11. We may sometimes be led to assign much of the development of man's peculiar powers, to the influence of external circumstances. And that the development of those powers is so influenced, we cannot doubt; but their development only, not their existence. We have already said that savages, living a precarious and miserable life, occupied incessantly with providing for their mere bodily wants, are not likely to possess language, or any other characteristic of humanity, in any but a stunted and imperfect form. But, that manhood is debased and degraded under such adverse conditions, does not make man cease to be man. Even from such an abject race, if a child be taken and brought up among the comforts and means of development which civilized life supplies, he does not fail to show that he possesses, perhaps in an eminent degree, the powers which specially belong to man. The evidences of human tendencies, human thoughts, human capacities, human affections and sympathies, appear conspicuously, in cases in which there has been no time for external circumstances to operate in any great degree, so as to unfold any difference between the man and the brute; or in which the influence of the most general of external agencies, the impressions of several of the senses, have been intercepted. Who that sees a lively child, looking with eager and curious eyes at every object, uttering cries that express every variety of elementary human emotion in the most vivacious manner, exchanging looks and gestures, and inarticulate sounds, with his nurse, can doubt that already he possesses the germs of human feeling, thought and knowledge? that already, before he can form or understand a single articulate word, he has within him the materials of an infinite exuberance of utterance, and an impulse to find the language into which such utterance is to be moulded by the law of his human nature? And perhaps it may have happened to others, as it has to me, to know a child who had been both deaf, dumb, and blind, from a very early age. Yet she, as years went on, disclosed a perpetually growing sympathy with the other children of the family in all their actions, with which of course she could only acquaint herself by the sense of touch. She sat, dressed, walked, as they did; even imitated them in holding a book in her hand when they read, and in kneeling when they prayed. No one could look at the change which came over her sightless countenance, when a known hand touched hers, and doubt that there was a human soul within the frame. The human soul seemed not only to be there, but to have been fully developed; though the means by which it could receive such communications as generally constitute human education, were thus cut off. And such modes of communication with her companions as had been taught her, or as she had herself invented, well bore out the belief, that her mind was the constant dwelling-place, not only of human affections, but of human thoughts.