as primordial, which is _materialism_; or,
(_C_) the physical law as derived and special, the psychical law alone
as primordial, which is _idealism_.
The materialistic doctrine seems to me quite as repugnant to scientific
logic as to common sense; since it requires us to suppose that a
certain kind of mechanism will feel, which would be a hypothesis
absolutely irreducible to reason,—an ultimate, inexplicable
regularity; while the only possible justification of any theory is that
it should make things clear and reasonable.
Neutralism is sufficiently condemned by the logical maxim known as
Ockham's razor, i. e., that not more independent elements are to be
supposed than necessary. By placing the inward and outward aspects of
substance on a par, it seems to render both primordial.
The one intelligible theory of the universe is that of objective
idealism, that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming
physical laws. But before this can be accepted it must show itself
capable of explaining the tridimensionality of space, the laws
of motion, and the general characteristics of the universe, with
mathematical clearness and precision; for no less should be demanded of
every Philosophy.
Modern mathematics is replete with ideas which may be applied
to philosophy. I can only notice one or two. The manner in which
mathematicians generalise is very instructive. Thus, painters are
accustomed to think of a picture as consisting geometrically of the
intersections of its plane by rays of light from the natural objects
to the eye. But geometers use a generalised perspective. For instance,
in the figure let _O_ be the eye, let _A B C D E_ be the edgewise view
of any plane, and let _a f e D c_ be the edgewise view of another
plane. The geometers draw rays through _O_ cutting both these planes,
and treat the points of intersection of each ray with one plane as
representing the point of intersection of the same ray with the other
plane. Thus, _e_ represents _E_, in the painter's way. _D_ represents
itself. _C_ is represented by _c_, which is further from the eye; and
_A_ is represented by _a_ which is on the other side of the eye. Such
generalisation is not bound down to sensuous images. Further, according
to this mode of representation every point on one plane represents
a point on the other, and every point on the latter is represented
by a point on the former. But how about the point _f_ which is in a
direction from _O_ parallel to the represented plane, and how about the
point _B_ which is in a direction parallel to the representing plane?
Some will say that these are exceptions; but modern mathematics does
not allow exceptions which can be annulled by generalisation. As a
point moves from _C_ to _D_ and thence to _E_ and off toward infinity,
the corresponding point on the other plane moves from _c_ to _D_ and
thence to _e_ and toward _f_. But this second point can pass through
_f_ to _a_; and when it is there the first point has arrived at _A_. We
therefore say that the first point has passed _through infinity_, and
that every line joins in to itself somewhat like an oval. Geometers
talk of the parts of lines at an infinite distance as points. This is a
kind of generalisation very efficient in mathematics.
[Illustration]
Modern views of measurement have a philosophical aspect. There is
an indefinite number of systems of measuring along a line; thus, a
perspective representation of a scale on one line may be taken to
measure another, although of course such measurements will not agree
with what we call the distances of points on the latter line. To
establish a system of measurement on a line we must assign a distinct
number to each point of it, and for this purpose we shall plainly have
to suppose the numbers carried out into an infinite number of places
of decimals. These numbers must be ranged along the line in unbroken
sequence. Further, in order that such a scale of numbers should be
of any use, it must be capable of being shifted into new positions,
each number continuing to be attached to a single distinct point.
Now it is found that if this is true for "imaginary" as well as for
real points (an expression which I cannot stop to elucidate), any
such shifting will necessarily leave two numbers attached to the same
points as before. So that when the scale is moved over the line by
any continuous series of shiftings of one kind, there are two points
which no numbers on the scale can ever reach, except the numbers fixed
there. This pair of points, thus unattainable in measurement, is called
the Absolute. These two points may be distinct and real, or they may
coincide, or they may be both imaginary. As an example of a linear
quantity with a double absolute we may take probability, which ranges
from an unattainable absolute certainty _against_ a proposition to an
equally unattainable absolute certainty _for_ it. A line, according
to ordinary notions, we have seen is a linear quantity where the two
points at infinity coincide. A velocity is another example. A train
going with infinite velocity from Chicago to New York would be at all
the points on the line at the very same instant, and if the time of
transit were reduced to less than nothing it would be moving in the
other direction. An angle is a familiar example of a mode of magnitude
with no real immeasurable values. One of the questions philosophy has
to consider is whether the development of the universe is like the
increase of an angle, so that it proceeds forever without tending
toward anything unattained, which I take to be the Epicurean view, or
whether the universe sprang from a chaos in the infinitely distant
past to tend toward something different in the infinitely distant
future, or whether the universe sprang from nothing in the past to go
on indefinitely toward a point in the infinitely distant future, which,
were it attained, would be the mere nothing from which it set out.
The doctrine of the absolute applied to space comes to this, at either—
First, space is, as Euclid teaches, both _unlimited_ and
_immeasurable_, so that the infinitely distant parts of any plane seen
in perspective appear as a straight line, in which case the sum of the
three angles of a triangle amounts to 180°; or,
Second, space is _immeasurable_ but _limited_, so that the infinitely
distant parts of any plane seen in perspective appear as a circle,
beyond which all is blackness, and in this case the sum of the three
angles of a triangle is less than 180° by an amount proportional to the
area of the triangle; or,
Third, space is _unlimited_ but _finite_, (like the surface of a
sphere,) so that it has no infinitely distant parts; but a finite
journey along any straight line would bring one back to his original
position, and looking off with an unobstructed view one would see the
back of his own head enormously magnified, in which case the sum of the
three angles of a triangle exceeds 180° by an amount proportional to
the area.
Which of these three hypotheses is true we know not. The largest
triangles we can measure are such as have the earth's orbit for base,
and the distance of a fixed star for altitude. The angular magnitude
resulting from subtracting the sum of the two angles at the base
of such a triangle from 180° is called the star's _parallax_. The
parallaxes of only about forty stars have been measured as yet. Two of
them come out negative, that of Arided (α Cygni), a star of magnitude
1-1/2, which is -0."082, according to C. A. F. Peters, and that of a
star of magnitude 7-3/4, known as Piazzi III 422, which is -0."045
according to R. S. Ball. But these negative parallaxes are undoubtedly
to be attributed to errors of observation; for the probable error
of such a determination is about ±0."075, and it would be strange
indeed if we were to be able to see, as it were, more than half way
round space, without being able to see stars with larger negative
parallaxes. Indeed, the very fact that of all the parallaxes measured
only two come out negative would be a strong argument that the smallest
parallaxes really amount to +0."1, were it not for the reflexion that
the publication of other negative parallaxes may have been suppressed.
I think we may feel confident that the parallax of the furthest star
lies somewhere between -0."05 and +0."15, and within another century
our grandchildren will surely know whether the three angles of a
triangle are greater or less than 180°,—that they are _exactly_ that
amount is what nobody ever can be justified in concluding. It is true
that according to the axioms of geometry the sum of the three sides
of a triangle are precisely 180°; but these axioms are now exploded,
and geometers confess that they, as geometers, know not the slightest
reason for supposing them to be precisely true. They are expressions of
our inborn conception of space, and as such are entitled to credit, so
far as their truth could have influenced the formation of the mind. But
that affords not the slightest reason for supposing them exact.
Now, metaphysics has always been the ape of mathematics. Geometry
suggested the idea of a demonstrative system of absolutely certain
philosophical principles; and the ideas of the metaphysicians have at
all times been in large part drawn from mathematics. The metaphysical
axioms are imitations of the geometrical axioms; and now that the
latter have been thrown overboard, without doubt the former will be
sent after them. It is evident, for instance, that we can have no
reason to think that every phenomenon in all its minutest details is
precisely determined by law. That there is an arbitrary element in the
universe we see,—namely, its variety. This variety must be attributed
to spontaneity in some form.
Had I more space, I now ought to show how important for philosophy is
the mathematical conception of continuity. Most of what is true in
Hegel is a darkling glimmer of a conception which the mathematicians
had long before made pretty clear, and which recent researches have
still further illustrated.
Among the many principles of Logic which find their application
in Philosophy, I can here only mention one. Three conceptions are
perpetually turning up at every point in every theory of logic, and in
the most rounded systems they occur in connection with one another.
They are conceptions so very broad and consequently indefinite that
they are hard to seize and may be easily overlooked. I call them the
conceptions of First, Second, Third. First is the conception of being
or existing independent of anything else. Second is the conception of
being relative to, the conception of reaction with, something else.
Third is the conception of mediation, whereby a first and second are
brought into relation. To illustrate these ideas, I will show how
they enter into those we have been considering. The origin of things,
considered not as leading to anything, but in itself, contains the
idea of First, the end of things that of Second, the process mediating
between them that of Third. A philosophy which emphasises the idea of
the One, is generally a dualistic philosophy in which the conception of
Second receives exaggerated attention; for this One (though of course
involving the idea of First) is always the other of a manifold which
is not one. The idea of the Many, because variety is arbitrariness and
arbitrariness is repudiation of any Secondness, has for its principal
component the conception of First. In psychology Feeling is First,
Sense of reaction Second, General conception Third, or mediation. In
biology, the idea of arbitrary sporting is First, heredity is Second,
the process whereby the accidental characters become fixed is Third.
Chance is First, Law is Second, the tendency to take habits is Third.
Mind is First, Matter is Second, Evolution is Third.
Such are the materials out of which chiefly a philosophical theory
ought to be built, in order to represent the state of knowledge to
which the nineteenth century has brought us. Without going into other
important questions of philosophical architectonic, we can readily
foresee what sort of a metaphysics would appropriately be constructed
from those conceptions. Like some of the most ancient and some of the
most recent speculations it would be a Cosmogonic Philosophy. It
would suppose that in the beginning,—infinitely remote,—there was
a chaos of unpersonalised feeling, which being without connection or
regularity would properly be without existence. This feeling, sporting
here and there in pure arbitrariness, would have started the germ of
a generalising tendency. Its other sportings would be evanescent, but
this would have a growing virtue. Thus, the tendency to habit would be
started; and from this with the other principles of evolution all the
regularities of the universe would be evolved. At any time, however, an
element of pure chance survives and will remain until the world becomes
an absolutely perfect, rational, and symmetrical system, in which mind
is at last crystallised in the infinitely distant future.
That idea has been worked out by me with elaboration. It accounts for
the main features of the universe as we know it,—the characters of
time, space, matter, force, gravitation, electricity, etc. It predicts
many more things which new observations can alone bring to the test.
May some future student go over this ground again, and have the leisure
to give his results to the world.
CHARLES S. PEIRCE.
ILLUSTRATIVE STUDIES IN CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
I.
"LA BÊTE HUMAINE" AND CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
If I had to be the judge of M. Zola I could be only a very partial
judge. To me the books of Zola are, with those of Dostoyewski and
Tolstoï, the only ones which have struck a fresh tone in the literary
monotony of this quarter of a century, in which it is said the
political levelling and the general abasement of character extend
even to the republic of letters. Thus I am partial to Zola, for, as
the chief of a school which pushes the science of psychiatry far into
the field of psychology and of sociology, I find in Zola an ally
the more valuable that he has not been sought and that he reigns in
a very different empire. To the scientific charlatans who deny, as
does M. Colajanni, the importance and the gravity of alcoholism, its
associations with crime and degeneracy, "L'Assommoir" is perhaps the
best of refutations. "Germinal" and "La Fortune des Rougon" give us the
demonstration of that cruelty which is born for the crowd and in the
crowd, and both prove the influence that criminals and lunatics have
in rebellions. Zola is the only one of the Latin race who endeavors to
introduce the scientific method into literary work.
His romances are modern histories which are founded upon living data,
as histories in general are on dead data. And in history he knows also
how to employ soberness, by contenting himself with a very simple
sketch, disdaining the vulgar tricks which are as easy to invent as
they are far from the truth.
I ought to be still more partial to "La Bête Humaine"; for, with a
generosity not very frequent in men of letters, M. Zola avows that he
had recourse to my "Homme Criminel" and my "Homme de Génie" for the
material for his romance. Nevertheless, I cannot forbear mixing some
criticism with the praises merited by this work, for I do not find
satisfied by it that which I regard more than my personal vanity: my
love of truth. In "La Bête Humaine" all those artifices which the
romanticists had accustomed us to, and from which Zola was freed,
reappear, and that alas too often!
In the first place, it is a sufficiently strange fatality that the same
knife that was given as a mark of conjugal love should be by turns the
instrument of every murder committed, and that all the assassinations,
derailments, and suicides invariably occur at the Croix-de-Maufras,
where the first lewd practices of the President Grandmorin took place.
That a great number of criminals should be congregated in the small
enclosure of a second-rate railway station and of its approaches, is in
itself a strange fact, but it is still more strange that every crime
always derives its character from that accursed place which already
bears a fateful and dismal name. This is contrary to the laws of
probability; for we know by statistics that the number of criminals, as
well as of crimes, is always the same for a certain number of people,
or a certain number of square miles, or years, and cannot be massed
and restricted to a small space of ground, to so few individuals,
and so short a time. This is an atavistic reversion, or, we might
say, a return to the old ways of romance, in which fatal events
always followed each other in certain fatal localities, or through
particular men and by certain fated weapons, etc. In "La Fortune des
Rougon," also, there is a certain musket which serves for the murder
of gendarmes by a grandfather and his nephew, and of the nephew by
gendarmes; as if the cause of the fatality was not the hereditary
instinct, but this silent and unconscious instrument.
However, the greatest fault is not here; but rather in the delineation
of character. Zola, who, in my opinion, has admirably depicted people
poisoned by alcohol, and the common middle classes of the towns and
of the country, has not studied criminals according to nature:
undoubtedly because the latter are not so easily met with; nor allow
themselves to be studied even in prisons. Zola's figures of criminals
give me the false pictorial effect produced by certain photographs
taken from portraits, and not from the living subjects. For this
reason it is then that I, who have studied thousands and thousands
of criminals, should not know how to class his Roubaud, a good clerk
and a good husband, who on accidentally discovering the secret of
the old amours of his wife with Grandmorin, which were not yet done
with, throws himself upon her, wishes to kill her, finally changes
his mind, and ends by deciding on the murder of the pseudo-adulterer,
with the complicity of his wife. Can he be called a criminal through
passion? But then it is _she_ that he should have killed, or at least
the adulterer being killed he should have repented of it. And again,
criminals through passion are, like Roubaud, very good and respectable
people, but in their crimes they rush blindly and headlong forward,
without accomplices, without premeditation, and without artifices.
And they repent, they confess: they are the only criminals who feel
remorse. He has no remorse; for some time he leads a life of revenge,
and, afterwards, suddenly, he gives himself up to vice, to wine, to
gambling, and forgets his wife, and he is jealous of her no more; on
the contrary, indifferent, he assists in her infidelities. Can he be
called a born criminal, a _bête_? But then how explain that he had
lived so long without vices, free from debauchery, and that he had been
so good a clerk? He could still be a criminal incidentally; but for a
correct, steady, quiet man, as a railway official ought to be, would
the discovery of the old amour of his wife be a proportionate reason
for him to commit a premeditated murder, the greatest of crimes? And
then, as we shall see, criminaloids are born criminals in part; they
have many of the latters' psychological and physical characteristics.
Now Roubaud has a full beard, red hair, and quick eyes: the only
anomalies are meeting eyebrows, a low forehead, and a flat head:
nothing is said of hysterical or epileptical ancestors.
According to Henry Héricourt (_Revue Bleue_, p. 14), M. Zola was
inspired by a recent trial, that of the apothecary Fenayron, who
is said to have had much resemblance to Roubaud. Marin Fenayron,
the apothecary, was a man of forty-one, intelligent, steady, and
industrious. He had married, twelve years before, the youngest daughter
of his old employer, whom he had succeeded. His wife, who was eighteen
years old at the time of her marriage, and who had consented to the
union only with repugnance, was not slow to deceive him, and soon
formed an intimacy with his assistant. This triangular relation lasted
a time, not precisely stated by the proceedings, but sufficiently
long for Gabrielle Fenayron, tired of her first lover, to take the
opportunity to replace him by several others. The husband, who during
this time has become a gambler and idle fellow, is informed of the
misconduct of his wife. Although he did not put much credit in this at
first, yet in the quarrels which followed and were continually renewed
he ended by abusing her, striking her, and menacing her with death: and
at last he obtained from her the confession of her relations with his
old assistant Aubert, then himself established as a chemist. According
to her recital, the woman could obtain the pardon of her husband only
by the promise that she would assist him in his plans of revenge,
and she had consented through shame without protesting. Then, by the
order of her husband, she writes several letters to her old lover,
renews relations with him, and finally, under the pretext of a country
excursion, draws him into an ambush where she aided her husband in
killing him with a hammer. It will be remembered that Aubert, after
the first blow, turned round, recognised his murderer, and prepared to
defend himself: but his mistress threw herself on him, twined her arms
about him, and the husband could thus finish his work in safety.
After the crime there was no remorse on the part of either the one
or the other. Far to the contrary. The criminal pair delivered
themselves anew to their accustomed distractions with the most perfect
tranquillity, and the performance appeared without doubt very natural
to Fenayron, for one day, meeting his mother-in-law, he accosted her,
saying, "Well, Mother, it is done. I have killed Aubert."
But let it be remarked how this Marin Fenayron, who figures as an
occasional criminal, this time reveals himself a criminal by habit,
meditating and premeditating his vengeance, waiting two long months
before putting it into execution, surrounding himself with every
precaution to secure immunity for the crime. Such a one certainly is
not the violent man whom passion blinds and who is instantaneously
inflamed with anger. It is rather the degenerated man with whom
predisposition has found the opportunity to reveal and to develop
itself. It is necessary to add that Marin had a brother feeble in mind:
an hereditary defect.
The true _bête humaine_, Jacques Lantier, possesses the anatomical
characters of the born criminal; "his thick black locks were curled,
like his moustaches, so heavy and dark that they increased greatly
the natural paleness of his complexion." Moreover, the inclination to
crime in him was justified by inheritance. And this passion for murder
which supplants the sensual passion is truly intoxicating. Where the
author has gone astray is where he makes Jacques find pleasure for a
considerable time with Séverine without any thought of murder; while
these unfortunates, at least all that I have studied, do not experience
sexual pleasure except in murder. On the other hand, the vertigo of
epileptic amnesia which Zola often causes Jacques to suffer, is based
on fact and actually accords with the most recent observations:
"He had finally found himself on the brink of the Seine
without being able to explain to himself how. That of which he
retained a very clear impression, was of having thrown from
the top of the bank the knife that his hand held clutched in
his pocket. Then he knew no more, stupefied and absent of
mind, out of which the other, and the knife too, had entirely
vanished.... He was in his narrow chamber in the Rue Cardinet,
fallen across his bed, fully dressed. Instinct had brought him
back there, as a worn out dog crawls to his kennel. Besides
he remembered neither having ascended the stairs, nor of
having slept. He awoke from a heavy sleep, scared to re-enter
abruptly into possession of himself, as after a profound
fainting fit. Perhaps he had slept three hours, perhaps three
days."