The term “degeneration” is unquestionably an indefinite one, and remains to-day incapable of either anatomical or physiological explanation; but it owes to Lombroso’s researches a definite practical significance, from the fact that he has proved that the majority of degenerates are socially inadequate, and, further, that this social inadequacy of degenerate individuals makes their existence a great danger to society. The degenerate is often an anti-social being, and society must protect itself against him.
The importance of these stigmata was not comprehensively understood by Morel and the other predecessors of Lombroso, in respect either of their mode of origin, or of their grouping to constitute specific types of degenerate. Morel merely sketched the outlines, and enumerated a few important facts about degeneration. One small area only of this enormous province has as yet been carefully studied—that of criminality. By Lombroso’s anthropometric and other researches very numerous demonstrations and statistical classifications of the stigmata of degeneration have been effected, whilst nothing of the kind has yet been attempted in respect of other forms of degeneration. As a result of his work, we are enabled to define the type of the criminal as that form of degeneration which is characterized morphologically and biologically by atavistic characters, and psychologically by the deficiency of altruistic feelings. Even if this type does not afford us a brief or invariably harmonious signification of crime, still, in a period in which we no longer believe in the persistence of species, and in which, even in “good species,” we recognize the tendency to variation, we must not demand that a degenerative subtype should exhibit constant characters.
CHAPTER IV
GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING LOMBROSO’S LIFE-WORK AS A SOCIAL REFORMER, HIS METHODS, AND HIS PHILOSOPHY
Lombroso’s life-work was by no means confined to the highly specialized field of criminal anthropology. For more than thirty years he was engaged in the description and elucidation, in a very large number of monographs and handbooks, of various social ills—crime, prostitution, alcoholism, pellagra, anarchism, revolts, anti-Semitism. It was as pathologist and anthropologist that his attention was, in the first instance, drawn to these matters; and it was his aim to show that these phenomena—together with many others of which his study was merely occasional—owe their origin to the typical characteristics of the anti-social individual.
To this aim, and to his discoveries, under the guidance of this aim, in the most diverse fields of human experience and knowledge, are due his peculiar significance in the history of science.
He was an anthropologist, but he studied human beings, not in artificial isolation, nor in respect merely of individual organs, such as the skull or the brain—he studied man as he always manifests himself, as the member of a community, man more or less perfectly adapted to his environment, and, in so far as he is imperfectly adapted, in conflict with the hostile forces of that environment. He studied especially the ill-adapted varieties of mankind, and those which lack the faculty of adaptation; and in this study he endeavoured to discover “types.”
As a thinker, his nature resembled that of Spinoza. Like Schopenhauer, Buckle, Quetelet, and Vico, he was one of the most notable advocates of the determinist conception of society and of history. Looking far beyond the horizon of a merely economic view of human society, he sought and found the laws of development of human society rather in the laws of organic nature.
Undoubtedly many of his ideas and tendencies are in harmony with the materialist conception of history, and for this reason we find many of his most distinguished pupils and collaborators in the Marxian camp; but it was impossible that a man endowed as he was with an intuitive capacity for the understanding of the conception of the biological determination of social phenomena should be content to deduce the actions of individuals and the fate of a nation from the economic structure of the society in which the individual and national life are passed.
In his conception of human life, determinism is, indeed, so self-evident a premise of research, that it is not even discussed, and is hardly so much as mentioned; in this respect Lombroso stands on the same platform with the supporters of the materialist conception of history.
But the extent to which, in its detailed application, his biological determinism leads to different results from those which are the outcome of the economic determinism of the Marxians will best be shown by a specific illustration.