On the education of the imbecile / by Dora Greenwell.

  • Greenwell, Dora, 1821-1882.
Date:
1869
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the education of the imbecile / by Dora Greenwell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    All that we as yet know of our own nature tends to awaken surmises as vague and wild as were those of Cortez when he gazed ‘ Silent upon a peak of Darien,’ and yet if we wish to know anything of man as he really is, if we would desire, amid the complications of an incom¬ plete and struggling existence, to be truly useful and help¬ ful to our fellow-creatures, we must learn not to turn aside from Humanity under its more strange and conflicting aspects. We must be content to grow as familiar with its every chamber as we might be with the rooms of some old memory-haunted house where we have played in childhood, and dreamed away the golden hours of youth. And in this £ our breathing house not made with hands/ we shall doubtless find not only fair parlours looking upon summer gardens, but many dark closets, many long drearily-echoing corridors, many passages that end in nothing. We shall come suddenly upon windows that open upon heaven it¬ self, and find that here also, as in the vision of the Pilgrim, is a gateway £ that leadeth unto hell.’ This region has in ages less enlightened than our own been almost given up to the charlatan and the fanatic, and even in our own days we have seen fantastic tricks played within it both by the mesmerist and the revivalist, and known things done that were enough to make the angels weep. But surely the time has come when all fact has grown too valuable to the true thinker to be ignored or passed over because it happens to be inconvenient and hard to fit in to some already established system. Man’s complex nature encloses within it many facts, startling