[179]. Friedmann, “Genesis of Disinterested Benevolence,” Mind, vol. i. (1878), p. 404.
[180]. About 1820, during the time of scarcity consequent on Tshaka’s wars, certain of the Natal tribes (the natives say, at the suggestion of a chief named Umdava) adopted the practice of cannibalism. It was abandoned when food again became plentiful, and has always been regarded with great horror; those individuals who had acquired such a taste for human flesh as to prefer it to other food, fled into the recesses of the Drakensberg and Maluti mountains. Moshesh, the great Basuto chief, directed his efforts for years to the extirpation of the practice, though unwilling to do so, as his advisers desired, by means of a summary massacre of the offenders. The Amazimu (Modimo) are now a myth to both Zulus and Basutos; indeed the word, as now used, is frequently synonymous with “ogre.” It is to be noted that Moshesh was not in any way acting under European influence, in fact the last of the cannibals had disappeared long before the country came under British rule, and though the memory of their atrocities was still fresh when the French missionaries arrived in 1833, the chief had already been proceeding against them for some time. See Casalis, Les Bassoutos.
[181]. Staniland Wake, Evolution of Morality, vol. i. pp. 427 et seq. To be consulted for facts of this kind.
[182]. Letourneau, L’évolution juridique chez les différents peuples.
[183]. “Latrocinia nullam habent infamiam quæ extra fines cujusque civitatis fiunt.”—De Bell. Gall., vi. 21.
[184]. It should perhaps be added that the more scientific writers on criminal anthropology do not regard the chief causes suggested above as rival theories, but rather as factors which may co-operate to produce criminality, the biological factor (heredity, arrest of development, infantilism, etc.) acting as predisposing cause, the sociological factor as exciting cause.—Ed.
[185]. According to Krafft-Ebing, Lehrbuch (vol. i., sec. 2, chap, iii.), Regiomontanus already maintained, in 1513, that depravity is quite independent of the accurate knowledge of good and evil; he attributed this anomaly to the influence of the planet Venus.
[186]. Especially Despine, Psychologie naturelle (ii. pp. 169 et seq.), and Maudsley, Pathology of Mind.
[187]. Dictionary of Psychological Medicine, art. “Criminal Anthropology.” Here it is stated that, at Elmira, 34 per cent. criminals on admission exhibit entire absence of moral susceptibility; while (according to Dr. Salsotto, at Turin) in 130 women guilty of murder, or complicity in murder, genuine remorse was only observed in 6.
[188]. Since the above was written two lengthy and valuable studies of the psychology of religion, and more especially of the phenomena of “conversion,” have been published by Leuba and Starbuck, largely inspired by Prof. Stanley Hall (Am. Jour. Psych., 1896-97). Both these studies are founded on original data, in part obtained by a questionnaire.—Ed.