CHAPTER V
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY
The true significance of criminal anthropology is a matter with which few outside Italy have any real acquaintance, and least of all do those understand it who have most forcibly attacked Lombroso’s methods of work on account of their alleged defects.
What is, then, the real significance of this doctrine? It is not merely that it is the starting-point of the reform movement in criminal procedure, in penal methods, and in the theory of jurisprudence; this, indeed, accounts for its practical significance. But its importance reaches far beyond the traditional contest between the prosecuting counsel and the experts, as to whether, in the case of an individual accused person, responsibility is diminished or absent. In legal circles, Lombroso does not play the undesirable rôle of the alienist who appeals to the prosecutor or to the judge with the assertion: “This man belongs to me, not to you, for he is a patient, an invalid.” But Lombroso, in the name of criminal anthropology, appeals to all those responsible for the enforcement of the criminal law in the following terms: “You are upon a false road. Neither the accused, nor the accuser, nor, finally, society at large, will be in the least helped or satisfied by your methods, by which you study the crime dialectically and inquisitorially, and endeavour to apportion the punishment to the degree of blame. Criminal anthropology is not satisfied with demanding, with Mittelstaedt and Kraepelin, that we should do away with imprisonment, and abandon any attempt to measure out punishment. Criminal anthropology declares that the interest of society lies, not with the individual crime alone, but with the criminal. Every criminal is, in fact, even before the necessary social reaction has set in against him, or it may be on his behalf, the object of positive scientific study—i.e., of anthropological study. To ascertain whether his nature has been moulded by endogenous or by exogenous factors, to determine whether we have to do with a criminal nature (a born criminal), with an accidental or an occasional criminal, with an insane or a degenerate criminal, is the affair solely of positive science, of anthropology, with methods peculiarly its own.” Thus, when we rightly comprehend the life-work of Lombroso, we see that it is completely erroneous to assert that the object of study of criminal anthropology is merely the born criminal, and that its content is solely the description and elucidation of his characteristics.
Everything belonging to inherited human nature, to the social structure, to the economic system and economic history, to justice, to geological, climatical, and meteorological conditions as determining factors of human conduct, all determinative cosmic processes—in short, the reciprocal action between the individual and his environment in the widest possible sense, and the precise determination of the socially important characters of the individual—all these are, for Lombroso, the subject-matter of anthropology; and if a conflict arises between the individual (thus influenced) and the traditional rights or interests of society, they are the subject-matter of criminal anthropology. Criminal anthropology would, and must, exist, even if the idea of responsibility, and the psychological and legal decisions and traditions based upon that idea, were non-existent.
A broad-minded general review of the necessity and the causal connection, in consequence of which inheritance from nearer and more remote ancestors determines the nature of the individual from his entrance into the world, and of the inescapable influences which the world-all as a unity and as a totality, and also through the individual forces of organized matter and highly organized human society, exercises on the individual, so that the latter is compelled to act in whatever manner the operation of these forces determine, whilst all the time he is under the illusory belief that he desires so to act, and is liable to be blamed for his actions—this view of the ἓν καὶ πᾶν, of the totality of the cosmic process, interpermeated throughout by the spirit of life, and in whose eternal unity and endless manifoldedness the differences between normal and abnormal, healthy and unhealthy, would seem utterly without importance—this is the positive view of the world, which from the very beginning guided Lombroso in his researches. I do not propose to consider at any length the question whether this view involves certain dogmatic assumptions. I myself do not think so. In any case, it is to this view of the world we owe the overwhelming accumulation of facts which, between the years 1845 and 1860, was effected in the different fields of natural science. We may also draw attention to the manner in which the growth of positivism was accompanied by a development of the industrial arts and by the consequent transformation of economic life. In a brief Appendix to this work an account is given of the facts discovered during this period—one characterized by a temporary realism in politics and by the development of a realistic and naturalistic art and poetry, and remarkable also for discoveries in chemistry and physics, with consequent important practical applications. Thus, for example, the new idea regarding man’s place in Nature (involving also a new idea of man’s relationship to his social environment) led to a new artistic method of representing humanity.
In this period, the time of Lombroso’s youth—that of the maturity of Moleschott, Darwin, R. Mayer, Bunsen, Lyell, Pflüger, and Helmholtz—it was possible to gain some respect for facts, the enormous accumulation of which had overwhelmed those who were playing at “natural philosophy” during the two preceding generations. Positive facts, in an abundance known to no previous and to no subsequent period in history, were the foundation of positivism, which then became a principle of investigation and of explanation. Upon this foundation, and with the aid of this principle, criminal anthropology was erected. From far-reaching conceptual analyses, and even from distinct definitions, Lombroso was preserved, because he accepted as a fact only that which had definitely been observed, whether as object or as process. His respect for facts was boundless. It is ridiculous to reproach him with not having personally observed every single fact of which he makes use. Read his books, and see the enormous mass of statistical material requisite for his researches. Wide general conclusions can be reached by no other road than that of statistics (see above, p. [10]).
It must be freely admitted that Lombroso, in his continuous hunger for material, in his insatiable, unresting desire for new, important, rich, and rare facts—a greed of the intellect from which nothing was more remote than mere sensationalism—did not confine his attention to matters directly observed by himself, nor was he always satisfied with statistically registered details, but frequently utilized facts of a singular nature—inadequately warranted facts, which, on the face of the matter, should have been more strenuously verified. Among these are certain anecdotes from the lives of celebrated men. To the same category belongs his credulous acceptance as facts of the processes observed by him in his “spiritualistic” experiences. This is a matter to which further reference will be made in a later chapter.
Lombroso’s positivism had one consequence of great importance to criminal anthropology. “Anthropology,” in his view, embraced all the facts which, proximately or remotely, determine the being and life of man. But he had a preference for observing and utilizing states—i.e., persistent facts—in place of observing and utilizing processes. Thus it happened that Lombroso’s all-embracing anthropology, which was far more comprehensive than anthropology as understood by Virchow, Broca, and Mantegazza, availed itself more frequently and more thoroughly of anthropometrical and descriptive data than of the results of experiment, which must first be planned and then registered, whereas congenital or acquired physical characters are always ready for observation, and may easily be submitted to serial study and to statistical treatment. He had little inclination for the clinical observation of transient, morbid processes, although he did not disregard this field. In spite of his conviction that mental disorders are diseases of the brain, he did not regard the brain as something which man carries about in his skull as he carries his watch in his pocket; he studied the sick brain of an acute maniac in its organic connection with the entire life-process, in its dependence upon the social conditions of life, in its subordination to hereditary influences—and this inheritance he was accustomed to trace back to the first beginnings of organic life, regarding man as the final product of a cosmic causal chain. Thus, to him the permanent documents, the “stigmata,” in which these resultant effects of remote causality find a universal and permanent expression, necessarily seemed to him to be of greater importance than the transient phenomena of clinical observation. The “types,” the categories of criminals, of geniuses, pseudo-geniuses, and cretins, must, he considered, be more worthy of observation than the impulses to speech and movement of the maniac or the katatonic. So, also, he was fascinated by epilepsy, by the trance-state of “spiritualistic” mediums, exhibiting in a high degree phenomena always alike, always recurring in the same manner, whereas the internal processes in the psyche which eluded objective research attracted his observation less, although he was one of the first who appreciated at its true value Fechner’s idea of psycho-physics.
Moreover, the phenomena of experimental physiology and pathology, which would otherwise have been most interesting to him, were rendered inaccessible to him in consequence of the elaborate technicalities of the pathological and clinical laboratories. To this category belong racial variability, the hereditary influence of social factors upon social predisposition, the influence of the constitution of the soil, of climate, and of the seasons, upon the most diverse manifestations of human activity, and the significance of cosmic factors. The inevitable result of this was that German biology, and, above all, German psychiatry, which endeavoured to unriddle everything, either at the bedside of the living patient in the hospital or in the brain of the deceased patient in the laboratory, did not understand, and could not understand, what Lombroso was really driving at with his anthropology.
Now let me attempt to summarize the matter in a few words. Lombroso’s mind was permeated with the idea of the unity of a universe under the dominion of strict law, of an invariable uniformity of principle throughout the world, within which the human being is subjected to laws identical with those to which crystals, plants, and lower animals are subordinated; and the understanding of these laws could, he was convinced, be obtained only by the establishment of positive facts. In so far as these facts relate to human beings, they comprise in their totality the science of anthropology.