William James and Laura Bridgman
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
In an article in the New Yorker, July 2, 2001, Louis Menand wrote about Laura Bridgman, a predecessor of Helen Keller. Fifty years before Helen, Laura (1829–1889) was the first blind-deaf person to get an education in English.
Her mind had very limited content to work with — mainly memories of what she could touch with her fingers. “Yet she found life as intensely absorbing as anyone else does.” From her example, William James concluded “that the relations among things are far more interesting and important than the things themselves.” He continued, “All sorts of terms can transport the mind with equal delight, provided they be woven into equally massive and far-reaching schemes and systems of relationship. The schemes and the systems are what the mind finds interesting.”
James believed that there are many “realities” in the universe, and “that we sense relations as much as we sense things.” According to Menand, Bridgman insisted that she had a “sense of think.” For her, thinking was “as immediate and spontaneous as sight or touch.” He concluded, “[Thinking] is the way we weave the sensuous tapestry of the world. From a cosmic point of view, all minds are pathetically underpopulated. We somehow intuit a world from a tiny sample of what is out there — not as tiny as Laura Bridgman’s but possibly not as great as we would like to imagine, either.”s but possibly not as great as we would like to imagine, either.”
