Letter. 11 - Dr. Howe's Report on Idiocy

Summary

H. M. to H. G. A.

I was just going to write to you yesterday, when I took up Dr. Howe's Report to the Legislature of Massachusetts on Idiocy: and I found it so interesting, that I could not put pen to paper till I had gone through it. One of the best things in it is the quiet exhibition of the mess made by Law, Medicine, and Philosophy, of the statement of the case of idiots. One would think nothing could be done in the legal direction without some definition or description of Idiocy which might be of pretty general application to the class of the imbecile: but nothing can be more loose, and, at the same time, limited, than the description that English and American law give of an idiot. The philosophers who have attempted to define do no better. Proceeding from the idea that the mind is one thing, and the body another, only arbitrarily connected with it, and entangled by the notion of freewill, they talk in the most confused manner of weakness of the understanding as accounting for failure of the affections;—of weakness in that connection which should bring the other faculties under the control of the will; and so on, till one wonders whether the writers really believed that they had any clear idea in their minds when they wrote what was so vague and utterly unsubstantial.