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.

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    Abnormal phases of Humanity. which purifies and exalts and crowns each with an equal honour. Christ is the Saviour of the body; the heaven to which He admits us is no blank uncomforted Sheol, of which Job said, ‘ I shall lie down in desolate places among kings and counsellors of old’—no shadowy Elysium to which Achilles and Iphigenia preferred life, be it even that of a slave ‘toiling among men beneath the light of the cheerful sun.’ Christ is emphatically the ‘life;’ He is the Lord and the Giver of life in its fulness and entirety, and the resurrection which we obtain through union with Him is the restored perfection of our whole nature, the marriage of the purified soul with the glorified body,—a union with¬ out which neither can exert its full powers or know its true blessedness, and awaiting which each groans within itself, being burdened, ‘waiting for the adoption, to wit, the re¬ demption of the body.’ And in a region presenting, as does all that has to do with Humanity, many apparent contradictions, it need not surely surprise us to find that we advance greatly towards the clear understanding of man’s whole nature, through the contemplation of its exceptional and abnormal phases. The very imperfections and aberrations of Humanity seem to let light, as through chinks and crannies, into caverns within which it would not otherwise have penetrated. In insanity and delirium, for instance, both soul and body exert a fitful and irregular strength, of which the experi¬ ence of calmer moments has possibly given little more than the hint. Even the wreck of mind will sometimes give proof of the power of mind, and manifest the superiority of will over muscle, in the energy of misdirected volition
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