Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/670

652 have no notion of virtue. Whatever they may do, we can impute their conduct to them neither for good nor for evil." Herr Cæsar, of Leipsic, corroborates this testimony. "The deaf and dumb," says he, "comprehend neither law nor duty, neither justice nor injustice, neither good nor evil; virtue and vice are to them as if they were not."

The proof of this moral deficiency by deaf-mute testimony is not so easily obtained, for the reason that the deaf-mute early learns by parental discipline to attach certain consequences to certain acts, and, when he becomes educated enough to be questioned concerning moral perceptions, he has forgotten the time when he did not have what he calls conscience, but which is no more like the theological definition of conscience than is the feeling that makes a dog slink away when detected in wrong-doing. I am not prepared to say that animals have no conscience; indeed, I am quite sure they have the same kind of inward monitor that an uneducated deaf-mute has: child and pup are alike restrained by severe tones and a switch, only the pup learns the most readily. You can teach a hungry dog to watch a piece of meat quicker than a child can be brought to resist the temptation of stealing cherries. Both respond to the gentle culture of caress and kindness, though the dog is the more boisterous in his acknowledgments. Indeed, every parent who has watched the development of an infant must have noticed how like the means used in training animals is the method of child-education. There are the same warning tones, the thwarting of desires, the resort to punishment, and the smiling face, the nod of assent, the rewards of well-doing, and the petting of approbation. With the child there is much iteration of reference to right and wrong; but it is the rewards and punishments which he understands, and not the wordy appeal to the higher motives.

That this is true of the uneducated deaf-mute naturally follows from his peculiar symbols of thought. He thinks in images, and the signs he makes grow out of and represent these images. His ideas are concrete, in the sense that he seldom arrives at general conclusions, his judgment being exercised on particular cases that have fallen under his observation, and which he recognizes when they occur again. Morality is an abstraction that goes beyond the reach of his instruments of thought, and it is only as he comes within the larger capacities of the sign-language as developed and used in institution-life that he can be brought to the level of spiritual conceptions, and to do this we have continually to make stepping-stones as it were out of his own crude and imperfect mental imagery. In this respect the deaf-mute does not differ from the many lower races whose language is so wanting in expressions for spiritual truths that missionaries are obliged to use the most material words from the meager vocabularies of the savages to express their novel messages of mercy and peace.

That what we call the dictate of conscience is only another name for an act of judgment and reason, seems evident from the difficulty one