There is, then, one sort of persons in whom the most conspicuous and troublesome trait is mere mental inconsistency and lack of character, and another who possess a fair degree, at least, of consistency and unity of purpose, but whose mental scope or reach of sympathy is so small that they have no adequate relation to the life about them.
An outgrowing, impressionable sort of mind, if deficient in the power to work up its material, is necessarily unstable and lacking in momentum and definite direction: and in the more marked cases we have people of the hysterical type, unstable forms of dementia and insanity, and impulsive crime. “The fundamental defect in the hysterical brain,” says Dr. Dana, “is that it is circumscribed in its associative functions; the field of consciousness is limited just as is the field of vision. The mental activity is confined to personal feelings, which are not regulated by connotation of past experiences, hence they flow over too easily into emotional outbursts or motor paroxysms. The hysterical person cannot think.”[[106]] It is evident that something similar might be said of all manifestations of instability.
On the other hand, an ingrowing sort of mind, whose tendency is rather to work over and over its cherished thoughts than to open out to new ones, may have a marked deficiency of sensibility and breadth of perception. If so, the person is likely to exhibit some form of gross and persistent egotism, such as sensuality, avarice, narrow and ruthless ambition, fanaticism, of a hard, cold sort, delusion of greatness, or those kinds of crime that result from habitual insensibility to social standards rather than from transient impulse.
As conscience is simply the completest product of mental organization, it will of course share in whatever defect there may be in the mental life as a whole. In the lower grades of idiocy we may assume that there is no system in the mind from which a conscience could spring. In a higher degenerate of the unstable type, there is a conscience, but it is vacillating in its judgments, transient in duration and ineffectual in control, proportionally to the mental disintegration which it reflects. We all, probably, can think of people conspicuously lacking in self-control, and it will perhaps be evident, when we reflect upon them, that their consciences are of this sort. The voice of conscience, with them, is certain to be chiefly an echo of temporary emotions, because a synthesis embracing long periods of time is beyond their range; it is frequently inaudible, on account of their being engrossed by passing impulses, and their conduct is largely without any rational control at all. They are likely to suffer sharp and frequent attacks of remorse, on account of failure to live up to their standards, but it would seem that the wounds do not go very deep as a rule, but share in the general superficiality of their lives. People of this sort, if not too far gone in weakness, are probably the ones who profit most by punishment, because they are helped by the sharp and definite pain which it associates with acts that they recognize as wrong, but cannot keep from doing without a vivid emotional deterrent. They are also the ones who, in their eagerness to escape from the pains of fluctuation and inconsistency, are most prone to submit blindly to some external and dogmatic authority. Unable to rule themselves, they crave a master, and if he only is a master, that is, one capable of grasping and dominating the emotions by which they are swayed, they will often cleave to him and kiss the rod.
With those whose defect is rigidity rather than instability, conscience may exist and may control the life; the trouble with it is, that it is not in key with the consciences of other people. There is an original poverty of the impulses that extends to any result that can be worked out of them. It may appear startling to some to assert that conscience may dictate the wrong, but such is quite clearly the fact, if we identify the right with some standard of conduct accepted among people of broad sympathies. Conscience is the only possible moral guide—any external authority can work morally upon us only through conscience—but it always partakes of the limitations of one’s character, and so far as that is degenerate the idea of right is degenerate also. As a matter of fact, the very worst men of the hard, narrow, fanatical, or brutal sorts, often live at peace with their consciences. I feel sure that anyone who reflects imaginatively upon the characters of people he has known of this sort will agree that such is the case. A bad conscience implies mental division, inconsistency between thought and deed, and men of this sort are often quite at one with themselves. The usurer who grinds the faces of the poor, the unscrupulous speculator who causes the ruin of innocent investors to aggrandize himself, the fanatical anarchist who stabs a king or shoots a president, the Kentucky mountaineer who regards murderous revenge as a duty, the assaulter who causes pictures commemorative of his crimes to be tattooed on his skin, are diverse examples of wrong-doers whose consciences not only do not punish, but often instigate their ill deeds.
The idea, cherished by some, that crime or wrong of any sort is invariably pursued by remorse, arises from the natural but mistaken assumption that all other people have consciences similar to our own. The man of sensitive temperament and refined habit of thought feels that he would suffer remorse if he had done the deed, and supposes that the same must be the case with the perpetrator. On the contrary, it seems likely that only a very small proportion of those whom the higher moral sentiment regards as wrong-doers suffer much from the pricks of conscience. If the general tenor of a man’s life is high, and the act is the fearful outcome of a moment of passion, as is often the case with unpremeditated murder, he will suffer, but if his life is all of a piece, he will not. All authorities agree that the mass of criminals, and the same is clearly true of ill-doers within the law, have a habit of mind of which the ill deed is the logical outcome, so that there is nothing sudden or catastrophic about it. Of course, if we apply the word conscience only to the mental synthesis of a mind rich in higher sentiments, then such people have no consciences, but it seems a broader view of the matter to say that they have a conscience, in so far as they have mental unity, but that it reflects the general narrowness and perversion of their lives. In fact, people of this description usually, if not always, have standards of their own, some sort of honor among thieves, which they will not transgress, or which, if transgressed, cause remorse. It is impossible that mental organization should not produce a moral synthesis of some sort.
There is nothing in this way of conceiving degeneracy which tends to break down the practical distinctions among the various forms of it, as, for instance, that between crime and insanity. Though the line between these two is arbitrary and uncertain, as must always be the case in the classification of mental facts, and as is confessed by the existence of a class called the criminal insane, yet the distinction itself and the difference in treatment associated with it are sound enough in a general way.
The contrast between our attitudes toward crime and toward insanity is primarily a matter of personal idea and impulse. We understand the criminal act, or think we do, and we feel toward it resentment, or hostile sympathy; while we do not understand the insane act, and so do not resent it, but regard it with pity, curiosity, or disgust. If one man strikes down another to rob him, or in revenge, we can imagine the offender’s state of mind, his motive lives in our thought and is condemned by conscience precisely as if we thought of doing the act ourselves. Indeed, to understand an act is to think of doing it ourselves. But, if it is done for no reason that we can comprehend, we do not imagine, do not get a personal impression of the case at all, but have to think of it as merely mechanical. It is the same sort of difference as that between a person who injures us accidentally and one who does it “on purpose.”
Secondarily, it is a matter of expediency. We feel that the act which we can imagine ourselves doing ought to be punished, because we perceive by our own sympathy with it that more of this sort of thing is likely to take place if it is not put down. We want the house-breaker to be stigmatized, disgraced, and imprisoned, because we feel that, if this is not done, he and others will be encouraged to more housebreaking; but we feel only pity for the man who thinks he is Julius Cæsar, because we suppose there is nothing to be feared either from him or his example. This practical basis of the distinction expresses itself in the general, and I think justifiable, reluctance to apply the name and treatment of insanity to behavior which seems likely to be imitated. It is felt that whatever may be the mental state of the man who commits an act of violence or fraud, it is wholesome that people in general, who draw no fine distinctions, but judge others by themselves, should be taught by example that such conduct is followed by moral and legal penalties. On the other hand, when the behavior is so evidently remote from ordinary habits of thought that it can be a matter only of pity or curiosity, there is no occasion to do anything more than the good of the person affected seems to require.
The same analysis applies to the whole question of responsibility or irresponsibility. It is a matter of imaginative contact and personal idea. To hold a man responsible, is to imagine him as a man like ourselves, having similar impulses but failing to control them as we do, or at least as we feel we ought to do. We think of doing as he does, find it wrong, and impute the wrong to him. The irresponsible person is one who is looked upon as a different sort of being, not human with reference to the conduct in question, not imaginable, not near enough to us to be the object of hostile sentiment. We blame the former; that is, we visit him with a sympathetic resentment; we condemn that part of ourselves that we find in him. But in the latter we do not find ourselves at all.