justice. What is the use of your finding by experiment in some
people a thing we know by reason must be in all of them?"

Here it will be as well to pause a moment and avert one possible
misunderstanding. I do not mean that you and I cannot and do not
practically see and personally remark on this or that eccentric or
intermediate type, for which the word "feeble-minded" might be a very
convenient word, and might correspond to a genuine though indefinable
fact of experience. In the same way we might speak, and do speak, of
such and such a person being "mad with vanity" without wanting two
keepers to walk in and take the person off. But I ask the reader to
remember always that I am talking of words, not as they are used in
talk or novels, but as they will be used, and have been used, in
warrants and certificates, and Acts of Parliament. The distinction
between the two is perfectly clear and practical. The difference is
that a novelist or a talker can be trusted to try and hit the mark; it
is all to his glory that the cap should fit, that the type should be
recognised; that he should, in a literary sense, hang the right man.
But it is by no means always to the interests of governments or
officials to hang the right man. The fact that they often do stretch
words in order to cover cases is the whole foundation of having any
fixed laws or free institutions at all. My point is not that I have
never met anyone whom I should call feeble-minded, rather than mad or
imbecile. My point is that if I want to dispossess a nephew, oust a
rival, silence a blackmailer, or get rid of an importunate widow,
there is nothing in logic to prevent my calling them feeble-minded
too. And the vaguer the charge is the less they will be able to
disprove it.

One does not, as I have said, need to deny heredity in order to resist
such legislation, any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world
in order to resist an epidemic of witch-burning. I admit there may be
such a thing as hereditary feeble-mindedness; I believe there is such
a thing as witchcraft. Believing that there are spirits, I am bound in
mere reason to suppose that there are probably evil spirits;
believing that there are evil spirits, I am bound in mere reason to
suppose that some men grow evil by dealing with them. All that is mere
rationalism; the superstition (that is the unreasoning repugnance and
terror) is in the person who admits there can be angels but denies
there can be