n Indian chief, with half a peacock's tail stuck in his cap. Yet
another idiot, a fierce and dangerous creature, seemed as invariably
malignant in his dispositions as the Cromarty one is benevolent, and
died in a prison, to which he was committed for killing a poor
half-witted associate. Yet another idiot of the north of Scotland had a
strange turn for the supernatural. He was a mutterer of charms, and a
watcher of omens, and possessed, it was said, the second sight. I
collected not a few other facts of a similar kind, and thus reasoned
regarding them:--

These idiots are imperfect men, from whose minds certain faculties have
been effaced, and other faculties left to exhibit themselves, all the
more prominently from the circumstances of their standing so much alone.
They resemble men who have lost their hands, but retain their feet, or
who have lost their sight or smell, but retain their taste and hearing.
But as the limbs and the senses, if they did not exist as separate parts
of the frame, could not be separately lost, so in the mind itself, or in
at least the organization through which the mind manifests itself,
there must also be separate parts, or they would not be thus found
isolated by Nature in her mutilated and abortive specimens. Those
metaphysicians who deal by the mind as if it were simply a general power
existing in _states_, must be scarce less in error than if they were to
regard the _senses_ as merely a general power existing in states,
instead of recognising them as distinct, independent powers, so various
often in their degree of development, that, from the full perfection of
any one of them, the perfection, or even the existence, of any of the
others cannot be predicated. If, for instance, it were--as some
physicians hold--the same general warmth of emotive power that glows in
benevolence and burns in resentment, the fierce, dangerous idiot that
killed his companion, and the kindly-dispositioned Cromarty one who
takes home pailfuls of water to the poor old women of the place, and
parts with his own toys to its children, would, instead of thus
exhibiting the opposite poles of character, at least so far resemble one
another, that the vindictive fool would at times be kindly and obliging,
and the benevolent one at times violent and resentful. But such is not
the case: the one is never madly savage--the other never genial and
kind; and so it seems legitimate to infer, that it is not a general
power or ene