652 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



have no notion of virtue. Whatever they may do, we can impute their 

 conduct to them neither for good nor for evil." Herr Caesar, of Leipsic, 

 corroborates this testimony. " The deaf and dumb," says he, " com- 

 prehend neither law nor duty, neither justice nor injustice, neither good 

 nor evil ; virtue and vice are to them as if they were not." 



The proof of this moral deficiency by deaf-mute testimony is not so 

 easily obtained, for the reason that the deaf-mute early learns by 

 parental discipline to attach certain consequences to certain acts, and, 

 when he becomes^educated enough to be questioned concerning moral 

 perceptions, he has forgotten the time when he did not have what he 

 calls conscience, but which is no more like the theological definition of 

 conscience than is the feeling that makes a dog slink away when de- 

 tected in wrong-doing. I am not jDrepared to say that animals have no 

 conscience ; indeed, I am quite sure they have the same kind of inward 

 monitor that an uneducated deaf-mute has : child and pup are alike 

 restrained by severe tones and a switch, only the pup learns the most 

 readily. You can teach a hungry dog to watch a piece of meat quicker 

 than a child can be brought to resist the temptation of stealing cherries. 

 Both respond to the gentle culture of caress and kindness, though the 

 dog is the more boisterous in his acknowledgments. Indeed, every parent 

 who has watched the development of an infant must have noticed how 

 like the means used in training animals is the method of child-educa- 

 tion. There are the same warning tones, the thwarting of desires, the 

 resort to punishment, and the smiling face, the nod of assent, the 

 rewards of well-doing, and the petting of approbation. With the child 

 there is much iteration of reference to right and wrong ; but it is the 

 rewards and punishments which he understands, and not the wordy 

 appeal to the higher motives. 



That this is true of the imeducated deaf-mute naturally follows from 

 his peculiar symbols of thought. He thinks in images, and the signs 

 he makes grow out of and represent these images. His ideas are con- 

 crete, in the sense that he seldom arrives at general conclusions, his 

 judgment being exercised on particular cases that have fallen under his 

 observation, and which he recognizes when they occur again. Morality 

 is an abstraction that goes beyond the reach of his instruments of 

 thought, and it is only as he comes within the larger capacities of the 

 sign-language as developed and used in institution-life that he can be 

 brought to the level of spiritual conceptions, and to do this we have 

 continually to make stepping-stones as it were out of his own crude 

 and imperfect mental imagery. In this respect the deaf-mute does not 

 differ from the many lower races whose language is so wanting in 

 expressions for spiritual truths that missionaries are obliged to use the 

 most material words from the meager vocabularies of the savages to 

 express their novel messages of mercy and peace. 



That what we call the dictate of conscience is only another name 

 for an act of judgment and reason, seems evident from the difficulty one 



