ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with issues which in earlier times were seen as metaphysical, lying further back than nature – cause, identity, permanence – but which today are seen as belonging to nature, and form the starting point of scientific knowledge about our topic. It then progresses to the question of how, in this natural realm, intellectually abnormal creatures appear. How are they generated: God’s work? The Devil’s? The parents’? These questions were being asked throughout the early modern period, and have been formative of the representation of intellectual disability prevalent today. Medical science’s interest in the causal connection from bodily difference to intellectual difference is at root an interest in our salvation. Its overwhelming power in Lockean and post-Lockean accounts of intelligence and disability marks an advance on earlier periods, when medicine and philosophy were assumed only to deal with secondary causes since God and the Devil were beyond explanation.
