Learning and Other Essays

by John Jay Chapman

The following is from the monumental justification of his ideas as put forth in the Second Report to the Massachusetts State Board of Charities in 1866:—

“Finally, they (the board) have dwelt upon the importance of knowing and obeying all the natural laws, because they are ordained by our beneficent God and Father, to bind together by bonds of mutual interest and affection all the children of His great human family; and to prepare them here, for his good will and pleasure hereafter.”

The thought in each of these passages is the same. Blindness, deficiency, in fact evil, are to be accepted as part of the divine will. This thought, taken in conjunction with the conception of the unity of human nature, form the whole of Howe’s philosophy. The conventional language of piety in which Howe generally expresses himself, may perhaps conceal from some persons the first-hand power of his nature. He seems only to be saying what everybody knows; but the difference is that Howe sees the truth as a fact. It is not so much a philosophic reality or abstraction as a first-hand visual perception, always new, always reliable.

The different specific reforms with which Howe is to be credited are neither deductions from theory, nor the summary of experiments made by him; but simply things seen in themselves to be true. They can all of them be grouped under almost any one of Christ’s sayings. I shall return to this subject after speaking of Laura Bridgman, who has been waiting too long.

The early history of the Boston Blind Asylum is like a great mediæval romance—voluminous, glowing, many-sided. That history is recorded in multitudinous documents and papers, letters, arguments, reports, anecdotes—the whole mass of them being illumined by the central figure of Howe who looms through the story like Launcelot or Parsifal. Overpowering indeed is this literature, and it ought not to be condensed. One should wander, and explore and browse in it. If I make a few extracts from the story, it is not as a summary, but rather as an advertisement. There are certain events that you cannot summarize, but only introduce. The texture of them is greater than any condensation can make it.

The New England Institution for the Education of the Blind began its work in 1832. Howe, having neither house nor fortune of his own, received a few blind children at his father’s house in Boston. Within a very few years, however, the school was properly housed and supported, and it remained ever a favorite with the public. It was not until 1837 that news was brought to Howe of the existence of Laura Bridgman, a blind deaf-mute aged seven, then living with her parents on a New Hampshire farm. He made a journey to New Hampshire to visit her, and through good fortune was accompanied by Longfellow, Rufus Choate, George Hilliard, and Dr. Samuel Eliot. The friends waited at Hanover while Howe visited the Bridgman farmhouse in quest of his prize. “He won it, and came back to the hotel triumphant,” says Dr. Eliot, “I perfectly recollect his exultation at having secured her, and the impression he made on me of chivalric benevolence.”

Laura Bridgman had lost her sight and hearing at the age of two, through scarlet fever; and when she reached the school in Boston was blind, deaf, dumb, and “without that distinct consciousness of individual existence which is developed by the exercise of the senses.” She was, nevertheless, a very remarkable being, sensitive, passionate, and highly organized. Upon being transferred to the school “she seemed quite bewildered at first, but soon grew contented, and began to explore her new dwelling. Her little hands were continually stretched out, and her tiny fingers in constant motion, like the feelers of an insect. She was left for several days to form acquaintance with the little blind girls, and to become familiar with her new home.”

Within two months Howe was able to write to Laura’s father—“I have succeeded in making her understand several words in raised print, and I am very sanguine in the hope that she will learn to read, and perhaps to express her wants in writing.”... Such were the beginnings of that remarkable intimacy which was fraught with so much consequence to the world.

The process by which Laura Bridgman was taught the alphabet was in principle the same as that now often employed in teaching ordinary children; that is to say, certain words are first given to the child as unities, and the child is led to discover the letters by thereafter himself dissolving the words into component letters. “I had to trust, however, to some chance effort of mine, causing her to perceive the analogy between the signs which I gave her, and the things for which they stood.... The first experiments were made by pasting upon several common articles, such as keys, spoons, knives, and the like, little paper labels on which the name of the article had been printed in raised letters. The child sat down with her teachers and was easily led to feel these labels, and examine them curiously. So keen was the sense of touch in her tiny fingers that she immediately perceived that the crooked lines in the word KEY, differed as much in form from the crooked lines in the word SPOON as one article differed from the other.

“Next, similar labels, on detached pieces of paper, were put into her hands, and now she observed that the raised letters on these labels resembled those pasted upon the articles....