human speech is. More than a hundred years ago doctors were classifying mentally defective children by speech defects. Up to a certain point then, language, or connected speech, and beyond it tool projection, are final tests. They spell victory—the victorious arrival of the voyaging mind at the door of a new life, and that is why the study of the feeble minded leads up at last to the study of the tool projectors!
We have not to anticipate the tool projectors here however, in this chapter on "defects." We have to linger yet a little with the feeble, the unhappy minority. The family history of the seriously defective is very obscure. The parents do not want to lift the dark curtain that hangs over the past, and, in many cases they cannot. But enough is known to make it clear that alcohol—a poison that seems to have a strangely evil effect on the higher brain—is one great cause, if not the great direct[1] cause of arrested development. Its work once fairly done, there is no going back on the consequences of it. They follow as the night the day.
The burden of supporting the unfit is heavy. Moreover, a certain percentage of all defectives are a constant danger to the people among whom they live.
- ↑ Very few would deny that the great indirect cause is poverty.
