nature, his affections, his sentiments, and his
conscience, in the deep sense of the term,
have never been reached at all. It is easy to
see how this must be, if we look at the case
from an early stage.

If he is so fortunate as to be destined to
good special school training, still he must
spend his first years at home. Now, how is
he to be taught anything? He can be taught,
of course, to wash and dress himself, and
behave properly at table; to imitate, in short,
what he sees. But how can he get any real
knowledge? He can draw, if shown how,
what is before his eyes; and he can draw the
letters of the alphabet, and words, as easily
as anything else. But how is he to learn
what letters and words mean? Some words,
nouns signifying what he sees, he presently
learns. The cat, papa's hat, the table, a
spoon, and the like, he can soon join with the
written word; and he may even get so far as
to fit the word table to all tables, and the
word spoon to all spoons. But how will you
teach him the days of the week? It is no
easy matter to make him attend to what a
day is; for it is a sort of abstract idea; and
when you come to separating the days by
name, when to the child they are all alike;
and when the separation ends at seven, and
the same names then begin again, how can
you make such a complicated affair
understood by a child to whom you cannot explain
it? Before he can get any true notion of it, he
must have some idea of what time means; and
how can you give him that? The only
way of beginning is to use the external appearance
of a day—Sunday, for instance,—as a
starting point, and let constant repetition
teach the rest. There are no church bells for
him; but he sees papa at home that day;
and that people are dressed differently from
other days; and that they go out at a
particular hour, in a grave sort of way; and
that no sewing is done, and so on. The word
Sunday is shown him, and he probably writes
it every morning when he sees these appearances.
The next day, he writes Monday, and
is aware in his own mind that it comes next
to Sunday. In course of time he knows all
the seven; but it is only knowing names,
after all. The thousand associations that
cluster round the idea of a day do not exist
for him whose mind has never really
communicated with any other. What, then, can be
about such abstract ideas as truth,
justice, or nine-tenths of the matters we talk
about? Without agreeing with Aristotle,
that the deaf and dumb are and must be
altogether brutish, or with Condillac, that
they have no memory or reasoning power, we
have no doubt whatever, that the impossibility
of ever giving them the ordinary access to
abstractions renders them necessarily and
always the lowest class of rational beings.
Their case is infinitely worse than that of the
born blind, on this ground—: the blind have
to go without an immense deal of knowledge;
but they are not precluded from thought as
deaf mutes are. This view of the case may
be surprising to some people, who are rather
romantic, and who have not watched the life
of any deaf and dumb person with an open
mind. It was a sad misfortune to the class
that the attempts—noble and most glorious
attempts—to retrieve their condition, were
first made when men's minds were in a highly
metaphysical condition, and they saw
everywhere whatever they looked for, and could
believe whatever they imagined. Hence
arose the popular notion—the very opposite
of Aristotle's—that deaf mutes were a kind
of sacredly-favoured class, cut off from vulgar
associations, but endowed with an infinite
soul, working purely in a kind of retreat from
the world. The delusion was confirmed by
the pretty poetical sort of things that the
first pupils in the schools used to write, in
pretty broken language. But, if the benevolent
visionaries who repeated these things
had lived five years with deaf mutes, seeing
what was the arrogance and violence of their
tempers, the childishness of their moods, and
the astounding ignorance of the commonest
things, and most necessary ideas, that now
and then peeped out from amidst the flowers
of their expression, the spectacle would have
been a most bewildering one. Their whole
notion of the case is, in fact, a wrong one.
That interior power, supposed to be so active
and blessed, has never been awakened, and
the highest part of the human being is as if it
did not exist. There have been a few cases of
cure, of hearing being obtained, and, of course,
language and mental training, after the best
deaf-mute education had apparently
succeeded. What those persons have told of the
state of their minds—of their ideas of God, in
particular—is too sad and too terrible to be
cited here. It is enough to say that they had
no ideas whatever on any abstract subjects
till they were expressly communicated at
school, and then they were at once so low and
so wild, that they will not bear quotation.
Yet, because the pupils use pretty similes,
and write down pretty sentiments, they are
supposed to mean what we should mean by
the same similes and sentiments. The difference
is tremendous: no less than this—that
in their case there is the sign without the
thing signified, and the sentimental phrase
without the radical feeling under it. We must
not grow too abstract. What we have said
may be enough to show the depth of the
misfortune that deaf mutes labour under. One
fact in their case may be cited as an illustration
of what we mean.

In large educational establishments for the
deaf and dumb, it is found that a vast majority
of the pupils who must have a vocation,
wish to be artists. It is found that this
will not do at all. Most of them can draw to
a certain extent, and some with considerable
skill; but as artists they fail utterly (though
they themselves do not think so!) All the