There are 100,000 epileptics in Great Britain, and as all their children carry a taint which tends to reappear as epilepsy in a later generation the number of epileptics doubles every forty years. We protect these unfortunates against others; why not posterity against them?
Neuropaths must pass on some defect; therefore, though victims may marry, no neuropath has a right to have children.
CHAPTER XXV
CHARACTER
"All men are not equal, either at birth or by training. Nature gives each of us the neural clay, with its properties of pliability and of receiving impressions; nurture moulds and fashions it, until a character is formed, a mingling of innate disposition and acquired powers. But clay will be clay to the end; you cannot expect it to be marble."—Thomson & Geddes.
"Heaven lay not my transgression to my charge."—King John.
It is essential that attendants, relatives, and friends carefully study the character of neuropaths, and recognize clearly how abnormal it is, for untold misery is caused by judging neuropaths by normal standards.
Patients are often harshly treated because others regard the victim of defective inhibition as having gone deliberately to work, through wicked perversity and pure wilfulness, to make himself a nuisance, to persist in being a nuisance, and to refuse to be other than a nuisance, rather than exercise what more fortunate men are pleased to term self-control.