ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the immediate influences on John Locke, from English Puritans to French Cartesians and Jansenists, and then at the subsequent influence of his own psychology and logic on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century educational and behavioural prescriptions. It shows how his work demonstrates the historical contingency of the modern concept; his “idiots,” “changelings” and “natural fools” are discrete entities arising from disparate political and theological contexts, despite the temptation to see them as interchangeable. Descartes had used a similar vocabulary to Locke’s when he described how the pineal gland links mind to body; it radiates the soul spirits around the brain until they find the track that represents the relevant impressions that have previously been “stamped” there. Descartes’s immediate successors had already gone down this route of disjoining name from idea in the case of intellectual monstrosity.
