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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    put forth by a poor emaciated madman whom many strong men cannot hold. In dreaming, too, the soul is often stirred to depths of anguish, and raised to heights of ecstasy, such as actual life under its present limited conditions can never admit it to. The ten derest heart in its waking moments can neither conceive nor realize rapture so ex¬ quisite as the bliss that floods body and soul and spirit in a happy dream, nor can all that a cruel imagination has yet devised of subtle torture equal the absolute horror with which nightmare can crowd and overcharge a moment. Even some of our merely intellectual powers seem to gain strength in states like those induced by hysteria and som¬ nambulism. Nay more ! the mind under these unnatural conditions seems to develop a fresh range and order of faculties, as if a secret finger had been laid upon some hitherto unsuspected stop in the great organ.* The dull under these conditions become brilliant; the illiterate (as in so many cases of religious exaltation) eloquent; the very countenance is, as it were, transfigured into tender and expressive beauty. These things are enough to prove that around, above, within man, is a world from which he is at ordinary times excluded, yet a world which is surely his own, although it be for the present barred from him * Nothing in this way is more wonderful than the influence of narcotics, and the consciousness of expansion and freedom, thronged with images of beauty, to which the soul attains under such influence. And yet it cannot be in the power of a mere drug to create such images, or to induce such energies. The secret of beauty and of energy is in man himself, and the power of the drug is over the body, imparting a momentary concentration to the nervous system, that lifts its weight from the soul, which is ordinarily kept down by a too feeble or too heavy physical organism, and enables both body and soul to ascend together to heights, from which, alas ! both ^ must quickly fall. ^