Then again, crime is not a disease in the sense that it is so lightly proclaimed. Crime may eventuate mainly because of congenital flaw, physical, mental, or both; or it may crop out by acquirement in spite of a sound heredity; but it always issues to relative mental disease in the sense that habitually oblique reasoning becomes master of the subject, either tentatively, or for good and all; tentatively, if the constant weight of influence is preponderantly in his favor, and permanently under the reverse circumstance.
More than that, the serviceable investigator will understand how the weight of influence can be turned, one way or the other, by seeming straws of effort or circumstance. For instance, the mood of the moment must be understood not only, but as well, why it is the mood of the moment. Here, pre-natal influence may carry in nothing more tangible than a lowering sky. There, the marked face of the man betrays the erotic-neurotic in the throes of the immediate aftermath of his self-indulged spree, in which state of low vitality he naturally looks out upon an ugly, drab world. Another nurses a fetich: a ridiculous fetich, to be sure, but one of which you shall not purge his mind with a club of words; indeed, in no way else than through patiently building to his better understanding. Per contra, looms up the capsheaf of them all: the parent-spoiled ego-centric mouther, who is certain sure he could plan a better world than ever Almighty God could think of. Very good, encourage him to build it; then pick it to pieces, preferably with terse, pregnant parables that leave him not a stone to stand on. Do it often, do it advisedly, and do it thoroughly. You will not thereby win him at once to rational thought, but you have better than a fighting chance to switch him for it, if you are kindly tactful, and do not attempt to stuff your opposed views down his throat.
We are not concerned here with those doomed mentally in state of embryo, save that it is well to have in mind Dr. A. Jacobi’s “Report to the Prison Congress of 1892,” to the effect that “No congenital chronic thickening of the brain membranes, no fixed changes in the brain substance, unless it be syphilitic perhaps, have ever been cured.” So much is indisputable fact, qualified by the word “cured.”
With Dr. Jacobi’s further assertion, many will, without presumption, disagree: “It is not necessary to resort to material impressions (in the embryonic state) as the cause of physical, intellectual and moral anomalies in the offspring: that theory may safely be left to nurses and poets.”
Passing the poet—who usually culls and adorns, yet has been known to probe and create—while objecting strongly for the grateful nurse who often guides to health where the physician, single-handed, would have failed, is Dr. Jacobi’s second sweeping conclusion unassailable?
What is the last power of the protoplasmic germ, and what is the last influence from which it derives that power? Can any man answer unqualifiedly, and if he cannot, just why exclude the psychic from the possibilities? If morbidly by “psychic contagion” is admitted, why refuse pre-natal impressions of psychic origin?
We know that hereditary transmission is persistent as to physical attributes. It may appear to drop stitches here and there, though we shall note more or less of reversion to type if we follow through far enough; but let opinion be as it may, how is one to check up variations of mood, temperament and disposition with physical figures? As to the last three, Jimmy the first and Johnny the second of the same family are antithetic. Why, if the physical is final?
How, by purely physical analysis, are we to account for the fact that the original Clay family of horses were notoriously high-strung and hard to school to rein: whereas the Morgan family were supremely easy to break and groove? Why, where the blood line was kept pure, did the family temperament persist, with few deviations, and even then breed on again back to original family “manners”? Why, with mixture of those breeds, mixture of manners?
What made the intrinsic difference in mental bent and physical outlook as between Webster and Hayne? Why was the one a stickler for centralized governmental power, and the other champion of the rights of individual States, and why was each cock-sure of his ground of contention under the Constitution? In the final analysis, did anything out of physiology decide the question, and how did, what did decide, take up its abode in the national consciousness?
Do hopples employed in effecting change in the original, instinctive gait of a mare from trot to pace, alone account for change of gait? If so, why, when her instinct of motion is changed mechanically from the trot to the pace, does she transmit the latter-acquired instinct to her progeny, to the near exclusion of the gait she was born to? Why, when the hopples are removed, does she not revert to the trot?