" What to me also seems most striking in this respect is how the great poetic geniuses (an Ossian, a Homer) are presented as blind. Naturally it doesn't matter to me whether they really were blind; the point is people have imagined them so, as if to indicate that what they saw when they sang of the beauty of nature appeared not to the external eye but to an inner intuition. How remarkable that one of the writers on bees - yes, the best of them - was blind from early youth; it's as if to show that here, where you would have thought external observation so important, he had found that point and from it was then able by purely mental activity to infer back to all particulars and reconstruct them in analogy with nature. "

― Søren Kierkegaard , Papers and Journals