was all pretence. A number of these cases of ambulatory epilepsy have
been under the observation of distinguished neurologists, however, and
there seems no good reason to doubt that some of them, at least, were
entirely without any fictitious element. In any given case the {263}
possibility of the occurrence of an attack of what is really the
assumption of a secondary personality must be judged from the
circumstances, from the previous history of the individual, from the
family traits, and from certain stigmata as narrowing of the field of
vision and the like, which go to show the existence of a highly
neurotic constitution. In this case the family history showed marked
neurotic tendencies on both sides, and a brother had displayed a
tendency to regularly spaced attacks of alcoholism about every six
weeks, and finally became absolutely uncontrollable. There seemed good
reason to think that the case was a real example of ambulatory
epilepsy, and that the lapse of memory claimed by the patient really
existed.
In these cases it is usual for the so-called secondary personality to
assert itself at moments of intense excitement, especially if they
have been preceded by days of worry and fatigue and nights of
disturbed rest. The secondary personality is not a complete
personality, but is a manifestation of the original ego with the
memory for past events as a _tabula rasa_. It is well known that the
memory is one of the intellectual faculties most dependent on physical
conditions. It is the lowest in the scale of mental qualities and is
shared to a very large degree by the animals. Injuries to the head not
infrequently produce lacunae in the memory. These lacunae often have
very striking limitations. It is not an unusual thing to find that old
people remember events of their very early childhood better than
things that have happened within a few years. Still more interesting
is the fact that languages learned in youth may continue to be easily
used, when those that were learned later in life, though perhaps known
better than the previously studied languages, are forgotten.
It has often been noted that people who suffer from apoplexy may have
peculiar affections of their memory. This may include such striking
peculiarities as the forgetting of the uses of things, though their
names are retained, or more commonly, the forgetting of names while
the knowledge of uses remains. The one form of memory disturbance is
called "Word Amnesia;" the other is called "Apraxia." It is on {264}
record that a person suffering from a hemorrhage in the brain has lost
completely the use of a language acquired later in life, though the
memory of the native language, long since fallen into disuse, was
perfectly retained. One apoplectic woman patient who had left Germany
before she was ten years of age, and who had lived in America until
she was fifty, forgot absolutely the English she knew so well and had
to set herself to work to learn it over again, though her German came
back to her very naturally. These are wonderful peculiarities of
memory-pathology that show how much this faculty is dependent on the
physical basis of mind and upon the cellular constituents of the
brain.
It is not surprising, then, to find that lapses of memory may occur
and that, as a consequence, so many of the facts that ordinarily
enable us to identify ourselves as particular persons may be in
abeyance. That apparently a secondary personality asserts
itself,--though not in the sense that there is ever another ego
present, another mind or another will,--practically all experts in
psychology and nervous diseases are now ready to concede. There are,
however, involved in this question a number of important problems of
responsibility that have not as yet been entirely worked out, and with
regard to which prudent persons are withholding their judgment. Each
case must be studied entirely on its own merits, with a leaning in
favour of the criminal or patient, in case there are evidences in past
life of serious disturbances of mentality, though only of very
temporary nature, or if there is a strong nervous or mental heredity.
The notion of the possibility of a secondary personality asserting
itself is a much older idea than it is usually thought to be. When
Stevenson wrote _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_, the immediate widespread
popularity of the book was not due to recent psychological studies on
dual personality and popular interest in a rare but striking mental
phenomenon, but rather to the traditional feeling, long existent, of
the possibility of two personalities in almost any individual. The
other law in his members, of which St. Paul speaks, is an expression
of this feeling, and its recognition was not original with him since
it is after all a phenomenon at least as old {265} as the existence of
conscience. It is one of the basic ideas in religious feeling. Nearly
everyone has something of the consciousness that there is in him
possibilities for evil that somehow he escapes, and yet the escape is
not entirely due to his own will power. There is here the mystery of
temptation, of free will and of grace as the drama of conscience works
itself out in every human being. At times the evil inclination seems
to get beyond the power of the will and a period of irresponsibility
sets in. Needless to say, the adjudication of how much may be due to
the habitual neglect of repression of lower instincts is extremely
difficult, and this constitutes the problem which the alienist must
try to solve. In the meantime there is need in many mysterious cases
where secondary personality may play a role, of the exercise of a
larger Christian charity than that hitherto practised. Pretenders may
succeed in deceiving only too often, but in the past not a few
innocent individuals have been held to a responsibility for actions
for which they were not quite accountable.
JAMES J. WALSH.
{266}
XXIV
IMPULSE AND RESPONSIBILITY
Not unlike that condition which develops as the result of so-called
psychic epilepsy, in which patients perform apparently voluntary acts,
while the mind is really clouded by an epileptic attack, are those
states in which, as the result of a more or less blind impulse, acts
are performed for which the responsibility of the individual is at
least dubious. Modern experts in nervous and mental diseases have
sometimes spoken of these states as obsessions. This term is adopted
from the older writers on mysticism who used it to designate states of
mind in which an individual was under the influence of some spirit,
though his intellectual and volitional state was not as completely
under the subjection of this spirit as in the condition of possession.
It seems clear to the modern student of these obscure conditions that
the old mystics and the modern alienists practically talk about the
same state of affairs when using this term. As the result of
obsession, mystical writers would have conceded that responsibility is
not quite complete, though it is not entirely done away with. The
modern alienist is just as sure of the diminution of responsibility,
though he considers it due to the fact that for some physical reason
the will is not able to act or prevent action as it is under normal
conditions. The will is sometimes spoken of by certain of these modern
psychologists as mainly an inhibitory faculty, that is, a faculty
which prevents certain reflex acts from taking place, though
permitting one set of reflexes to have its way. Under the influence of
an obsession or, as the French call it, _une idee obsedante_, this
inhibition is not {267} exercised and as a result an action is
accomplished which the agent may very shortly afterwards regret
exceedingly.
There is no doubt that impulsions or impulsive ideas may push an
individual into the performance of an action which his reason
condemns. Uncontrollable anger is a well recognised example of this.
Impulses of other kinds may exercise just as tyrannic a sway, though
it is harder to recognise the elements that make up the mental
condition in other cases. Of course it may well be said that man must
control his impulses. It is, however, just such impulses as can not be
controlled that lessen responsibility and sometimes seem entirely to
destroy it. It would, without doubt, be very easy to advance the
uncontrollable impulse as an excuse for many criminal actions. In
fact, the discussion of responsibility and its limitation by impulse
would seem to be open to so many abuses as to make it advisable, in
the present indefinite state of our knowledge, to put the subject
aside entirely. The argument, however, from the abuse of the thing,
does not hold, and an effort must be made to get at the truth
concerning certain mental conditions which modify responsibility.
It is generally conceded that no two men are free in quite the same
way with regard to the actions which they may or may not perform.
Allurements that are almost compelling for some individuals, for
others have no influence at all. Some men are so under the influence
of anger that irritation may easily lead them to the commission of
acts for which they will be subsequently supremely sorry. This may
even be the case to such an extent as to endanger their lives, yet
they are not able to control themselves. Many men suffering from
degeneration of the arteries of the heart have been warned, like John
Hunter more than a century ago, of the extreme danger of a fit of
anger, yet, like John Hunter, have succumbed to bursts of anger,
notwithstanding the warning, because someone irritated them beyond
their rather limited powers of endurance.
It is extremely difficult ever to come to any proper appreciation of
the responsibility of a given individual from a {268} single act.
Preceding acts, however, may very well give evidence of the state of
mind and the tendencies to disequilibrium which may make an apparently
normal individual irresponsible under trying circumstances. The only
way to render this clear is to illustrate such conditions by a
concrete case.
Not many years ago one of the large cities of this country was
shocked, for one twenty-four hours at least, by the news that a
business man had shot his partners and himself, while at a
consultation in which the affairs of the partnership were being
settled up, after legal dissolution had taken place. The man in
question had paid some debts of the firm with his own personal checks,
and without taking proper legal recognisance for the moneys paid. When
the partnership had been dissolved his partners insisted that instead
of obtaining credit for these payments he should, on the contrary, pay
his share of these debts once more as a partner. The state of the
evidence was such that his lawyers told him it would be useless to
take the case before the court at all; there was nothing to do but pay
the unjust demands. He went to the meeting of his partners with a
certified check for the amount of their claims in his pocket. As he
took out his pocket-book to pass it over to them he seems to have
realised very poignantly the fact that he was paying money that he
knew he did not owe, and that his partners knew he did not owe, and
that they were evidently taking advantage of a legal quibble in order
to cheat him. Evidently it was an extremely trying situation. It was
too much for his mental balance and he took a revolver from his
pocket, shot both his partners dead, and then shot himself.
Taken by itself it is extremely difficult to say anything about the
responsibility of a man who commits an act like this. In ordinary life
he was known as a clever business man; to his friends he was known to
be rather irascible and impatient, but a fairly good fellow. He was
known to have what is called an awful temper; he had, however, never
committed any violent act before. It is possible, of course, that a
man should give way to a fit of anger for the beginning of which he is
responsible, and then do violence {269} much greater than he would
justify himself for in calmer moments.
There was another occurrence in the man's life that seemed to throw
informing light on his mental condition. When he first came to live in
the large city in which he died he began paying attention to a young
woman, and the young woman was informed by a friend that he probably
had a wife living. The young woman investigated this by putting the
question directly to him. He denied it at once, wanted to know the
name of her informant, and finally laughed the whole matter out of her
mind. Within a week after his marriage to her, while on their wedding
tour, he was arrested, charged with bigamy at the instance of his
first wife, and it became evident at once that the charge was well
substantiated.
Here is a man, then, who twice at least in life, when put in the
presence of trying conditions, goes on to do the irretrievable, though
the act is eminently irrational.
With regard to the murder and suicide it is said that he had talked to
friends of shooting the scoundrels who were cheating him, but had been
persuaded of the utter foolishness of any such idea. He had apparently
given it up entirely. Notwithstanding this, he went to the last
conference with his former partners with a loaded revolver, as well as
the certified check for the amount of their claim. In the case of his
bigamous marriage, notwithstanding the warning that his second
fiancee's questions must have been, he followed out his preconceived
idea of marrying her, though he must have realised in saner moments
that discovery of his double dealing was inevitable. In a word, he was
a man who, becoming dominated by an idea, an obsession it may be
called, to do something, could not get away from the sphere of its
influence even though it might be made very clear to him it was
eminently irrational to follow out the idea.
There are many such individuals, and only the knowledge of their
previous career enables us to desume the responsibility for their acts
under trying conditions. That they are not responsible in the ordinary
sense in which the logical, timorous mortal is who is at once repelled
from such modes {270} of action seems very clear. Their lack of
responsibility is manifest, at least to a degree that makes it easy
for charity to find excuses for their crimes because of fatal flaws of
character, the result of physical defects and faulty training, which
make themselves felt especially at the moments that try men's souls.
JAMES J. WALSH.
{271}
XXV
CRIMINOLOGY AND THE HABITUAL CRIMINAL
In recent years no little attention has been devoted to the subject of
criminology, and a supposed science of the criminal has been evolved.
It has been the claim of a very well known Italian school of mental
diseases, whose leader is Professor Lombroso of Turin, that there is a
criminal type in humanity, that is, that there is a generic human
organisation not difficult of differentiation, at least as a class,
the members of which almost necessarily develop criminal proclivities.
Even when criminality has not actually occurred, this is thought to be
but an accident, and criminal acts may be looked for at any time from
these individuals. Lombroso's claims in this matter have met with
decided opposition in every country of Europe and also here in
America. This opposition has come especially from serious students of
abnormal types who have devoted much time to the study of criminals
and other supposedly degenerate individuals. Magnan, the very well and
widely known French authority on insane peculiarities, especially the
so-called criminal monomaniacs, and whose opportunities for careful
investigation of such cases in the Asile St. Anne in Paris have been
very extensive, utterly rejects the idea of a special physical
conformation as characteristic of the criminal.
He is not the only one of the distinguished authorities in mental
diseases who is in opposition to Lombroso in this matter. Dr. Emile
Laurent, the eminent criminologist of Paris, has shown that the same
anomalies which are supposed to characterise criminals are to be found
among those who have never committed any criminal act, and that these
supposed signs of degeneracy are not sufficient to indicate even {272}
that there are criminal tendencies. Manouvrier, the distinguished
anthropological authority of the University of Paris, does not
hesitate to advance the opinion that he can not find any distinctive
difference between criminals and normal men in the extensive studies
of the comparative anatomy of the two classes. He admits, however,
that environment sometimes leads to the formation of habits which
modify the anatomy in certain ways, and that of course traces of hard
work, as well as of poor living, can be found in the anatomical
conformation of many habitual criminals.
Dr. von Holder, a distinguished German authority on the subject, says
that it is impossible to draw any conclusion from cranial asymmetries
as to psychical characteristics, and that physical signs of
degeneration indicate nothing further than the possible presence of a
tendency to psychic degeneration. Dr. Wines, quoted by Draehms in his
book on _The Criminal, a Scientific Study_, says that in a strictly
scientific sense, the existence of an anthropological criminal type
has not been proved, and it is doubtful whether it ever can be proved.
Dr. Arthur McDonald, the well known American specialist in criminology
and degeneracy, some of whose work in connection with the National
Bureau of Education at Washington has attracted widespread attention,
says, in his _Abnormal Man:_ "The study of the criminal can also be
the study of a normal man, for most criminals are so by occasion or
accident, and differ in no essential respect from other men. Most
human beings who are abnormal or defective in any way are much more
like than unlike normal individuals."
How much the subject of criminology has been overdone because of the
morbid popularity of the idea that many persons are, as it were,
forced by their natures into the commission of crime, can best be
appreciated from some recent publications with regard to left-handed
individuals. A number of supposed observers, much more anxious,
evidently, to make out a case for a pet preconceived theory, than to
make observations that would add to the present store of truth, have
rushed into print. As a result, left-handed persons have been said to
be criminals much more commonly than {273} those who habitually use
their right hand, and have also been said to be defective in other
ways. They were spoken of as weaklings, degenerates, and the like.
Statistics even were quoted to show a much larger proportion of
criminals than might be expected, according to the normal percentage,
between right-handed and left-handed people, among those who use their
left hand by preference. As a matter of fact, left-handed people are
far from being the weaklings or degenerates they are thus proclaimed;
but on the contrary are often magnificent athletes and excellent
specimens of normal development. Left-handedness is due to
right-brainedness and this is an accident dependent on a diversion of
blood supply in an increased amount to this side of the brain in early
embryonic life. This question of the criminal and the left-handed
individual and their mutual relations is only a good example, then, of
how far over zealous advocates of a theory have been led astray in
their attempts to bolster it up.
Draehms, whose opinion on the supposed born criminal is worth while
quoting, as it is founded on his personal experiences and observations
while a resident chaplain of the state prison at San Quentin,
California, says:
"Crime is not, as Lombroso and his coadjutors would have us believe,
wholly either a disease or a neurosis in the sense of a direct,
absolute, physiological, pathognomonic entity, though doubtless not
infrequently closely associated with physical, anatomical, and nerve
degeneration, as above conceded. To presuppose absolute and necessary
brain lesion or diseased nerve action, or anomalous, physiognomonical,
or anatomical diathesis, as the inevitable precursor of any form of
mental and moral deflection, is an assumption wholly unwarranted and
is nowhere substantiated by facts, though its advocates have sought to
lay their foundations deep and wide in the materialistic hypothesis.
Most criminals present unusually sound physiological conditions, and
there is among them no unusual death rate, considering their habits
and mode of life, as we shall hereafter see. Hence their moral
instability can not be associated with physiological instability in
the absolute sense. The physical defect must be either reversionary or
incidental, rather than absolute."
{274}
The impetus in the study of criminals, which came as a result of the
revolutionary teaching of the Italian school, has not been without a
good effect. Criminals all over the world have been studied more
closely and more sympathetically, in order to test the new ideas,
until now it is possible to draw definite conclusions with regard to
certain features of the problem. After a time, Lombroso came to admit
that the so-called criminal type occurred in somewhat less than half
the criminal cases. Criminal anthropologists, however, have shown that
the physical conformation called by the name criminal, is really only
the result of a defective or degenerative physical constitution. It is
easy to understand that persons born with a defective nervous system,
or with serious degenerative lesions in other parts of the body, which
prevent the proper nutrition and functional development of the nervous
system, would perform many more materially criminal acts than the rest
of the population. The idiot and certain forms of the degenerative
insane show this. Any defective development of the nervous system,
moreover, may lead to instability of moral character, because the free
action of the soul may be hampered by the physical environment with
which it is associated.
Certain of the physical peculiarities most frequently seen in
criminals have an influence of this kind and merit discussion. A
knowledge of them will furnish clergymen with reasons for a larger
charity to those unfortunates, and a greater tolerance for their
relapses, without allowing sentiment to play too important a role in
dealing with them. There are all grades of defective human beings,
from the idiot up to those little less than normal. Anatomical
peculiarities prevent the proper functions of the nervous system, as
it is not hard to understand. The will is hampered in its action by
the defect of the instrument through which it must work.