Sixth Sense
I
MY lifelong concern with those mysterious powers of perception with which the blind and deaf seem to supplement their handicapped faculties was given a fillip about a year ago through receiving from a friend in England a bundle of clippings, the results of one of those spontaneous symposiums which break out now and then in newspaper columns. They consisted of letters written to the London Observer by various provincial readers, and they touched upon extraordinary phenomena which, however familiar they may be to the professional investigator, awaken in the average mind something like astonishment and awe. Many of the case histories described were startling, and all were interesting and provocative of thought.
Wondering what experiences along similar lines might be gathered in this country, I started a symposium of my own, at the suggestion of the editor of the Atlantic, and put the question to its readers under the caption, ‘Have you a sixth sense?’ It seems that some of them had. The response was as generous as it was revealing. Letters came from all over the country, some from abroad, and, though many months have elapsed since the naïve inquiry appeared in the pages of this magazine, they are still coming.
While there were many about the experiences of the blind and deaf, more than sufficient for the purpose, a very large number of writers interpreted the expression ‘sixth sense’ as denoting those strange elusive faculties known as psychic, and wrote almost incredible accounts of occult adventures in television, clairvoyance, thought transference, and premonitions, which open up an equally fascinating but wholly different field of inquiry. Some of the blind, and even the deaf, reveal these powers, or something strangely like them, which may or may not be extensions or increased sensitivity of normal perceptions; but my primary interest is with the narrower field of adaptation to a lost sense, sometimes called compensation, whereby the blind man finds his way along the unfamiliar path, or the deaf person divines the mental attitudes of others. It is difficult to separate the more practical phenomena from the ghostly; they shade into one another and the dividing line is at best a tenuous one. The two sets of phenomena are associated in the minds of many, apparently, by the words ‘sixth sense.’
Some of the best examples of the blind man’s sense of direction and awareness of obstacles were furnished at the instigation of Dr. Edward E. Allen, the venerable Director Emeritus of Perkins Institution for the blind, near Boston, who persuaded some of its alumni to contribute facts of their own knowledge. Elwyn Fowler writes thus of an experience concerning himself and two others, all graduates of Perkins and all blind: —
One Christmas vacation, Benson, Basford, and I went home together on the same night train. Benson left the train in the wee small hours in a snowstorm that had gathered several inches. He walked to his home, six miles out into the country. I recall asking him later how he got along, and he said, ‘All right.’ Anyway, he met Basford and me on the train coming back, according to schedule — with a good supply of half-grown apple pies in his grip.
Alfred Hosking, another graduate, relates:—
I went walking with Alexander Cameron, a blind student at Yale, and found him very bold in rushing with his cane along strange streets. He was very eager to show what he could do. Later, I read his story of driving an ox team in the wild new lands of Canada. He said that he got his direction from the sun. Manifest nonsense.
A South Norwalk woman, whose name I have forgotten, told me about her uncle, who had remained a fisherman after becoming totally blind. He would row alone out into the Sound in the morning, and row back to the exact starting point in the evening. She did not know how he managed it.
An Atlantic reader writes me that he earned part of his college expenses reading to blind students, with one of whom he frequently discussed this faculty of orientation and path finding.
I marveled at his ability to avoid walking into trees and similar objects. He frequently expressed the opinion that there was an undeveloped power latent in everyone to detect objects without the use of sight and without direct contact. He thought an inanimate object gave off stimuli of some undefined nature which the body can recognize and will learn to respond to without the use of any of the more highly developed senses. The majority of people never have use for this less specialized and perhaps primitive sense.
Another blind man’s own description of facial perception, unscientific but nevertheless convincing, is likewise given: —
As I proceed along the streets I hear a lamp post or a tree or an electric standard; that is to say, I realize that the stationary object displaces air and gives off a definite sound which enables me to ‘sense’ danger. The muscles of my face contract, and I know that I am in the region of a stationary object with which it would be inadvisable for me to collide. As I recede from the danger zone the muscles of my face relax, and I experience a happier physical condition.
II
Examples such as these could be multiplied indefinitely from the letters I have received. The faculty is well known to science, and science has a rational explanation of it, but many of the case histories go a step beyond this faculty, wonderful as it is, into experiences not so readily explained. The editor of the Atlantic tells me of a friend, an artist who had studied under William H. Hunt, but now completely blind, who, visiting the editor’s home for the first time, walked around the room, running her hand lightly over bookcase, window sill, mantel, and exclaimed: ‘ What a pretty room this is, with your garden looking in at your southern windows, and all your books against the only dead wall! ’
Miss Viola Roseboro writes from Valencia, Spain, about Molly Fancher, a blind invalid, whom she visited as a young girl. Miss Fancher was sitting up in bed working with a variety of bright wools, choosing colors and making patterns as any seeing person might.
As I sat on the opposite side of the large room a small kitten jumped in my lap. ‘Don’t let that kitten annoy you, Miss Roseboro,’ said the invalid, this being the first word spoken about the cat. Miss Fancher often announced the approach of a visitor before the coming one had turned into the street her room faces.
Molly Fancher, it seems, was something of a celebrity in her day. Miss Roseboro’s letter gives only an inkling of her strange powers. She was the subject of much controversy at one time, but it was never proved that her feats were not genuine.
Mrs. Helen B. Ford of St. Louis sends the following story as told her by an old woman who used to call at her door with fresh vegetables. I wish I could give it in full, but it is too long and there are many corroborating details I must omit. It seems there was a blind woman living on a farm with her adopted brother, who was not strong, so that the blind woman did some of the chores.
Oh, it was about twenty-five years ago, when her adopted brother was alive [said the vegetable woman]. He was n’t never very strong, and Miss Mary always got up early and went out to feed the cows. She kept the feed in a barrel in the barn, and knew just where to find the bucket, which hung overhead. It was just as if she could see them; she never made no bones of doing it.
Well, one morning she got up as usual and went out to the barn, and over to the corner to take down the bucket. She was thinking of something nice, she says, and was sort of humming, she felt so happy and well.
All of a sudden, as she reached up for the bucket, a sickness came over her so that she like to died. She could n’t breathe, hardly — and she tried to get to the barn door for some fresh air. She was so sick to her stomach that she could n’t hardly walk, but finally she dragged up to the house and got on to the sofa. After a while she felt a little better, and then she began to worry about the cows being fed. So she called Tom, her brother, and told him she guessed he’d have to feed the cows; she was just too awful sick to do it.
Well, Tom came down, and after trying to fix her up, he went out to the barn and over to the barrel to get the feed.
He got the bucket down off the nail, and was just going to dip it in when he saw, all curled up inside the barrel, a great big rattlesnake.
The deaf also receive these strange warnings. Miss Lillian Morris, of Oakland, California, who is apparently quite hard of hearing, has always possessed this inward monitor which has several times saved her life. I will give the most spectacular experience in her own words: —
We were spending the summer in a mountain cabin, and one morning I was out in the brush hacking off a walking stick. Something like an alarm clock went off in my brain, a sharp clear buzz. I jumped at the same instant, straight up and over a ditch, landing in the road. It all happened so quickly that it seemed as if I had nothing to do with it. Then I began to collect my thoughts, and wonder what I had heard, or did I hear it? How did a sound that I could not be expected to hear reach my perception, and why did I jump the same instant? I never could duplicate that feat, by the way; and it would have been a winning leap for an athlete! Next morning a husky rattlesnake with a notable string of rattlers was killed by a neighbor a short distance down the road, and other campers said they had glimpsed it occasionally winding in and out of the brush a day or two previously. I have always believed that the snake was in the brush near me, but have also wondered how the sound reached my perception, and why it was immediately translated into an action which was as involuntary as the kick of a stimulated frogless frog leg.
Mysterious warnings of the imminence of an unsuspected deadly reptile occur in several narratives, so many, in fact, that the coincidence is curious to say the least, if only for its association with the curse in the third chapter of Genesis, which is no doubt responsible for the special sense of horror a poisonous snake excites in most of us. I am tempted to add one such letter to this collection, though the writer is apparently a normal man with no handicap or physical defect. F. W. A. Prideaux, barrister-at-law of Monte Carlo, says:
The first two years of service in India saw me constantly traveling in camp. I was keen on big game, but had not the money to drive animals, so was reduced to sitting up on moonlight nights over live baits or water waiting for tigers or panthers.
I frequently sat up all night on a small platform in a tree, the nearest human being some miles distant. I soon learned that I could with safety go to sleep, for I always awoke as the animal approached in time to get ready for a shot.
This faculty remained with me for the whole of my service, some forty years. I never felt this sense in daylight. It seems to be some form of subconscious feeling of approaching danger. Many jungle men have it. The most pronounced instance was some years ago, when going along my verandah to the bathroom after dinner on a dark night. I shook the feeling off, thinking it absurd to take notice of it within doors, but it made me turn up the electric light in passing through my study. As I entered the bathroom and took a step inside, a loud hiss made me put on the light, when a large Russell’s viper, a most deadly snake, lying inside the door, struck at me. It fortunately missed me, but I found venom on my trousers over one ankle. The snake then retreated to a corner of the room and lay hissing like a kettle. I called for a gun and shot it.
III
A Virginia newspaper man, C. J. Harkrader, of the Bristol Herald Courier, has generously shared with me an account of James Barger, the blind horse trader of Blountville, Tennessee, which he has been saving for some time. It is to be hoped he will make a fuller record of this engaging character, for it is by far the most colorful and unusual story that has come to hand. Barger, blind from birth, knew the step of every horse in the county. Sitting on the porch of the general store of an afternoon, he would greet the farmers and others as they drew up before a word was spoken, ‘Howdy, Zeb!’ ‘Howdy, Lem!’ whether on a horse or mule or with a team. He also knew the dogs in the same way, detecting the soft pad on the road, and they, dogs and horses, knew him and recognized his kinship.
In a country where horse trading is a fine art, and it is a point of honor to outwit the other fellow, he bought, sold, and swapped horses, mules, and cattle, and was never fooled. Let him once get those sensitive fingers on an animal’s body and he knew more about the beast than the sharpest-eyed and shrewdest trader. He asked no quarter, and generally received none, trading on even terms — often, in the picturesque phrase of the country, ‘as they wear hair,’ a local expression for caveat emptor. No defect or disease in an animal escaped him. He could appraise everything about a horse except the color. He was shrewd, courageous, quick, and daring, and in spite of his handicap made money in an occupation where all five wits are none too many for most operators. Only in making payment did he need help. He always settled by checks, which he would sign only in the presence of two witnesses. He died five years ago, but his fame is still blown about the hills. While his astuteness is not unprecedented among the blind, being a combination of touch and memory, the use he made of it puts him in a class by himself.
Even recognizing the color of a horse by touch is not an unknown feat. There was published recently in the Outlook for the Blind an excellent series of papers on ‘Problems in the Psychology of Blindness ! by Dr. Samuel P. Hayes. He quotes Clarence Hawkes, the famous blind scholar (‘Some Common Fallacies of Blindness’): —
I knew a blind horse dealer who could really tell the color of a horse by the sense of feeling, but the color itself had nothing to do with the feat. It was all performed through the fact that different-colored horses had different-textured coats. With some colors the hair was fine, while others were coarse; some coats were smooth, and others rough.
This, of course, is the logical explanation of Dr. Kitto’s famous blind Scotch tailor who matched the tartan of the clan at the seams so that the stripes registered. The point is that while the blind cannot recognize color as color, some of them are able, by touch, to distinguish differences of texture and surface produced by dye or color, and learn to tell the colors by these differences. This is sufficiently marvelous in itself! Dr. Hayes himself observes:
The myth that the blind can distinguish colors by feeling seems to have taken a strong hold on the popular mind, although writers on the blind have been constantly refuting it for over one hundred years.
IV
Dr. Hayes, who is consulting psychologist for the American Foundation for the Blind and professor of psychology at Mt. Holyoke College, is concerned with contradicting the popular belief that the blind are gifted with compensating powers to make up for their lack of sight. He has standardized the Binet-Simon tests for use of the blind, and in the Supplement to Science (December 29, 1933) gives a brief account of his experiments in measuring the sensitivity of the blind as to touch and hearing compared with normal seeing persons. These tests show that the blind group was inferior in both senses to seeing subjects.
On the other hand, Dr. Robert H. Gault, director of the American Institute for the Deaf Blind, describes a simple test as follows: —
I once had the opportunity to test a blind man in my laboratory. He was forty years old and blind from birth. I seated him with his back to the window and took up a position directly in front of him. In my right hand I held a very light wand that was cleft at its farther end. Into this cleft I inserted an ordinary business card, 3½ by 1¾ inches. I removed my coat and rolled my sleeves up to my shoulders. I then brought the card in the cleft wand very slowly downward by the side of the man’s cheek, and about three inches from it, now at his right and now at his left, in irregular order. On each occasion I asked the man to indicate where the card was. He was never deceived in 200 trials. I should have said that I moved the card so slowly that it produced no swish in the air. Nevertheless, I subsequently plugged his ears with wax (to take care of a possible chance in a million that he got some auditory cues) and repeated the experiment with the same result. Evidently he felt something upon his cheek or detected the lack of something that he had been feeling. For example, the card may have interfered with a current of air against his cheek.
I have never interpreted these or any such cases as evidence of a ‘sixth sense,’ but rather as evidence of the enormous possibilities that lie in appropriate training — to develop the art of using one or another sense. This interpretation seems to me to be one that supports the greater expectations of results on the part of educators.
Personally, I am more interested in deafness than in other sensory handicaps. It is an amazing thing — how people who have never heard are able, after training, to pick up in their fingers the very patterns of vibrations (suitably amplified) that stimulate the ears of normal people and to make practical use of them. The vibratory sense that we reach in this manner represents a stage in the evolutionary history of the human ear — the phylogenetically latest sense organ to appear. I believe there is ample evidence for the proposition that this sense still coöperates with others in our process of normal hearing. Moreover, when the ear is out of commission, this vibratory sense comes to the rescue, and it may, as a result of training, and with instrumental aid (for amplification), give a good account of itself.
Most people think that if one sense organ is lost others become more acute. I doubt if this is true in an absolute sense. It is more likely that in such a situation one learns to use the senses that remain. In a practical sense, of course, it is of no consequence.
The last paragraph explains why such experiments as those of Dr. Hayes yield apparently negative results. The feats of hundreds of blind and deaf contradict the literal and limited tests of the psychologists. The very scientific accuracy of the tests precludes recognition of something less tangible existing in the mind — faculty, intuition, the result of necessity, experience, education — which indicates some use of the sense being measured that cannot be recorded mechanically. The feats of the blind and deaf described here, and numerous others for which I have no space, can without doubt be explained rationally, but that does not do away with the almost miraculous quality of the feats.
The achievements of the blind described by Dr. Hayes in his articles in the Outlook for the Blind, cited to illustrate and prove his thesis, have none the less this same quality of the marvelous, and since he has sent me the papers as a contribution to this symposium, I will quote some of them, for they do show that while the rank and file of deaf and blind are undoubtedly just as stupid as the average normal human being, there are some who make remarkable use of the faculties they have, and these feats to the unscientific observer partake of the supernatural and are naturally linked with psychic phenomena, though belonging in an entirely different category.
The experiences of Clarence Hawkes, given in his book, and which Dr. Hayes quotes at some length, are among the most interesting, and since I am making a collection rather than conducting a scientific investigation, — which I am not competent to do, and which Dr. Hayes has done admirably, — I shall give some of his quotations without going into his scientific explanations, which are mainly concerned with showing that the average blind person under psychological tests does not reveal the powers that these admittedly exceptional blind display: —
There are things that they [the blind] can do by the sense of touch [writes Clarence Hawkes] which are even more remarkable [than telling colors or distinguishing bills], such as threading a needle by placing the end of the thread on the tongue and shoving the head of the needle along until the thread is thrust through the eye (a good trick to teach your grandmother when her sight fails), or replacing delicate springs in a typewriter and keeping the machine in order. I recently successfully adjusted the reproducer on a graphonola which had become discordant.
It would seem almost as wonderful for one without the sense of sight to trace the margin on a printed page of a book or newspaper by feeling where the type leaves off and the unprinted page begins. Yet I can do that, while I have known blind people who could read raised print through four thicknesses of a silk handkerchief, or play a piano with a spread placed over the keyboard.
To tell the weight of paper in ream lots within five or ten pounds merely from feeling one sheet would seem to call for a very expert sense of touch, yet that is possible, as well as to tell much about the texture and quality of the paper and how it was prepared for book use.
S. C. Swift, the blind librarian of the Canada Institute for the Blind, says in his The Unknown Folk (still quoting from Dr. Hayes): —
The other day I was standing at a corner waiting for a street car. An acquaintance engaged me in conversation till the sound of an approaching car attracted my attention. I listened for a moment (for cars of two lines used that particular street) and then remarked, ’I must leave you now, for I think my car is coming.’ My acquaintance looked at me in amazement a few seconds and then exclaimed in a tone of mystified wonder, ‘Oh, those ears!’ He did not understand how I distinguished the cars of those two distinct lines, but supposed I was possessed of some occult power beyond the ken of ordinary mortals.
When a street car approaches a blind man, the fact is first announced by the hiss of the trolley wheel along the wire; this is followed by the rush of the wheels along the rails, and from this sound the size and weight of the car are easily deduced. Of the two car lines referred to above, one used short, light, single-truck carriages, while those of the other were long, heavy, double-truck vehicles. Each type produced its own distinctive sound, the first somewhat shrill and jerky, the second steady and rumbling.
V
A blind man seems to find his way over a familiar path by muscle memory. With only facial sensitiveness as his guide, he traverses an unfamiliar terrain, or one rendered unfamiliar by snow; by his sense of touch he feels the difference in a textile fabric produced by the dyes. But when a blind man is aware of the aspect of a room or the beauty of a view, with neither of which he is familiar, or recognizes the presence of a stranger who has not spoken or made a sound, or feels the premonition of a lurking danger, we are confronted by phenomena which surely exist, but with which the equipment of the psychologists is unable as yet to cope. I am aware of the unreliable nature of the unsupported evidence I have quoted, but its unanimity is in its favor. The danger lies in making a general application of what are apparently individual instances. I realize that even a large group of blind or deaf might show no traces of such powers, but that they do exist seems credible, and some of them are still just a bit outside the practical explanations of facial perception, delicate hearing, sensitive touch. As Dr. Gault suggests, it makes no difference how the handicapped gather these impressions. The important thing is the conclusions they arrive at, and the use they make of them. They are exceptional, naturally. Such intelligence, even if subconscious intelligence, is rare among normal persons.
It should be borne in mind that the handicapped vary in mental ability as much as do normal persons, and this fact qualifies all their activities. As Dr. Edward E. Allen puts it, ‘There is really no such class as “ the blind.” Blind people vary among themselves tremendously, and by no means all of them possess this so-called “sixth sense.” ’
So there are evidently blind and deaf people of superior brain power but with limited hyperæsthesia, and others of small mental equipment exhibiting almost uncanny powers of orientation, facial perception, and even at times something approaching second-sight or clairvoyance.
A thoughtful letter from Professor Edwin G. Boring, the Harvard psychologist, points out that it is not really a problem of hyperæsthesia or increased sensitivity, but an attentional and educational problem of how persons come to use sensory data that they have not been accustomed to employ before. ‘ Another factor that comes into this is the capacity of people to make sensory discriminations without being able to analyze the ground of their judgments.’
This, by the way, is the weakness of all tests and questionnaires which depend on the subject for the information desired. Every hard-of-hearing person knows how difficult it is to determine whether or not he hears a given sound.
VI
Among the first to collect and comment upon the achievements of the blind and deaf through delicate extensions of natural powers was Dr. John Kitto, the erudite Biblical scholar. This remarkable man lost his hearing by the singular process of falling off a roof he was helping his father shingle when he was a boy of twelve. His parents were poor; he became a public charge, but none the less managed to educate himself, acquire several languages, among them Sanscrit and Aramaic, become a distinguished commentator on matters pertaining to Bible history, and write a long shelfful of books. All his life interested in the phenomena of deafness and blindness, he collected unusual case histories, and in 1845 published two small books entitled The Lost Senses, one of them devoted to deafness, the other to blindness.
Curiously enough, Kitto doubts that the loss of one sense is compensated by any extraordinary development in another, in which doubt he is confirmed by the findings of the psychologists. He complains that he was compelled to adopt glasses at the usual age, but his autobiography reveals him as a man with great powers of observation. He explains this by saying that he ‘saw’ while others merely ‘looked.’ The improvement in his sight was mental rather than physical, a better use of the eyes, and that is a faculty which sometimes eludes such tests as the psychologist applies.
The instances with which his books are studded do not differ in principle from those sent in by friendly readers of the Atlantic, but they are corroborating examples of the remarkable powers of adjustment and adaptation to new sets of conditions.
In the eighteenth century, says Kitto, Philip Davis, a blind traveler, went alone on foot from Liverpool to Manchester, and thence to Leeds, York, Sheffield, Birmingham, Worcester, Bristol, Bath, Glastonbury, Staunton, and Teignmouth, some six hundred miles, very seldom asking the way. Before leaving a city he inquired particulars of the route, and found his direction afterward from memory. In even large cities like Manchester and Liverpool he went unerringly to any address. He visited Dublin and was embarrassed by the great width of Sackville Street. He started to cross it and, not finding the curb as soon as he expected, was bewildered, but decided from the feel of the vehicles passing him that he was going in the right direction, and kept on until he came to the other side. He recognized the condition or state of passers-by, whether they were poor or rich, by the sound of their footwear. He speaks of the creaking boot of the opulent.
Thomas Wilson, the famous blind man of Dumfries, about the middle of the eighteenth century, used a lathe with great skill. He would buy a plank ten feet long, carry it safely home through the streets without touching a single person or object, and cut it up for material for his lathe. He lived alone and kept his house unusually tidy, did all his own cooking, could cut peats without ever missing his foothold in the marshes, raised his own potatoes, and was for fifty years the bell ringer of the mid-steeple of Dumfries.
Kitto was profoundly interested in the history of Laura Bridgman, deaf and blind inmate of Perkins Institution, the Helen Keller of the nineteenth century, whose plight also appealed to Charles Dickens. Kitto studied the notes of her progress made by her teacher, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe (somewhat overshadowed by his famous wife, Julia Ward Howe), and commented at length on each phase. Laura was the first of such unfortunates to receive competent instruction, and through Dr. Howe’s resourcefulness and patience she was able to communicate and comprehend. She also lacked the senses of smell and taste, but her touch was transcendently delicate and she was able to distinguish colors.
She was so greatly attached to Perkins Institution that she spent a part of every year there until her death, and one of the younger pupils who used to sit and talk with her the last years of her life was Anne Sullivan, now Mrs. Macy, who was one day to repeat Dr. Howe’s achievement with a more famous pupil.
One of the most moving books in the literature of the blind is the life of Anne Sullivan Macy by Nella Braddy. When Mrs. Macy undertook the education of Helen Keller she had ideas of her own and did not always agree with Dr. Howe, but she owed him much, for she was blind when she came to Perkins Institution (and is now at the point of again losing her sight), and it was from him that she got the inspiration for her life work. Her own apprenticeship to blindness was of immeasurable service to her in finding a way to Helen Keller’s mind, and there is a sort of satisfaction in knowing that this resourceful and patient woman is the human link between the two most famous victims of the double handicap of blindness and deafness.
Helen Keller is not a particularly good example of that super-sensitiveness which enables the blind to perform such amazing feats of orientation. She is comparatively helpless even in familiar surroundings, and uses cords to guide her steps about the grounds of her own home. She is rather a woman of unusual mental ability, which expressed itself in different channels as soon as the barrier between her and the world was removed.
VII
From the testimony of the blind and deaf we have wonderful evidence of the teamwork of the senses, whereby a combination of those remaining compensates for the missing one, plus a certain mental agility in using the impressions collected and making proper deductions from them, a faculty apparently by no means common to the general body of the deaf or blind. So if it is true, as the psychologists maintain, that the blind as a class reveal under tests no especial advantage in touch, hearing, and smell over normal persons, and the deaf no improvement in sight or feeling, then it must mean that those faculties are latent in all human beings, undeveloped because uncalled for, as it seems unquestionable that both the blind and the deaf who are especially gifted do perform apparently miraculous feats of orientation and divination— miraculous, that is, in the light of the ordinary use of the five senses made by normal human beings.
Normal human beings develop some of the same powers under stress of special occupation or great need. The sailor’s sight, the miller’s thumb, — by which he recognizes any grade of Hour by feeling of it, — the tea or wine taster’s tongue, the hearing of a woodsman or Indian, are all familiar instances. A group of country bankers being shown through the Subtreasury were brought to a table where a woman was sorting bills. She ran rapidly through large bundles, now and then whipping one out and throwing it into a basket. The guide picked up one of these and asked the bankers if they thought it genuine. All agreed they would consider it a good bill. Nevertheless, it was a clever counterfeit. The woman recognized it the instant her fingers touched it. Some of the blind are able to discriminate between bills of large and small denominations because of a slight difference in the thickness of the paper on which they are engraved.
Apparently all or nearly all of the blind and deaf have these powers, but not all have the superior mental faculty to develop and make use of them, and this particular astuteness does not make itself felt in the restricted and controlled tests of the psychological laboratory; nor would even these remarkable blind and deaf we have been describing register as superior in any of their perceptive senses. It is quite possible that the blind man who feels his way with his feet, noting every depression and change of level, the texture of every sort of roadway or path, who avoids obstacles by facial perception, who recognizes people, both acquaintances and strangers, by odors, — as a dog does, — who is aware of surroundings and environments through subtle emanations not apparent to those who see and hear and have never had need to call upon them — it is quite likely that even such a seemingly supernaturally endowed individual would not, if submitted to Simon-Binet tests, show a greater sensitiveness of touch than the average normal person. But I know from my own experience that where one sense is missing there seem to be strange supplements which come forward, though I cannot explain them, whereby things are made manifest to one through other channels. I have often received warnings of imminent danger, particularly in this motorridden era, which some of my correspondents describe — danger of the sort that would be manifest to the ears of a hearing person. I was once rejected by an insurance company because of my deafness, but a far more intelligent medical examiner of another organization passed me with flying colors as a particularly good risk, arguing that my long apprenticeship to deafness had fortified me with a better system of self-protection than most hearing people possess, especially in what has become a confusingly noisy world.
It would seem to a nonscientific observer that what all this indicates is that new attention should be paid to these powers which the handicapped have in common with normal human beings, so that more of them could be trained and developed by education. Instead of exclaiming in wonder over the miraculous feats of some few particularly intelligent blind, or submitting the rank and file to tests to prove that they have no compensating gifts, we should learn how the proficient do what they do, and see if the knowledge cannot be imparted to others not so quickly or easily adjusted to their state.