On the education of the imbecile / by Dora Greenwell.

  • Dora Greenwell
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the education of the imbecile / by Dora Greenwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    11/54 (page 11)
    The Soul’s Captivity. ties, without aims, without resources; his life s histoiy is indeed a blank, summed up and circled in nonentity. He is one who, in the emphatic language of Seguin, ‘ can do nothing, can think of nothing, can care for nothing.’ The spectacle of idiocy fast bound in the iron misery of an imperfect organization, awakens in the mind the thought of a fatality more gloomy and irresistible than that which presides over a Greek drama. The bondage here is final, the soul’s captivity lifelong. Yet even in learning the soul s dependence upon the body, we learn, as I have said, much of the soul’s greatness; and nothing brings out more strongly than does idiocy, the sharp distinctive difference between the animal and man. When the great governing principle of reason, intelligence, that in fact which makes man what he is, is unable to exert its supremacy, all in the lower, as in the higher part of human nature, is chaos and disorder, and the idiot is as far from the perfect animal as he is from the perfect man. Such is the grandeur of man’s whole nature, that, as in all that is perfect and structural, defect in any part works ruin to the whole design. An animal is sufficient to its own wants—self-helpful, in harmony with the universe it belongs to, a law unto itself, guided and checked even as to its instincts and propensities; but the man in whom the animal nature predominates is unable even to provide for the mere animal wants which have to him become imperious. He has lost his life’s Dominant to which every fibre in his nature refers, and all is discord ; he is unable to help himself, out of relation with all that surrounds him; and the utter absence of spontaneity in the idiot is one of the strongest witnesses we have to man’