The cult of the born completely blind man, revisited

This chapter examines the influence of Rene Descartes and Robert Boyle on the earliest years of the cult during the Enlightenment and discusses the influence of Locke on the mind-body problem and his analysis of a male with a visual impairment in the cult; the fourth section formulates a discussion on the cult. Descartes proposed, the waving of a guiding cane by a man who was blind was a simple but powerful analogy to the movement of light. John Locke’s contribution to the Deficit Paradigm was primarily through the study of a man who lost his sight early in life, and whom he subsequently interviewed to understand the difference between innate and learned aesthetic principles of the mind. Like Descartes earlier in the century, Locke’s study was set in a context of shifts in power of state institutions from Roman Catholicism to the Protestant faith.