1870.J ( 49 ) 



V. ON IDIOCY. 



By P. Martin Duncan, M.B. Lond., F.B.S., <fcc. 



What became of the idiots in the days of antiquity ? Were there 

 any amongst the early races of mankind ? How is it that they are 

 hardly mentioned by classical authors, and not noticed at all in 

 Holy Writ ? These are questions upon which those who are aware 

 of the multitudes of idiots in the most highly civilized modern com- 

 munities may speculate freely, but not very satisfactorily. The 

 term idiot is of course Aristotelian. The existence of peculiar 

 members of the human family who were " solitary " was known to 

 the founder of that philosophy, and he clearly recognized the 

 absence of the vie de relation amongst those he so well and aptly 

 termed " ifoo$" in kind. Children and adults who could not be 

 communicated with, and who could not place themselves en rapport 

 with others, were considered to be " solitaries ; " they were beyond 

 the sympathies, and were heedless of the love of the human race, 

 and they were incapable of expressing the desire for or of seeking 

 companionship. Probably Grecian idiots were very much akin to 

 those of modern date in their deficiencies and peculiarities. They 

 stared open-eyed by the hour, or they waved their hands about, 

 beslavered their bodies, and wearied the beholder with automatic 

 movements. They were as heedless of the weather as of the voice 

 of authority, and they had neither reverence for the priest nor 

 admiration for the goddesses or their living representatives. Alone 

 amongst the multitudes, thoughtless amongst the philosophers, 

 unloving when embraced, caring for no one, having neither friends 

 nor foes, the " solitaries " of old were not unsurrounded by a faint 

 atmosphere of sanctity even amongst the Greeks. They were 

 unlike all other children when young, and could not be associated 

 with in mental communion when old. They had no greed of gold ; 

 food they did not live for ; luxury they were careless about ; and of 

 ambition they had none. The Helot might look upon the heedless 

 solitary with slight respect, and call him a fool like a practical 

 Anglo-Saxon ; but his philosophic master, with his yearnings after 

 the abstract and unknown, and with his dim misgivings concerning 

 his own origin and future state, evidently associated the condition 

 of his fellow-mortal with a mysterious and personal relation to the 

 gods. He gilded the gingerbread humanity with a halo of sanctity, 

 but the slave doomed to work did nothing of the sort. The men 

 who" recognized something more than a fiction in the myth of 

 Prometheus gazed into the fixed eyes of the " solitaries " and 

 speculated upon the possibility of the existence of an inward life of 

 thought behind those dull orbs, and of a close affinity with the hidden 

 intelligence of Zeus. Was there an Elysium within and a Tartarus 



VOL. VII. E 



