This illustration relates to the elucidation of the causes of a tumult which occurred in Esthonia in the year 1905. The judge before whom the persons arrested during the suppression of the revolt have been brought wishes to discover who were the ringleaders; the psychologist wishes to ascertain to what extent imitation, suggestion, or hypnotic automatism, has impelled certain ordinarily law-abiding citizens to take part in the disturbances; the editor of the local Marxian newspaper demonstrates the causes of the revolt by an analysis of capitalism in general, and of the economic and social characteristics of the government of the disturbed section; the reactionary politician will consider that the fault lies in irreligion, in the disturbing effect of revolutionary agitation, and in the decline in the authority of a government in which constitutionalism has replaced absolutism, and whose punitive measures have lost their former repressive severity. But if Lombroso had been summoned to the prisons of Liebau, Riga, Dorpat, and Reval, and had been invited to ascertain the causes of the Letto-Esthonian jacquerie, he would have examined the meteorological records at the time of the disturbances; would have inquired carefully regarding the racial origin of the persons arrested; would have looked for stigmata of degeneration in their physiognomy and physical characteristics, especially those of the skull; would have noted how many epileptics, hysterics, lunatics, and alcoholics there were among them; would have distinguished the habitual vagrants and those with previous convictions. Among the women arrested during the jacquerie, he would have asked how many were menstruating at the time; he would have made a list of the adolescents entirely dominated by fanatical doctrines; a list of the agents provocateurs; a list of those instigated by feelings of personal animosity against the local landed gentry and their retainers. And when all this had been done, it is very doubtful if among the accused there would then remain any considerable residuum in whom an advocate of the materialist conception of history would be able to prove the existence of a purely economic determination to the offences with which they have been charged. And even if Lombroso, as is not improbable, should have found among those arrested or liable to arrest some disciples of Bebel or of Schönlank, his analysis of their inherited tendencies, their gynæcological state, their sensibility and reflexes, the shape of their skulls and the extent of their visual fields, would ultimately bring to light determinants of their actions quite other than their acquired orthodox Marxism, which a jurist of the school of Plehve would have denounced as the vera causa, or sufficient reason, for their participation in the disturbance.
In no other way can we obtain so clear an idea of Lombroso as a sociologist as from a study of his remarkable book on political criminals and revolutions.[[33]] (See above, Chapter III., pp. [64]–79.)
Moreover, the manner in which he was led to undertake the writing of this work is in itself especially characteristic of his methods of investigation.[[34]] In the year 1884 there was an exhibition at Turin of the relics of those who fought for Italian freedom; in this exhibition were to be seen likenesses of the originators and leaders of this movement, the men who worked and fought beside Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour. It was the study of these physiognomies that led Lombroso to draw his distinction between revolutionists and rioters, and led further to his general analysis of political criminals. This course is extremely characteristic of his method of research. Lombroso at all times and in all places starts from the immediate study of individuals, and proceeds thence to the formulation of general sociological theories. This method of procedure differentiates him as an isolated phenomenon among modern sociologists; but the method was that employed by Goethe and Lavater.
To enable us to characterize more closely Lombroso’s method in sociology, let us quote from two of our greatest thinkers, Kant and Goethe. Kant writes: “Thoughts without contents are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Goethe says (“Zur Morphologie,” p. 2): “To the man of understanding, to take note of the particular, to observe with precision, to distinguish each from other, is in a sense that which arises out of an idea, and also that which leads up to an idea. Such a one has found his own way home through the labyrinth, without troubling himself about a clue which might have provided him with a more direct path; to such a one a piece of metal which has not been passed through the coining press, and whose value therefore is not apparent, seems a troublesome possession. He, on the other hand, who stands on higher ground is apt to despise the individual instance, and to comprise in a lifedestroying generalization that which can possess life only in isolation.”
In hardly any province of thought is the contrast thus characterized by the great morphologist and observer so clearly marked as in the science of society.
Lombroso has described for us individual human beings to the number of many thousand, personally examined by himself in respect both of mental qualities and of bodily characteristics. In addition, we owe to him a number of personal descriptions of deceased celebrities—“pathographies,” as they have recently been termed; these comprise the vast material collected by him in his research into the nature of genius. His work on “Cardanus” (Girolamo Cardano [Jerome Cardan], natural philosopher and physician, 1501–1575), published in 1855, when he was still a student, was the first modern pathography; it contains the germ of Lombroso’s theory of genius.
The use he is able to make of such individuals for the elucidation of sociological ideas is dependent upon his own peculiar gifts. He has an extraordinarily keen insight into whatever is important and characteristic in an individual; and his grasp of the significance of the facts thus obtained is due to his remarkable talent for the discovery of analogies. But if he had been endowed with this talent alone, a talent possessed also by the German natural philosophers of the beginning of the nineteenth century, he would not have gone beyond the formulation of mere hypotheses; but owing to his wealth of coinable metal (to use Goethe’s simile)—owing, that is to say, to his possession of a limitless abundance of intuitions peculiar to himself—he was able to pass beyond the simple formulation of brilliant hypotheses; his intuitive endowments enabled him to say with Bacon: “Intellectum longius a rebus non abstrahimus, quam ut rerum imagines et radii (ut in sensu fit) coire possint.”
Thus, clear perceptions, the utilization of analogy as an organon of research, a grasp of the important and characteristic elements of concrete phenomena—these are the means employed by Lombroso in sociological research. Superadded to these, there arose in him, as a result of his mental development, a strong conviction of the importance of enumeration and mensuration, inducing him to accumulate a colossal mass of data relating to all the subjects investigated by him, to collect statistical data of anthropometry, demography, economic, moral, criminal, and social statistics. It was, moreover, a fact of great importance to the extension of sociological knowledge, that his collection of data was notably facilitated by brilliantly-grounded and broadly-based official statistical inquiries instituted in Italy during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, and also by the results of comprehensive parliamentary investigations. In the absence of the great “Inchiesta Agraria” (Agrarian Investigation), his researches into the causes of pellagra, the widely-diffused and destructive disease affecting the agricultural labourers and small farmers of Northern and Central Italy, would hardly have been possible. Equally important for the anthropometrical researches which, when army surgeon in Calabria in the year 1862, he initiated upon the mixed population of that region (then containing no Latin admixture, but composed of Greek, Albanian, and Sicilio-African elements), was the publication of the recruiting statistics, by means of which it is comparatively easy to ascertain the racial composition of the Italian people; whilst to German anthropology and sociology this indispensable material is almost as inaccessible as are the Italian plans of mobilization.
Quantitatively considered, the greater part of Lombroso’s life-work has been devoted to the study of social phenomena bearing upon the fact that every society contains certain categories of pathological or abnormal individuals, whose behaviour has a disturbing influence upon the regular social life. But however interesting and important in relation to the practical working of State and society may be the social interconnections thus brought to light, it is certainly not possible from the knowledge of these alone to deduce a system of sociology; for example, we do not obtain an adequate knowledge of the remarkable social phenomenon of prostitution simply by means of the biological study of the anomalies of a large number of individual prostitutes, and by the proof that these anomalies are analogous to those whose presence may be demonstrated in criminal types. For, although this explains the sociological fact of the existence of a supply of purchaseable sexual pleasure, it does not explain the existence of the demand for the same commodity. Lombroso was gradually induced, not only by the critical powers with which he was so richly endowed (and which led him repeatedly to the view that most of the phenomena he was investigating were produced by purely social factors), but, in addition, by the general tendency of his mind, to show, not merely that the existence of numerous abnormalities and degenerative varieties of mankind disturbs the life of society, but, further, that the political and economic development of the civilized nations gives rise to the appearance of abnormalities which themselves induce social reactions—and to demonstrate that these cannot be got rid of by reformatory measures, will not disappear with the removal of the cause, but lead to permanent biological individual variations, and, through inheritance, produce anomalies for generations to come, and in this way give rise to long-enduring social injury or disturbance.
In the first place it is to him that we owe the knowledge that a given social and economic order can give rise to transmissible biological anomalies, and that those who suffer from these anomalies, ill-adapted for any social and economic order, necessarily exercise a disturbing influence in society. It was not merely as a positivist that he was led to this view, but, above all, as an anthropologist.