The second instance, is of those who are born blind, and continue sightless through life. A person under such total privation of vision, must be exempt from those phantasms or Ideas, that are connected with, or are the residuary contingents on visual perception: yet the blind acquire speech, when young, with equal facility, as the children who enjoy sight; but visible objects must, to them, be abstract or complex terms, as all such necessarily are, that cannot be the objects of perception. The other sensitive organs, and especially the touch, to a limited extent, become the substitutes for visual defect, although they are no actual compensations for sight. By models the blind can become acquainted with alphabetic characters, and unite them into words: and in the same manner discriminate, and record the musical notes. Some of the blind have become highly intelligent, and have excelled in conversational acuteness; and as human beings have left the deaf and dumb in the rear, notwithstanding the latter are furnished with all the _Ideas_ that can be inherited from sight. This constant employment of words, impregnated with meaning, affords the blind considerable facility in acquiring information by pertinent questions, and enables him to communicate his thoughts with precision and correctness. These words, and the intelligence that resides in them, are the only sources of his knowledge, (his perceptions being commuted for words,) and the meaning they import is all that it is necessary for him to comprehend. It may here be repeated that the capacity by which man exclusively exercises the range of thought by sounds that are significant, and receives from others the same oral intelligence, has no material basis that we can possibly detect or logically infer: but must be considered an endowment of infinite power and wisdom.