Nicholas Saunderson Quotes

“Saunderson lectured on light, lenses, optics, the phenomenon of the rainbow, and other subjects connected with sight. He also helped to make Newton's theories of the Principia Mathematica and other works accessible to students of Cambridge. Unlike Newton, however, Saunderson was famously (or infamously) irreligious, which adds another layer to Diderot's interest in this blind man.”
― M. Leona Godin, There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness

“Diderot ends his Letter with a fiction—an imagined scene of Saunderson on his deathbed, with a clergyman named Mr. Holmes trying to convert him. The sighted clergyman begins by pontificating on the wonders of nature—visible everywhere as evidence of God's existence, which the blind mathematician dismisses: "Ah, sir," replies the blind philosopher, "don't talk to me of this magnificent spectacle, which it has never been my lot to enjoy. I have been condemned to spend my life in darkness, and you cite wonders quite out of my understanding, and which are only evidence for you and for those who see as you do. If you want to make me believe in God you must make me touch Him.”
― M. Leona Godin, There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness