) It is probable that this dream coincided with the supres-
sion in France of illegal associations, no doubt described to Marie
when expulsion seemed to threaten the Soeurs de la Sagesse.
154 MAN'S MIRACLE
throw on the hour of the birth of human conscious-
ness and memory!
Just before leaving the institution at Larnay, I
asked Marie to tell me the time. She drew from her
waist belt a little watch specially made for her with
raised figures, and answered, " Ten minutes to four."
A question arose naturally out of the military aviation
experiments then being made at the grand manoeuvres.
Had the elder of the two girls any knowledge of the
magnificent efforts then being made for the conquest
of the air? Her teacher assured me that she had
understood perfectly the theoretic explanations of
aviation, and that they intended taking her, on the
first possible occasion, to a flying machine, so that
she might get a concrete idea by touching it. I asked
Marie if she would like to make an excursion in one.
"Oh no/' she cried, " it would be too dangerous
for anyone who can neither see nor hear: I would
not risk it." Hear she made a sign signifying a fall
through the air.) "A motor car is different. I have
been in one twice. One glides as if on a carpet.
But, all the same, I should like very much to touch
an aeroplane."
A letter which she wrote to me some days later,
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 155
and which will be found at the end of the book, with
a facsimile of a part of the original in the Ballu
characters, shows the lasting impression which this
part of our interview had made on her. The impres-
sion I took away from Larnay is unforgettable.
Above all, the extraordinary vitality shown by these
girls, so fearfully maimed at the outset, will justify
better than any argument, the resolute and thoughtful
cultivation of life. There was not a trace of melan-
choly on the thin face of Marie (she had grown thin
during the last year or two), or on the fuller and rosier
face of her little sister. On the contrary there was
a constant smile on their lips and an extraordinary
mobility in the eyelids ; the extinguished and
inexpressive eyes which sometimes gave the illusion
of living organs affected by a squint. There was an
evident optimism, creating a sort of atmosphere which
seemed to say, "How good life is!" — an untiring
animation of the face — a joyous and unwearying
participation in action and thought, all evidence of
what M. Bergson calls " Velan vital."
Medical science can perhaps explain this pheno-
menon which struck me — the almost icy temperature
of the two girls' hands ; these hands which were, more-
156 MAN'S MIRACLE
over, so exceptionally active, and in which resided all
the strength, the pulsations, the energy of the destroyed
senses. But one can answer, in any case, for the
intensity of the flame which burns under the poor
bodily shell of these children of the miracle, and pro-
test against the curses which the difficulties of existence
so often draw from the less wretched. In the persons
of Marie and Marthe, who had entered Notre-Dame
de Larnay in the state of wild animals, is verified the
imaginary tale of M. Frangois de Curel in his Fille
Sauvage, unless the dramatic-philosopher has simply
transposed on the scene, with all the vividness of his
art, the history of Marie Heurtin, a history so full
of inspiration.
An example has been given me of a case almost
the reverse of this, but equally striking. There was
a man known by everyone in Paris — rich, happy,
cultivated, brilliant — who, for twenty years, waited
for death in almost complete solitude and with
classical stoicism. He had been struck by paralysis,
and deprived first, partially, then almost entirely, of
movement. His hearing had grown so weak as to
render conversation almost impossible; his power
of speech gradually left him, and finally refused
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 157
all service. He saw objects only as if through
a fog, which gradually thickened, and predicted
a total darkness. A perfectly lucid brain alone
remained to him, which, as the lantern at the top
of a mast seems to watch the great waves slowly
flooding the vessel, witnessed the successive atrophy
of the senses. And his brain retained its perfect
serenity, as the lantern retains its steady light, resist-
ing the waves to the last.
If I had seen a trace of pessimism or discourage-
ment in Marie Heurtin, who was regaining each day
a little of what life originally refused her, I should
have told her, for her comfort, something of this
story of disintegration and ruin, to show her the
persistence of this victim, in the love of life until its
last moment. But I had no need to heal where
there was no symptom of wound. Consolation
must be kept for those less unfortunate than the
blind and deaf mutes, who have, nevertheless, less
patience with fate than they.
#
•aV" "7V*
In religious circles in France and Germany
Marie Heurtin's happy state of soul is attributed
158 MAN'S MIRACLE
to the influence of religious education. The certainty
promised of infinite compensation in a future world
makes the "cross" she bears in this world so light.
It seems very likely, and I have already given it as
my opinion that, if it is necessary to construct an imag-
inary heaven, we should certainly be warranted in
doing so for the consolation of such miseries. And,
moreover, I would never use a drop of ink in suggest-
ing the shadow of a criticism of the work, in every
sense admirable, undertaken and carried out at Larnay
in a silence and with a simplicity which increases its
merit.
If the pious French teachers believed it was their
duty to limit systematically the intellectual develop-
ment of Marie Heurtin to certain stages, which it
was in any case a triumph to have attained, I again
bow before their decision. Her social rank does
not admit, in principle, of a brilliant and many sided
culture ; and, no doubt, the limitations of her natural
aptitude are added reasons. Fiction and conjecture
are perhaps preferable for minds only half educated
and scarcely prepared, by their antecedents, for the
shock of realities, or for discouraging speculations.
But if we recognise willingly and without reserve,
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 159
the salutary nature of the methods employed with
regard to Marie and Marthe Heurtin, we have the
right also to exact the same respect for those which
have made of a Laura Bridgman, or a Helen Keller,
what they have become. That respect has not been
forthcoming up to the present.
There are — in Belgium and Germany, principally,
not to mention France — writers who have expressed
regret that, at the root of Helen Keller's brilliant
existence, there has not been a "serious Christian
education." This was not included in Dr. Howe's
tradition. Being imbued with the theory of Jean
Jacques and Entile, he dispensed with the teach-
ing of any faith, especially in the first period of
instruction. But why regret this, or blame him?
Would Helen Keller's prodigious mental progress
have been greater, if a religion, no matter what, had
been the principal stimulant? Would the remarkable
American blind and deaf mute (who belongs to the
Swedenborgian sect, and believes in the proposi-
tions of her faith without making it the pivot and
the mainspring of her thoughts), have shown
herself more altruistic and benevolent than she
is — more Christian in the ultra-ideal acceptation
160 MAN'S MIRACLE
of the word — if the same pains had been taken to
teach her the doctrines of the Trinity or the Eucharist,
as the precepts of pure and simple morality, the
masterpieces of classic and modern poetry, the duties
taught by political economy, the marvels divulged
by natural history, and other exact sciences?
Although she has read Kant, Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche, as well as Spencer, Gustave Le Bon and
Tolstoi, do not all the witnesses of her life allow that
her moral health is at least as good as those blind
and deaf mutes who know nothing of philosophy and
metaphysics^)? Only minds steeped in sectarianism
ism will doubt the answer that must be given to such
questions raised by their own objectors. The truth
(i) Some doubts have been raised on this point by the following
criticism of a French writer: "The one cause for regret," he
writes, "is that Helen Keller has not seen more of her family.
She told me when I asked her that she had not met her mother
for two years."
From a recent letter of Mr. Macy to Mme. Maeterlinck, which
I have before me at the moment, it is clear that the author of
this criticism has involuntarily made a mistake. Helen Keller's
father died in 1896, while her mother visits her three children in
turn, her married daughter Mildred, her son Philip, a young and
clever engineer, and Helen herself. They live far apart, in
separate towns, which accounts for the infrequency of their
visits, which are, nevertheless, fairly regular and last a long time.
This is sufficient proof of the loyalty of Helen Keller's feelings
for her mother and her brothers and sisters, and it must be re-
membered that circumstances have of necessity tied her to the
beloved instructress who has devoted her life to her help.
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 161
lies in this — that in each of the cases in point, the
education of these triply afflicted people has been
perfectly appropriate to its subjects and its objects.
That of Marie Heurtin, condemned by circumstances
to a limited horizon, and to spend her life in the
quiet of a religious asylum, has been one developed
by charity and wisdom. That of Helen Keller, a
woman of genius, adapted to the highest enjoyment
of a vast amount of knowledge, has answered not
less adequately to the mental needs which it
satisfied. I cannot believe that constant brooding on
the possible joys of a life hereafter would have added
in any way to her present happiness, to the graces of
her character, or to her capacity for returning the
devotion which she has received by an equal devotion
to those who suffer. From the contrast between
Larnay, the Perkins Institute and Wrentham Villa
any impartial observer may perceive the necessity
for adapting the education of each of the victims of
nature to her natural tastes and capacities, and to
the conditions of her surroundings.
This fact is of real importance, for a little egois-
tically, we have only contemplated, in the preceding
chapters, the moral and material profit which the
L
162 MAN'S MIRACLE
human race may gain from the study of these mis-
fortunes. There is, however, another point of view
which we must not neglect — that of the means to
employ for assuring and perfecting still further the
well-being of the afflicted themselves. The sum
total of the deaf and dumb persons in the world
would constitute the equivalent of the population of
a large town. The blind from birth, or blind from
accident, would fill another. According to statistics,
not quite complete, in 1909, the known cases of blind
and deaf mutes (*) were then 338, eight cases being
blind deaf and mute from birth. By an apparent
paradox the number seems to increase with the advance
of science, for these terrible organic deficiencies
generally accompany diseases which formerly medical
(1) Although the statistics do not give the causes of these
extreme cases treated to-day in six different establishments —
Boston, New York, Venersborg (Sweden), Nowawes (Germany),
Edinburgh, and the small number of blind and deaf mutes at
Larnay — the principal causes seem to be marriages of consan-
guinity, at least as often as alcoholism or hereditary physical
taint. This is proved by the relatively large number of the
"triply infirm" in Scandinavian countries where intoxicating
drink is strictly prohibited, and where marriages between cousins
(first) or other near relations are exceptionally numerous. An
enquiry might, perhaps, reveal some cases of this nature in the
Island of Marken, in the gulf of Zuyder-zee, inhabited, it is known,
by descendants of the Vikings, who, living in a distinct colony
under the flag of the Netherlands marry exclusively between each
other without mixing with the Dutch in the neighouring islands.
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 163
skill could not touch, while to-day it is able to snatch
from death many of these poor creatures whom he
has already three-quarters mutilated. ( J )
There are thus legions of unfortunate beings, who
while forming an extraordinarily instructive study
for mankind, have a right to collective help. Such
collective assistance is bound to be rendered, as I
have already said in other words, with our new
facilities for rapid intercommunication, and the sense
of our responsibilities toward our neighbour which is
steadily on the increase. It may also be increased by
the regular interchanges of views between all the
institutions for the treatment of such cases. We need
not fear that the comparison of results obtained in the
different houses of " miracle" will result in the adoption
of a uniform education (such as Dr. Sangrado's) which
ignores the profound difference between one case and
another. On the contrary, it will confirm the necessity
for assimilating the best of the rules for physical and
moral culture, and for altering them to the conditions
(1) This is, perhaps, the reason of the relatively large numbers
of blind and deaf mutes in the United States, where medical men
never consider the condition of a patient beyond hope, and who
defy, up to the end, the worst form of complications. Moreover,
it is important to recognise that the cases of blind and deaf mutes
must be more numerous than statistics show, as many families
systematically hide the truth about these afflictions.
L I
164 MAN'S MIRACLE
of the various subjects of treatment, as we vary the
seed according to the climate and quality of the soil.
From this springs the justification of the different
systems applied in one case to Laura Bridgman, in
another to Helen Keller, and then again to Marie or
Marthe Heurtin.
Another fact — a little humiliating for our old
Europe — is evident from this universal work. We
shall see the pecuniary inferiority of our society —
compared with that of the United States — for recon-
stituting these wrecks of individuals into happy
and active living beings. Many aspects of the tumul-
tuous civilisation of America are tarnished in our eyes
by the excess of practical pre-occupation and the
vulgar theatrical attitudes which accompany them.
But we must do justice to Washington's posterity
for their philanthropic munificence, which covers ours
with shame, even if we take into consideration the
disproportion of wealth between the New World and
the Old, on account of the disproportion of respective
military charges and other causes. Even if a grain
of vanity is at the bottom of the generous gifts
of so many rich men beyond the Atlantic, what
WITH THE CHILDREN OF THE MIRACLE 165
matter? They produce no less rich a harvest of
good.
In America there is a great rivalry for the title of
Maecenas. To give money, accumulated in industry
or finance, to help the poor and ignorant has lately
become a habit, while it promises to become a tradition.
Dollars fall like rain into the hands of those who help
the afflicted to regain their footing on the ladder of the
world. So much so, that when we meet, as I have met,
French teachers of the deaf and dumb, or blind, and
mention the wonders accomplished in their profession
on the banks of the Charles river, or the Hudson, one
always hears the plaintive remark: "They are so rich
over there, and they give so much! Suffering is
accustomed to hide its false modesty and to cry aloud
for charity — and charity is so contagious that the
country is a field of rivalry, where each races to be
the first to do good. Ah, if only our habits did not
limit our means of action so miserably!"
This is the sad parallel which we draw, in comparing
what is done in America with what is done in Europe,
for the miseries that nature inflicts on individuals.
While encouraging each nation to borrow from others
the special educational methods suited to this or that
166 MAN'SIMIRACLE
case, this international enquiry will, no doubt, awaken
at the same time a salutary remorse amongst all,
whether public societies or wealthy individuals, who
might so easily help the operations of "human
Providence " and who at present hold back.
True, intimate and sincere compassion is, without
doubt, a virtue as much with us as with the people of
any other latitude. But in Europe there are as many
rich men with a false sense of shame, as there are poor.
Not merely is almsgiving practised with discretion on
account of the counsel of Christ as to the right
hand and the left — but, often, it is not practised at
all, from fear of the ridicule attaching to every kind
of display of pity or sentiment, in a society anxious
to assume an air of cynical scepticism, and afraid
of being despised for sentimental weakness.
But it is an attitude which will change, if encouraged
to do so, since it is only a conventional mask that
hides a nature fundamentally different.
CHAPTER VII
From the Crow's Nest
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 M.M.
BERGSON AND SCHURE. GOD AND MAN. CON-
CLUSION.
The connection existing between all things and all
causes strikes us each time that we begin to investigate
any subject. And the study of what I have called
"Man's Miracle," far from disproving the axiom
of "tout est dans tout/' confirms it more strongly.
Have I sufficiently insisted, I wonder, in the pre-
ceding chapters, on the counsels it conveys of self-
confidence, to whoever faces life in a position of serious
inferiority ? If not, I come back to the charge for a
moment, and ask — What child born in a sordid hut,
with eyes to see, and ears and tongue ready to hear,
understand and express himself, could believe he was
168 MAN'S MIRACLE
infallibly condemned to perpetual material or moral
misery, if at the age of mental adolescence he could
compare himself with creatures born without any of
the essential means of communication with their
fellow creatures, and who have conquered these
immense disadvantages? And when he had also
seen these very shortcomings incite them to further
effort, and to a greater success than the majority of
persons highly favoured from their birth, may we not
be sure that initial misfortune, can and ought to help,
instead of hinder, their will, and energy? To say
that a child, rich in fortune, honour and security,
from his cradle, is handicapped by the simple results
of heredity for life, because he has not the strength
to overcome its disillusions, or that he is wearied by
having his desires immediately and invariably satis-
fied, is a truism rather than a paradox. And yet, it
is not useless to repeat again and again that the
more unfortunate life is at the outset, the greater
compensations are in store in the future, provided
that there is a brave heart ready to struggle. A
Helen Keller, whose early youth had been normal,
would probably never have attained to the intellectual
and moral heights she has climbed under the spur of
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 169
adversity. Her example ought to encourage us to
seek for happiness in spite of our surroundings; that
is, as the fruit of natural adversity, and not as the
reward of exceptional advantages. It will convince
us that in this world the first shall be last and the
last first, although this may only come to us in the
far-distant future.
Perhaps the proofs from the cases of Laura Bridg-
man and Helen Keller and Marie and Marthe Heurtin,
may be considered insufficient to prove the unity
of intelligence and consciousness. But in this case I
admit my inability to express my convictions more
powerfully than I have already done. It seems to
me that all has been proved that was capable of proof
when one has said this. Try to teach the most gifted
animal on earth (man excepted) to write and to
speak intelligently and intelligibly — no attempts up
to the present have succeeded ; but only make the same
experiment on a child, a hundred times inferior to this
animal, in that the most indispensable senses are
absent, and you may hope to teach him the principal,
or even all the things that human beings can be taught.
This hope has been realized. Take a watch made this
morning, but which has not been set going. If I can
170 MAN'S MIRACLE
wind it up and make the hands move, it is because
the potentialities of motion were concealed under its
inert and motionless face What other phenomenon
than the pre-existence of an invisible mental spring
will explain the setting in motion of intelligences,
as paralysed and as incapable of motion as those
of a child born into the world without the least
apparent mechanism of perception and comprehen-
sion, except bodily contact with objects around? Let
those who disagree prove their case if they can.
It is doubtful in any case whether they can refuse
to blind and deaf mutes, with otherwise complete
organisations, the position we claim for them as
examples of evolution worthy of the best scientific
research.
If a single bone was all that Cuvier needed to recon-
struct a species, extinct or transformed in the course
of ages, why should we despair of reconstructing
the history of our prototype by observing the
transformation of contemporary beings as meagrely
endowed by nature at the outset of their existence
as their prehistoric ancestors?
I leave to others the task of discovering the
creator of the mental spring without which no one in
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 171
the world could convey to such beings the move-
ments of thought. Whether it be the work of nature
operating on humanity by gradual but infallible
processes, which are still perhaps very far from
their highest point of development, or else of some
conscious and invisible force: that is a question
on which I am not qualified to speak, whatever my
intimate impressions on the subject. But there is no
reason why others should not tread this great but
adventurous path of exploration.
This study, which is not meant for such vast specula-
tions, has no other object than to draw out of the
shadow a few humble truths easy to demonstrate
and more immediately essential, and to establish on a
sounder basis some truths, often conjectured or fore-
seen, but never accepted as proved. Amongst the
answers which it seems to give to a thousand pressing
questions is perhaps the solution to this one : " Does
our morality spring from ancient and artificial con-
ventions which can be altered to-day, or from an
infallible instinct which is essentially necessary and
therefore immutable?"
When one climbs to the crow's nest to obtain a
general view of the surroundings, does it not seem
172 MAN'S MIRACLE
evident that the precepts which, at the extreme
horizon of our civilization, declared the conjugal
union of near relations immoral, are absolutely in
agreement with the higher interests of individuals
and races?
A certain number of cases of blindness, of deafness
and dumbness, or of all three afflictions, are no doubt
pure accidents, without any relation to antecedents.
The case of Helen Keller furnishes us with one
proof, as also that of Marthe Obrecht, another inmate
of Larnay (I) who lost her sight, her hearing and her
speech at the age of three years, during the war of
1870, after a nervous convulsion caused by the
cannonade, musketry, the sight of blood, and other
terrifying manifestations of the war.
But, even more than alcoholism, marriage between
persons of consanguinity remains one of the principal
and persistent causes of these deformities. It is
that, as we have seen, which is the source of a vitiated
blood and poisoned life. And it is no narrow and
(1) Also the case of Anne Marie Poyet, born of healthy-
parents in 1894, who became blind, deaf and dumb at 15 months,
after an accidental and very serious illness. She was sent to
the Institute at Larnay, where she gives promise of good
results. Also the case of Alexis Decramer, a blind, deaf and
dumb inmate of the Institute at Bruges, who is mentioned in
another part of this book.
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 173
absurd prejudice which condemns incest in its higher
and lower degrees, but an intuition, conscious or
unconscious, of the fatal degeneration which follows.
This intuition does not date from Christianity, for
in the heartrending tragedies of Euripides and
Sophocles the Eumenides intervene to punish severely
the passion of Phaedra for her son, and the guilty
though unconscious union between CEdipus and his
mother. Still, Christianity, (l) even while admitting
the union of a brother and sister to be at the base of
their creation — as failing that, the posterity of the first
human couple would have become immediately
extinct — has forbidden marriages between near rela-
tions with the utmost rigour in the name of a moral
ideal, which simply gives expression to the most
elementary physiological laws, and is in every case
in happy agreement with them.
Perhaps one might find at the root of every article
of our moral code, ecclesiastical or political, a similar
(1) The term "Christianity " does not apply here, exclusively to
the Catholic religion, but to all categories of modern religions.
Protestantism, for example, is still more severe than Rome
against consanguinity, or conjugal affinity, to such an extent
that English law prohibited, up to a few years ago, the marriage
of a widower with his sister-in-law, and the law was only repealed
after a century of controversy in Parliament.
174 MAN'S MIRACLE
explanation of its utility, of an alliance of practical
interest with a virtuous ideal. The origin of the
greater part of our infirmities shows that the morality
which forbids the union of relations does not merely
concern the health of the soul, but also that of the body.
This fact once established, the culture of the moral sense
becomes much simpler. For beyond the counsels of
wisdom and goodness which conscience gives us, there
are others, to which we more readily listen, dictated
by our positive interest. If we awaken this interest
and show that it goes hand in hand with the intimate
satisfaction which comes from rectitude and purity
of conduct, our exhortations will have an infinitely
greater chance of being heard. English moralists
take this point of view in such maxims as M Honesty
is the best policy." The churches themselves
rely on the egotistic and self-interested motives of
men in holding out as an inducement to good, and as
a deterrent from evil, the prospect of infinite reward,
or eternal expiation ? The sanctions, however, which
they preach, obtain less and less hold of the imagination.
They are too distant and problematic. When we
have made it clear to all, that faults or errors, without
speaking of crime, must be paid for dearly, inexorably,
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 175
and at no distance of time, we shall have replaced a
religious morality, which is losing its hold on humanity,
by another more efficacious, though there will always
remain a class of persons that reason can never hope
to reach.
To show that this is no mere dream, let us consider
a direct proof to the contrary from one of the cases
before us.
The cousins who married and had nine girls and
boys, seven of whom were terribly abnormal, were
decent people who erred in pure ignorance of the
consequences of their union. One may be sure
that if they had been enlightened beforehand as to
the misfortunes that might arise, they would have
resisted the attraction they obeyed. Especially as
they, themselves, were doomed to suffer as much,
or more, than the victims themselves.
One can imagine the humiliation and anguish of
the parents who give birth to such miserable beings.
In the greater number of these occurrences the
reparation of the evil becomes a new source of
torture for the unhappy parents. The blind and deaf
mute, brought back to consciousness and active life by
long and heroic efforts, often does not know his own
i;6 MAN'S MIRACLE
mother. In the case of Laura Bridgman, and others,
there have been agonising scenes between the parents,
who vainly hold out their arms, and the children, now
free, who take them for strangers and turn away.
The most sacred tie of nature is more or less completely
broken.
The child has now — at least, in his heart — no other
mother than the indefatigable and devoted author of
his spiritual being. The mother who bore him realises
the awful penalty she must pay for her transgression
of those laws of nature of which she was ignorant,
though the simple thought of such a possible torture
would have prevented such a transgression eight times
out of ten. I know that science still hesitates to use
definitely the word " transgression " in such cases.
A school of physiologists maintains that the union of
near relations produces, in certain cases, an improve-
ment instead of a deterioration of the race. But cases
such as those we are considering would seem rather
to tend to militate against this last theory, or may
serve, at least, as an argument against unions which
appear, in principle, so full of misery for parents and
children alike.
For all men and all women capable of any feeling
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 177
of charity, new rules of conduct might be laid
down with the intent to awaken in them an interest
outside of themselves or the immediate moment.
The light that science in the present day has thrown
on the hereditary nature of taints, will authorise a
further development of our recent methods of pueri-
culture. One already hears whispers of pre natal
and ante natal culture, in the sense of a better in-
dividual discipline, for the benefit of the future as
well as for the present. If these theories were
converted into rules, of life they would work marvels.
Old proverbs worn-out, yet still teeming with sig-
nificance have repeated from age to age that the boy
is father of the man. The immense majority of
people only date their responsibility towards their
descendants, from a child's birth. They lose sight
of the endless chain which binds each generation
and each step, to the generations and steps going
before and coming after them.
Many of those who repeat the classical cry of
egoism, " After me, the deluge," mean "After me —
and my kin." But even these, think they have fully
paid their debts to their posterity when they have
M
178 MAN'S MIRACLE
secured for them, for a time, shelter and food.
The evidence, each day more overwhelming, of
hereditary degeneration, will sanction the revelation
to a future parent of the fatal influence which a
fault of youth, a folly of the twenties, the careless
fancy of a day, may have on the character, health,
physique and moral destiny of a whole generation
after him, which no legacy or fortune, however
large, will be able to remedy. Dramatic works such
as Ibsen's "Ghosts," or Brieux' "Les Avaries," have
done much to make many young brains think, and
thus have preserved others in the future from a
fearsome heritage. But although efficacious, the
result of this teaching by the theatre is small and
fleeting. It must be generalised and prolonged by a
systematic and permanent propaganda, enumerating
the grave and far-reaching consequences which
excess of all kinds and marriage between cousins (I)
may have for the future. It belongs to France,
which has erected the brilliant lighthouse of the
Or marriage between old people and young. The great and
unhappy Baudelaire was such a victim, as he says : " I inherit
an execrable temperament from my parents. I am torn to
pieces on account of them. This is what it is to be the child of
a mother of 27 and a father of 62." {Conversations of Baudelaire
with M. Georges Barral).
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 179
Declaration of the Rights of Man, to formulate
with the same precision (at least in the educational
sphere) the Declaration of the Duties of Man first
towards himself, and afterwards to his posterity,
which is menaced as much, or more, than he is, by
his weakness, his ignorance, or his want of fore-
thought.
To a nation which has formulated the rights of
the individual in such a clear and definite manner,
this mission of imprinting on man's conscience
the fact that the first of his duties is to deserve
his rights, legitimately belongs. Many people may
smile at such an attempt to purify an age which
makes a cynical show of impurity. But an age,
which believes and calls itself so perverse, con-
tradicts itself. This very mania, as old as civil-
isation, for professing a bad opinion of the times
and declaring its decadence, seems to betray some
noble regret for not being better, and a longing
for perfection, as far as that is humanly possible.
Certainly no one will deny, that as societies
advance in age, they lose, as do individuals, some-
thing of their early simplicity. It is perhaps a
special characteristic of our age, to affect in regard
MI
180 MAN'S MIRACLE
to moral laws, a much-vaunted indifference which
is contradicted by a thousand daily noble actions
and aspirations towards good. The visibly growing
intensity of the struggle for life forces many to
adopt the attitude of eager gamblers or fierce
combatants, who will stop at nothing. To avoid
being treated as ready dupes of worn-out scruples,
or for fear of appearing old fashioned, we put on a
semblance of depravity and try to hide any praise-
worthy and natural sentiment that we feel, as rich
women hide the glories of their real hair with false,
or, like lilies in our gardens which, blushing to be
taken for lilies, desire to pass in their borrowed
crimson for what M. Henri Lavedan denounces in
his Goilt du vice as "la rose qui pue."
It seems, also, for the moment, as if music itself
had renounced all charm, and had become laborious
and coldly expressive of truths from which it has
previously served as a refuge ; as if poetry had left
the clouds where she had lingered too long, to skim
over the earth, or hover above factory chimneys and
aviation sheds ; as if the cultivation of muscle must
come before that of brain, and sport before art;
that dancing must no longer be a gracious and lovely
FROM THE CROW S NEST 181
movement, but a realistic imitation of the whirl of
a machine, or resemble an indecent turn at a music
hall ; as if the passion of love, sentimentalised
by our fond grandparents, must give place, in the
theatre and perhaps in life, to the primitive desire
for sensual satisfaction. For fear of being taken
for a relic of the age of swords and ruffles, we have
not the courage to appear honest and fastidious,
and prefer to meet every example of idealism with
the croak of the frogs who scoffed at the enthusiastic
crowing of Chanticleer. And this is particularly
apparent at the centre of civilisation, towards
which all ears are turned to catch the word of
command.
No doubt, all these signs of psychic fatigue, of
disenchantment, or spiritual decay, would be danger-
ous if they endured, or if they were not merely the
confused prelude to some moral revival. For if we
persist in any attitude for long enough, we end
by remaining there altogether. But a view of the
progress of humanity suggests the hope that these
are only the symptoms of an ephemeral fashion. It
is true that a gifted observer wrote recently that our
182 MAN'S MIRACLE
century "is a new era, which has separated itself
from its antecedents, and detached from the rest of
history, is going towards the unknown." But this
can only be said or thought with certainty of the
mere surface. This apparent break with the past
holds good only of scientific discovery, which has
suddenly opened to us so many means of loco-
motion, of communication, of sources of energy and
light, of instruments for investigation and conquest,
unknown, although confusedly foreseen, by past
generations. But the human soul has not changed
so far as to become unrecognisable, even if our age
has made such a rapid and measureless advance in
physics. The discovery of the radiograph, or the
creation of the aeroplane, has not broken the thread
which from all time has bound our psychic being
to the past. Our existence is a hundred times
better equipped materially than it ever has been,
for the satisfaction of our immediate and practical
needs. Because the machinery of the world has
made an enormous bound into space, must one
believe that our moral nature has made or will make,
an equal step backwards, and put an immeasurable
distance between the body and the soul? On the
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 183
contrary, does not reason tell us that humanity, when
it recovers from the astonishment and intoxication
caused by its sudden and unexpected material pro-
gress, will become morally better, saner, and more
generous in proportion as its conditions of life have
made it richer in feeling, better equipped in know-
ledge, and more ready to receive the beautiful and
the good?
Of such progress the history of these blind and
deaf mutes, so pitifully handicapped at life's start,
is symbolical. As science has enabled us to trans-
mit the sound of our voices to enormous distances,
to telegraph over the seas, or to travel from one
end of the world to another in less time than it
took, a quarter of a century ago, to traverse a
quarter of Europe, so they have been magically
provided with a new power of perception and re-
ceptivity. The Helen Kellers, the Marie Heurtins,
and, in a less degree, all the blind and deaf mutes in
the world were, at the beginning of their lives, only
animals. The result of their wonderful education
has been to lead them nearer to idealism, not to
estrange them from it. What right then have we
to be pessimistic, to be so certain of our moral
184 MAN'S MIRACLE
degeneration, when we see the actual advance that
social evolution has made, which has led society,
once as undeveloped as were they in their infancy,
to a state of development as high and as complete
as is theirs to-day. But if, as it happens, we are
passing through a period of transition in the sphere
of morality, the example of these poor creatures,
who have been rescued from the darkness in which
they lay, should help to give us confidence in the
future.
One of the many symptoms of the persistence of
the moral ideal is the duel which is being fought
between those who are roughly styled militarists
and pacifists. The two camps obey — perhaps con-
fusedly, but fatally — two equally high ideals. On
the side of peace is the revolt, not only against
the fatal risks which in the past have cost so many
millions of young lives, altering the natural course
of their destiny, but also against the immoral prin-
ciple of hatred and antagonism between races and
people. On the other side — for no one dares
defend war simply as a barbarous sport — is a revolt
against the idea that would hold existence higher
than honour, dignity or justice, and sacrifice the
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 185
interest of a whole people, or of a country, to our
individual cravings for peace and enjoyment. I am
not one of those fanatics who think that " peace at
any price" represents a desirable object, or that
"war at any price M can be justified. But I know
that if I were an anti-militarist I should quote cases
such as the deaf and dumb, the blind, and other
victims of nature, and preach that all the activities,
all the sacrifices, all the aspirations that go to the
fight for victory can find something to satisfy them
in the battle with the eternal coalition of blind
forces that surround human nature and the thirst
for happiness. Again, I may perhaps be allowed to
repeat that the very acuteness of the struggle that
rages round the question of peace and war, and the
limits and latitude to be allowed to the question
respectively by the interests of each collective
human group, viewed as a corporate unit, and the
general desire for universal brotherhood, is in itself
a witness to the moral preoccupation of an age
which is, on the surface, so anxious to advertise a
sneering scepticism and a sensualist outlook on life.
If, however, we are assured that our age is like a
ship going adrift, it is, doubtless, not without some
186 MAN'S MIRACLE
reason. Such words express the uneasiness of many
minds as to how conscience will steer without the
compass furnished by a vanishing religion. Listen
to the philosopher who has written on " Our Moral
Uneasiness." (I) Although imbued with mysticism, he
makes no fetish of this spiritual compass, since he
observes that in the middle ages ' ' vice and crime
were at least as common as they are now/' that
"life was incomparably more cruel and unjust."
But, while maintaining that it was not religion that
created the ideal, but that it is the ideal that created
religion, he asks how we are to fill the void left by
faith, in imaginations which looked upon it as the
counsellor of one's conscience. It is, doubtless, these
contemporary doubts that an acute thinker like
M. Bergson is answering when he tells us not
to listen to reason, or geometrical argument,
those incompetent explorers of the immaterial un-
known, but to trust to instinct to reveal where logic
fails. The same desire to replace, cost what it may,
the religions that are discredited, or on the way to
be so, led another writer, the author of the Grands
Inities and VEvolution divine y to found a new
i Maurice Maeterlinck, L' Intelligence des Fleurs.
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 187
religion of lofty and fantastic design on the ancient
creeds, in which, with all the fascination of a warmly
romantic imagination, he at once revives the old
secrets of the esoteric philosophy and embraces the
evolution of Christianity and its future in all their
vast scope. A more concrete example of the
anxieties of the modern mind in search of some faith
is offered by the career of Mrs. Annie Besant, the
great priestess of Theosophy. She was first married
to a Protestant clergyman whose hard and narrow
bigotry disgusted her with Christianity, and she be-
came the fervent disciple of Charles Bradlaugh, the
English advocate of Atheism. Then, troubled by the
emptiness of simple negation, she caught desperately
at the plank of Indian mysticism, and returned to a
faith, such as it was, by another and very ancient road.
* *
I do not pretend to say here what encouragement,
or causes for alteration, the recent systems that
profess to explain the origin and future of life may
find in the startling phenomenon of the evolution
of the blind and deaf mutes. Perhaps, Henri Bergson
might find in these a new proof of the superiority of
intuition over logical faculties, although we have not
188 MAN'S MIRACLE
seen that instinct by itself led our triply afflicted friends
to the idea of Divinity. (l) Would M. Edouard Schure
have offered Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller to
Darwin and his followers as living proofs of his
theory of an old and degraded ancestor without
eyes or ears, whom he himself assigned to them as
progenitor, and shows us as developing, little by little,
through actual human form, to the grandeur of the
archangels ? The answer to these two points would
be extremely interesting, but it could only be made
by those to whom the question is put.
But, if one confines oneself to patent undeniable
facts, as is my wish, one must first recognise that
the presence in our race of a spiritual root, that is,
of a power lit from within, is clearly shown by the
cases studied in these pages, and secondly, that these
same cases teach us courage, confidence in ourselves
and the high dignity of our condition, whatever con-
jectures may be made as to the source of our
mind and its ultimate destiny. Not that these con-
jectures are useless, and that it is better to rest
(i) As a fact, they were led to it, as we have seen, by education,
and the elementary reasoning which logic suggested. "Nothing
is made by itself. Therefore someone invisible has made the
earth, the flowers, the stars." But it is evidently possible that
this atavistic reasoning was originally dictated by instinct.
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 189
content with the ignorance advocated by agnostics.
The human race would lose one of its chief and most
glorious characteristics the day that it put aside the
most magnificent of its cares, and became indifferent,
as doubtless mere animals are indifferent, to knowing
whence it came and whither it is going. Again, the
transformation that humanity accomplishes in these
triply afflicted persons, strengthens the conviction
that everything is possible to its genius and its daring,
even to the penetration of the enigmas which trans-
cend the gulfs of the past and future. But we must
realise that up till now the noblest of our problems
has not been solved in any manner approximately
certain, or definitely convincing. Perhaps the great
mysteries have been touched, or soon will be, by
science, or by the subconsciousness of each individual.
But will the knowledge which may come in this
century, or in ten or twenty centuries, obtain the
almost unanimous assent without which it will never
serve to govern the general conduct of society ?
However actively the field of theory be excavated
and the thousand parasitical superstitions be got rid
of, it will probably be long before some truth is
unearthed from the depths beneath convincing enough
190 MAN'S MIRACLE
to be universally accepted. Life will probably
continue to appear to the majority of men as an
intelligible moment between the unintelligible
infinities of the past and future. This moment must
remain the one solid foundation for knowledge until
a new order of things arises; therefore, is it not
natural and necessary to prolong it as far as we can,
and cling to it, rather than to the vague fog from
which it emerges and to which it recedes? Can one,
in good faith, expect the majority of human beings
to neglect the immediate and the certain for the
problematic and the distant, about which we are all
so slow to agree? As long as occult truths are
kept from the greater number of eyes, we must take
our stand on tangible facts, and adapt ourselves to
them, as did the first sailors in navigating unknown
seas, or as do Arctic explorers of to-day imprisoned in
ice floes. And if we are told that the consideration
of life as a self-contained and finite entity must
produce demoralisation and evil, we can show that
advice is only an interested sophism, or a mistaken
prejudice,
The loss of belief in Divinity, whether total and
definite, or simply partial and temporary, seems
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 191
to dictate to us duties with which faith dispenses
when it authorises us to delegate our responsibilities.
First of all it must destroy the traditional excuse
provided for egoism by the convenient axiom :
"Each for himself and God for all." And it will
incite all to help the societies which, rightly or
wrongly, do not rely on the intervention of a third
and omnipotent power for the common defence
against the dangers of life. Though the denial of a
Supernatural Providence be a heresy, a sacrilege, yet
the more it is affirmed, the more evident it becomes,
that a human Providence is necessary, such as that
which has made existence more than tolerable for
the afflicted and infirm. Add the greater energy and
initiative which is instilled into an orphan by the
conviction of being isolated, abandoned, and reduced
to rely only on his own resources, and we have the
moral condition of our race, which has come to think
itself orphaned because of the absence of a Father
it believed in. No doubt this prospect offers some
dangers not quite imaginary ; to incorrigibly unmoral
people in whom the fear or hope, encouraged by
religion, restrain indiscipline, it might suggest the
reasoning which Dostoevsky puts into the mouth of a
192 MAN'S MIRACLE
Muscovite : " If there is nothing beyond life, then let
us enjoy it by any means — everything is lawful."
But one of the most remarkable symptoms of our evolu-
tion re-assures us by showing us that such a state of
mind is only exceptional and fleeting. Before a part
of modern consciousness had excluded Divinity from
its vision or presentment; the greater number of con-
sciences, even the humblest and the most prone to
superstition, had effaced the cruel element from its
divinity. One may say without contradiction that in
France, for instance, there is hardly a peasant, even
the firmest believer, who adheres to the idea of hell
and of eternal punishment. That is, that there is an
end to the sarcasm of Voltaire : ' ' If God made man
in his image, man has done the same for God. 5 ' Even
the greater number of those who remain faithful to
the altar have profoundly changed the image of the
tutelary being, placed there for their adoration.
Instead of a God to be dreaded for his ferocious and
exorbitant justice, they only see His almighty power,
infinite goodness, and inexhaustible kindness and
mercy. Here is the luminous indication of a new and
beautiful morality which makes for progression, and
not for retrogression. How can we better the models
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 193
held up to us if we do not better ourselves? The
faith of the man who believed without discussion
in a furiously vindictive Providence corresponded
exactly with the barbarous nature of a society which
practised on each other all the refinements of torture,
and saw God in its own image. Each age has the
gods it merits, and ours is One Whose face, though
turned away from many of us, is for others the ideal
of an age of veritable justice and real love.
Some may object that in softening so far the
divine character we have only made away with
an absurdity, apparent to our good sense, and have
not been fighting against an atrocious conception
condemned by our hearts. Nevertheless, why has the
idea of a supreme and pitiless executioner become
absurd to us, if not that we have become infinitely
more just and charitable, and that our moral sense
could no longer admit of a superior power less just and
charitable than ourselves ? Shall we not find, also, in
spite of a few apparent instances to the contrary, the
proof of our moral progression in the new modes of
material organisation of our existence : for instance,
in our marvellous systems of insurance and friendly
societies ? We are accustomed to see in such organisa-
N
194 MAN'S MIRACLE
tions only the simple combinations of foresight and
practical wisdom. But behind them and their cold
arithmetic shines the principle of moral altruism :
" All for one— one for all." This new star is seen
shining from the top of the crow's nest. Someone
who had the temerity to proclaim the extinction of
the old constellations, neglected to say that others
would be lighted for the general good, for no world
could bear in patience the darkening of the skies.
And our conclusion is this: Instead of a God who
has vanished, or will vanish never to return, man
will find another in himself. Believers and sceptics
only differ on a question of prejudice. According to
the first, our race, on the awakening of conscience,
found their gods in a sublime intuition forced on it by
reality. According to the others, they found them in an
invention equally inspired, in the dream of grandeur,
of beauty, of immortality, by which they desired to
raise themselves above their elementary condition,
that condition being too unhappy and uncertain for
their needs. Whichever of these two versions we
accept for want of a certainty, or while waiting for a
decisive revelation, the results are the same. Man,
whether creature, or creator, has grown incomparably
FROM THE CROW'S NEST 195
superior to all that is before and around him. One
can hardly see anything to hinder his ascent to the
highest physical level, still less to his moral ascent.
Though we may be mistaken in this feeling of a
personal force, independent of any outside power, it
should, I think, serve to exalt our ambition to prove
ourselves worthy. Royalty is more powerful when
it is held sacred by its own claim, than when based on
universal consent. Since man has fashioned a more
perfect God in his own image during these last
centuries, he has, by so doing, acquired for himself a
sort of divinity on the way to perfection, from which
everything may be expected, if it has not reached a
point where further progress is impossible, or from
which it must descend once more. Man must be as
God, until some crushing evidence has convinced him
of wild presumption. In this attainment his morality
may lose, perhaps, the prestige of the melancholy
poetry which the church instils by the severity of its
teaching, its sad ideal, dominated by the crucifix and
death ; but, on the other hand, it will gain by drawing
to it spirits eager for the joy of life, and for living
in the sun — a sun very different from that of the
pagans, extinguished at least by twenty centuries of
n 1
196 MAN'S MIRACLE
Christianity. In any case, we shall never find such a
definitely persuasive proof of the greatness and the
goodness of humanity as the re-creation of such poor
outcasts of nature as these blind and deaf mutes. It is
miracles such as these, whether actual or symbolic,
which, ascribed to Christ, have brought generation
after generation to Christianity. The restoration of
sight to the blind, of the power of movement to
the paralytic, have so impressed our feelings, that
for a long series of centuries they have been open
to dogmas which they have explained and justified.
Mans Miracle, which has been so specially and
brilliantly exemplified in such beings as Helen
Keller and Marie Heurtin, seems to have been
accomplished for the purpose of inspiring in them the
same faith in themselves, and of guiding the virtues
which it betrays towards higher duties and more
complete realisation.
In a fine book (that of M. Arnould, to which I have
made many allusions, and from it borrowed many
details of facts, while differing from his conclusions),
regret is expressed that Marie Heurtin, the product
of one of these miracles, draws far fewer people to
the old capital of Poitou than a beautiful and antique
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FROM THE CROW'S NEST 197
statue of Pallas Athene, excavated ten years ago in a
local garden. The truth is that we ought to con-
template in turn this virgin in stone, and the marvels
in flesh and blood of Larnay and Wrentham Cottage.
They are sisters in origin. All three have sprung
armed, from the brain of the same father, who was
called Jupiter in ancient times, and whose name men
have the right to take to-day.
For the work of our own hands is simply foretold
by the allegories of our fables and marble statues,
and those Olympian marvels were only the forecasts
of our own.
APPENDIX
Text of the letter partially reproduced here, in Ballu
characters.
Monsieur,
Your kind visit has left a very pleasant memory, and
we shall not forget your goodness and amiability.
Yesterday our mistress took us to the aerodrome so
that we might touch the aeroplanes — but, unfortunately,
they had gone away the week before and will not return
for a few days. When they come back we shall go
again, and perhaps be more fortunate, and may have the
pleasure of touching and examining them. I will write
to you again, and tell you my impressions of the aero-
planes.
Please accept, Monsieur, our respectful gratitude, and
kindly remember us to Madame Harry.
Marie Heurtin
Marthe Heurtin
Notre- Dame de Larnay,
September 23, 1912.
Letter from Canon P. A. NAEGHELS, director of the
Institute for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind at Bruges,
on the case of ALEXIS DECRAMER
Monsieur,
Our blind and deaf mute, Alexis Decramer, does not
yet fulfil the hope we had of him. He came to us at
the age of seven, in a purely animal condition. Up to
his twelfth year (i.e., till 1909) he had acquired a know-
ledge of words for current ideas, and a few general ideas
(for example, those of idleness, industry, intelligence,
stupidity), but he rebels against the least manual work,
and is extremely gluttonous.
He sleeps to excess, and he has no control over
terrible fits of temper when the satisfaction of his instincts
is thwarted. He is very strong and muscular, and the
blows he gives, leave their traces for weeks.
He can find his way about alone, where he is accus-
tomed to go. But if a closed door or window stops
him, he will demolish them like straws. His rages also
break out whenever a lesson seems too long.
You can understand how difficult it is to teach this
poor creature. But we do not despair of better results
in the future.
He seems to have an idea of God, without knowing
His name, by the sign that deaf mutes have taught
him (the sign of Jesus Christ: the hands folded, the
middle finger of one in the palm of the other, and vice
versa). He is quiet in church. He can recite the
" Hail Mary! " which he knows on his fingers. But can
he understand words and phrases of religious ideas ?
Cardinal Bourne said to me, when he saw him, " We
do not know what takes place in these souls."
Alexis Decramer never begins a conversation himself,
even by signs. This state of mind does not satisfy me.
Otherwise, he is good, walks in the garden with one
or other of the pupils who can be trusted, and replies to
any question these may ask him by signs or gestures.
He is happy when he is told that anyone has sweet-
meats to give him; he tries to seize these and eat them,
even if his hands are held, to restrain his greediness.
He was born deaf and dumb, but not blind. At the age
of five months, after an attack of scarlatina, he was
discovered to suffer from ophthalmia, without altogether
having lost his sight. His mother exposed his eyes to the
sun; the disease became worse, and blindness followed.
His mother, after taking care of him with the greatest
devotion up to his fourth year, died of grief at the poor
child's infirmity, which from ignorance she had partly
caused. After his mother's death, little Alexis was more
neglected, and finally left to himself; he acquired bad
habits, such as crawling like an animal on the ground, and
hanging on to the feet and legs of any one he met — a
habit which returns to him now, if he sees a strange
person. He has a strong constitution, and his health
would be perfect if he did not spoil it by over- eating.
He does not seem to be the victim of any hereditary
taint; he has a brother who is perfectly normal.
His father, an honest and sober workman, is employed
at the sugar factory at .
(Father) Canon P. M. Naeghels.
WOODS & SONS LTD., PRINTERS, LONDON, N.
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