The hand book of idiotcy : showing the idiot's condition, the numerous causes of idiotcy, and the most experienced methods of training and educating the idiot ... / by James Abbott.

  • Abbott, James.
Date:
1857
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The hand book of idiotcy : showing the idiot's condition, the numerous causes of idiotcy, and the most experienced methods of training and educating the idiot ... / by James Abbott. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    81/92 (page 73)
    APPENDIX. WE here add a few remarks to those we made pages 8, 9, and 10, in our comparison of man and beast. It is evident that if a man had not will from the faculty ■which is called liberty, and understanding from the faculty which is called rationality, he would not be a man. Beasts, ^we have shown, have not these faculties. It certainly appears as if they could will and understand, but they cannot; it is natural affection, which in itself is desire, with its concomitant science, which alone leads and prompts them to do what they do. There is indeed a civil and moral principle in their science ; but they are not above science, because they have no spiritual principle which enables them to perceive the moral principle, and thence to think it analytically. They can in- deed be taught to do anything; but this is only the natural principle which adds itself to the science, and at the same time to their affection, and is reproduced either by sight of hearing, but is never made a principle of thought, and still less of reason in them. What the rationality is, and what the liberty, which arc proper to a man, and which are so limited in Idiots, cannot be known more clearly, than by a comparison of man with beasts ; for as we have shown, the latter have not any ration- ality or faculty of understanding, or any liberty or faculty of willing freely, and thence have no understanding and will; but instead of understanding, they have science, and instead of will, affection, both of which are natural; and as they have not those two faculties, therefore they have no thought, but instead of thought internal sight, which makes one with their external sight.