DEFINITIONS OF IMBECILITY 469 



a weakening of the observing and reasoning faculties due to 

 disease of the brain or the arrested development (of a faculty not 

 mentioned, and due to a cause not named). There is, however, no 

 evidence that the observing faculties of imbeciles are defective ; 

 their senses are usually as acute as the normal, and, apparently, 

 they are as much guided by them as other animals. But they 

 cannot store their observations. Their reasoning faculties are 

 defective only because reason itself is an ' acquirement ' only 

 because they cannot gather sufficient materials for complex thought 

 nor learn to use skilfully even such materials as they do gather. The 

 defect is, as I say, essentially an incapacity to profit by experience, 

 an initial lack or subsequent failure of memory, which prevents the 

 imbecile learning and retaining all that the normal person learns 

 and retains from infancy forwards. I include failure of memory 

 because there does not appear any good reason for the arbitrary 

 limitation of the term feeble-minded to " arrested development or 

 disease of the brain dating from birth or from some age short of 

 maturity." Take away, as by injury, from the normal adult all 

 that he has learned and at once he becomes an imbecile. Failure 

 of memory in the aged, whereby stored experience is lost, produces 

 precisely the same effects as congenital defect. The individual 

 becomes equally ' incapacitated for education or of taking care of 

 himself/ and, as a fact, is taken care of by his friends or the State 

 in just the same way as a congenital imbecile. 



769. A better description occurs in a Statement on Heredity in 

 Relation to Feeble-mindedness, written by Sir E. Ray Lankester at 

 the request of the Commission. " There is every reason to regard 

 this condition as a case of atavism a relapse to a primitive 

 animal condition of cerebral activity memory, and with it self- 

 control (depending very closely as it does on memory), is defective. 

 Some savage races (e.g. Australian blacks) are as compared with 

 more highly developed races normally in a condition of feeble- 

 mindedness. 1 



"Such throwing back in brain character among the more 

 advanced races of man is certainly transmitted to offspring, and 

 there seems no properly based argument for the view that feeble- 

 mindedness is not always congenital. In most cases it can be 

 shown (90 per cent, of carefully examined cases) to be due to 



1 I think it would be hard to prove this statement concerning Australian 

 natives. A school of native children once obtained the first place in an Australian 

 colony, and most people (e.g. Sir John Cockburn, who told me personally) who have 

 personal knowledge of the blacks rate their natural intelligence very high, and 

 suppose that training, not incapacity, has made them savages of a low type. 



