Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/237

Rh to the more purely intellectual faculties, language is largely intelligible to a child long before it is itself able to articulate; but, soon after it is able to articulate, the faculty of abstracting qualities and classifying objects by the aid of signs begins its course of development. Thus, for instance, I have lately seen a child who belongs to one of the best of living observers, and who is just beginning to speak. This child called a duck "quack," and by special association it also called water "quack." By an appreciation of the resemblance of qualities, it next extended the term "quack" to denote all birds and insects on the one hand, and all fluid substances on the other. Lastly, by a still more delicate appreciation of resemblance, the child eventually called all coins "quack," because on the back of a French sou it had once seen the representation of an eagle. Hence to this child the sign "quack," from having originally had a very specialized meaning, became more and more extended in its signification, until it now serves to designate such apparently different objects as "fly," "wine," and "shilling." And as in this process we have the initiation of the logic of signs, so we have in it the potentiality of the most abstract thought. Accordingly, soon after a child begins to speak, we find that reason of a properly human kind begins to be developed.

Upon the whole, then, the study of infant psychology yields just the kind of results which the general theory of evolution would lead us to expect. But in comparing the intelligence of a young child with that of an adult animal we are met with this difficulty—that as the bodily powers of children at so immature an age are so insufficiently developed, the mind is not able, as in the case of animals, to accumulate experiences of life. In order, therefore, to obtain a fair parallel, we should require a human being whose mental powers have become arrested in their development at an early age, while the bodily powers have continued to develop to mature age, so serving to supply the aborted human intelligence with full experiences of life. Now, the nearest approach that we have to these conditions is to be found in the case of idiots. Accordingly, in anticipation of this lecture, I have sent a table of questions to all the leading authorities on idiocy, and the answers which I have obtained display a very substantial agreement. Through the kindness of these gentlemen I have also been enabled to examine personally a number of the patients who are under their charge. In particular I have to express my obligations to Drs. Beech, Crichton Browne, Langdon Down, Ireland, Maudsley, Savage, and Shuttleworth. On the present occasion I can only pause to state the leading facts which have been elicited by this inquiry.

As there are all degrees of idiocy the object of my inquiry was to determine the order in which the various mental faculties become enfeebled and disappear as we descend from the higher to the lower grades of imbecility. On the general theory of evolution we should expect that in such a descending scale the characteristically human, or