The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
History
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 1
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
A diseased state of an organ of sense, or of the inner organs connected
with it, will perpetually tamper with the understanding, and unless
there be an energetic and watchful counter-action of the judgment (of
which I have known more than one instance, in which the comparing and
reflecting judgment has obstinately, though painfully, rejected the full
testimony of the senses,) will finally overpower it. But when the organ
is obliterated, or totally suspended, then the mind applies some other
organ to a double use. Passing through Temple Sowerby, in Westmorland,
some ten years back, I was shewn a man perfectly blind; and blind from
his infancy. Fowell was his name. This man's chief amusement was fishing
on the wild and uneven banks of the River Eden, and up the different
streams and tarns among the mountains. He had an intimate friend,
likewise stone blind, a dexterous card player, who knows every gate and
stile far and near throughout the country. These two often coursed
together, and the people here, as every where, fond of the marvellous,
affirm that they were the best beaters up of game in the whole country.
The every way amiable and estimable John Gough of Kendal is not only an
excellent mathematician, but an infallible botanist and zoologist. He
has frequently at the first feel corrected the mistakes of the most
experienced sportsman with regard to the birds or vermin which they had
killed, when it chanced to be a variety or rare species so completely
resembling the common one, that it required great steadiness of
observation to detect the difference, even after it had been pointed
out. As to plants and flowers, the rapidity of his touch appears fully
equal to that of sight; and the accuracy greater. Good heavens! it needs
only to look at him! Why his face sees all over! It is all one eye! I
almost envied him; for the purity and excellence of his own nature,
never broken in upon by those evil looks, (or features, which are looks
become fixtures), with which low cunning, habitual cupidity,
presumptuous sciolism, and heart-hardening vanity, coarsen the human
face,--it is the mere stamp, the undisturbed 'ectypon' of his own soul!
Add to this that he is a Quaker, with all the blest negatives, without
any of the silly and factious positives, of that sect, which, with all
its bogs and hollows, is still the prime sun-shine spot of Christendom
in the eye of the true philosopher. When I was in Germany in the year
1798, I read at Hanover, and met with two respectable persons, one a
clergyman, the other a physician, who confirmed to me, the account of
the upper-stall master at Hanover, written by himself, and countersigned
by all his medical attendants. As far as I recollect, he had fallen from
his horse on his head, and in consequence of the blow lost both his
sight and hearing for nearly three years, and continued for the greater
part of this period in a state of nervous fever. His understanding,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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