The phrase "a defective person" was once commonly believed to mean an idiot, or a person with no brain-power at all. But it is now known that every human brain is defective more or less, just as every world or planet is "defective." A world may have many fertile places and be very beautiful on the whole, but it is certainly not equally fair and equally fertile in every part. No more is any human brain. It is said that Mozart could not cut his own food, that a certain learned professor never could be trusted to take his own train ticket, and that Darwin lost any faculty for music he had ever possessed.[1] Some children are defective in ways that make it impossible to take the ordinary school curriculum, and yet they are not necessarily of low mentality, but are sometimes above the average.
For example. In 1906 a little boy of ten was taken into a "Special Class" in Bradford. He was intelligent; his blue eyes had a strange, sad look—a look of resignation and wonder. He seemed to be looking always for a deliverer, but to have lost all hope of finding him, and indeed, twenty years ago,
- ↑ "There are," writes Dr. Thomas, "many persons who are physically without the power of registering musical memories, although the ears are perfect. If such people lived in a world where musical memories were the only means of intercourse—in a grand opera world—they would be considered imbeciles."
