They had before them a blind child, a future man, the possible father
of a family. “Malevolent fate,” or perhaps “accident” hidden within
the mysterious realm of phenomena, had closed forever those eyes,—the
windows through which the soul receives impressions from the glowing,
many-colored, changing world. Doomed never to behold the light of the
sun, although not himself the offspring of the blind, he was still a
link in the illimitable chain of bygone lives, and contained within
himself the possibilities of future lives. All those living links now
lost in the remote past, corresponding in proportion to their capacity
to the impressions of light, had transmitted to him the inner faculty,
and through him, blind though he was, to an endless succession of future
generations who would possess the power of vision.[14]
Thus it was that in the depths of this child’s soul these hereditary
forces lay dormant,—vague “possibilities,” hitherto unaffected by outside
influences. The whole fabric of his mind, fashioned after the ancestral
model, had reserved within itself a substratum of the impressions of
light, the product of the countless experiences of his ancestors. Thus in
his inner organization the blind man is like another possessing eyesight,
but with eyes forever closed, Hence a dim yet ever present consciousness
of desire that craves contentment; an undefined yearning to exercise the
dormant powers of his soul which have never been called into action.
Hence also certain vague forebodings and endeavors,—like the longing for
flight, which children feel, and the joys of which they taste in witching
dreams.
Now, at last, the instinctive inclination of little Peter’s childish
fancies was reflected on his features in that look of troubled
perplexity. Those hereditary, and yet as far as he himself was concerned
undeveloped and therefore unshaped, “possibilities” of the ideas of light
rose like obscure phantoms in the child’s mind, exciting him to aimless
and distressing efforts. All his nature, in an unconscious protest
against the individual “accident,” rose to claim the restoration of the
universal law.