The criminal of passion is one who is strong enough to resist ordinary temptations of no exceptional force, to which the occasional criminal would yield, but who does not resist psychological storms which indeed are sometimes actually irresistible.
The forms of occasional criminality, which are determined by these ordinary temptations, are also determined by age, sex, poverty, worldly influences, influences of moral environment, alcoholism, personal surroundings, and imitation. Tarde has ably demonstrated the persistent influence of these conditions on the actions of men.
In this connection, Lombroso has drawn a clear distinction between two varieties of occasional criminals: the ``pseudo-criminals,'' or normal human beings who commit involuntary offences, or offences which do not spring from perversity, and do not hurt society, though they are punishable by law, and ``criminaloids,'' who commit ordinary offences, but differ from true criminals for the reasons already given.
A final observation is necessary in regard to this anthropological classification of criminals, and it meets various objections raised by our syllogistic critics. The difference existing amongst the five categories is only one of degree, and depends upon their organic and psychological types, and upon the influence of physical and social environment.
In every natural classification the differences <p 45>between various groups and varieties are never anything but relative. This deprives them of none of their theoretical and practical importance, and so it is with this anthropological classification of criminals.
It follows that, as in natural history we advance by degrees and shades from the inorganic to the organic creation, life beginning in the mineral domain with the laws of crystallisation, so in criminal anthropology we pass by degrees and shades from the mad to the born criminal, through the links of moral madmen and epileptics; and from the born criminal to the occasional, through the link of the habitual criminal, who begins by being an occasional criminal, and ends by acquiring and transmitting to his children the characteristics of the born criminal. And finally, we pass from the occasional criminal to the criminal of passion, who is but a species of the other, and who further, with his neurotic and epileptoid temperament, not infrequently approximates to the criminal of unsound mind.
Thus in our everyday life, as in science, we very often find intermediate types, for complete and unmixed types are always the most uncommon. And whilst legislators and judges, in their complacent psychology, exact and establish marked lines of cleavage between the sane and the insane criminal, experts in psychiatry and anthropology are often constrained to place a prisoner somewhere between the mad and the born criminal, or between the occasional criminal and the normal man.
But it is evident that even when a criminal cannot be classed precisely in one or the other category, and <p 46>stands between the two, this is in itself a sufficiently definite classification, especially from a sociological point of view. There is consequently no weight in the objection of those who, basing their argument on an abstract and nebulous idea of the criminal in general, and judging him merely according to the crime which has been committed, without knowing his personal characteristics and the circumstances of his environment, affirm that criminal anthropology cannot classify all who are detained and accused.
In my experience, however, as a counsel and as an observer, I have never had any difficulty in classifying all persons detained or condemned for crimes and offences, by relying upon organic, and especially upon psychological symptoms.
Thus, as Garofalo recently said, whilst the accepted criminal science recognises only two terms, the offence and the punishment, criminal sociology on the other hand recognises three: the crime, the criminal, and the means best calculated for social self- defence. And it may be concluded that up to this time, science, legislation, and, in a minor degree, but without any scientific method, the administration of justice, have judged and punished crime in the person of the criminal, but that hereafter it will be necessary to judge the criminal as well as the crime.