20G MYTH AND SCIENCE. 



some analogous means, animals and man think in 

 images, and the relations between these images are 

 observed in the shnultaneousness and succession of 

 their real differences ; these images are combined, 

 associated, and compared by the development of reflex 

 power, and hence arises the estimate of their concrete 

 relations. Of this we have another proof, observed by 

 Romanes in a lecture on the intelligence cf animals, 

 and confirmed by myself, in the condition of deaf- 

 mutes before they are educated, in whose case the ex- 

 trinsic sign and figure takes the place of the phonetic 

 and articulate sign. Where speech is wanting, it is still 

 possible to follow a conscious and imaginative process 

 of reasoning, but not to rise to the higher abstract 

 ideas which may be generated by such reasoning. 

 The thought of deaf-mutes always assumes the most 

 concrete form, and one who was educated late in life 

 informed Eomanes that he had always before thought 

 in images. I know no instance of a deaf-mute who 

 has independently attained to an advanced intel- 

 lectual stage, or who has been able without education 

 to form any conception of a supernatural world. E. 

 S. Smith asserts that one of his deaf-mute pupils 

 believed, before his education, that the Bible had 

 been printed in the heavens by a printing press of 

 enormous power ; and Graham Bell speaks of a deaf- 

 mute who supposed that people went to church to 

 do honour to the clergyman. In short, the intellectual 

 condition of uneducated deaf-mutes is on a level with 



