Abstract
A conception of the idiotic mind was used to substantiate late 19th-century theories of mental evolution. A new school of animal/comparative psychologists attempted from the 1870s to demonstrate that evolution was a mental as well as a physical process. This intellectual enterprise necessitated the closure, or narrowing, of the ‘consciousness gap’ between human and animal species. A concept of a quasi-non-conscious human mind, set against conscious intention and ability in higher animals, provided an explanatory framework for the human–animal continuum and the evolution of consciousness. The article addresses a significant lacuna in the historiographies of intellectual disability, animal science, and evolutionary psychology, where the application of a conception of human idiocy to advance theories of consciousness evolution has not hitherto been explored. These ideas retain contemporary resonance in ethology and cognitive psychology, and in the theory of ‘speciesism’, outlined by Peter Singer in Animal Liberation (1975), which claims that equal consideration of interests is not arbitrarily restricted to members of the human species, and advocates euthanasia of intellectually disabled human infants. Speciesism remains at the core of animal rights activism today. The article also explores the influence of the idea of the semi-evolved idiot mind in late-Victorian anthropology and neuroscience. These ideas operated in a separate intellectual sphere to eugenic thought. They were (and remain) deeply influential, and were at the heart of the idea of the moral idiot or imbecile, targeted in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, as well as in 20th-century animal and human consciousness theory.
Highlights
A conception of the idiotic mind was used to substantiate late 19th-century theories of mental evolution
These were human ‘idiots’, a class of persons . . . of peculiar interest in relation to mental evolution, because in them we have a human mind arrested in its development as well as deflected in its growth . . . supplying to the comparative psychologist very suggestive material to study. (Romanes, 1883: 181)
Across the disciplines of comparative psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychiatry, a new framing of the idiot mind occurred in the last decades of the 19th century
Summary
While Darwin was famously reticent about the evolution of humans in On the Origin of Species (1859), smuggling in his line ‘light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history’ on his final page (Darwin, 1998[1859]: 368), he would attempt to place the human species within his overarching theory in The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). Those actions that could be caused entirely by physical stimuli without recourse to the brain were prevalent in idiocy, while those that required some level of mental faculty and capacity were absent The purpose of such a formulation was to demonstrate that by applying reversion theory, we could observe in the arrested idiot mind a specific point on the journey of mental evolution from unconscious reflex of the simple organism, through partially conscious instinctive actions, to the fully conscious intentionality and volition of the fully developed human type. An initial supporter of evolutionary theory, later turned against the idea that the human intellect was subject to the evolutionary process and became an implacable opponent of Darwin His critique of Darwin’s over-attribution of conscious intention to animal actions captures the loss of rigour that occurred between Origin, and Descent and Expression. Just as what Robert Young has called ‘Darwin’s anthropomorphic way of writing about selection’ and even his ‘rank anthropomorphism’ (Young, 1985: 92–3) created a sense of conscious intention in his descriptions of animal actions, so he drew on the inverted anthropomorphism of culturally embedded Victorian tropes about idiot animality to place animal-like humans close to humanlike animals in the evolutionary scale
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