MAMMALIA — MAN. 47 



as yet but imperfectly. Soon after, some able divines questioned him con- 

 cerning his ideas of his past state ; and principally with respect to God, his 

 soul, the moral beauty of virtue, and deformity of vice. The young man, 

 however, had not directed his solitary speculations into that channel. He 

 had gone to mass indeed with his parents, had learned to sign himself with 

 the cross, to kneel down, and to assume all the grimaces of a man in the 

 act of devotion. But he did all this without any manner of knowledge of the 

 intention or the cause ; he saw others do the like, and that was enough for 

 him. He knew nothing even of death, nor did it ever enter into his mind. 

 He led a life of pure animal instinct ; and though entirely taken up with 

 objects of sense, and such as were present, he did not seem to have made 

 such reflections even upon these, as might reasonably have been expected. 

 The young man was not, however, deficient in understanding ; but the un- 

 derstanding of a man, deprived of all commerce with others, is so very con- 

 fined, that the mind is in some measure totally under the control of its 

 immediate sensations." 



It is highly possible, nevertheless, to communicate ideas to deaf men, 

 which they previously wanted, and even to give them very precise notions 

 of abstract and general subjects, by means of signs and of letters. A person 

 born deaf, may, by time and application, be taught to read, to write, and 

 even, by the motions of the lips, to understand what is said to him ; a plain 

 proof how much the senses resemble, and may supply the defects of each 

 other. It is probable, however, that, as most of the motions of speech are 

 made within the mouth by the tongue, the knowledge from the motion of 

 the lips can be but very confined. 



The sense of feeling is spread over the whole body, but it employs itself 

 differently in different parts. The sensation which results from feeling, 

 cannot be excited otherwise than by the contact and immediate application 

 of the superficies of some foreign body to that of our own. If Ave apply a 

 foreign body against the breast, or upon the shoulder of a man, he will feel 

 it ; that is, he will know that there is a foreign body which touches him : but 

 he will not have a single idea of the form of this body, because the breast 

 touching the body in a single plane 01 surface, he cannot gather from it any 

 knowledge of this body. It is the same with respect to all other parts of the 

 body, which cannot adjust themselves upon the surface of foreign bodies, 

 and bend themselves to embrace, at one time, many parts of their super- 

 ficies. These parts of our body cannot, therefore, give any just idea of their 

 form ; but those which, like the hand, are divided into many small, flexible, 

 and moveable parts, and which, consequently, can apply themselves, at one 

 and the same time, upon the different planes of the superficies of the body, 

 are those, w\ich, in effect, give us the ideas of their form and of their size. 



It is not, therefore, only because there is a greater quantity of nervous 

 tufts, at the extremity of the fingers than in any other part of the body — it 

 is not, as it is vulgarly pretended, because, the hand has the most delicate 



