Warring Wilkinson

“ Abbé Sicard says of the deaf-mute: "As to morals, he does not suspect their existence. The moral world has no being for him, and virtues and vices are without reality." "The deaf and dumb," says Herr Eschke, of Berlin, an eminent teacher, "live only for themselves. They acknowledge no social bond, they have no notion of virtue. Whatever they may do, we can impute their conduct to them neither for good nor for evil." ”

“ But nature has done what civilization would have no right to do, and offers in the phenomena of deaf-mutism a psychological study of curious interest. Considered from an intellectual and moral standpoint, the deaf-mute is an anachronism—a prehistoric man standing bewildered in the blaze of the nineteenth century. By simple severance of a nerve connection an invisible barrier is thrown around the child, and in this seclusion the mind develops to a certain extent free from the influences of accumulated culture, and is in respect to ethical notions absolutely primitive. ”

“ MR. DUGDALE, in his recent monograph, "The Jukes," has endeavored to show by rather startling statistics how crime and pauperism become hereditary. In this vicious and depraved family, there is a conspicuous absence of moral sensibility—a lack of what we call conscience—that strikes the social scientist as something abnormal. Is not this lack rather a return to normal conditions by the removal of that favorable environment which holds in check the lower instincts, and helps to develop the higher capabilities, of man's nature? ”

“ You can teach a hungry dog to watch a piece of meat quicker than a child can be brought to resist the temptation of stealing cherries. Both respond to the gentle culture of caress and kindness, though the dog is the more boisterous in his acknowledgments. Indeed, every parent who has watched the development of an infant must have noticed how like the means used in training animals is the method of child-education. ”

“ Remorse is absolutely unknown, and Lubbock says the only instance of a man belonging to one of the lower races trying to account for an act is the case of a young Feejeean, who, when asked why he had killed his mother (in law?) , answered, "Because it was right."
It is very difficult to get at the original man, for the reason that wherever found he is the heir of all the ages, and the training of circumstance and condition begins away beyond the reach of mind and memory. No man can remember the time when he could not talk or walk. ”

“ The proof of this moral deficiency by deaf-mute testimony is not so easily obtained, for the reason that the deaf-mute early learns by parental discipline to attach certain consequences to certain acts, and, when he becomes educated enough to be questioned concerning moral perceptions, he has forgotten the time when he did not have what he calls conscience, but which is no more like the theological definition of conscience than is the feeling that makes a dog slink away when detected in wrong-doing. I am not prepared to say that animals have no conscience ”

“ A conscience to justify the popular notions of its origin and authority ought to be infallible, and must be universal. If this faculty is an innate and essential part of man's being, it should be in every man, and exercise its functions everywhere. It is admitted that isolated and sporadic cases of deficient moral sensibility do not authorize the logical conclusion that there is no such thing as conscience, any more than the inmates of a blind-school prove that there is no such thing as sight ”

“ Every article of the religious code in which we have been educated, and which we revere, has been or is violated without remorse among the peoples who sit in darkness, but who are supposed to have that intuitive faculty which makes the pagan a law unto himself. ”

“ It must be confessed that time and tradition have lent a sanctity to many articles of popular creed that have little authority in Holy Writ, and the so called conflict between Science and Religion will have served no ill purpose if in its heat the rubbish of ages is burned away. ”

“ Thus it is that human nature repeats itself, and that deaf-mute children left, by their inability to profit by the experience of their elders, in a prolonged infancy exemplify, in their efforts to account for the phenomena of nature, many of the fancies that prevailed in the infancy of society. ”

“ The blood of martyrs stains the skirts of every sect: Catholics have persecuted Protestants, Protestants have persecuted Papists, and both have set their heel upon the Jew. The atrocities of Alva were equaled by the cruelties of Louvois. ”

“ A lawyer may have pronounced upon certain common points of law so frequently that when a case is presented he does not stop to think, but gives answer immediately, yet one would not say that he acts intuitively. ”

“ A more poetical notion was that of a little fellow who thought the soft, feathery snow-flakes in the winter were the falling blossoms of unknown orchards in the sky, of which hailstones in summer were the icy fruit. Some suppose thunder and lightning to be the discharge of firearms in the sky, a notion the converse of that of the Aztecs, who believed the Spaniards were gods armed with thunder and lightning. ”

“ Governor Eyre says the Australians have no moral sense of what is just and equitable in the abstract, their only test of propriety being whether they are numerically or physically strong enough to brave the vengeance of those whom they may have provoked or injured. "Conscience," says Burton, "does not exist in eastern Africa, and 'repentance' means regret for missed opportunities of mortal crime." Mr. Campbell observes that the Soors, an aboriginal tribe of India, are without moral sense. ”

“ Morality is an abstraction that goes beyond the reach of his instruments of thought, and it is only as he comes within the larger capacities of the sign-language as developed and used in institution-life that he can be brought to the level of spiritual conceptions, and to do this we have continually to make stepping-stones as it were out of his own crude and imperfect mental imagery. ”

“ The relative duties to God, to self, and society, to family and friendship, require much weighing of motive, and evidence, and interests, which, so far from being settled intuitively, call for the most careful exercise of judgment. ”

“ A little girl imagined that the plants which spring up from year to year in the fields and woods were like those in her mother's garden, planted and watered by "some woman"—an infantile conception, in which, however, may be traced a kindred germ to the old Greek notions respecting nymphs and dryads. ”

“ Cœlum noil animum mutant qui trans mare currunt [1] is perhaps true of those who are old enough to travel, and who find national habitudes of thought and culture following them everywhere, but morals certainly change with almost every clime and age. In a broad survey of the history of morals one comes to doubt whether there is such a thing as abstract right and wrong. ”

“ The uneducated deaf-mute never rises to the conception of a God or Great First Cause. If he reasons at all on the subject, he concludes things have always been as they are, or as one expressed it, "it was natural to be so." He has no idea of a life beyond the grave, nor of future rewards and punishments. ”

“ The animal instincts are strong, and their gratification sought after the manner of an animal. He appreciates kindness and resents injury. He will steal and hide the thing stolen, but I have seen a dog do the same. ”

“ It suffices that they were committed without remorse, without a feeling of wrong-doing. They are not instances of perverted conscience, but of no conscience, and the concurrent testimony of travelers is that the lower races have no moral sense. ”

“ They are simply some of the outposts which theologians and schoolmen have erected to strengthen, as they imagine, the citadel of Biblical truth, but forming no part of the citadel itself. These needless defenses have been multiplied in the course of centuries till the thing defended has sometimes been lost sight of. ”

“ The Fathers have usurped the authority of the Apostles; ancient interpretation ranks revelation. Milton has come to substitute Moses to that degree that so learned a man as Professor Huxley has considered it worth his while to apply the tests of a scientist to the visions of a poet. ”