The Criminal

by Havelock Ellis

At a very early period such popular generalisations as these were embodied in that empirical science of physiognomy, which found many professors among the Greeks and Romans. According to the well-known story, a Greek physiognomist who examined Socrates’ face judged that the philosopher was brutal, sensuous, and inclined to drunkenness; and Socrates declared to his disciples that such, although he had overcome it, was his natural disposition. He was himself a physiognomist; he disliked a certain man who was of pale and dark complexion, such signs, he said, indicating envy and murder; the peculiar dark and pallid complexion of the instinctive criminal has of late years been frequently noted.

Aristotle, that great master of all the sciences, clearly recognised not merely the physiognomic signs of habits, vices, and crimes, including many signs that are in accordance with modern scientific observation, but he also observed a connection between the shape of the head and the mental disposition, and he recognised the hereditary character of vicious and criminal instincts. Galen, who inaugurated the experimental study of the brain, adopted the views of Aristotle, and pointed out the influence of the abuse of alcohol in the production of crime; he was of opinion, also, anticipating a modern doctrine, that when the criminal is a criminal by nature he ought to be destroyed, not in revenge, but for the same reason that scorpions and vipers are destroyed.[12]

Although these feeble beginnings of criminal anthropology received the sanction of the highest scientific authorities, as well as of the people, and later on a mediæval law declared that if two persons fell under suspicion of crime the uglier or more deformed was to be regarded as more probably guilty, they were not universally admitted, and some, like Pliny, regarded it as absurd that the outward form could indicate the inward disposition. Whatever art or science there was in the matter was left, then and long after, to the physiognomists, of whom Polemon may be taken as a distinguished example, and these were ready to supply the most elaborate physical signs to correspond to any vicious or criminal disposition. Polemon wrote of the criminal that he was of pallid complexion, with long hair, large ears, and small eyes, and he proceeded to give the characteristics of various classes of criminals, his observations often showing keen insight. This pseudo-science was passed on from physiognomist to physiognomist, usually with added absurdities, until in the sixteenth century we reach the Neapolitan Dalla Porta, at once the greatest (and except Lavater the last) of the physiognomists of the old school and the first of the new. He treated judicial astrology with contempt, and at the same time wrote a treatise of celestial physiognomy; he gathered up all that his predecessors had done, and at the same time laid the foundations of a more scientific treatment.

Passing by Lavater, with his fine intuition and genial humanity, which formed, however, no epoch in the scientific study of criminal anthropology, at the beginning of the present century we reach Gall, a very great figure in the history of science, and the representative of the most important moment in the development of our knowledge of the brain.

Before speaking of Gall, however, it is necessary to give a word, in passing, to Grohmann, who slightly preceded him, and who anticipated many of the conclusions relative to facial and cranial characteristics reached by modern criminal anthropologists. Thus, in 1820, he wrote:—“I have often been impressed in criminals, and especially in those of defective development, by the prominent ears, the shape of the cranium, the projecting cheek-bones, the large lower jaws, the deeply-placed eyes, the shifty, animal-like gaze.”

Gall thrust aside for ever the credulous fancies of the physiognomists; and he has been described, not altogether without reason, as the founder of the modern science of criminal anthropology. He was certainly its most brilliant pioneer. Lavater believed in the homogeneity of the human organism, but he was not a man of science, and he had been content to study the surface of the body; Gall, with true scientific instinct, tried to get to the root of the matter; following the great English anatomist, Willis, who had made some attempt at cerebral localisation, he studied the brain, sought to differentiate the functions of its various parts, and the effects of its varying development on the skull.

For Gall the varying development of the brain was the cause of the divergent mental and moral qualities of the individual; he was firmly convinced that all the facts of psychical life are rooted in the physical organisation; he wished to write the natural history of every primitive moral and intellectual force, in health as well as in disease. To the best of his ability he carried out this programme in detail, by an unceasing study of all the varieties of the brain and of the living head that he could find; he pursued his studies throughout Europe, in lunatic asylums and in prisons, as well as among the ordinary population, and he foresaw the extent of the applications of the science he was opening up to medicine and to law, to morality and to education. While his work extended far beyond the borders of what we should now call criminal anthropology,[13] he devoted much attention to the problems of the criminal organisation, and even to its varieties, many of his observations according well with the results of recent investigation. More than this, following Galen and Diderot (who had written, fifty years earlier, “The evil-doer is one whom we must destroy, not punish”), he clearly advocated a method of dealing with the criminal which is now widely regarded as the only right and reasonable method. “There can be no question,” he said, “of culpability or of justice in the severe sense; the question is of the necessity of society preventing crime. The measure of culpability and the measure of punishment cannot be determined by a study of the illegal act, but only by a study of the individual committing it.” In his great work, Les Fonctions du Cerveau (1822), Gall has summed up his conclusions.

It has been the misfortune of this great and truly scientific investigator to give origin to an empiric art of phrenology which took the place of the old art of physiognomy he had done so much to destroy. He has consequently, until recent years, been popularly known chiefly by his mistakes, especially perhaps by his localisation of the sexual instinct in the cerebellum—a localisation, however, which he supported by a large body of evidence. The influence of dubious phrenological doctrines hardened into a system somewhat impairs the value of Lauvergne’s Les Forçats (1841), which seems to have been the first book of any importance devoted entirely to the study of convict nature, physical, moral, and intellectual. Lauvergne, who was the chief medical officer to the hospital for convicts at Toulon, appears to have been a man of humanitarian instincts, whose wit and bonhomie enabled him to maintain friendly relations with the criminals he was studying; he had little capacity for scientific analysis, but he wrote fully of what he had seen and known, and his book contains many keen observations which have been since verified. He fully recognises also the importance of the social factor in the production of criminals.

Lauvergne had observed how many of his subjects were insane or diseased; the students of the criminal who followed him all insisted on the pathological element. Dally maintained that the criminal and the lunatic are identical, and both equally irresponsible. Prosper Lucas, in his valuable Traité philosophique de l’hérédite (1847), showed how deeply rooted in the organism are the morbid tendencies of crime. Lélut compared the length and breadth of head in criminals. Voisin noted their defects in cerebral organisation. It was, however, Morel who, in his Des Dégénérescences (1857), chiefly developed this aspect of criminality, and his influence is still strong among French students of the criminal. Morel regarded crime as one of the forms taken on by degeneration in the individual or the family; and degeneration he defined as “a morbid deviation from the normal type of humanity.” The causes of degeneration which he recognised were intoxications, famines, social environment, industries, unhealthy occupations, poverty, heredity, pathological transformations, moral causes. “My principal aim,” he says, “has been the study of these causes, and of the influences which they exercise, firstly on the constitution of individuals, and afterwards on that of their descendants.” Among these causes he gives a chief place to the manifold effects on the children of alcoholism in the parents. In his pamphlet De la Formation du Type dans les variétés dégénérés (1864), Morel proposed to give the name of morbid anthropology to “that part of the natural science of man, the aim of which is to study the characters due to certain special diseased influences, as well as to hereditary transmissions of bad nature.”

Despine, by his great work, Psychologie Naturelle (1868), made a new and important step in criminology. Leaving aside the study of the criminal’s physical nature, he sought to make an exhaustive study of his mental nature. No one has done more than Despine to prove that what we should now call the instinctive criminal is, on the psychological side, a natural anomaly, a mental monstrosity. He brought into clear relief the unforeseeing imprudence, the entire lack of moral sensibility and of remorse, which characterise the instinctive criminal. He recognised that the criminal is not necessarily an insane or diseased person, and he showed that his abnormality is not of the kind that intellectual education can remedy. “No physiologist,” he said, “has yet occupied himself with the insanity of the sane;” he considered the criminal as “morally mad,” and therefore irresponsible. Maudsley, from an opposite philosophic standpoint, came to very similar conclusions. Without bringing any fresh contribution of importance, he re-affirmed emphatically the conclusions already reached. Speaking in his Responsibility in Mental Disease (1872) of instinctive criminals, he remarks, “It is a matter of observation that this criminal class constitutes a degenerate or morbid variety of mankind, marked by peculiarly low physical and mental characteristics.” Like Despine, he drew from this the conclusion, since widely accepted, that the criminal, being morally insane and usually incurable, should be treated in the same way as the intellectually insane person. “If the matter be considered deeply, it may appear that it would, perhaps, in the end make little difference whether the offender were sentenced in anger and sent to the seclusion of prison, or were sentenced more in sorrow than in anger, and consigned to the same sort of seclusion under the name of an asylum. The change would probably not lead to an increase or to a decrease in the number of crimes committed in a year.” An artist as much as a man of science, master of a sombre and weighty style, illumined by vivid flashes of imagination, Maudsley by his numerous works popularised the new ideas, and is justly regarded abroad as a pioneer of criminal anthropology.