In bad company

IV

The eyes, someone has said, are the mirror of the soul.
It would be more true, perhaps, to liken them to windows, through which the soul receives its impressions of the outer world in all its vivid, sparkling colour. Who can say what portion of our spiritual make-up depends upon our sight impressions?
A man is only one link in an unending chain of lives that stretches, through him, from the bottomless past to the infinitely distant future. In one such link, a blind little boy, some cruel chance had shut these windows. All his life must pass in darkness. But did that mean that the chords by which the soul responds to sight impressions had snapped within him, never to be mended? No! Through this dark life, too, the soul's receptiveness to light must continue, to be passed on to succeeding generations. The blind boy's soul was a normal human soul, with all the normal human capacities. And since every capacity carries with it the desire for accomplishment, this dark soul held within it an unconquerable longing for light.
Somewhere in the unfathomed depths lay inherited powers, unessayed, still dormant in the misty state of "potentiality", but ready at the first ray of light to rise in swift response. But the windows remained shut. The child's fate was sealed. He would never see that ray! All his life must pass in darkness.
And the darkness was alive with phantoms.
Had the child lived in poverty, had he been surrounded with misery, his thoughts might, perhaps, have been absorbed by these outer sources of suffering. But his family had taken care to isolate him from all that might cause him distress. They had given him unbroken peace and quiet. And now, in this quiet that reigned in his soul, the inner want made itself the more strongly felt. Through the still darkness around him, he began to feel a vague, but unremitting sense of a need that sought fulfilment—a striving to give shape to powers that lay dormant, unapplied, deep in his being.
All this gave rise to strange, undefined expectations and impulses—something in the nature of the will to fly that all of us have experienced in childhood, with the wonderful dreams it is bound up with at that age.
And this, in its turn, gave rise to instinctive mental strivings that found expression in a look of painful inquiry on the blind boy's face. The "potentialities" of sight impression, inherited but not applied, raised strange phantoms in the childish brain—dark, shapeless, undefined, compelling, tormenting effort to attain he knew not what.
It was Nature, rising in blind protest against this individual "exception"—seeking to reassert the universal rule that here was violated.