BLIND

BLIND, an epithet applied to a person or sensitive creature deprived of the use of his eyes; or, in other words, to one from whom light, colours, and all the glorious variety of the visible creation, are intercepted by some natural or accidental disease. Such is the literal acceptance of the term: but it is likewise used in a metaphorical sense, to signify mental or intellectual darkness; and frequently implies, at the same time, some moral or spiritual depravity in the soul thus blinded, which is either the efficient or continuing cause of this internal malady. Yet, even in metaphor, the epithet of blind is sometimes applied to a kind of ignorance, which neither involves the ideas of real guilt nor of voluntary error. It is, however, our present intention to consider the word, not in its figurative, but in its natural and primary sense. Nor do we mean in this place to regard it as a subject of medical speculation, or to explore its causes and enumerate its cures. These are in the department of another science†. It is rather our design to consider, By what means this inexpressible misfortune may be compensated or alleviated to those who sustain it; what advantages and consolations they may derive from it; of what acquisitions they may be susceptible; what are the proper means of their improvement; or by what culture they may become useful to themselves, and important members of society.

There is not perhaps any sense or faculty of the corporeal frame, which affords so many resources of utility and entertainment as the power of vision; nor is there any loss or privation which can be productive of disadvantages or calamities so multiform, so various, and so bitter, as the want of sight. By no avenue of corporeal perception is knowledge in her full extent, and in all her forms, so accessible to the rational and inquiring soul, as by the glorious and delightful medium of light. For this not only reveals external things in all their beauties, in all their changes, and in all their varieties; but gives body, form, and colour, to intellectual ideas and abstract essences: so that the whole material and intelligent creation lie in open prospect, and the majestic frame of nature in its whole extent, is, if we may speak so, perceived at a single glance. To the

blind, on the contrary, the visible universe is totally annihilated; he is perfectly conscious of no space but that in which he stands, or to which his extremities can reach. Sound, indeed, gives him some ideas of distant objects; but those ideas are extremely obscure and indistinct. They are obscure, because they consist alone of the objects whose oscillations vibrate on his ear, and do not necessarily suppose any other bodies with which the intermediate space may be occupied, except that which gives the sound alone: they are indistinct, because sounds themselves are frequently ambiguous, and do not uniformly and exclusively indicate their real causes. And though by them the idea of distance in general, or even of some particular distances, may be obtained; yet they never fill the mind with those vast and exalting ideas of extension which are inspired by ocular perception. For though a clap of thunder, or an explosion of ordnance, may be distinctly heard after they have traversed an immense region of space; yet, when the distance is uncommonly great, it ceases to be indicated by sound; and therefore the ideas, acquired by auricular experiment, of extension and interval, are extremely confused and inadequate. The living and comprehensive eye darts its instantaneous view over expansive valleys, lofty mountains, protracted rivers, illimitable oceans. It measures, in an indivisible point of time, the mighty space from earth to heaven, or from one star to another. By the assistance of telescopes, its horizon is almost indefinitely extended, its objects prodigiously multiplied, and the sphere of its observation nobly enlarged. By these means, the imagination, injured to vast impressions of distance, can not only recall them in their greatest extent with as much rapidity as they were at first imbibed; but can multiply them, and add one to another, till all particular boundaries and distances be lost in immensity. Thus nature, by profusely irradiating the face of things, and clothing objects in a robe of diversified splendour, not only invites the understanding to expatiate on a theatre so extensive, so diversified, and so attractive; but entertains and inflames the imagination with every possible exhibition of the sublime or beautiful. The man of light and colours beholds the objects of his attention and curiosity from far. Taught by experience, he measures their relative distances; distinguishes their qualities; determines the situations, positions, and attitudes; presages what these tokens may import; selects his favourites; traverses in security the space which divides them from him; stops at the point where they are placed; and either obtains them with ease, or immediately perceives the means by which the obstacles that intercept his passage to them may be surmounted. The blind not only may be, but really are, during a considerable period, apprehensive of danger in every motion towards any place from whence their contracted powers of perception can give them no intelligence. All the various modes of delicate proportion, all the beautiful varieties of light and colours, whether exhibited in the works of nature or art, are to them irretrievably lost. Dependent for every thing, but mere subsistence, on the good offices of others; obnoxious to injury from every point, which they are neither capacitated to perceive nor qualified to resist; they are, during the present state of being, rather to be considered as prisoners at large, than citizens of nature. The sedentary life, to which they

privation of sight they are destined, relaxes their frame, and subjects them to all the disagreeable sensations which arise from dejection of spirits. Hence the most feeble exertions create lassitude and uneasiness. Hence the native tone of the nervous system, which alone is compatible with health and pleasure, destroyed by inactivity, exasperates and embitters every disagreeable impression. Natural evils, however, are always supportable; they not only arise from blind and undesigning causes, but are either mild in their attacks, or short in their duration: it is the miseries which are inflicted by conscious and reflecting agents alone, that can deserve the name of evils. These excruciate the soul with ineffable poignancy, as expressive of indifference or malignity in those by whom such bitter portions are cruelly administered. The negligence or wantonness, therefore, with which the blind are too frequently treated, is an enormity which God alone has justice to feel or power to punish.

Those amongst them who have had sensibility to feel, and capacity to express, the effects of their misfortunes, have described them in a manner capable of penetrating the most callous heart. The venerable father of epic poetry, who in the person of Demodocus the Phæatian bard is said to have described his own situation, proceeds thus:

6
Homer.

Τὸν γὰρ Μῦν' ἐκίηται, ἢ δὲ τ' ἀγαθὸν τὸ, κακὸν γὰρ
ὄφθαλμὸς μὲν ἀνείρηται, ἢ δὲ τ' ἀγαθὸν ἀνείρηται. OEDS. 8

'Dear to the muse, who gave his days to flow
With mighty blessings mix'd with mighty woe,
In clouds and darkness quench'd his visual ray,
Yet gave him power to raise the lofty lay. PORR.

Milton, in his address to light, after a sublime description of his arduous and gloomy journey from the regions of primeval darkness to this our visible diurnal sphere, thus continues to apostrophise the celestial beam:

7
Milton.

Taught by the heav'nly muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and rare; thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovereign vital lamp: but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quench'd their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veil'd. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander, where the mutes haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song: but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flow'ry brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallow'd feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit; nor sometimes forget
Those other two equall'd with me in fate,
So were I equall'd with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris, and blind Mæonides,
And Tirefias and Phineus prophets old:
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of ev'n or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever during dark,

Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank,
Of nature's works to me expung'd and ras'd,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.