5 ideas
Once she grasped that finger-spelled words named things, she says consciousness itself began, so that she could remember nothing reflective from the earlier state. She offers this as first-person evidence that selfhood and deliberate thought depend on symbolic language rather than on sensation alone.
Critics charged that Keller's references to color, light, and sound were empty words she had not earned. She answers that the sighted routinely speak of things they have never sensed, such as the soul, God, and infinity, and understand them through analogy and association. Meaning therefore rests on a word's relations to other experiences, not on direct sensory acquaintance, so she may use 'red' by linking it to warmth or anger just as others use abstract terms.
Keller treats touch not as a crude substitute for sight but as an active perceptual system. The moving hand samples a surface in parts, and the mind assembles those parts into a unified image, so objects, faces, and statues are 'seen' through their outlines and textures. Handshakes likewise reveal temperament: she reads warmth, reserve, condescension, or vitality in how a hand grips.
Through her feet and hands Keller registers vibrations in floors, walls, instruments, and bodies: footsteps identify people, a piano or organ conveys rhythm and swell, and the throat reveals speech. For her, sound arrives as a pattern of vibrations felt in the body, which she learns to interpret with enough precision to track events in a house and to experience music.
Keller calls smell 'the fallen angel' of the senses, a faculty that society disparages even though it carries rich information. By smell she detects approaching storms, the trade and whereabouts of individuals, and the distinct personal odor that marks each person. She argues that the low status of smell reflects cultural prejudice, not any weakness in what the sense can reveal.