No clear answer of general application can be given to this question, for the relative influence of the anthropological, physical, and social conditions varies with the psychological and social characteristics of each offence against the law.
For instance, if we consider the three great classes of crimes against the person, against property, and against personal purity, it is evident that each class of determining causes, but especially the biological and social conditions, have a distinctly different influence in evolving homicide, theft, or indecent assaults. And so it is in every category of crimes.
The undeniable influence of social conditions, and still more of economic conditions, in leading up to the commission of theft, is far inferior in the genesis of homicides and indecent assaults. And similarly, in each category of crimes, the influence of the determining conditions varies greatly according to the special forms of crime.
Certain casual homicides are plainly the result of social conditions (gambling, drink, public opinion, &c.) in a much higher degree than homicides which for the most part spring from brutality, from the moral insensibility of individuals, or from their psycho-pathological conditions, corresponding to abnormal organic conditions.
In like manner, certain indecent assaults, incests, &c., are largely the outcome of social environment, which, condemning a number of persons to live in <p 58>hovels without air or light, with a promiscuity of sex between parents and children such as obtains amongst the brutes, effaces or deadens all normal sense of modesty. On the other hand, there are cases of rape and the like which are mostly due to the biological condition of the individual, either in manifest forms of sexual disease or, less manifest though none the less actual, of biological anomaly.
For thefts, again, whilst occasional simple thefts are largely the effect of social and economical conditions, this influence becomes feebler in comparison with impulses due to the personal constitution, organic and psychical, as, for instance, in the case of thefts with violence, and especially of murder for the purpose of robbery, which scoundrels of the ``swell-mob'' so frequently commit in cold blood.
The same observation applies to the conditions of physical environment. For instance, if the regular increase of crimes against property in winter (and, as I showed for the first time from French statistics, in years when the cold is greatest) is only an indirect result, through the social and economic influences of temperature, the increase of crimes of passion and indecent assaults during the months and years when the temperature is highest is only a direct effect of temperature, even for such as, by their biological conditions, offer the feeblest resistance to these influences.
Meanwhile, a last objection has been raised against the conclusions which I have maintained for many years past.
It has been said that, even if we admit that for <p 59>certain crimes and criminals the greatest influence must be recognised as due to the physical and psychical conditions of the individual, extending from slightly manifested anomalies of an anthropological character to the most accentuated pathological condition, this does not exclude the possibility of a crime being due to social conditions. In fact, it is said the anomalies of the individual are in their turn only an effect of a debasing social environment, which condemns its victims to organic and psychical degeneration.
This objection is sound enough if it be taken in a relative sense, but groundless if it be insisted on absolutely.