II.
RECENT FRENCH PUBLICATIONS.
The works that have appeared during the last three months belong to authors of different nationalities—Italian, Roumanian, Belgian, and I ought to add Russian; but I shall not speak on this occasion of the important work of Sergneyeff, Physiologie de la Veille et du Sommeil.
It is, as you see, a gathering of good company, on French soil.[64]
[64] All these works are published by Alcan.
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The only French work to be mentioned is that of M. CH. ADAM, Philosophie de François Bacon, a memoir presented in the prize competition of which M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire was the reporter and preferred by the Academy of Moral and Political sciences.
M. Ch. Adam is already known by several works relating to the history of philosophy. The study which he now gives to the public is conscientious; we must commend his erudition and the moderation he has displayed both in his praise and in his criticism. I am not sure, however, if he is right in asserting that the fame of Bacon will increase and diminish alternately, according to whether patient analyses or daring hypotheses find the more favor in the scientific world. I have known many a savant, profoundly metaphysical and imaginative, who, in admiring Bacon, delusively believed himself in the possession of a solid safeguard against metaphysics. There is more chance, to my mind, of finding the admirers of the Chancellor among pure philosophers than among men of science. This is why I subscribe completely to the judgment of M. Ch. Adam, when he subordinates Bacon to Descartes and to Galileo. Especially should he be put below Galileo, who was the great initiator of modern science, at least the first to add a link to the chain of human science then being forged; one, I might say, who by his solid contributions really founded physical science, as chemistry was founded by Lavoisier and his contemporaries a century and a half later.
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The Roumanian writer is M. BASILE CONTA, whose unfinished work, Les Fondements de la Métaphysique, has been translated by M. Tescanu. M. Conta died in the heyday of his powers. Born in 1845, he was successively, from 1875 to 1881, professor of jurisprudence at the University of Jassy, deputy, and minister of public instruction. The author and his works have, therefore, serious claims to our attention. Nevertheless, I can hardly believe that M. Conta always kept in the path in which he started, for if he had, it would have led him to considerable results.
M. Conta held that every combination of ideas, that is to say every ultimate generalisation, is essentially mobile, alterable in character, and that there will never be any final, definitive philosophical system. Subject to the benefit of this wise reserve, he undertook, nevertheless, to frame a "materialist" metaphysic, founded like the positive sciences on induction, and he attempted to rise to a general system, from which it appeared to him that the ancient notions of the soul, of freedom, and of God could not be legitimately excluded.
According to my mind, the defect of his method was the allowing too much to reasoning, the too great desire to create reality by simple logic. Unfortunately, the intellectual necessity that he proclaimed, of reducing all to unity, does not carry with it the means of properly making this reduction by a subtle operation of the mind. In order to advance towards his end, M. Conta found himself led to formulate a compendious sketch of a theory of cognition, a psychology, and a logic, at the risk of sinking at times in the quicksands of a treacherous discussion. As a matter of fact, metaphysics, spiritualism, and materialism, are conceptions of great vagueness, and the problem to reconcile them by any fashion of union, is rather like inquiring how many ways there are of placing three persons at table, or even a greater number.
This is not said by way of disputing the merits of a writer whose loss is justly regretted, or to discourage the reading of a book in which many will find much to accept.
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The Belgian author is M. ALBERT BONJEAN, a barrister of Verviers. His book, L' Hypnotisme, ses Rapports avec le Droit et la Therapeutique, la Suggestion Mentale, affects too much the style of an address before a court in which the orator wishes to exhibit wit and acumen. Nevertheless, it is written with clearness, is agreeable to read, and the verbal nicety sought does not impair its good sense.
M. Bonjean has developed the three following theses: First, that the action of magnetism is not explained by the hypothesis of a fluid, that we cannot speak with M. Ochorowicz, of "a certain tonic vibratory movement which propagates itself outward from the periphery of the body," but that it is explainable by simple suggestion; second, that the power of suggestion is almost unlimited; and third, that though verbal suggestion is incontestable, mental suggestion remains doubtful until proof to the contrary.
M. Bonjean thus sides with MM. Ochorowicz and Delbœuf, and the whole school of Nancy, against that of the Salpêtrière. He endeavors especially to show the serious consequences, in criminal and civil affairs, of immoral suggestions, the dangers of which he reproaches M. Gilles de la Tourette with having concealed far too much. His personal conviction does not rest itself solely on the expositions of others, but on experiments which seem to have been conducted with prudence.
Extraordinary as this almost passive obedience of a subject to the suggestion of an act which is repugnant to his moral tendencies appears, we come in a position, it seems to me, to comprehend it by the observation of the degenerate patients of our asylums in their various manias. The dipsomaniac resists with all his power the impulse to drink, and the kleptomaniac the impulse to steal; they fight against it even to agony, but they end always by yielding to it. "It was stronger than I"; such is the formula that we have noted most often in the answers of these unfortunates. And remark, that the dipsomaniac does not drink for pleasure, but by compulsion, be the beverage what it may, water, urine, or petroleum; just as the kleptomaniac does not steal with a view to enjoying the product of his theft, which he ordinarily abandons or restores, but steals to deliver himself from agonising torture. In this manner also the onomatomaniac acts, who is seeking a word, and who rises at night to consult the dictionary, etc. The hypnotised subject is in the same predicament, whatever pathological difference there may be between the two; his personality has momentarily sunk in hypnosis, as does that of an insane person during the attack of insanity; his moral resistance must finally yield, and it is not at all remarkable that it does.
The volume of M. Bonjean ends with an interesting discussion of the celebrated case of Lully. The deceit that gave rise to belief in suggestion without words or gestures appears to be established; the subject reads from the lips of his magnetiser.
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Let us turn to the fine work of M. R. GAROFALO, La Criminologie, Etude sur la Nature du Crime et la Théorie de la Pénalité. M. Garofalo has himself translated his work from the Italian; this second edition is entirely recast.
The Italians have always had a taste for juridical studies. Their school of criminologists has placed itself at the head of the movement which ought to result in the reform of all criminal codes. Two principal tendencies are predominant in the works of this school: the physicians and anthropologists, for example M. Lombroso, have conformably to their mental tendencies, particularly studied the criminal, of whom they have endeavored to fix the type; the jurists, like M. Garofalo, vice-president of the civil tribunal of Naples, consider by preference the crime, which they determine by reference to our social organisation. M. Garofalo shows himself at once an innovator, in that he endeavors to give a positive definition of crime, to take the place of the vague and incomplete definition which was accepted by the old jurists, and conforming to which anthropologists have thought themselves able to mark the characteristics of the criminal man. That definition has relation to the average morality of the societies of to-day; crime or criminal offence is to be sought, according to him, only in the violation of altruistic sentiments acquired and consolidated in the average social individual—compassion and probity. New categories ought then to be established; that of "revolutionists," for example, with whom the offence does not proclaim moral monstrosity.
The violation of altruistic sentiments certainly reveals in the offender a grave anomaly; it marks him as not adapted to the conditions of society, and even incapable of adapting himself to them, in consequence of psychical and physiological irregularities. The principle, then, is correct, although M. Garofalo has based it on an analysis of sentiments which appears to me insufficient. The sympathetic emotions which compassion embraces, are not the only source of our moral activity; probity arises in part from intelligence, and the logical sense intervenes to give the form of justice or injustice to an act of passion. Now, feebleness of judgment becomes, incidentally, an important element of the diagnosis of the criminal. Let us agree, nevertheless, that the absence of compassion and of probity upon the whole makes up the "natural crime." This suffices surely in practice.
On the other hand, it is not convenient, and it is unquestionably not indispensable, to make a difference between an anomaly "in relation to a superior civilised type," and an anomaly "in relation to the human type itself." Here is the criterion that M. Garofalo—prepossessed as he is to take away from born criminals the benefit, too easily obtained, of disease—proposes to us, in order to distinguish from the anomaly truly morbid, an anomaly not pathological, but which depends in some way on the cerebral organisation. Subtle is this distinction which he opposes to the opinion of French alienists, according to whom the immoral are always more or less physically degenerated. I will confine myself to recalling on this point a remark of Dr. Magnan. Very often, said this eminent clinician one day to me, a father of poor moral stability but otherwise healthy of body, has a son well balanced in his moral and intellectual tendencies but already on the way to degeneracy. The anatomical anomaly invoked by M. Garofalo would be then not far from the physiological anomaly; functional disturbance of the higher faculties is not alone concerned. Fundamentally, this is of little moment to the practical conclusions of his system, which we must rapidly indicate. With regard to the repression of crime, and as to a large category of criminals, the social point of view necessarily dominates the medical point of view.
M. Garofalo inquires what the power of education and of the increase of well-being is in diminishing crime. He has found them extremely weak. Severity of repression alone appears of some efficacy; indulgence augments crime. For the sake of social selection, the criminal ought to be eliminated, by capital punishment, perpetual banishment, etc., according as the case demands. Temporary imprisonment has no place in this system. Finally, the only criterion of penality is lack of adaptability to social life; this criterion will replace the false principles of "moral responsibility" and "proportionment of the punishment to the crime." It is too apparent that the prevailing penal theory and the jurisprudence in agreement with it, seem to tend to protect the criminal against society, rather than society against the criminal. And what absurdities besides! The attempt is less severely treated than the consummated offence; preparatory acts are never punished, the attempt at a crime is always punished.
The criterion of penality once accepted, it is necessary to find the indices of this lack of fitness, of the impossibility of adaptation to social life, which justifies repression. M. Garofalo seeks them no longer in "premeditation," but he finds them in the motive of the crime and in the way in which it has been prepared or perpetrated. We cannot follow him into the details of this discussion, which presents the highest interest. Our exceptions would turn on the interpretation of certain features; they do not bear on the general principles of this great and solid work.