44 Major Pricx’s Extracts from the Mualijat-i-Ddra Shekohi. 
such circumstances, to the dumb, the deaf, and the blind ; a proof that man 
requires both eye, and tongue, and ear, other than what he possesses in 
common with his fellow creatures. 
I shall lastly state, that speech is the sign of reason, and reason is to the 
soul the essential principle, as writing is the manifestation of reason pro- 
duced. Hence it is, that either of two intelligent persons, when so dis- 
posed, can invent a writing which none but himself can read, and a 
language which none but himself shall comprehend. So also a child, when 
the speaking faculty impels, is observed, in his efforts to speak, to give 
names of his own to limbs or members of which he has not learnt the 
names. But a person who has no knowledge of writing makes no attempt 
at writing, though the latter be an attainment to be acquired by human 
application, while speech or reason is the spontaneous gift of the Deity. 
He that is intimate with the arrangements and gradations of mathema- 
tical science, soon finds that each separate science opens to him another eye 
and another ear, and furnishes him with another tongue, with neither of 
which he was before acquainted. When a man disregards the dictates of 
wisdom, and will neither submit to labour nor study in the pursuit of 
knowledge, the eye is closed to him by which he might contemplate the 
figures in geometry, and so is the ear against hearing the arguments and 
decisions of the judicious; and the senses of sight and hearing, which he has 
received from his Creator, are to him thus rendered unavailing. 
DISCOURSE THE THIRD. 
ON THE EXTERNAL SENSES, 
Tue mind of man acquires the faculties of speech and writing, which are 
the sources of knowledge, through the medium of the two senses of sight 
and hearing: hence I have taken occasion to enlarge on the external 
senses in general. The five senses in the body are to the mind as so many 
instruments by which it derives its comprehension of things. Among the 
senses, some are however of greater excellence or importance than others. 
This superiority consists in their greater or lesser tendency to good or evil ; 
in their effect to enable the animal to seek that which is good, and to avoid 
that which is pernicious. 
