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Excerpt from:
"A Chapter on Idiots"
It is for us to act upon the medium view sanctioned alike by science and morals -- neither to cast out our idiots, like the savages who leave their helpless ones to perish; nor to worship them, as the pious Egyptians did, and other nations who believed that the gods dwelt in them, more or less, and made oracles of them -- a perfectly natural belief in the case of beings who manifest a very few faculties in extraordinary perfection, in the apparent absence of all others....