MIND IS FUNCTION 193 



HELEN KELLER. Why Helen Keller has succeeded 

 in knowing the relation of so many objective phe- 

 nomena, through the sense of touch, almost alone, is 

 that she was born with a finely organized nervous 

 structure adapted to all five senses, which responded, 

 by the associative brain centers, to sensations of touch. 

 The auditory and optical centers existed in her brain 

 the same as in the brains of those who have these 

 peripheral sense organs. While these centers are not 

 excited in the same way they would be by normal eyes 

 and ears ; yet they are not dormant by any means, in 

 producing, by association, very much of the activity of 

 her consciousness, her correspondence with environ- 

 ment. Her visual brain center is excited, not by sight, 

 but by touch, and thus she has a mental vision. It 

 would have been very different had she been without 

 the neural brain centers of sight and hearing. She 

 is wanting only in the functioning of these peripheral 

 sense organs, not in the brain centers of them. There 

 is no doubt that her education consisted, in the ganglia 

 of the touch centers of the brain, throwing out new 

 fibres to the centers of sight, sound, taste and smell. 

 As these enlarged in number and power, so her 

 knowledge increased. 



Educational institutions can only place the neural 

 structures of the students in contact with a superior 

 environment. In other words, education consists, or 

 should consist, of repeated presentations to the sensory 

 nerves of the most important objective truths, with 

 which the nervous structure, by constant practice, can 

 establish correspondence, and build up a method and 

 memory. This is usually done by means of printed 

 books, containing the best ideas, and by oral lectures 

 conveying the most important objective truths. But 



