"Or is this a vision in my mind?" (Visions, Stevie Wonder)

With its "eyes open inwards" (p.106), the case of Marie Heurtin (1885 - 1921), deafblind and dumb by birth, seems taken directly from an extraordinary story of Edgar Allan Poe.
Demonstrating with disarming simplicity how every human being "living a spiritual spark, as we can not find in any animal" (p.95), his prodigious testimony destroys the rantings of positivist materialist philosophies and according to which every act of the mind merges with the sensation.
We need the resolution of such a tragedy alive with the method of Sister Marguerite, of Larnay, near Poitiers, with his Institution intended to foster communication among these "prison souls." First, every object has a sign that is revealed by the sign language; Then, the method comprises applying to the skin an alphabet, as if the patient were treated in dumb. Finally, the Braille alphabet that allows reading, you approach it as a blind. Then, learning of wealth, poverty, death, old age ... to the soul and God.
The progression of thought in this "scary brain work" (p.44) is dizzying.
With a sense of the concrete, it was sufficient that a knife caress causes the sign, so that the children took the com-REPORT between the sign and its object, freeing up mental dictionary. This equivalence, the other name of analogy in philosophy, is capable, in its raw verification, to shatter many thought patterns. In opposition to the theses of Diderot, Descartes, Leibniz and even Condillac, the method of Sister Marguerite reinforces the Maine de Biran thesis according to which the language, if it is not necessary to the act of thought, at least to the progress of thought; finally, the experience of Marie Heurtin proved he "was not in her a pure receptivity of impressions and there was a ready business to search" (p.127)
About time, Bergson is consolidated since Mary Heurtin "judge time from space, and utilize, to talk about the weather, to terms that are more suitable to the space" (p.105)
With a key focus, "in a modest convent of our Catholic France was accomplished, in favor of humanity, one of the greatest things in the late nineteenth and twentieth century" (p.61) that a film like The Miracle Worker Arthur Penn reproduced with the equally stunning testimony of Helen Keller (besides the film by Jean-Pierre Marie Améris on Heurtin, can be compared also with the soldier quadruple amputee who lost his sight and speech, hearing and smell, in the nightmarish movie Johnny Goes to War).
For his part, Maurice Blondel will draw the consequences of his method of immanence and its dramatic ontogenetic (see Thought, Volume 1); making his infirmity a stone waiting for a higher happiness, himself losing his sight, he could very well adhered to the confession of Mary Heurtin forever incomprehensible to our modern eyes, too modern, "I am very happy that the good Lord made me dumb and blind to be able to know you better. Thank you for the grace that the world does not know. No, I want to stay that way. I do not want to see here, to see d even more clarity there "(p.57)