Professor Lombroso is unremitting in bringing up new facts in support
of his doctrines. His _Nouvelles Recherches de Psychiatrie et
d’Anthropologie criminelle_ (New Researches in Psychiatry and Criminal
Anthropology) comprise a good many, gathered from the latest works
relating to criminality. In adding psychiatry to anthropology in the
title to this volume, writes the learned author, “I return to my
starting point and to the true source of these studies, which is only
a clinical demonstration, but a more perfect one, of what is called in
old psychiatry, moral insanity and masked epilepsy.” Lombroso may be
reproached with a certain exaggeration, a certain haste, in his views
respecting criminal man: yet can we conceive of an opinionated inquirer
who would not have faith in his work, and who could resist the desire
to generalise from the facts already obtained? But I have little doubt
that the works of his school will end in producing a precise conception,
which will force itself on the attention of legislators and jurists. I
say _precise_, because one has a glimpse of the truth in criticising
the evidence offered to us in such variety, though what one perceives
sometimes vanishes.
How can we conceive of the criminal type? This is a prime question on
which it is not useless to insist. Crime, as M. Tarde tells us, has
become a real profession in our modern societies. Although there is some
truth in it, we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the subtle
form of this paradox. There is no want of delinquents carrying on a
business; the army of crime recruits itself from all classes, it includes
peasants and workmen, chemists and physicians, lawyers and merchants,
soldiers and poets, that is to say, subjects possessing some one at least
of the aptitudes which form a calling. We have here, then, on the one
side, wretches destitute of all aptitude for a trade, and on the other
men who do not adhere to the exercise of their profession, although
capable of making use of it. The delinquent appears to us, in short,
as stricken with some degree of professional incapacity, and if crime
has become a profession in some sort, the criminals of every category
first represent, if I may thus say, a professional or social waste. The
study of the causes and the signs of this waste is just what has been
undertaken.
The social causes of crime have often been put in prominence. They are
numerous, and persons unacquainted with these questions are inclined to
attribute the largest proportion of crimes and offences to distress and
misery. But, according to the inquiries of Morrison, for example—and by
the confession also of M. Troal, of whom I shall speak immediately—misery
rarely produces crime, and if we examine carefully, one after the other,
the social causes of crime, we shall soon be convinced that poverty,
drunkenness, etc., feed criminality by producing degeneracy of the race,
rather than that they directly arouse the criminal.[79] We are compelled
then to seek the immediate reason for a crime in the criminal himself,
and to learn to distinguish the delinquent by means of the methods fixed
upon by anthropologists and physicians.
At first, as we know, Lombroso recognised only one criminal type. He has
since found that there are many. The distinction between the thief and
the murderer is classical. Benedikt has described the born vagabond;
Brouardel, the feminine type. It is always necessary in describing a
type to resort to the methods of natural history, to pass in review the
emotional and intellectual characters, the physiological or functional
characters, the anatomical or morphological characters, and endeavor
to seize certain constant correlations between the signs one has been
successful in observing. The delinquent may be described as abnormal
from the emotional standpoint, and as deficient or perverted from the
intellectual point of view. We could then begin by describing exactly
certain intellectual and emotional types, and it is no exaggeration
to say that experienced magistrates in their way have done so, those
even who, with M. Proal, we shall see to be the most hostile to
anthropological theories. But they are reluctant to admit any relations
between the moral agent and physical nature, whereas the new school, on
the contrary, makes every effort to discover and determine them.
How far is it successful? That is the question.
If we take the ensemble of the emotional and intellectual characters, we
shall affirm with Professor Pelman (whose opinion Mr. Christian Ufer has
made known in _The Monist_) that the portrait of the imbecile traced by
Sollier corresponds strongly to that of the born criminal of Lombroso.
We shall aver also that this portrait does not answer equally well for
all kinds of delinquents, and that we pass gradually from the malignant
imbecile to the average or mediocre man. The same observation applies
when we study the physiognomical characters of which the little book of
Lombroso furnishes a great variety. We shall have evidently to consider,
with respect to physiognomical characters and physical marks, a strong
type (certainly inborn), a weak type, and, I would add, an _acquired_
type.
If we take functional anomalies—those of touch, sight, etc.—we shall be
struck with their number as well as with their importance, and, I may say
in passing, the alienist physicians who continue to be the adversaries
of Lombroso discover every day fresh examples of them, which could
give to the conception of the type, the reality they still deny it to
possess. The latest discovery, and certainly one of the most striking,
is that which Ottolenghi has just made, in the clinic of Lombroso
himself, respecting the visual field of epileptics and of the morally
insane. According to the researches of Ottolenghi, the visual field will
be remarkably limited, both with epileptics not in paroxysms, and with
born delinquents, but more often with the latter. They present a partial
hemiopia, vertical and heteronymous; the periphery of the field is
sinuous and irregular. This discovery tends, then, to confirm the analogy
of epilepsy with criminal tendencies; it will furnish a sign of the first
order for a well marked category of delinquents.
Let us pass on to morphological characters. The abundance of evidence
is truly extraordinary, and one cannot abstain from remarking, in this
relation, that a certain number of the anomalies designated ought to
be found, and indeed are found, in morally healthy subjects, and that
therefore they do not alone suffice to furnish a ground of distinction
from the medium normal type. As certain functional anomalies are not
wanting either in many subjects whose morality remains perfect, it would
be necessary to aim, it seems to me, at establishing an approximate
_quantum_ for the criminal type, or rather for the _kinds_ which ought to
lead, by sensible gradations, from the most pronounced type to that which
is the least so. Some scattered elements of this work will be found in
the book of Lombroso; the studies of Clouston on the palate (deformation
of the palate existed in 19 per cent. of the general population, 61
per cent. of imbeciles, 35 per cent. of criminals, and 33 per cent. of
madmen); the monographs of Ottolenghi and Roncoroni on the pathological
anomalies of 100 criminals, with an indication of the number and the
nature of the anomalies, etc.
In short, it cannot be questioned that the new school holds its ground
well, since it circumscribes and makes more and more precise the object
of its researches. In my humble opinion, it is of importance for it to
get rid of hazardous or useless explanations, for it to tell us as little
as possible of remote atavism—for if heredity is constant, it is not
possible to trace it link by link as far as the deluge!—and finally for
pure anthropologists and psychiatrists to beware of themselves drawing
practical conclusions from their doctrines. The applications concern
jurists, and constitute a question of another kind, into which other
considerations also enter.
* * * * *
In the juridical domain, a French magistrate, M. LOUIS PROAL, has
just published a considerable work, _Le Crime et la Peine_ (Crime and
Punishment) which is truly the performance of an adversary, but not of
such an adversary as M. Tarde. M. Proal is an irreconcilable, and all
his dialectic—charged a little too much with citations of which many are
useless or prove nothing—turns on the absolute affirmation of free-will.
He flatters himself to have demonstrated freedom, in which he is wrong.
It is a matter of faith, as criticists have very well perceived. Human
science can know only determinism; it proves only what it finds.[80]
M. Proal claims then to found on free-will the two principles of the
moral responsibility of the delinquent, and the moral character of
punishment, in opposition to the purely social point of view in which
the new criminalists place themselves. The physical anomaly of the
criminal seems to him a chimera, and he goes so far as to deny, or falls
little short of it, the relations of frenzied impulsion with degeneracy.
Willingly, perhaps, he would accept as truly mad and irresponsible only
the insane, those who are shut up forever in the asylums!
Certainly, M. Proal possesses the experience of the magistrate, he
has erudition and triumphs easily, in details, by the defects and
deficiencies of the doctrine he combats. His objections, nevertheless, do
not touch the general conception which connects crime, in a great number
of cases, with the disorders of the living machine. He is not willing
for the criminal to differ from the honest man otherwise than by his
inclinations and will, as though will and inclinations had no dependence
on the state of our organs, and as though heredity entered for nothing
into the “personal factor” of character! He is not averse to saying that
moral and physical decadence is always the effect of criminality, as
though it was never its cause! He allows with that attenuations of moral
responsibility, resulting from physiological and physical influences, as
though a weakened responsibility was a true moral responsibility in the
sense he understands, and as though the judge had the means of deciding
at what moment morbid evolution involves irresponsibility!
These absolute principles once established, he defines an offense “the
violation of a social duty,” and he grants that the judge “ought to take
account of the importance of the social evil resulting from the crime.”
It is sufficient for him that the _intention_ and the _responsibility_
is appreciated, in order to attach the penalty to morality. In default
of which, writes he, there would be no more justice. It is a noble
solicitude, that of wishing to justify punishment in the eyes of the
guilty person himself, and to inflict it on him as an expiation of the
evil he has committed. But here an error is fallen into, which is, in
my opinion, to suppose that the law punishes “morally.” The law has
not the power to inflict moral chastisement. It strikes the delinquent
materially, in his goods, in his person; the rest depends not on the
judge who applies the law, but on the judge who is in ourselves,
the avenger more or less severe according to the complex incidences
of education and heredity. Moral chastisement can exist only in the
conscience of the delinquent, and, if this conscience is wanting, or
nearly so, all the affirmations of the judge cannot cause the punishment
to have the quality of moral expiation for the guilty. The criminal will
submit to it through force, and the magistrate will apply it by necessity.
Such is, I think, the true situation. The new school of criminology
will introduce reforms in the practice of the tribunals and in the
administration of the penal laws; it will not change justice and could
not compromise morality. And now pardon me for adding to these some
further remarks, in connection with the books of which I have still to
speak.
* * * * *
The interests and the passions of men, habits too long acquired to alter,
can be considered as the immediate and constant motives of societies,
the _vis à tergo_ of their evolution. Political theories work on a
pre-existing social matter, and more or less in the direction of the
tendencies which have produced the state of things that they aspire to
reform or overturn. In a general manner, they possess then neither the
power necessary to create, attributed to them by utopists, nor the power
to destroy, which makes them appear so formidable to conservatives.
Without denying all efficiency to the intellectual ideal, it is
permissible to say that its action has a bearing purely conditional,
and that the revolutions of growth of social organisms never absolutely
depend on the theorist who establishes its diagnosis, and endeavors to
regulate its march. We behold, in a word, history making itself, rather
than that we make it ourselves and according to our inclination. It is
hardly possible for us to foresee the remote effects of our inventions,
of our discoveries. In sociology as well as in physics, man remains the
servant and the interpreter of nature.
There is in this, if I am not deceived, a reason for reassuring ourselves
concerning certain alarming predictions as to the future of our
civilisation. In his book _La Civilisation et la Croyance_ (Civilisation
and Belief), the second edition of which has just appeared, M. CHARLES
SECRÉTAN estimates that our societies will sink down, at least that they
will neither return to a purified Christianity—a Christianity that has
never yet been practised—nor restore the great principles of the free
soul and of God. M. Secrétan is a brilliant writer and has a noble heart,
and his book contains at least one truth of the first order, always good
to repeat, which is that nothing durable is founded on hatred. He dare
not flatter himself, however, that his warnings will be listened to, his
lessons observed. Perhaps he exaggerates the real dangers which menace
us, because he enlarges, unknown to himself, the rôle of philosophic
doctrines, and attributes to the mind a kind of discretionary power over
the sentiments and the interests of mankind.
Here we have the intellectualist mistake. It appears chiefly in the
revolutionist propaganda which agitates our Europe, and of which M.
J. BOURDEAU makes known the ideas and the progress, in a clear and
interesting manner, in his work _Le Socialisme allemand et le Nihilisme
russe_ (German Socialism and Russian Nihilism). It is a fact well worthy
of remark, that the genial promoter of the theories of Fourier, St.
Simon, and others—I refer to J. J. Rousseau—had had the conjecture of a
social physiology: fragments of his that have been published show well
that he did not regard the age of gold as one of savagery, and that
he foresaw the part that human nature had to do in our calculations
of government. What is found just in his writings could even well be
intimately connected with this naturalist point of view. But he lived
in the century _par excellence_ of rationalism, where such ideas could
be neither developed nor understood; he constructed the political world
according to reasoning, and I shall not be far wrong in thinking that
socialism represents in its turn, definitively, at least in its essential
features, a last offshoot from this rational school which has already, a
hundred years ago, made us the villainous present of Jacobinism.
Absolute communism has no chance of ever realising itself. Neither Karl
Marx, nor Engels, has ventured even to indicate the possible form of
the society of which they dream. The action of the socialists, in turn,
could have as its result the substitution for our régime of excessive
individualism and of disordered democracy, a régime of corporations and
of more regular co-operation, by one of those reversions to institutions
anciently delineated that history presents to us, and which respond to a
sort of “law of oscillation” of social phenomena. There is no occasion,
however, to give it long consideration to establish that these returns
do not exclude novelty, for the apparent form of social arrangements is
of less moment than the nature of the ideas and of the relations which
sustain them, and here is what I would readily call a “law of progressive
repetition.” As to the exact sense of the evolution which there manifests
itself, the great task of disengaging it falls to the sociologists. But
the school of Marx has wished to see things only from one side, and his
theory, which is too simple, does not embrace the complexity of the
phenomena.[81]
Without any pretension to renew the face of the world and to interpret
economic phenomena in favor of an arbitrary thesis, M. AD. COSTA, in his
opuscule _Alcoholisme ou Épargne_ (Alcoholism or Thrift) places before
us the truly immediate question of socialism, in the presence of this
“social dilemma” which reformers willingly mask in their discourses:
on one side, alcoholism, life from day to day, the unreasonable and
momentary illusion that one imbibes with stimulants, the wasting of daily
resources, finally the pauperism which leads to social servitude; on the
other side, thrift under all its forms, a provident life ordered with
intelligence, abstention from dangerous stimulants, progressive comfort
and increasing happiness, more and more freedom. Yes, here are the two
issues between which the workers have to choose. Those who read this
little book can learn there, both what milliards of salaries alcohol has
devoured, and what misery both physical and moral it engenders, and the
degradation that it brings to those who give themselves up to it. To
many this may be only the small side of a great problem. Without thrift
and the qualities which render it possible, there is neither family nor
morality. How can a man pretend to possess instruments of labor when he
deteriorates the chief of all, his own living machine? How can a social
class have the illusion to believe that a revolution ever profits him who
is neither able nor capable of preparing and conducting it?
* * * * *
The last work of M. E. DE LAVELEYE, _Le Gouvernement dans la Démocratie_
(Democratic Government),[82] published a few months before his death,
treats chiefly of the organisation of public powers. This question has
importance to-day, writes the learned author, only in relation to the
great questions which will agitate the world of to-morrow, the social
question and the religious question. Conservatives make use of government
as a brake; revolutionists seek to seize hold of it as a lever. The fact
is that our Europe marches towards democracy. But will democracy give
us freedom? On what conditions can it form an acceptable régime and one
compatible with high culture?
It is not necessary for me to explain here the reasonings and conclusions
of M. de Laveleye. His book, to speak the truth, is less a book than a
collection of Review articles and historical sketches. The politics of
action will find in it too much theory, and philosophers will regret the
absence of master-ideas. It is well to read this work for its practical
advice and the rich details that it contains; we must not look there for
a real historical or social conception.
The sentiment which is dominant, finally, in all the writings of which
I have just spoken is inquietude, and unfortunately it is only too well
justified. We see, in our Occident, alcoholism increasing with salaries,
the hatred of classes with wealth, immorality with enfranchisement,
public burdens with political progress, the aggregation of individuals
with great industry, criminality even with education. The wealth acquired
is compensated for by new evils; it seems that all our conquests have the
result of putting social order in peril, and that the civilisation of
which we are so proud is bound, in a short time, to become bankrupt.
We have, nevertheless, a weighty capital with which to restore ourselves,
and it is only right to say that it is beginning to be applied. But we
must give up some errors as to which it is good time to open one’s eyes.
One of the gravest, certainly, is always to place instruction before
education, and the mind before the heart. We have allowed to drop, at
the same time with religion, the difficult task of forming moral habits.
Let us understand in a word that, in a society, the most valuable thing
is neither the steam engine, nor the bank note, but the man himself,
and that in the man even it is not ability or special knowledge but
_character_.