Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/669

Rh and brained the officer, and when brought into court could hardly be restrained from inflicting the same punishment upon the constable's assistants whom he recognized there. He was acquitted, on the ground that, being entirely ignorant of the legal rights of the case, he had only obeyed one of the first laws of nature in defending his father and his property.

The uneducated deaf-mute never rises to the conception of a God or Great First Cause. If he reasons at all on the subject, he concludes things have always been as they are, or as one expressed it, "it was natural to be so." He has no idea of a life beyond the grave, nor of future rewards and punishments. The more intelligent will work out philosophies not of creation but of physical phenomena, sometimes strangely like the mythologies of the ancients, and the similarity of these myths indicates how naturally the primitive mind materializes and seeks explanation of phenomena by the generalizations of personal experience. The association of causes is sometimes ludicrous.

An English deaf-mute boy observing that he could raise quite a strong wind with his mother's bellows, naturally concluded that the wind which sometimes took his hat off in the street came from the mouth of a gigantic bellows. He never stopped to inquire who blew the bellows. A little girl imagined that the plants which spring up from year to year in the fields and woods were like those in her mother's garden, planted and watered by "some woman"—an infantile conception, in which, however, may be traced a kindred germ to the old Greek notions respecting nymphs and dryads. One lad, struck by the similarity between flour falling from a mill and snow falling from the clouds, concluded that snow was ground out of a mill in the sky. A more poetical notion was that of a little fellow who thought the soft, feathery snow-flakes in the winter were the falling blossoms of unknown orchards in the sky, of which hailstones in summer were the icy fruit. Some suppose thunder and lightning to be the discharge of firearms in the sky, a notion the converse of that of the Aztecs, who believed the Spaniards were gods armed with thunder and lightning.

Thus it is that human nature repeats itself, and that deaf-mute children left, by their inability to profit by the experience of their elders, in a prolonged infancy exemplify, in their efforts to account for the phenomena of nature, many of the fancies that prevailed in the infancy of society.

But if this primitive mind fails to grasp the idea of a Great First Cause, it is equally clear that ethical distinctions are also lacking; and this belief is supported by good authority among those who have intimate acquaintance with this peculiar class. Abbé Sicard says of the deaf-mute: "As to morals, he does not suspect their existence. The moral world has no being for him, and virtues and vices are without reality." "The deaf and dumb," says Herr Eschke, of Berlin, an eminent teacher, "live only for themselves. They acknowledge no social bond, they