OPENING ADDRESS 695 



" But this is not all. The idiot and the feeble-minded ought to 

 offer us the best possible means of getting at that all-important 

 framework of later development, the original stock of innate 

 tendencies, emotional, impulsive, reflex, with which the human 

 being comes into the world, and into which he fits his earliest 

 experiences. Here we should be able to discover the nature and 

 characteristics of that "going concern " in which, in Principal 

 Morgan's phrase, every young mind finds itself a partner when it 

 first comes to a realization of itself. Complicated and overgrown 

 by experience and training these tendencies surely are, even in 

 defectives, but not so complicated and not so overgrown as in the 

 normal individual. 



Or where, again, could we hope to find a better opportunity to 

 study in unsophisticated purity the broad and general expressive 

 movements of face and members the mimetic and other move- 

 ments in which Wundt sees the foundation of language, and Lipps 

 the germ of much of our esthetic comprehension? 



The methods of attack must resemble in a considerable degree 

 the simple ones of animal psychology and child-study, observa- 

 tion of spontaneous activities and simple experiments. The im- 

 becile cannot become the subject of any difficult or delicate tests. 

 But on the other hand, he can command a few words, and can now 

 and then answer a simple question comprehendingly. And here, as 

 in all cases where we deal with the human subject, our anthropo- 

 morphizing tendencies, though still to be kept in restraint, have 

 a larger justification in the facts than in the study of animal forms 

 far remote from man. It may reasonably be assumed that what 

 psychic life an idiot or imbecile may have is more like our own 

 psychic life in its simpler expressions than anything else in the 

 world, and that, if comparative psychologizing is anywhere justi- 

 fiable, it is here. 



Let me not give the impression that I think this field could be 

 cultivated without difficulty, that there are nuggets lying about 

 on its surface for any one to pick up, if you will let me change 

 my figure a little. Far from it; the field has been looked over al- 

 ready; what can be picked up easily has for the most part been 

 picked up. It has also difficulties of its own, but not insuperable 

 ones. All that I desire now is to point out clearly that this is really 

 a portion of our field of comparative and genetic psychology, and 

 a promising one, one that, when we meet in future congresses, 

 may possibly have an independent place upon the programme. 



