Volume 1

The lost senses / By John Kitto.

  • John Kitto
Date:
1845
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The lost senses / By John Kitto. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    65/224 page 51
    Could there be left anything to such a one but snuff and smoke? Indeed, could he even smoke? I do not recollect to have ever seen a blind man smoking ; and I think it is true, that one derives no sensation from smoke, nor even knows that he is smoking, unless he is assured of the fact by seeing either the smoke or the fire, or both. But, although I am unprepared to say that I perceive any physical developments of the visual organ, which can be supposed to be referable to the loss of the other perceptive sense, I do conceive that there have been some marked effects, mani- fested through the eye, of those circumstances which have made that organ almost the only sense of pleasurable perceptions. It has, I believe, in the first place, developed a sense of the beautiful in nature and art, and a love for it—a passionate love—which has been to me a source of my most deep and pleasurable emotions. This I attribute to my deafness. It seems to me that, under ordinary circumstances, this feeling is, in a great degree, the result of cultivation received, at least in the rudiments, through the ear. For this cultivation, formal instruction is not needed, but it is, as I apprehend, imbibed insensibly, in the course of years, from the admiring observations of friends in the presence of beautiful objects. If such observations only suggest in the slightest way what objects are beautiful, and why they are so, this is instruction ; for they set the mind to work in the right direction, and indicate the principles which are applicable to all the objects of this sen- timent. Now anything like this instruction I have never had, even to this day. It is not to be acquired from books, and must be conveyed, so far
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