When men of science (or, more often, men who talk about science) speak
of studying history or human society scientifically they always forget
that there are two quite distinct questions involved. It may be that
certain facts of the body go with certain facts of the soul, but it
by no means follows that a grasp of such facts of the body goes with
a grasp of the things of the soul. A man may show very learnedly that
certain mixtures of race make a happy community, but he may be quite
wrong (he generally is) about what communities are happy. A man may
explain scientifically how a certain physical type involves a really bad
man, but he may be quite wrong (he generally is) about which sort of man
is really bad. Thus his whole argument is useless, for he understands
only one half of the equation.
The drearier kind of don may come to me and say, “Celts are
unsuccessful; look at Irishmen, for instance.” To which I should reply,
“You may know all about Celts; but it is obvious that you know nothing
about Irishmen. The Irish are not in the least unsuccessful, unless it
is unsuccessful to wander from their own country over a great part of
the earth, in which case the English are unsuccessful too.” A man with
a bumpy head may say to me (as a kind of New Year greeting), “Fools have
microcephalous skulls,” or what not. To which I shall reply, “In order
to be certain of that, you must be a good judge both of the physical
and of the mental fact. It is not enough that you should know a
microcephalous skull when you see it. It is also necessary that you
should know a fool when you see him; and I have a suspicion that you
do not know a fool when you see him, even after the most lifelong and
intimate of all forms of acquaintanceship.”
The trouble with most sociologists, criminologists, etc., is that while
their knowledge of their own details is exhaustive and subtle, their
knowledge of man and society, to which these are to be applied, is quite
exceptionally superficial and silly. They know everything about biology,
but almost nothing about life. Their ideas of history, for instance,
are simply cheap and uneducated. Thus some famous and foolish professor
measured the skull of Charlotte Corday to ascertain the criminal type;
he had not historical knowledge enough to know that if there is any
“criminal type,” certainly Charlotte Corday had not got it. The skull, I
believe, afterwards turned out not to be Charlotte Corday's at all; but
that is another story. The point is that the poor old man was trying to
match Charlotte Corday's mind with her skull without knowing anything
whatever about her mind.
But I came yesterday upon a yet more crude and startling example.
In a popular magazine there is one of the usual articles about
criminology; about whether wicked men could be made good if their heads
were taken to pieces. As by far the wickedest men I know of are much too
rich and powerful ever to submit to the process, the speculation leaves
me cold. I always notice with pain, however, a curious absence of the
portraits of living millionaires from such galleries of awful examples;
most of the portraits in which we are called upon to remark the line
of the nose or the curve of the forehead appear to be the portraits of
ordinary sad men, who stole because they were hungry or killed because
they were in a rage. The physical peculiarity seems to vary infinitely;
sometimes it is the remarkable square head, sometimes it is the
unmistakable round head; sometimes the learned draw attention to the
abnormal development, sometimes to the striking deficiency of the back
of the head. I have tried to discover what is the invariable factor,
the one permanent mark of the scientific criminal type; after exhaustive
classification I have to come to the conclusion that it consists in
being poor.
But it was among the pictures in this article that I received the final
shock; the enlightenment which has left me in lasting possession of the
fact that criminologists are generally more ignorant than criminals.
Among the starved and bitter, but quite human, faces was one head, neat
but old-fashioned, with the powder of the 18th century and a certain
almost pert primness in the dress which marked the conventions of the
upper middle-class about 1790. The face was lean and lifted stiffly up,
the eyes stared forward with a frightful sincerity, the lip was firm
with a heroic firmness; all the more pathetic because of a certain
delicacy and deficiency of male force, Without knowing who it was, one
could have guessed that it was a man in the manner of Shakespeare's
Brutus, a man of piercingly pure intentions, prone to use government
as a mere machine for morality, very sensitive to the charge of
inconsistency and a little too proud of his own clean and honourable
life. I say I should have known this almost from the face alone, even if
I had not known who it was.
But I did know who it was. It was Robespierre. And underneath the
portrait of this pale and too eager moralist were written these
remarkable words: “Deficiency of ethical instincts,” followed by
something to the effect that he knew no mercy (which is certainly
untrue), and by some nonsense about a retreating forehead, a peculiarity
which he shared with Louis XVI and with half the people of his time and
ours.
Then it was that I measured the staggering distance between the
knowledge and the ignorance of science. Then I knew that all criminology
might be worse than worthless, because of its utter ignorance of that
human material of which it is supposed to be speaking. The man who could
say that Robespierre was deficient in ethical instincts is a man utterly
to be disregarded in all calculations of ethics. He might as well say
that John Bunyan was deficient in ethical instincts. You may say that
Robespierre was morbid and unbalanced, and you may say the same of
Bunyan. But if these two men were morbid and unbalanced they were morbid
and unbalanced by feeling too much about morality, not by feeling too
little. You may say if you like that Robespierre was (in a negative sort
of way) mad. But if he was mad he was mad on ethics. He and a company of
keen and pugnacious men, intellectually impatient of unreason and
wrong, resolved that Europe should not be choked up in every channel
by oligarchies and state secrets that already stank. The work was the
greatest that was ever given to men to do except that which Christianity
did in dragging Europe out of the abyss of barbarism after the Dark
Ages. But they did it, and no one else could have done it.
Certainly we could not do it. We are not ready to fight all Europe on a
point of justice. We are not ready to fling our most powerful class
as mere refuse to the foreigner; we are not ready to shatter the great
estates at a stroke; we are not ready to trust ourselves in an
awful moment of utter dissolution in order to make all things seem
intelligible and all men feel honourable henceforth. We are not strong
enough to be as strong as Danton. We are not strong enough to be as weak
as Robespierre. There is only one thing, it seems, that we can do. Like
a mob of children, we can play games upon this ancient battlefield;
we can pull up the bones and skulls of the tyrants and martyrs of
that unimaginable war; and we can chatter to each other childishly and
innocently about skulls that are imbecile and heads that are criminal.
I do not know whose heads are criminal, but I think I know whose are
imbecile.