If we were to look at the matter in a rather more thorough and scientific manner, there can be no doubt that the previsions of Tarde would be justified, and that men would fall into certain natural anthropologic groups, according to their habitual modes of feeling and thinking and acting, the nature of each person, to some extent, “subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.” In each class there would be different degrees in sensory perception, in cranial shape and size, in muscular development. Such investigations will no doubt be systematically carried out in time. At present, owing to the extraordinary apathy of anthropologists, and consequently the general indifference to the importance of studies connected with the development and varieties of men, scarcely anything is known regarding the matter.
But important as professional selection is, it cannot account for everything. Indeed no serious attempt has been made to substantiate it by reference to the details of criminal anthropology. M. Tarde is a magistrate; no scientific man would have attempted to account for all the facts that have now accumulated by professional selection and acquired habits.
It is interesting to note that Topinard, the distinguished anthropologist, who has bestowed some severe and not unmerited criticism on portions of Lombroso’s work,[86] while accepting the professional theory of crime, by no means considers that it is sufficient to explain the whole of the facts; remembering the teaching of Lélut and Baillarger, under whom he had studied mental disease, he calls in the aid of the morbid element:—“Criminals constitute a special professional category in society, in the same way as men of letters, men of science, artists, priests, the labouring classes, etc., but a complex category in which the most diverse elements enter: the insane or those predisposed to insanity, epileptics and those predisposed to epilepsy, the alcoholic, the microcephalic, the macrocephalic, those predisposed by some vice of organisation or of development, anterior or posterior to birth, betraying itself sometimes by very evident anatomical anomalies, those who are predisposed by family traditions and inclinations, those whose moral instincts are perverted by individual education and social environment, and finally those who are criminals by accident, without preparation or predisposition.”[87] Professional characters will carry us a long way when we are seeking to account for natural social groups. But in the anti-social groups another and more morbid element enters. It is indeed largely the presence of morbid elements which gives these groups their anti-social character.
(f) The morbid element in criminality has sometimes been too strongly emphasised, but it would be idle to attempt to deny its importance. The frequency with which insanity appears among criminals, even when the influence of imprisonment may with considerable certainty be excluded, is well ascertained. Of recent years also the close connection between criminality and epilepsy and general paralysis has often been shown. I have several times pointed out that the resemblances between criminals considered as a class and the insane so considered are by no means great; at many points they are strongly contrasted. The resemblances with epileptics, on the other hand, are anthropologically very marked, as Lombroso was the first to point out in detail. He has also observed that those regions of Italy which produce most epileptics produce also most criminals. Epilepsy has a certain relationship to insanity; it tends naturally to weak-mindedness, although some of the world’s greatest men have been epileptics; and there is in epilepsy a tendency to the development of brutal, unnatural, and bloodthirsty instincts. The slighter and more concealed forms of epilepsy offer also a very fruitful field for investigation in this respect.[88]
But the roots of criminality are not only deeper than professionalism, they are deeper also than any merely acquired disease. I have frequently had occasion to note the remarkable resemblances between criminals and idiots. There is the same tendency to anatomical abnormalities of the muscles, arteries, bones, etc.; in both the muscular system is weak; there is the same tendency also to small and weak hearts, with valvular defects. There is, again, the same sensory obtuseness, with the same exception in the case of sight, which is remarkably good, with rarity, it seems, of colour-blindness. Criminality, like idiocy, tends to run in the line of the eldest sons, and in both the hereditary influences are frequently bad. Cranial asymmetry is common in idiots as well as among criminals; and while meningitis is a common cause of idiocy, such evidence as we possess shows that it is also common in criminals. Tubercular disease is again common in both. Epilepsy, to which so much importance has of late been attached in connection with criminality, is notoriously common among idiots, being found among nearly 25 per cent.[89] The relations of criminality to idiocy have not yet been sufficiently studied.
The criminal is, however, by no means an idiot. He is not even a merely weak-minded person. The idiot and the feeble-minded, as we know them in asylums, rarely have any criminal or dangerous instincts. Another term is frequently used to denote vicious or criminal instincts in a person who is, mentally, little if at all defective; he is said to be “morally insane.”
The term “moral insanity” was originated nearly half a century ago by an Englishman, Dr. Prichard, who in his Treatise on Insanity declared that insanity exists sometimes with an apparently unimpaired state of the intellectual faculties; and the conception has been developed by Krafft-Ebing, Maudsley, and many others. The term itself is an unfortunate one; the condition described by no means falls in easily as a subdivision of insanity, and it is moreover frequently of a congenital character. There is now a very general tendency to drop the expression “moral insanity,” and to speak instead of “moral imbecility.”
The condition in question, by whatever name it is called, is described by alienists as an incapacity to feel, or to act in accordance with, the moral conditions of social life. Such persons, it has been said, are morally blind; the psychic retina has become anæsthetic. The egoistic impulses have become supreme; the moral imbecile is indifferent to the misfortunes of others, and to the opinions of others; with cold logic he calmly goes on his way, satisfying his personal interests and treading under foot the rights of others. If he comes in contact with the law then his indifference changes into hate, revenge, ferocity, and he is persuaded that he is in the right. Although so defective on the moral side, these persons are well able to make use of the abstracted intellectual conceptions of honour, morality, philanthropy; such words are indeed frequently on their lips, and it is quite impossible to convince them of the unusual character of their acts. They are absolutely and congenitally incapable of social education, systematically hostile to every moralising influence. Being themselves morally blind, it is their firm conviction that all others are in the same condition; they disbelieve in the possibility of virtue, and being often possessed of considerable intellectual ability, maintain anti-social theories with much skill.
“Moral insanity” does not probably stand for any definite morbid condition. It is used as a convenient term to describe a certain group of psychic symptoms which are not found in a developed condition in the normal man. It is obvious that these symptoms closely resemble those we have already described as characterising the criminal in his most clearly-marked form—the instinctive criminal. The morally insane person has been identified with the instinctive criminal by Lombroso, Marro, Ferri, Benedikt, Colajanni, and many others. The fusion has, however, been rejected by some—by Binswanger and Kraepelin, for instance. There can, however, be little doubt that the two groups overlap in very large part.
The group of instinctive criminals therefore still stands fairly apart among the other groups of criminals, approximating, but not fusing with, these various morbid and atypical groups. The outlines blend, but each group is distinct at the centre. It will be the work of the future to arrange, and if necessary to re-form, these various groups.