A very little consideration, however, will, I think,
show the fallacy of this reasoning. Its validity hangs
upon the assumption, that intellectual power depends
altogether on the brain--whereas the brain is only one
condition out of many on which intellectual manifestations
depend; the others being, chiefly, the organs of the senses
and the motor apparatuses, especially those which are
concerned in prehension and in the production of articulate
speech.
A man born dumb, notwithstanding his great cerebral mass and his
inheritance of strong intellectual instincts, would be capable of few
higher intellectual manifestations than an Orang or a Chimpanzee, if he
were confined to the society of dumb associates. And yet there might
not be the slightest discernible difference between his brain and that
of a highly intelligent and cultivated person. The dumbness might be
the result of a defective structure of the mouth, or of the tongue, or
a mere defective innervation of these parts; or it might result from
congenital deafness, caused by some minute defect of the internal ear,
which only a careful anatomist could discover.
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