III.
We have already alluded to Weismann's and Wallace's views, but there is one important aspect not yet touched.
If Weismann and Wallace are right, if natural selection be indeed the only factor used by nature in organic evolution and therefore available for use by Reason in human evolution, then alas for all our hopes of race-improvement, whether physical, mental, or moral! All enlightened schemes of physical culture and of hygiene, although directed indeed primarily for the strength, health, and happiness of the present generation, yet are sustained and ennobled by the conviction that the physical improvement of the individual, by inheritance enters into a similar improvement of the race. All our schemes of education, intellectual and moral, although certainly intended mainly for the improvement of the individual, are glorified by the hope that the race is also thereby gradually elevated. It is true that these hopes are usually extravagant; it is true that the whole improvement of the individuals of one generation is not carried over by inheritance into the next; it is true therefore that we cannot by education raise a lower race up to the plane of a higher race in a few generations; but there must be a small residuum, be it ever so small, carried forward by inheritance and accumulated from age to age, which enters into the slow growth of the race. If it be true that reason must direct the course of human evolution, and if it be also true that selection of the fittest is the only method available for that purpose; then, if we are to have any race-improvement at all, the dreadful law of destruction of the weak and helpless must with Spartan firmness be carried out voluntarily and deliberately. Against such a course all that is best in us revolts. The use of the Lamarckian factors, on the contrary, is not attended with any such revolting consequences. All that we call education, culture, training, is by the use of these. Our hopes of race-improvement therefore are strictly conditioned on the fact that the Lamarckian factors are still operative, that changes in the individual, if in useful direction, are to some extent inherited and accumulated in the race.
IV.
We have said that the new factor introduced with man is a voluntary co-operation in the process of evolution, a conscious upward striving toward a higher condition, a pressing forward toward an ideal. Man contrary to all else in nature is transformed, not in shape by external environment, but in character by his own ideals. Now this capacity of forming ideals and the voluntary pursuit of such ideals, whence comes it? When analysed and reduced to its simplest terms, it is naught else than the consciousness in man of his relation to the infinite and the attempt to realise the divine ideal in human character.
JOSEPH LE CONTE.
ILLUSTRATIVE STUDIES IN CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
III.
THE PHYSIOGNOMY OF THE ANARCHISTS.
One of the most curious applications, and perhaps the most practical, of Criminal Anthropology, (of that new science which has associated itself with sociology, psychiatry, and history,) is that which flows from the study of the physiognomy of the political criminal. For not only does it appear to succeed in furnishing us with the juridical basis of political crime, which hitherto seemed to escape all our researches, so completely that until now all jurists had ended by saying that there was no political crime; but it seems also to supply us with a method for distinguishing true revolution, always fruitful and useful, from utopia, from rebellion, which is always sterile. It is for me a thoroughly established fact, and one of which I have given the proofs in my "Delitto Politico,"[71] that true revolutionists, that is to say, the initiators of great scientific and political revolutions, who excite and bring about a true progress in humanity, are almost always geniuses or saints, and have all a marvellously harmonious physiognomy; and to verify this it is sufficient simply to look at the plates in my "Delitto Politico." What noble physiognomies have Paoli, Fabrizi, Dandolo, Moro, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Bandiera, Pisacane, la Petrowskaia, la Cidowina, la Sassulich! Generally we see in them a very large forehead, a very bushy beard, and very large and soft eyes; sometimes we meet with the jaw much developed, but never hypertrophic; sometimes, finally, with paleness of the face (Mazzini, Brutus, Cassius); but these characteristics seldom accumulate in the same individual to the extent of constituting what I call the criminal type.