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It is certainly remarkable, that the deaf and dumb should have been almost universally regarded, in every age, as beings placed, in respect to mental endowments, somewhere between man and the brute creation. Deafness, in itself, implies no deficiency of intellect. A man of education may become deaf; still his powers of mind will lose nothing of their vigor or activity. Blindness, in like manner, may supervene, without impairing, in the slightest degree, the mental faculties. The nerves which subserve these senses, and the mechanical apparatus with which they are connected, constitute only certain means of communication between the external world, and the intelligence within. They form no part of the intelligence itself. Let them be destroyed or paralyzed, and the communication is indeed cut off, or rendered imperfect; but the soul, the recipient of information through the channel of the sense impaired, suffers, in consequence, a merely negative loss, -- a loss which consists in the failure, from that time forward, on the part of the sense impaired, to continue its usual observation upon external things, and to convey their results to the mind. To be deaf from birth, therefore, is not necessarily to belong to a class of beings of an inferior order of intellect, but only to be deficient in that species of information, which it is the province of the ear to collect without effort. It is to be ignorant, not weak, stupid, or savage. It is, indeed, to be ignorant in a very high and even fearful degree, -- to be ignorant of history in its widest sense, of science, and of morality, save in its first instinctive glimmerings; to be ignorant of language, the great store-house of knowledge; and, above all, to be ignorant of religion, -- to be, literally and strictly, 'without God in the world.' We are too apt to attribute ignorance to natural inferiority of intellect, even when the cause is palpable, -- at least we too often associate these two accidents together. Thus have the deaf and dumb been judged deficient in intellect, because they were found to be so in that amount of information, which, in their circumstances, could only have been acquired by a miracle.

Still more surprising is the circumstance, that the education of these ignorant minds should so long have been regarded as a self-evident impossibility. To account for this, we must refer to another propensity of our nature, which is to believe, that things cannot easily exist otherwise than as we have known them. That order of events to which we have been long accustomed, or which, within our individual observation, has been invariably the same, seems at length to become the necessary order, and assumes the character and importance of a law, a departure from which would excite in us no less surprise, than to behold the sun rising in the west. Through the ear we have ourselves acquired our mother tongue. Through the ear we have learned the use of those visible characters, representing sounds, by means of which speech is depicted to the eye. Thus, through the ear, we have become possessed of all our means of accumulating knowledge, or of communicating with our fellow-men. And thus we conclude, that the ear must always be the channel, through which the mind is to acquire that species of knowledge, which this organ has been the means of conveying to us. But we conclude hastily.

Let us suppose society in its infancy, possessed of no language whatever. The eye and the ear equally present themselves, as instruments, through which a communication may be established between man and man. In the first instance, the eye offers the only means of intelligible intercourse. It is through the medium of signs addressed to this organ, that the value of other signs, more convenient in use, but infinitely more arbitrary, having sound as their basis, and addressing the intelligence through the eye, is gradually determined. This, which must necessarily take place in the circumstances supposed, is what does actually occur in the history of every infant, who learns his mother tongue, as is commonly supposed, entirely through the ear. It is what must take place in the case of a voyager, unexpectedly cast upon an unknown coast, and compelled to hold intercourse with a people, speaking an unknown language. For him articulate sounds assume their real character; they appear as the mere conventional representatives of ideas: and whether he desire to make known his wants, to recount the history of his misfortunes, to awaken compassion, to implore relief and protection, or to deprecate cruelty, he finds himself compelled to abandon signs which are merely arbitrary, and to resort to those which are the suggestion of nature, -- to become, for the time being, dumb, and, with whatever art he may possess, to address the understandings of those whom he desires to influence, through the eye alone.

Ideas, then, may obviously associate themselves directly with visible signs, without regard to spoken language, -- without regard, in short, to articulate and audible sounds. Hence it follows, that those who are naturally destitute of the sense of hearing are not to be considered as incapable of intellectual culture. The degree to which their improvement may be carried is a farther question, and for the purpose of solving it, it is of high importance, to an instructor of the deaf and dumb, to determine the intellectual and moral condition, previously to all instruction, of those to whom his labors are devoted. This, indeed, seems absolutely necessary, that he may acquaint himself with the magnitude of his task, and ascertain the point at which his labors are to commence. The natural history of the deaf and dumb has, accordingly, occupied the attention, to a greater or less degree, of every instructer. The conclusions to which the investigations of different men have led them, have, nevertheless, exhibited nothing like uniformity; and, in many instances, nothing like justice toward the unhappy objects upon which they were exercised. So severe, indeed, are the judgments emanating from men who rank among the most able, intelligent and humane of those who have devoted their lives to this subject, so humiliating a picture do they present us in their delineations of a being, possessing certainly a soul, if not a language, and so little do we find in our own observations to justify their opinions and statements, that we are led with astonishment to set them in contrast with the ordinary acuteness displayed by their authors, and to inquire if it be possible that such sentiments can proceed from such men. The Abbé de l'Epée, whose name is synonymous with benevolence, ranks uneducated deaf and dumb persons with the brutes that perish. (2) The Abbé Sicard, his illustrious successor, declares that a ' deaf and dumb person is a perfect cypher in society, a living automaton, a statue, such as Condillac and Bonnet have represented him. He possesses not even that sure instinct, by which the animal creation are guided. He is alone in nature, with no possible exercise of his intellectual faculties, which remain without action, without life. As to morals, he does not even suspect their existence. The moral world has no being for him, and virtues and vices are without reality.' (3)

(3) Cours d'instruction d'un sourd-muet de naissance. 3d edition, Paris, 1803.