One of the witnesses for the prosecution said that he considered that Jean was normal and that his apparent backwardness was due to lack of schooling. This is a common error in all such cases. If asked why a boy should be backward through lack of schooling when he has been to school and has had every opportunity to learn, it is common again to fall back upon the idea that he has not studied. He has been a wild, wayward boy, playing truant, more or less, and has never applied himself, therefore he is behind his grade and is dull and backward. Again, while not denying that there are children of perfectly normal intelligence who seem to be misfits in school or who seem more interested in other things than in their school work, or children who will not study because of dislike for the teacher or for various other reasons, yet the reader must be reminded that a study of the high-grade defective shows that he is continually being confused with these very exceptional children who have the ability but who do not study. In other words, when a boy does not get along in school, even though it is evident that he does not study, the strong probability is that he does not study because he has not mind enough to appreciate the work, to understand it, hence to have that highest of all incentives to work, success. The fact that the majority of boys do get their lessons and get along well in school should be a strong argument that there is something seriously wrong with those that do not succeed.
It may further be asked: How does the fact that the boy has not succeeded in school affect his examination by the Binet test? Experience has shown that the test is affected but slightly. In other words, the mind develops regardless of school and school training. As long as we ask only such questions as call for a general intelligence and do not call for specific school instruction we are reasonably independent of such instruction. As a matter of fact, nearly all of the questions of the Binet Scale are free from this objection. Some of them, it is true, are a little helped if the child has been to school and correspondingly hard if the child has not been to school; but, on the whole, they do not affect the final rating to any serious extent. This has been proven repeatedly by normal children who, on account of sickness or for other reasons, have not been to school, and yet can pass the Binet tests for their own age.
We must now turn to the question of cause. If we can account for Jean Gianini’s imbecility, it will be much easier to believe in it. Much has been written on the subject of the causes of feeble-mindedness. Certain fundamental principles have been agreed upon. It is now known that at least 66 per cent of feeble-mindedness is hereditary; that is to say, the individual is feeble-minded because he comes from stock in which feeble-mindedness exists. There is another group in which there are practically no other feeble-minded persons in the family or among the ancestors so far as can be discovered, but there is, on the other hand, a great deal of bad physical history; there may be epilepsy, alcoholism, insanity, or other serious physical disturbances. Finally, we have a group in which there is history of some accident, either to the child at the time of birth or after birth, or to the mother previous to the birth of the child.
In Jean’s case we have no history of accident or injury to the child himself. The pedigree or family tree has not been worked up and we do not know what there may be. It was in evidence that the grandfather was born on the south side of the Alps; and there was some slight attempt to imply, since cretinism is very common in that region, that possibly there was some cretinous condition in the family. All this is not impossible; and if it existed in the grandfather or even in the great-grandfather, such a condition might reappear in the grandson in the form of imbecility; yet in view of our present knowledge, or rather our lack of knowledge on this subject, this line of argument is too vague to enable us to draw any conclusions.
The fact that the mother of Jean was insane and alcoholic justly had great weight. Before her first child was born she broke down mentally and was probably never “right” after that time. The first child lived to the age of seven and from the description was clearly an idiot. The second child is entirely normal. Jean, who is the third child, did not talk until he was five years old.
Our general studies have not yet gone far enough, and certainly our study of this particular family is far from sufficient, to enable us to decide whether this is a matter of heredity or whether we shall say that Jean’s condition as well as that of the first child is traceable directly to the mother’s insanity or to her alcoholism.
For the present purpose, of course, it does not matter. We see in these facts, whether we regard them as causes or merely as symptoms of a deeper lying cause, sufficient reason for Jean’s being an imbecile. There is every reason to believe that Jean Gianini is an imbecile of high grade. The next important question that arises is a legal one of whether, being an imbecile of high grade, he knew the nature and quality of his act and that it was wrong.
Before discussing this let us consider two other cases—after which we may discuss the general proposition of whether high-grade imbeciles know right and wrong.