ffirmed that
the entire intellectual life is based ultimately upon remembered
physical sensations; that we have no mental conception that is really
independent of sensuous experience; and that the most abstract thought
is only removed from sensation by successive processes of substitution,
I have not space to enter into so great and mysterious a subject as
this; but I desire to draw your attention to a truth very commonly
overlooked by intellectual people, which is the enormous importance of
the organs of sense in the highest intellectual pursuits. I will couple
together two names which have owed their celebrity, one chiefly to the
use of her ears, the other to the use of his eyes. Madame de Stael
obtained her literary material almost exclusively by means of
conversation. She directed, systematically, the talk of the learned and
brilliant men amongst whom she lived to the subject which for the moment
happened to occupy her thoughts. Her literary process (which is known to
us in detail through the revelations of her friends) was purposely
invented to catch everything that she heard, as a net catches fish in a
river. First, she threw down on paper a very brief rough draft of the
intended literary project. This she showed to few, but from it she made
a second "state" (as an engraver would say), which she exhibited to some
of her trusted friends, profiting by their hints and suggestions. Her
secretary copied the corrected manuscript, incorporating the new matter,
on paper with a very broad margin for farther additions. During all the
time that it took to carry her work through these successive states,
that ingenious woman made the best possible use of her ears, which were
her natural providers. She made everybody talk who was likely to be of
any use to her, and then immediately added what she had caught on the
wide margin reserved for that purpose. She used her eyes so little that
she might almost as well have been blind. We have it on her own
authority, that were it not out of respect to custom, she would not open
her window to see the Bay of Naples for the first time, whereas she
would travel five hundred leagues to talk with a clever man whom she had
never met.

Now since Madame de Stael's genius fed itself exclusively through the
faculty of hearing, what an enormous difference it would have made to
her if she had been deaf! It is probable that the whole of her literary
reputation was dependent on the condition of her ea