A blind painter medium.

— One of our correspondents in Maine-et-Loire, Dr. C…, conveyed to us the following fact:

“Here is a curious example of the mediumistic faculty applied to drawing, one that manifested several years before Spiritism was known, and even before the turning tables. Three weeks ago, while in Bressuire, I was explaining Spiritism and the relations of men with the invisible world to a lawyer friend of mine, who knew not a word about it. Now, here is the fact he told me as having a great bearing on what I was saying to him. In 1849, he said, I went with a friend to visit the village of Saint-Laurent-sur-Sèvres and its two convents, one of men, the other of women. We were received in the most cordial manner possible by Father Dallain, the superior of the first, who also had authority over the second. After we had visited the two convents, he said to us: ‘Now, gentlemen, I want to show you one of the most curious things in the convent of the women.’ He had an album brought, in which we indeed admired watercolors of great perfection. They were flowers, landscapes, and seascapes. ‘These drawings, so well gathered together,’ he told us, ‘were made by one of our young nuns who is blind.’ And here is what he told us about a charming bouquet of roses with a blue bud: ‘Some time ago, in the presence of the Marquis de La Rochejaquelein and several other visitors, I called the blind nun and asked her to sit down at a table to draw something. They diluted the paints, gave her paper, pencil, brushes, and she immediately began to paint the bouquet you see. During the work they placed several times an opaque body, now a cardboard, now a drawing board, between her eyes and the paper, but the brush continued to work with the same calm and the same regularity.’ At the observation that the bouquet was a little scanty, she said: ‘Well then! I will make a bud come out of the stem of this branch.’ While she was working on that correction, they replaced the carmine she was using with blue; she did not notice the change, and that is why you see a blue bud. “Abbé Dallain,” adds the narrator, “was as remarkable for his learning and his great intelligence as for his lofty piety. I have not met anyone who inspired in me more sympathy and veneration.”

In our opinion this fact does not prove, in an evident manner, a mediumistic action. From the language of the young blind woman, it is certain that she saw, otherwise she would not have said: “I will make a bud come out of the stem of this branch.” But what is no less certain is that she did not see with her eyes, since she continued her work despite the obstacle that was interposed before her. She acted with knowledge of cause and not mechanically, like a medium. It seems, then, evident that she was guided by second sight; she saw through the eyes of the soul, abstraction made of those of the body; perhaps she was even, in a permanent manner, in a state of waking somnambulism.

Analogous phenomena have been observed many times, but people contented themselves with finding them surprising. Their cause could not be discovered, because, being essentially linked to the soul, it was necessary first to recognize the existence of the soul. But even if admitted, this point was still not sufficient: there was lacking the knowledge of the properties of the soul and that of the laws which govern its relations with matter. Spiritism, by revealing to us the existence of the perispirit, made known to us, if we may so express ourselves, the physiology of the Spirits. By this means we were given the key to an immensity of misunderstood phenomena, qualified, for want of better reasons, as supernatural by some, and as oddities of Nature by others. Can Nature have oddities? No, because oddities are caprices. Now, Nature being the work of God, God cannot have caprices, without which nothing would be stable in the Universe. If there is a rule without exception, it is certainly the one that governs the works of the Creator; exceptions would be the destruction of universal harmony. All phenomena are linked to a general law, and a thing seems odd to us only because we observe it from a single point, whereas, if we considered the whole, we would recognize that the irregularity of that point is only apparent and depends on our limited point of view.

— This said, we will state that the phenomenon in question is neither marvelous nor exceptional. This is what we are going to try to explain. In the present state of our knowledge, we cannot conceive of the soul without its fluidic, perispiritual envelope. The intelligent principle escapes our analysis completely; we know it only by its manifestations, which take place with the aid of the perispirit. It is through the perispirit that the soul acts, perceives, and transmits. Detached from the corporeal envelope, the soul or Spirit is still a complex being. Theory teaches us, in agreement with experience, that the vision of the soul, like all other perceptions, is an attribute of the entire being. In the body it is circumscribed to the organ of vision, requiring the concurrence of light; everything that lies in the path of the luminous ray intercepts it. It is not so with the Spirit, for which there is neither darkness nor opaque bodies. The following comparison may help to understand this difference. In the open air, man receives light from all sides; immersed in the luminous fluid, the visual horizon extends all around. If he is enclosed in a box, in which a small opening is made, all around him will be in darkness, except the point by which the luminous ray reaches him. The vision of the incarnate Spirit is in this latter case; that of the disincarnate Spirit is in the first. This comparison is just as to the effect, but it is not as to the cause, because the source of light is not the same for man and for the Spirit, or, rather, it is not the same light that gives him the faculty of seeing. Thus, the blind woman in question saw by the soul and not by the eyes. This is why the screen placed before the drawing bothered her no more than it would bother a sighted person, before whose eyes a transparent crystal had been placed. It is also why she could draw at night as well as by day. Radiating around her, penetrating everything, the perispiritual fluid carried the image, not to the retina, but to her soul. In this state, does vision embrace everything? No; it can be general or special, according to the will of the Spirit; it can be limited to the point where he concentrates his attention.

But then, it will be asked: why did she not perceive the substitution of the color? First, it may be that the attention directed to the place where she wanted to put the flower diverted her from the color; besides, it is necessary to consider that the vision of the soul does not operate by the same mechanism as corporeal vision, and that thus there are effects of which we could not give an account; next, it must also be noted that our colors are produced by the refraction of our light. Now, the properties of the perispirit being different from those of our ambient fluids, it is probable that refraction does not produce the same effects there; that colors do not have, for Spirits, the same causes as for the incarnate. Thus she could, by thought, see as pink what appears to us as blue. It is known that the phenomenon of the substitution of colors is very frequent in ordinary vision. The principal fact is that of vision well established without the concurrence of the organs of vision. As one sees, this fact does not imply mediumistic action, but neither does it exclude, in certain cases, the assistance of a foreign Spirit. This young woman, then, might or might not be a medium, which only a more attentive study could have revealed.

A blind person who enjoyed this faculty would be a precious object of observation. But for that, it would have been necessary to know thoroughly the theory of the soul, that of the perispirit, and consequently somnambulism and Spiritism. At that time these things were not known; even today, it would not be in the circles where they are regarded as diabolical that such studies could be undertaken. Nor is it in those where the existence of the soul is denied that they can be done. A day will come, no doubt, when they will recognize the existence of a spiritual physics, as they are beginning to recognize the existence of a spiritual medicine.