The second division of criminal anthropology, which is by far the more important, with a more direct influence upon criminal sociology, is the psychological study of the criminal. This recognition of its greater importance does not prevent our critics from concentrating their attack upon the organic characterisation of criminals, in oblivion of the psychological characterisation, which even in Lombroso's book occupies the larger part of the text.[4]
[4] A recent example of this infatuation amongst one-sided, and therefore ineffectual critics is the work of Colajanni, ``Socialism and Criminal Sociology,'' Catania, 1889. In the first volume, which is devoted to criminal anthropology, out of four hundred pages of argumentative criticism (which does not prevent the author from taking our most fundamental conclusions on the anthropological classification of criminals, and on crime, as phenomena of psychical atavism), there are only six pages, 227- 232, for the criticism of psychological types.
Criminal psychology presents us with the characteristics which may be called specially descriptive, such as the slang, the handwriting, the secret symbols, the literature and art of the criminal; and on the other hand it makes known to us the characteristics which, in combination with organic abnormality, account for the development of crime in the individual. And these characteristics are grouped <p 10>in two psychical and fundamental abnormalities, namely, moral insensibility and want of foresight.
Moral insensibility, which is decidedly more congenital than contracted, is either total or partial, and is displayed in criminals who inflict personal injuries, as much as in others, with a variety of symptoms which I have recorded elsewhere, and which are eventually reduced to these conditions of the moral sense in a large number of criminals—a lack of repugnance to the idea and execution of the offence, previous to its commission, and the absence of remorse after committing it.
Outside of these conditions of the moral sense, which is no special sentiment, but an expression of the entire moral constitution of the individual, as the temperament is of his physiological constitution, other sentiments, of selfishness or even of unselfishness, are not wanting in the majority of criminals. Hence arise many illusions for superficial observers of criminal life. But these latter sentiments are either excessive, as hate, cupidity, vanity and the like, and are thus stimulants to crime, or else, as with religion, love, honour, loyalty, and so on, they cease to be forces antagonistic to crime, because they have no foundation in a normal moral sense.
From this fundamental inferiority of sentiment there follows an inferiority of intelligence, which, however, does not exclude certain forms of craftiness, though it tends to inability to foresee the consequences of crime, far in excess of what is observed in the average members of the classes of society to which the several criminals belong. <p 11>
Thus the psychology of the criminal is summed up in a defective resistance to criminal tendencies and temptations, due to that ill-balanced impulsiveness which characterises children and savages.
II.
I have long been convinced, by my study of works on criminal anthropology, but especially by direct and continuous observation from a physiological or a psychological point of view of a large number of criminals, whether mad or of normal intelligence, that the data of criminal anthropology are not entirely applicable, in their complete and essential form, to all who commit crimes. They are to be confined to a certain number, who may be called congenital, incorrigible, and habitual criminals. But apart from these there is a class of occasional criminals, who do not exhibit, or who exhibit in slighter degrees, the anatomical, physiological, and psychological characteristics which constitute the type described by Lombroso as ``the criminal man.''
Before further defining these two main classes of criminals, in their natural and descriptive characterisation, I must add a positive demonstration, which can be attested under two distinct forms—(1) by the results of anthropological observation of criminals, and (2) by statistics of relapse, and of the manifestations of crime which anthropologists have hitherto chiefly studied.