THE PSYCHOPOLITICS OF LEARNING AND DISABILITY IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY THOUGHT
Take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be human and isn’t yet, or used to be human once and isn’t now, or ought to be human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.
C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
I
The history of idiocy has scarcely been written. While social constructions of madness are common currency among most contemporary historians of psychiatry, I suspect the same historians believe that everyone just knows what an idiot or mentally handicapped person is, and that it is some unfortunate creature with a deficit in something called intelligence and a trans-historical reality. The little history on idiocy that has been done rarely goes back further than the late nineteenth-century statistical concepts of intelligence which subsist in our own period, or else lie in social or legal history. Both of these, by their very nature, can easily sidestep the demands of a critical account of concepts, which I shall attempt to give here for the seventeenth century.
One of the roots of the dyadic formula ‘madness or idiocy’ lies in John Locke’s remark that madness is a mis-match of ideas to the external realities that should correspond to them, whereas idiocy is absence of ideas.1 The account of madness has long been superseded and contextualised. ‘Mental handicap’ or ‘retardation’, to use the clinical terminology, as absence of the mental, remains taken for granted. This historiographical situation reflects exactly Locke’s hierarchical classification of madness as human and idiocy as non-human, the background to which forms the topic of this chapter. The philosopher J. L. Austin wrote that any time we find one half of an antithetical pair crumbling beneath our critical gaze, be sure that the other half will have crumbled too, but that this will have escaped our notice. The ‘Lockean’ psychological dyad is assumed to have influenced a later doctrine in social policy which saw it as the task of progress to distinguish between the mad and the congenitally idiotic. If we nowadays regard this assumption sceptically in relation to the history of madness, then idiocy as absence surely cannot stay unscathed.
Is there a trans-historical idiot? Is there a type from past cultures whom we could recognise as our learning disabled person, congenitally and incurably learning disabled, and with perhaps an organic explanation for this too? If we go back as far as possible, the Hippocratic writers have a clear schema of congenital physical features such as dislocation of the hip.2 Congenitality here is a major criterion in the classification of physical difference, for even the foetal age at which an injury occurs is said to determine the prognosis. Other Hippocratic texts deal with what may (or may not) be epilepsy, melancholia, depression, or other so-called mental illnesses. We could therefore recognise ‘our’ physically disabled as a group in ancient history and medicine; the mentally ill would be more contentious, but ultimately there would be some overlap between ours and theirs. However, idiocy in our sense is non-existent. It may be argued that this lacuna does not disprove the trans-historical reality, and is merely due to the legal and property structures of ancient society in which idiots simply did not have a social role. But this is to have your cake and eat it. If madness is mere social invention, then why should we believe that although antithetical idiots did not have an interactive role in ancient society, they did nevertheless positively exist in some other dimension?
The medieval fiscal distinction between congenital fools and those with lucid intervals between bouts of insanity is sometimes referred to as if it were a precursor of Locke’s psychological distinction. But proof of incompetence to administer the profits of an estate, and proof of other kinds of unfitness had no generalised basis in common psychological concepts such as would transcend social classes or the disciplines of medicine, theology and law. Even since the late nineteenth-century establishment of a general (lack of) intelligence, the clientele of the interests exploiting this construction has continued to change. Such a rapid turnover has not been achieved in constructions of madness. And yet, I suspect, most of us would assume a continuity between the medieval and Lockean models of idiocy, and that both models can be assimilated to a deficient ‘general intelligence’, much of which was in fact the product of the later nineteenth century; and this is to read back quite uncritically the assumptions of our own socialisation, in a way which historians have long challenged when the topic has been not idiocy but madness. Lack of generalised intelligence is no such thing, but lack of the specific historical intelligence that gained and became domination.
Neglect of this topic stems from interest. Women address historical texts on hysteria; members of specific ethnic groups tackle the psychological stereotypes of racism. People with severe learning difficulties do not do post-graduate research. As for the mad: the Renaissance melancholics, Locke himself, and later the Romantics, demonstrated that being mad carries status and, similarly, studying it is glamorous. I may not be sane but at least I am clever, since I belong to a social occupation whose status is grounded in putative cleverness. No honour accrues to the academy from natural and incurable idiocy. On the contrary, the confrontational psychosis of the academy and the professions demands both the construction and the personal denial of an inherent deficit in ‘intelligence’.
The other reason for neglect is that idiocy, having to do with absence, sits uneasily with the essentially epistemological concerns of madness. These ask us the following questions – where are the grounds of certainty? Who is to dictate to others what is and is not reasonable? To have wrong ideas, you must possess the capability for ideas in the first place. Idiocy as absence of Lockean ideas is not a question of interpreting the world this way as against that way, but of whether someone is competent to interpret the world in any way at all. Interpreting it this way and interpreting it that way share a terrain of discussion; interpreting it any way and not interpreting it any way manifestly do not – they are a mutual exclusion. Inclusion for people with learning difficulties means walking away from the epistemological criterion, as you would walk away from the playground bully. It invites a quite different set of questions: who belongs, and who – permanently – does not? What aspects of humanity, if any, ought we to perfect? What kind of values do we want to rule our social relationships? However seductive the pessimism generated by and after Foucault, I suggest that a history of the uses to which the concept of idiocy has been put should be able to contribute to social policy.
I am not sure that even adventurous historians are yet prepared to meet the consequences of Wittgenstein’s dictum that the mind as conceived by Locke, especially of ‘ideas’ that can be transposed into language, is an occult medium. If Wittgenstein was right, then those humans in whom mental events are allegedly absent keep him company. The real question then is still one of social goals and values: what kind of society might it be (and still a complexly organised society) that had the ability to include people with the severest learning disabilities, to the point of not noticing, or not being anxious about, the difference between Wittgenstein and them? This is the field in which an archaeology of concepts of idiocy would have to begin.
II
Locke’s definition of madness by antithesis with idiocy is in fact just one of several allusions in the first edition of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I have argued elsewhere3 that his definition of reason is a circularity, maintained by his denomination of ‘idiots’ and ‘changelings’; that these have no basis in any trans-historical type but are simply whatever does not belong within the circle; that certain normative considerations infuse his natural history, in which idiot changelings are a psychologically distinct type and on these grounds different in species. In the Essay he draws a distinction, famous for its novelty, between the ‘physical’ and the ‘moral man’. In replacing the Aristotelian definition of a creature whose real essence is ‘corporeal rational being’ (where the rationality of members of the species as individuals only needs to be intuited) with a definition by nominal essence (where each single member must conform with our idea of man and thus with our idea of what it is to be rational), Locke creates room for a classification of some individuals who in not being rational are at odds with the definition of humans as a species. He calls them ‘changelings’ – merely physical, non-moral beings. These changelings are used to illustrate the ‘principle of plenitude’ in the Chain of Being. This states that God does not omit anything from the fullness of creation; idiots, by occupying a niche between genuine humans and other animals, are hierarchically ranked below the madness of genuine humans. They are positively ‘excluded out of the species of man’ in Locke’s natural history. They have no souls, and consequently no afterlife; were we able to determine the prognosis at birth, infanticide or at least a refusal to baptise would be justifiable. He emphasises difference in kind: changeling idiocy is not due to inheritance, either parental or Adamite (which could imply at most a difference in degree), but to a difference in ‘the Wheels, or Springs (if I may so say) within’. It is assumed therefore that the condition is incurable and the subject ineducable. Finally, the assessment criteria for idiocy are based on the psychological category of ‘abstraction’, or the ability to sort species and kinds by their most useful characteristics; lack of this capacity is labelled ‘idiocy’.4
We are not looking at a coherent theory. Several of the themes are contradicted in other texts from before and after the 1680s where Locke is more sceptical, less exclusive. But this only emphasises that his notions are intuitive. What binds them is their location in the mind-set of someone born in 1632, reared a Calvinist, subject to the political events and the theological and scientific-medical disputes of the mid-century, and caught up in the specific conjuncture of 1689. Locke’s idiots – and ours – are urgently necessary inventions, squeezed into existence by ad hoc demands. The changeable definition of the changeling, however, is facilitated by the relative stability of the concept of absence of ‘ability’, which emerged from the revolution at the crucial time of Locke’s early personal development and has remained central to our culture.
III
Locke grew up in a religious setting still heavily influenced by the Calvinist theory of the elect. According to orthodox Calvinism, all humans are disabled: morally, in that they are impotent to believe, and naturally, in that this moral impotence is congenital, inherited from the fallen Adam. ‘Moral’ and ‘natural’ are one unitary disability. Election by grace is God’s cure, pre-ordained to only a few. But according to the opposite Protestant doctrine (Arminianism) Christ died to save all humans, not just the elect – on the grounds that ‘To beleeuve is of grace’ but ‘to be able to beleeuve is in nature’,5 in everyone. Everyone can, if they will. To the Calvinist reformed church, this was anathema. Humanists working within it,6 unhappy about humans being shuffled around by blind forces of predestination, had to try and justify human autonomy without incurring the charge of Arminian heresy. They located it in the ‘physicality’ of natural ability, of the Understanding as an active power, not passively receiving illumination but permeating body and soul through individual labour. Thus the humanists transformed previous scholastic notions of ‘active intellect’ into something enshrined in the natural history of individuals. Thus too they speak in new ways about differential rationality. It is no longer simply that some humans are elect, but also that some are more intellectually able than others.
If this contradicts the orthodoxy of pre-ordained election, it also contradicts the Arminian doctrine that everyone can if they will. Rather, everyone will (or should) if they can. This theory was known as ‘conditional universalism’. Since the main premise in this formula now rested on intellectual ability, rather than will, it raised the possibility that there might be individuals who ‘can’ not, and who therefore do not qualify for consideration as universal. The law of nature is, in the biblical phrase, ‘written on everyone’s heart’, but is disapplied where there is idiotic absence of reason; such individuals are morally exempt from the promise we humans make to fulfil our duties in our covenant with God. The absence is explained in terms of a disabled ‘nature’ that is separate from morals, or morally neutral. Conversely, the moral disability, though it behaves ‘as if it is natural, is something we can improve.
This formulation would have remained vague had it not been for attacks from orthodox Calvinist colleagues. Anyone lacking a whole faculty of Understanding would by definition be a beast: thus the humanists heretically challenge the fixity of species. An all-perfect God could not have created non-human humans; they would have to be considered faulty. One humanist reaction to this ad hominem argument is to espouse it, to emphasise species difference. More often it leads them to consider differences of degree, a differential psychology now set in a natural-history framework. For this, a generic classification of impediments already exists in legal notions of competence; and the ‘natural’ element of the differentiation can be explained by biblical-medical analogies with blindness, amputation and leprosy. From the husk of the old medical and legal discourses, till now embedded in unrelated realms of experience, there will emerge a concept of (absent) reason defined in terms of a purely mental ‘nature’, sometimes aligned with a species-type difference.
Orthodox Calvinists reject the tendency towards this ultimate differentiation, but only because for them the important boundary is between elect and non-elect. Once others blurred this boundary, it either included its idiots as excused humans, exceptions to the rule (untidy but unthreatening), or was redrawn to exclude a new species existing in the interstice between beasts and humans. This creature is more vulnerable. Is it excusable? Has it a soul? Are we obliged to preserve its life? The exclusion of the non-elect became the exclusion of the idiotic by a process that was occasionally even self-aware. This raises the possibility that the elect, if they did not become the bourgeoisie,7 became the psychologically human, that eventual ‘concept of man’ defined by possession of a prerequisite ‘human understanding’. If we are not redeemed because we are elect but because we are human and want to be redeemed, then conversely to be human must be to be redeem-able, in the sense of having the natural intellectual means to work at it.
Calvinist humanism’s distinction between natural and moral disability8 was taken up in the politically charged English context of the mid-century, by theologians seeking a middle way between the Calvinist orthodoxy of many Presbyterians and Independents and the Arminianism of the bishops and monarch. The most prolific of these was Richard Baxter, who subsequently influenced generations of pastors. It is clear from his observations that the kind of language used to discuss the boundary between elect and non-elect carried over into descriptions of the boundary between psychological humanity and its corresponding idiocy. Calvinist orthodoxy had always warned against prying into God’s reasons for calling some and not others; this would be human arrogance, because God pleases himself. Baxter and other champions of the humanists’ conditional universalism complained that this is mere evasion; but they transfer exactly the same discourse of evasion to their attempts to answer the question, did God create idiots in nature and if so, why?9
In Locke’s hands, the widening of the elective boundaries is clearest in his concept of ‘moral man’. This assumed innovation in fact followed several earlier moves. Calvin’s successors had used this respectably Aristotelian formula (originally signifying the person capable of restraining his desires) to describe their concept of humans in the state in which they are created by God in nature: hence the insistence that ‘moral man’ and ‘natural man’ were coterminous. At first this underlined the pessimistic view of man as corrupt: to be moral was to be born a sinner. The moral man was the ‘outer’ aspect of natural corruption, repentant verbally but still wicked; only inexplicable grace could get you to heaven. But gradually the humanist wedge driven between natural and moral disability forced theologians to clarify how they would define the species on those occasions when they needed to discuss elect and non-elect under one heading. To talk of the Aristotelian ‘rational animal’ as ‘the whole lump of mankind’10 would be to concede to Arminianism, in which corruption was underplayed and everyone redeemed. It became necessary to clarify the character of the species, however trivial this issue compared with who was or was not elect. The ‘moral man’ was to become irrevocably a definition premised on ability (albeit, for the orthodox, an ability of the will rather than of the intellect) to discharge one’s duty to God.11 This was a more restricted classification of species than St Paul’s ‘lump of mankind’. To make a distinction between natural and moral became more acceptable, although in fact the acceptance was still merely verbal among orthodox Calvinists; it is not a distinction they fully understand in practice.
People like Baxter took advantage of this shift. Moral ability, he said, cannot constitute natural ability; it presupposes the existence of a separable natural ability. The humanity of the corresponding idiots is thereby rendered dubious. In the 1650s there were already complaints that the Aristotelian formula ‘homo = animal rationale’ was circular. ‘Homo = animal morale’ was a substitution that allegedly cut through the circularity: the species is defined as that which owes a moral duty to God because it has certain natural mental abilities. The point of Locke’s Essay was to specify what those abilities were and how they worked in detail; they defined for Locke, in contrast to the ‘merely physical’ changeling, not ‘the moral man, as I may call him’ but ‘the moral man, as I may call him’ – a readjustment of the earlier terminology.12
What were those abilities which the new idiots lacked, with such dangerous consequences for the rest of us? Along with the species, the abilities are already envisaged in new ways at the Thermidorean turning-point of the revolution. One can almost specify the day in the calendar when belief ceases to be predominantly a set of principles residing in a place called the Understanding and comes to be determined ultimately by prior intellectual processes, the micro-mechanical ‘operations’, ‘aids and assistances’ of ability. These are both necessary and free: necessary in that they exist through nature, proceeding epistemologically (i.e. according to rules of rational evidence and probability), and free in that they involve the will. Such a way of talking about reason and the understanding, and thus of principles as separate from abilities, and sometimes of the mind as tabula rasa in this sense, already exists across the political and theological divisions of the late 1650s; the participants themselves are quite aware that they are talking in new ways about a ‘new reason’.13
The watershed political event is Cromwell’s dissolution of the Barebones Parliament, the final phase in the gradual evaporation of hopes for the millennium or at least for a Calvinist political regime in England. If the end itself were not realisable through instant mass regeneration, then the church could at least ‘police the means’14 to conversion. These means are constituted by the epistemological abilities facilitating belief in redemption, and constitute what it is to be human. People lacking abilities are now as crucial and visible as unregenerates who simply lack principles had previously been; they populate a dystopia of active learning disabilities, a fantasy which advances as the utopian vision of a passive receipt of rule by the saints recedes.
The theologians were also pastors, and the new way of talking about reason had been accompanied by over a decade of dispute about the practice of excluding would-be communicants. This was perhaps the central ideological battle of the mid-century,15 involving as it did the unity of the church, the role of the monarch and/or presbytery, and the question of who was to police the congregation: the civil magistrate or the ecclesiastical jurisdiction? The significance of communion, by contrast with the Roman theory of trans-substantiation, lay in self-examination. How could the pastor know what was going on inside the communicant’s self? According to those who believed in free admission one could not claim to be able to sort hypocrite chaff from truly regenerate wheat; the attempt of Presbyterian elders or Independent congregations to examine and exclude overstepped the limits of mere human competence, encouraged disunity and usurped the powers of the civil magistrate.
The free admission doctrine made two discrete exceptions to its rule of encouraging all to take communion: one was those who had already been excommunicated for ‘scandalous sins’, and the other was those naturally disabled from examining themselves such as children and the ‘distracted’ or mentally disturbed. At the outset, ‘fools’ are simply subsumed under the latter; if mentioned at all, they are the legal category of ‘born fools’, the distinction between them and madpeople with lucid intervals being irrelevant. What mattered was that they were all ‘excused’, in a legal sense, from self-examination. The Presbyterian and Independent counter-attack is initially the orthodox Calvinist rejection of any such separation between will (scandal) and reason (distractedness): the moral man is the inexcusable natural man. But eventually the argument about children and the mad is settled, and psychological (rather than legal) idiocy is the positive exclusion that emerges.
How does this happen? The debate contains an anxious subtext of complicity: surely there is some category of person who, we would all agree, will never be admitted to communion? The argument then would only be a secondary one of how wide this category is. Otherwise, our partisan differences as to who should be admitted, being unresolvable, would lead to a chaos of relativism and church-political disunity, corrupting the natural social order. The rock-like need for all sides to regain unity precedes and actually creates the thing itself, a common absolute exclusion. The excommunicate is still technically a church ‘member’, albeit ‘under care’. The infidel is not a member, but is capable of being baptised and eventually of receiving the eucharist. Beyond this there must be a level of absolute exclusion. What exactly is it? Opponents of free admission ask its champions whether they should not admit children to communion, since like infidels they have potential to become like us: how on your own criteria can you assess when they will reach the age of discretion? And the distracted or mad: if your rabble can attend in preparation for being ‘cured’ of their ignorance, the mad can be cured of theirs and so by your rules should be admitted. This still leaves a niche for someone who does not have either potential or curability: but this religious absence is no longer the fiscal disqualification (congenitality) or a strictly medical one (incurability) but absence of the ‘inner’ man. The supreme aim of the Presbyterians and Independents was to screen out hypocrites; the free admission party thought such exclusions posed a threat to unity. But hypocrites merely have different principles between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outward man’; the argument is simply about whether they can be detected or not (and who does the detecting). There must, however, also be someone who has no principles because they have no inner abilities, and no natural reasoning operations of the new kind I have described above. This new idiot is provoked, initially as a last-resort case, from the partisans of free admission at a precise moment in the 1650s, just as the French humanists had been forced by the ad hominem arguments of their opponents to consider the possibility of the intellectually ‘naturally disabled’ being an interstitial species.
This involved something practical. Pastors have churchwardens. The debate about who was responsible for exclusion necessarily entailed secondary debates about the allocation of administrative duties among lay wardens and clerical deacons, at parish level. Among their administrative duties were, first, the job of ensuring that certain people did not physically get beyond the chancel screen, and second, the application of the Poor Laws. Such officers were expert in methodologies of discrimination. Daniel Defoe’s Essay upon Projects, drafted at the same time as Locke’s proposals on Poor Law reform, is often cited as a precursor to the reforming efforts of the late nineteenth century to establish a clear institutional antithesis between madpeople and idiots, following on Locke’s psychological antithesis. However, most of Defoe’s ‘projects’ have since been identified as taken from interregnum pamphlets, and his proposal of separate institutions for the idiotic may well date from the same period as the pastoral debates I have been discussing. One of his arguments was that having more clearly demarcated institutions would reduce the social burden, since it was the existence of a single generalised institution that attracted inappropriate customers from the underclass of ‘idle drones’. The psychological justification (with clear theological roots) was that madness could be hypocritically counterfeited, whereas idiocy, being natural, was not. Locke’s proposal to shift the job of discriminating between deserving and undeserving from the parish to the state should also be seen against the background of these debates.
VI
The period from the outbreak of hostilities over ‘natural disability’ within French Calvinism at the beginning of the 1630s, to the general acceptance in England of a new way of describing reason as ability by the time of the Restoration, is of course also that of Locke’s upbringing and formal education. He accommodated to it his more immediate intellectual influences, notably through his absorption of Cartesian dualism as a way of discussing the mind and the human understanding, and their pathology. This accommodation, in the period of Locke’s maturity, took place against the background of the new political crisis surfacing at the end of the 1660s, occasioned by the attempts of a state church – with temporarily revived political authority of its own – to suppress religious toleration.
Its victims, the dissenters, took up once again the notion of a natural mental disability, not now against waning Calvinist orthodoxies but against the opposite (formerly Arminian) flank, the ‘Protestant Papists’ of the new church hierarchy. The hierarchy no longer argues theologically against compromise; it simply presents the crude threats of people who believe themselves powerful but realise that their authority is insecure, against those who do not conform. For the archbishop and his chaplains, reason was whatever divine authority (i.e. they) said it was, and faith achievable merely through ‘works’ and observances. For the dissenters, each human could journey to a redemptive threshold by the labour of reason itself, which was necessarily the effort of an individual and therefore required toleration. It was in political support of this dissenting position that Locke first conceived of the Essay.16
Locke’s epistemological turn was not the result of his asking himself ‘How do I really know what I claim to know?’ but of church authority interrogating the dissenters, ‘How do you really know what you claim to know?’ Places on the scale of perfection and the career ladder, and perhaps (who could tell, after thirty years of bloodshed?) continued existence on this earth, hung on the ‘ability’ to answer this question. If your faith was not a passive acceptance, nor your manner of observing it a decision for the magistrate, if it was the result of your own individual reasoning powers, how could you justify it without being an unthinkable, atomised relativist? Some dissenters realised that one could not simply respond by asserting that it was justified (how could more than one individual belief be justifiable?), but that one would have to look for something universal somewhere. Self-evidently, this universality could not lie in an individual rational weighing of evidence and probability alone. But it might consist in the existence in nature of the micro-processes of mental ability, through which the epistemological justification of individual beliefs emerges; this ability was coming to be the realm of absolute fact, in which a variegation of beliefs might hold together. Locke’s Essay is simply the most daring attempt to describe it.
The construction which Baxter had intimated – idiocy as lack of the innate ability necessary for weighing evidence – is now politically demanded. The bullies of conformity want to know how the human exceptions to the dissenters’ notion of reason can be explained. If they cannot, then it will prove that the dissenters themselves are heretical fools, antinomian individualists – ‘changelings’ in the sense of having a socially unruly and changeable will (a usage I shall return to). The dissenters too need an absolute exclusion of a ‘mental’ kind, as a strategy for the defence of unity and against accusations of provoking disunity (it is important to remember that the dissenters saw the right to toleration as the prerequisite for political and church unity). The new reason wants new idiots, and it finds them in conceptualisations which had already helped it into being.
Two dissenters in particular, Joseph Truman and Robert Ferguson,17 make this conscious revival of the French Protestant humanists, in a new context. Reason as ability was not merely a dissenting aberration. The church authorities themselves accepted the ‘new reason’ as the determiner of ‘doubts of all sorts … by the dictates of nature’.18 Their job was to recuperate this new concept into a scheme compatible with their own (divine) authority. The concept had been born out of a radical distinction between natural disability and the moral disability of reprobates. However, just like the orthodox Calvinists of the previous generation, they cope with the discourse of a natural (dis)ability only by subsuming it under the ‘moral’ in its scholastic sense. Here ‘the measure of man’s natural power of knowing or judging of things is his participating of these things, in some degree, with God’, that is, the moral relationship. The authority of reason is a divine, top-down determination, in spite of the separate existence of a specifically human, incorrupt natural ability.
Truman answers by asserting the importance of idiocy. His instincts are inclusive ones. He wants to describe his idiots as different merely in degree, citing the Aristotelian doctrine that degree cannot alter the species, and the forensic category of inculpability: idiots are excused from the effort to make themselves redeemable. His notion of a natural species is not that of Locke, who was an FRS and a medical imitator of Ray’s botanical classifications. Nevertheless, at times the force of his own argument, defending mental ability as something belonging to the individual and separate from absolute authority, leads him to concede that (just like the order to work in Locke’s conception of the poorhouse) ‘the command of loving God … requires the utmost of a mans natural Ability (and no more)’. Therefore the place in nature of the intellectually disabled – in the sense that the threats of hell and promises of heaven are something the earthly intellect is obliged to understand – must be described precisely. He suspects there is a reason for idiocy and its freedom from obligation ‘in the nature of things’. Moreover, Truman also reduces the circumference of the species from the ‘whole lump of mankind’ to ‘moral man’. As in earlier debates, it is the defensive posture against authoritarian opponents that forces from the dissenter a sharper definition of the idiot, and this in spite of Truman’s inclusive instincts. The naturalism of his ‘moral man’ is pasted over the choplogic phrase ‘rational animal’, as Locke’s is: lack of this ‘natural power’ makes one ‘no rational creature’. The new epistemological formula, based on the individual’s ‘power and knowledge to chuse’ on the basis of ‘suitable objective evidence’, both createsphilosophical ones created by Cartesian/excludes its corresponding disability and could not exist without it. Comparative psychology is the criterion of species definition.19
Truman is indecisive, however, perhaps out of political caution. The church hierarchy wants to say that God wills the conversion of everyone. In opposition to this Romanising or Arminian position, Truman tries to reassert that God’s fundamental division is between elect and non-elect. What, then, about the distinction between naturally abled and disabled? He asks us to ‘exclude the case of Infants and ideots, as being alien, and of less concernment in Religion, and also difficult’. His opponents seize on this contradiction and deride it: the demarcation line is either one or the other.20 This discussion is clear evidence that the transition from the boundaries of election to those of intellectual ability could be perceived as such by contemporaries.
It should be noted that in Truman too there is a lurking Calvinist orthodoxy. Just as the church hierarchy claimed to admit natural ability as separate, but simply subsumed it under a passive moral ability to obey, so – in an opposite but equal reaction – the dissenter Truman (and eventually Locke) bestow an assumed moral content upon a secular natural ability. Both approaches override the hesitant subtlety which the natural-moral distinction has in the writings of the Protestant humanists, and both thus restore a version of the original orthodoxy. For the old orthodoxy, the identification of natural with moral disability had spelt ‘natural man’, Adamite corruption. For the dissenters, the identification of natural with moral ability in the ‘moral man’ paints a veneer of humanist optimism; but accordingly, its opposite is constructed as the natural intellectual idiot. Did God himself create this contradictory creature? The contradiction can only be resolved by naturalising this idiot, by ‘excluding it out of the species’, in Locke’s phrase.
The self-styled ‘politico-theologian’ Robert Ferguson, writing in the same year as Truman and the famous discussion which inspired Locke’s Essay, reconstructs the history of the Calvinist debate about natural and moral disability. He too claims to adhere to the humanist side, but as I have said, this claim is problematical. Ferguson isolates the category ‘physical’. In scholastic terms, physical laws are willed by God upon the material universe and upon non-corporeal beings, moral laws upon humans. The French humanists, and their English counterparts such as Baxter, had expressly treated ‘physical’ and ‘natural’ as synonymous, and ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ as their joint antithesis. But for Ferguson, to be moral is to be ‘connaturalized to the Gospel’, and the ‘moral ineptitude’ of the unregenerate is in this sense21 a natural deficit. To be an ‘ideot’, on the other hand, is a ‘physical disproportion’, as deep between this idiot and ourselves as between ourselves and God. (The soul as well as the body are seen as physical in this sense.) The physical stands in contradistinction to the natural-cum-moral, just as the opposite of Locke’s moral man, the changeling, is a man merely ‘in a Physical sense’. If you are unregenerate, you are at least ‘physically’ (i.e. non-idiotically) capable of grasping scriptural truth; you can but won’t. Ferguson thinks this moral shortcoming is ‘cured’ by grace, whereas Locke argues that this is by perfection of the micro-processes of understanding. (In both, the subtlety of Baxter’s point about morals only behaving ‘as if natural is glossed over.) But can the natural intellectual idiot be cured? Ferguson says, ‘a believing soul … though otherwise simple and ignorant, hath an [already instilled] insight into the things of God’: if not exactly a cure, this implies a residue of innate principles. Locke, without this crutch, says that the creature with a human morphology constitutionally incapable of his ‘human understanding’ is a quasi-species – ‘physical’ not like Descartes’ animal automata (which after all were perfect in their own way, more so than humans) but in an unnatural and contradictory way – a human which is not a human.
He tackles this conundrum with the help of his ‘nominalist’ argument that we sort species as we find it useful to do rather than by objectively fixed ‘real’ categories. Changelings as a separate species are explained by, among other things, physiological difference in the ‘internal constitution’. Locke has no problem about thus breaching the fixity of species. The problem lies, once he has done so, in saying how his natural history can cope with something which ought to have a mind and doesn’t. Can it be just another species, or is it an unnatural one?
The difference between changelings and proper humans is that if to be human is to have reason-as-ability in the realm of pure mind, whether the body attached to it is human or not (it could be a baboon’s or a parrot’s body), then the changeling is a zero. But this requires a purely mental aetiology. Is such a thing possible? The origins of this dilemma are partly the philosophical ones created by Cartesian mind–body dualism, but partly political. To explain absence by symptoms of absence would be circular. If it can be said, albeit problematically, that bodily events can ‘cause’ purely mental (non-)events, why does Locke not pursue it? He does not say it cannot or should not be done. Rather, he explicitly passes up the opportunity. Perhaps this can be viewed by contrast to Thomas Willis’s version of changeling idiocy as caused by a difference in the anatomical structure of the brain. Medical interest in anatomy was, for various reasons, associated with aristocracy and the church hierarchy. The body, like Willis, was Tory.22 The mind was Whig, as was Locke’s patron, Shaftesbury, who protected the dissenters along with their doctrines of toleration and the individual labouring intellect. The opportunity for a physiological explanation was not so much rejected by Locke as already closed to him. As I will shortly show, this gap in the possibilities for a coherent ‘natural history’ explanation of idiocy is compensated for by other possibilities which emphasise unnaturalness.
Whatever its explanation, the fact of species difference is explicit. Locke’s God calls everyone conditionally, as did Baxter’s; what is new is the definition of ‘everyone’, which is grounded in a definitive exclusion of these changelings. If the displacement of special election to a universal plane seems like an egalitarian move to today’s reader (that is, if it seems anything more than pseudo-universal), it can only be because we are ourselves assuming trans-historical criteria in nature for the exclusion of an idiot.
VII
There is a more immediately political context to the discussion of causes; it concerns the role of philosophy as against divinity, and the correct use of language. Against the cultivation of ignorance through obscurity practised by the church hierarchy, Ferguson sees philosophy as a way of asserting the autonomy of the individual’s reasoning abilities and thus the public survival of dissent; this is the political importance of using ‘civil’ or publicly accessible terminology, and it is well known that this was Locke’s goal too. In fact the aim of the passage containing his changeling/moral man distinction is to demonstrate precisely that point.
Ferguson makes the same point when he argues for the synonymity between ‘natural’ and ‘moral’. The word ‘natural’ is more accessible to the lay reader schooled in scriptural accounts of moral disability, which are based on analogies with ‘natural’ conditions such as blindness. Lack of the physical organs of sight furnishes a descriptive framework for lack of the mental faculty of a labouring, individual understanding. Elision of the analogical character of this mind-body relationship facilitates elision of the difference between natural and moral disability; it helps communicate with a wider public, where ‘old terms’ (and perhaps old prejudices) ‘will serve the turn’. We are confronted with a creature who lacks not only the ability but the specific kind of disability (i.e. the moral one of reprobation) which orthodox Calvinism insists is natural to the human species. It is therefore not a human at all; rather than having some mental operations which are under-active by analogy with Galenism’s sluggish ‘animal spirits’, its defining mental characteristic is an absence. In the patois still informally used by medical practitioners in this field, ‘there’s nothing there’.
Locke, searching for a word for his extra species, chooses ‘changeling’ as the existing civil term (one drawn from everyday language) that shapes up as the least square peg in this new round hole. What had been its contemporary connotations? First, extreme difference from the parent, as in Aristotelian and Paracelsian discourses as well as Calvinist debates about the inheritability of election. Second, there is the child who is not a child:
A virgin became pregnant and said that she was visited every night by a handsome youth. Her parents lay in wait for this lover and the following night found a frightful monster in their daughter’s embrace. A priest was called and drove the devil out by reciting St John’s Gospel. Thereupon the devil set all the bedding on fire, let off a terrible fart, and made away. The following day the daughter gave birth to a monster or fantastic abortion.23
This text appeared in the same year as the Essay, and may seem rather different. However, demonology and natural history were not mutually exclusive. Midwives24 and theologians sought rather to make a correct distinction between fantasised demons and real ones. (Non-belief in their existence was a sign of atheism.) The function of baptism had been to exorcise the devil in the infant, and by this very act to enable divine illumination to enter in. Eventually the passivity of illumination is substituted by the active reason entailed in mental processes, and so the attribution of these latter just is the act of exorcism. Consequently their absence just is devil-possession.25 There is nothing exotic about the demonological explanation; such idiots, the ‘simulacra of hell’,26 are intrinsic to the historical construction of modern psychology.
This mind-set, or at the very least Locke’s supposition of it in the reader, is the only possible answer to the question: why did he connect the ‘separate species’ argument with a justification of infanticide if the difference be detected at birth? One does not kill all animals, just because they are animals. The implicit justification must be utilitarian: it deals with the consequences of the devil’s existence in the real world. This method of justification may be compared with the way in which medical science justifies genetic screening for learning disabilities by pointing to the fiscal consequences of allowing certain foetuses to come to term. Likewise the rarity of the seventeenth century’s demonological changeling means that it is exposed to the same statistical glare as the trisomic foetus whose abnormality is highlighted by being isolated at one end of the scale of random IQ distribution and is pursued by genetic technology. The statistical abnormality and the demonic paranormality associable with learning difficulties are simply two ways of representing the same thing: the difficulty which a particular society has in coping with the consequences of its own integration.
We can see then why Locke’s medical and pedagogical innovations did not extend to the possibility of curing or educating his congenital idiot.27 He had taken in hand the education of Edward Clarke junior, the son of his close political confidant, who became ‘blockheaded’ (a medical term in the seventeenth century) following childhood encephalitis; Locke was puzzled, but at least considered education possible.28 The difference between him and the changelings was not one of degree: it is not that changelings are ‘severe’ and Clarke merely ‘mild’. It all lies in the fact that changelings are congenitally so. Having different internal ‘wheels and springs’ means one is born different in kind, and if physiology cannot cause mental absence then answers must be sought in the causes of birth itself. For most readers, the devil would be understood here.29
VIII
The correct deployment of ‘civil’ terminology also helps us to understand the Essay’s antithesis between madness and idiocy. The formula ‘man is a rational animal’ was inadequate because it was merely a ‘physical’ description; it dealt with the body and the soul, but not with that fundamental law of nature which is, in a typical dissenting variant, ‘not so much a law which our nature prescribes unto us, as a law prescribed into our nature’.30 Absence of the Lockean ability to formulate abstract ideas, to think and sort for ourselves, is absence of that law. Magistrates may claim to represent divine authority, but blind obedience to their stipulated observances renders us idiotic. If humans are individually capable of fulfilling their own reasoning abilities, then creatures lacking such abilities do not blend into the lump. They stand out because they do need to obey authority unquestioningly (parents, legal guardians etc.); they are not exceptions to a mere rule of logical classification (‘man is a rational animal’), they ‘do Unman us’,31 threatening our place in the scheme of natural history and our new-found, individually grounded political maturity, our ‘ability’ to give rulers our consent or withhold it.
The pathological characteristics of idiocy thus merge with those of idolatry and divine authority, bringing along previous theological, medical and legal discourses. They include mental under-activity, idleness, lethargia, ignorance (enforced by the priesthood), humoral coldness, weakness (impotentia), the ‘stupidity’ of mere matter, as well as social backwardness and a nostalgia for the Roman religion and the everyday idiocy of the unconverted countryside. On the opposite side, the pathological characteristics of madness merge with those of religious enthusiasm: they are speed, heat, over-activity, and an excessively forward-looking (chiliastic) mentality, associated often with the lower social strata in the towns.
This antithesis between idiotic idolaters and mad enthusiasts exists in various permutated pairings throughout the century, often in medical contexts or analogies. Political and sometimes personal survival depended on finding, in the rapid fluctuation of forces, a fulcrum of ‘moderation’ between what might be construed by your enemies as nonconforming enthusiasm on the one hand, and Arminian or Roman idolatry on the other. The middle path of political and clinical sanity was a narrow and inscrutable one; you claimed to occupy it because you wanted to keep your head.
The Essay contains various subtextual references to this. In the 1690s Locke added both a chapter on the association of ideas and one on enthusiasm.32 The first of these is almost wholly about mis-association, and is clearly viewed through the same optic as enthusiasm, ‘the Conceit[s] of a warmed or over-weening Brain’ on the part of ‘the untractable Zealots’.33 The date of the added chapters coincides with the period when, after the exclusion of the idolatrous James II, the main target of the dominant ideology was once again enthusiasm. Locke, under pressure from the victorious doctrines and faced with charges of Socinianism (itself seen as enthusiastic), had to reply. He contrasts the enthusiasts with the Roman Church, in which superstitious belief encourages suspension or absence of reason’s operations, whereas enthusiasts let them run amok. Locke’s treatment of enthusiasts was somewhat opportunistic. When it did him no harm, he extended his vision of religious toleration to them. His exclusion of Roman idolatry never wavered. At least enthusiasts are mentally able, even if they misuse these abilities. His political rejection of ecclesiastical infallibility and idolatry and his espousal of toleration are inextricably tied up with his psychological rejection of innate ideas and espousal of innate abilities. In terms of pathology, this reflects his lopsided ranking of the antithesis in which the mad are just like us but the idiotic different in kind.
IX
Locke’s dissenting contemporaries still talked about needing, on top of the newly optimistic moral/natural abilities, a ‘spiritual’ entity of saving grace. ‘Where there is nothing but a natural Mind, it can act no otherwise than in a Natural way,’ says Ferguson.34 If our minds are no longer naturally corrupt, they are insufficient. But Locke pushes grace aside and uses this kind of formula as his positive starting-point; it is then ready to be born, in the hands of others, as a secular psychology. And the creation of ‘idiots’ on or beneath a terrain of reason as purely human ability and purely mental labour, is the ploy by which the rest of us are able to present ourselves to authoritarian bullies as intelligent, moderate, autonomous citizens capable of consent and democratic government. The more Locke’s leveller credentials35 extend towards a universalist concept of ‘man’ – the forty-shilling freeholder, perhaps servants, perhaps (if only hypothetically) women and the slaves of the colonial trading companies – the more sharply are the remaining exclusions etched in, the non-elect detritus of civil society.
This is in theory. But it is important to see that this does not overlap neatly with Locke’s perception of the real society around him, and important to understand this perception as a theological rather than a sociological one.36 A century of Puritan attacks on the notion of honour, and on the aristocracy’s disdain for the dishonourably hard mental labour needed to manage their estates, helps explain why Locke stresses that ‘Gentlemen should not be ignorant’.37 He normally makes a clear distinction between the word idiot as a technical usage and the class idiocy of the village, that general lack of education and metropolitan culture which according to him affects ‘the greatist part of mankind’ who are mainly concerned to ‘still the croaking of their own bellies’. But the two sets of criteria, legal and psychological, are not yet seamlessly one, and the class-restricted sense of the legal criterion is still implied. Locke is worried about the mental shortcomings of members of the social strata for whom the Essay was written. At the genesis of strictly psychological ‘idiocy’ criteria, they operate to some extent with different degrees of strictness according to one’s place in the social order. Exclusion only matters where there are grounds for inclusion in the first place. It is gentlemen idiots who are the fly in the ointment of early psychology. The social order is a divinely appointed order of unchanging nature, and the educability of one’s social inferiors to an equal level of understanding is, if feasible, mere speculation.
These normative elements in Locke’s natural history of idiocy and understanding reveal themselves most clearly when he focuses on ability.38 Unlike the dissenters, he does not refer to the old humanist debate; but the same pressures of conformity dictate his discussion. He uses ‘ability’ to try and disconnect the notion of freedom from that of willing. For the champions of ecclesiastical authority, liberty is the opposite of determination and compulsion: it means the social chaos of recent memory, summed up as antinomianism – the freedom to do what one likes, with the excuse that this is divinely sanctioned by the presence of God in oneself. Locke avoids the trap of appearing to defend this by defending ‘liberty’. Instead, he denies that liberty and determination are opposites. For this purpose, he brings in the changeling once again:
To give a right view of this mistaken part of Liberty, let me ask, Would any one be a Changeling, because he is less determined, by wise Considerations, than a wise Man? Is it worth the name of Freedom to be at liberty to play the fool?
It is not clear here whether the changeling is an idiot or a madperson, and this fusion of antithetical characteristics is instructive. In addition to the significances of the term already discussed, there are many Puritan sermons in which the ‘changeling’ is a unitary self that is always changing its will (rather than being swapped or possessed). This will-changeling can be idiotic in the context of Popery (it allows its opinions to be dictated at a whim by authority), or mad in the context of antinomian enthusiasm (where it changes itself constantly because it takes its own inconstant will to be the will of God). Locke uses this fusion to argue that the pursuit of happiness is itself a constraint; we have an ‘ability’ to ‘suspend the prosecution of this or that desire’ which depends upon self-examination, not on obedience to authority. The highest happiness is the afterlife, and the necessity of pursuing it ‘is the hinge on which turns the liberty of … finite intellectual Beings’. Changelings, on the other hand, appearing to have complete liberty because anything they do is excusable, are therefore in fact totally determined. ‘Agents that have no Thought, no Volition at all, are in every thing necessary [= physical] Agents,’ says Locke partly in answer to those who fear liberty of worship and removal of the magistrate’s compulsion. Amentia and its spuriously human agents are the concrete examples of total determination.39
Changelings in the above context are creatures who either lack the faculty of Will completely, or who have few intellectual abilities to examine it or suspend their action; just as idiot changelings, in the faculty of Understanding, are those who either lack ‘abstract ideas’ completely or who put ideas together very feebly. The either/or in both cases is significantly fuzzy. The naturalistic and the normative support each other: the separate species construction of the changeling is cultured from the simplicity of the uneducated whose shortage of abilities Locke admits is socially determined. Establishing separate categories in nature in whom humanity is absent is dependent on the notion of differences in (social) degree. Reversing the order in Charles Murray’s thought-processes,40 we could say: without the conception of an underclass there would be no way of positing mental handicap.
We can mix our notions with Locke’s because the publication of the Essay coincided in some real sense with the birth of the society in which we ourselves seek to participate. The notions of disability and tutelage, and of ability and consent, were pressed into existence through the class and political seizures of the seventeenth century. Though attached to more ancient metaphysical boundaries of absence/presence, under-activity/overactivity/median activity of the mind, curability and educability, what is distinctive about the modern period as a whole is the coexistence of these with certain notions of social control, from chancel screening to genetic screening. The inherently exclusive concept of psychological humanity belongs with exorcisms, farting devils, and the ethics committee of the British Medical Association, whose justification for the termination of foetuses with certain chromosomal dispositions (the alleged cost to the community of servicing them if they were allowed to come to term),41 is couched in language which Locke, as the author of a far-sighted Poor Law reform proposal with its paranoiac connecting of ‘waste’ with ‘impotence’ and its elevation of this ‘burden’ from the parish to the state, would have understood.
Locke asks us to consider ‘the weak and narrow Constitution of our Minds’ and that we are apt to waste our abilities, ‘not making that use of [our] Understanding [we] should’; but in doing so he also emphasises that our abilities are our own responsibility. This is the unified criterion by which we distinguish those who do not merit species rights (people who have no minds or abilities at all, of the kind we recommend) from those who do (us), and the hierarchical degrees of esteem and honour (read: intelligence) among ‘us’. According to Locke’s theory of consent, in a volatile society populated by imperfect but fully human people, the liberty he prescribes is a prerequisite for social order. But at the strange birth of liberal England there are some other anomalous offspring emerging. Totally determined inhuman idiots, at the opposite end from liberty, are necessary to the theory of consent.
More recently the line between consenting to be governed and being an idiot has become rather fine. To question the trans-historical nature of idiocy entails disturbingly negative implications for the whole theory of consent.42 But this questioning might, for us, be as constructive a path through a socio-political impasse, as upholding it was for Locke. He and his contemporaries often use the example of teaching a parrot to speak. If it could speak rationally, it would have to be classified with humans. If there are people of human outward appearance who can be taught to ‘speak’ only as a parrot actually does, they could not be so classified. But the epistemological criteria in this assessment of personhood have entailed certain social goals: rationality as the weighing of evidence about individual rewards (at first in heaven, but subsequently on earth), or as the classification of species by their public utility. I can think of a different hypothesis, or rather an example from real life. It is easy to teach someone with quite severe learning difficulties the moves in chess, parrot-fashion. What is immeasurably more difficult is to teach them the concept of winning, let alone strategies. It might much more easily occur to them, because it is naturally more pleasant, that the object is to take turns in removing each other’s pieces from the board. This would also develop abilities, but of a different ethical cast. I might develop these skills of co-operation and interdependence more quickly and to a greater extent than my ‘opponent’, but in a society which could admit to itself that such skills were ultimately more fundamental than those of rational choice, would this difference between us have any social significance? How if at all, would we classify these differences among humans psychologically?43
NOTES
1 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford, 1975, 2.11.13. References are to book, chapter, and section.
2 Hippocrates, On Joints (Withington), 52.60; 53.52; 53.77. I deal with these questions in ‘Mental Disabilities and Human Values’, in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 74/1, 1992.
3 ‘John Locke’s Idiots in the Natural History of Mind’, in History of Psychiatry, 1994, vol. 5.
4 Locke, Essay, 3.11.16; 3.6.26; 4.4.15–16; 3.6.39; 2.11.13.
5 Quoted in Peter Moulin [Pierre du Moulin], The Anatomy of Arminianisme, London, 1620. The word ‘disability’ is commonly used in this sense in contemporary texts; it has a legal origin.
6 Their leaders were John Cameron, Moisis Amyraut and Paul Testard, all based at the academy of Saumur. A detailed history of the conflict between them and the hierarchy of the Reformed Church is in François Laplanche, Orthodoxie et Predication: l’æceuvre d’Amyraut et la querelle de la grace universelle, Paris, 1965, and B. G. Armstrong, Calvinism and the Amyraut Heresy: Protestant Scholasticism and Humanism in Seventeenth-Century France, Madison, 1969. The relevant primary texts are at the Dr Williams Library, London.
7 This suggestion was made by C. B. Macpherson in The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford, 1962, and challenged by (among others) John Dunn, in The Political Thought of John Locke, Cambridge, 1969.
8 The distinction between ‘will nots’ and ‘cannots’ survives today, in exactly the same terminology, in education policy for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties.
9 R. Baxter, Universal Redemption of Mankind, by the Lord Jesus Christ, London, 1694, p. 477. The book was written in about 1656. See also Observations on Some Important Points in Divinity, London, 1672, p. 55, for a discussion of how to define species in both cases.
10 The phrase comes from St Paul, and is typically Arminian. See especially the main Arminian text, S. Hoard, Gods Love to Mankind Manifested, by Dis-Prooving his Absolute Decree for their Damnation, n.1, 1633.
11 Baxter, Apology, London, 1654, p. 291.
12 My italics.
13 This includes Presbyterians such as Baxter, Independents such as John Owen (Cromwell’s chaplain and Locke’s Oxford tutor), and even Platonists such as Henry More. Bishop and king went back in the bottle in 1660, but not the active reasoner.
14 W. Lamont, Godly Rule, London, 1969, p. 155ff.
15 This point is made by Lamont. The massive pamphlet literature on this topic is in the Thomason Tracts at the British Library.
16 R. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, Princeton, 1986.
17 J. Truman, A Discourse of Natural and Moral Impotency, London, 1671; R. Ferguson, A Sober Enquiry into the Nature, Measure and Principle of Moral Virtue, London, 1673. Truman was a close acquaintance of Baxter. Ferguson was imprisoned for his support for the dissenting clergy, and was chaplain to the Monmouth rebellion.
18 H. Hammond, ‘Of the Reasonableness of Christian Religion’, in Works, vol. 2, Oxford, 1847. Hammond was associated with Gilbert Sheldon, head of the Church of England during the Restoration and the enforcement of conformity.
19 Truman, Discourse of Natural and Moral Impotency, pp. 39, 43, 50, 80, 87.
20 Ibid., p. 115ff., and G. Bull, Examen Censurae, London, 1676, 17.6. Bull was an associate of Hammond and Sheldon.
21 Ferguson, Sober Enquiry, pp. 145–8.
22 Thomas Willis, De Cerebre Anatomi, London, 1664, p. 51. This point was suggested to me by Rob Martensen. See also his ‘Habit of reason: anatomy and Anglicourism in Restoration England’, in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1992, vol. 66.
23 E. Franciscus, Der Höllische Proteus, Nuremberg, 1690.
24 I. Rueff, The Expert Midwife or An Excellent and Most Necessary Treatise of the Generation and Birth of Man, London, 1637.
25 This is not an exaggeration. See for example Jeremy Taylor’s description of what happens at baptism, in A Discourse of Baptisme, Its Institution, and Efficacy upon All Believers, London, 1652.
26 The phrase is Baxter’s, in The Unreasonableness of Infidelity, London, 1655.
27 Willis suggests something of the kind. However, it is not clear whether he would include those changelings who are anatomically different. In Two Discourses Concerning the Soul of Brutes which is that of the Vital and Sensitive of Man, London, 1683, section 13.
28 J. L. Gorn, ‘The strange “case” of Edward Clarke, Jr.: Attending Physician – John Locke, Gent.’, in Educational Theory, 1983, vol. 17.
29 Luther’s story about the man who drowned his (autistic?) son because it turned out to be the devil was very widely referred to in the 1650s in exactly the circles whose writings I have been discussing.
30 Ferguson, Sober Enquiry, p. 81ff.
31 Ibid., p. 112ff.
32 Locke expresses the pathology of ‘wrong Judgement’ as an antithesis between ‘sloth and negligence’ on the one hand, and ‘heat and passion’ on the other: Essay, 4.19.Iff.
33 Ibid., 4.19.7.
34 Ferguson, The Interest of Reason in Religion, London, 1675, p. 144ff.
35 These are presented, no doubt justifiably, by Ashcraft in op. cit.
36 J. Dunn, ‘From Applied Theology to Social Analysis: the Break between John Locke and the Scottish Enlightenment’, in I. Hont and M. Ignatieff (eds.), Wealth and Virtue, Cambridge, 1983.
37 See also the Essay, 4.20.6. My italics.
38 The chapter (2.21) is entitled ‘Power’.
39 Ibid.
40 R. Herrnstein and C. Murray, The Bell Curve, New York, 1994, in which the two categories are tied together, as so often, by eugenic prescriptions.
41 See, for example, N. Wald et al., ‘Maternal Serum Screening for Down’s Syndrome in early pregnancy’, in British Medical Journal, 8 October 1988; Gill et al., in Social Science of Medicine, vol. 24, no. 9, 1987, pp. 725–31.
42 See my ‘Social History, the Disabled and Consent’, in Bulletin of Medical Ethics, 1993, vol. 89.
43 A very different first draft of this paper was read by Jonathan Andrews, Javier Moscoso and Roy Porter, whom I would like to thank for their comments.