with sight as superior intelligences, if he had not found out a hundred
times how inferior we are in other respects. How do we know--Diderot
reflects upon this--that all the animals do not reason in the same way,
and look upon themselves as our equals or superiors, notwithstanding our
more complex and efficient intelligence? They may accord to us a reason
with which we should still have much need of their instinct while they
claim to be endowed with an instinct which enables them to do very well
without our reason.

When asked whether he should be glad to have sight, the born-blind
replied that, apart from curiosity, he would be just as well pleased to
have long arms: his hands would tell him what is going on in the moon,
better than our eyes or telescopes; and the eyes cease to see earlier
than the hands lose the sense of touch. It would therefore be just as
good to perfect in him the organ that he had, as to confer upon him
another which he had not. This is untrue. No conceivable perfection of
touch would reveal phenomena of light, and the longest arms must leave
those phenomena undisclosed.

After recounting various other peculiarities of thought, Diderot notices
that the blind man attaches slight importance to the sense of shame. He
would hardly understand the utility of clothes, for instance, except as
a protection against cold. He frankly told his philosophising visitors
that he could not see why one part of the body should be covered rather
than another. "I have never doubted," says Diderot, "that the state of
our organs and senses has much influence both on our metaphysics and our
morality." This, I may observe, does not in the least show that in a
society of human beings, not blind, but endowed with vision, the sense
of physical shame is a mere prejudice of which philosophy will rid us.
The fact that a blind man discerns no ill in nakedness, has no bearing