However important the question of heredity may be to lawyers
psychologically, its application to legal needs is impossible. It would
require, on the one hand, the study of all the literature concerning it,
together with the particular teachings of Darwin and his disciples, and
of Lombroso and his. The criminal-psychological study of it has not yet
been established. The unfounded, adventurous, and arbitrary assertions
of the Lombrosists have been contradicted, especially through the
efforts of German investigators. But others, like Debierre in Lille,
Sernoff in Moscow, Taine, Drill, Marchand have also had occasion to
controvert the Italian positivists. At the same time, the problem of
heredity is not dead, and will not die. This is being shown particularly
in the retort of Marchand concerning the examinations he made with M. E.
Koslow, in the asylum for juvenile offenders founded by the St.
Petersburg Anthropological Society. Between Buckle, who absolutely
denies heredity, and the latest of the modern doctrines, there are a
number of intermediate views, one of which may possibly be true. There
is an enormous literature which every criminalist should study.[305]
Nevertheless, this literature can tell us nothing about the legitimacy
of the premise of heredity. Every educated man still believes Darwin’s
doctrines, and the new theories that seek to emancipate themselves from
it do so only by pushing them out of the big front door, and insinuating
them through the little back door. But according to Bois-Reymond
Darwinism is only the principle of the hereditary maintenance of the
child’s variation from its parents. Everybody knows of real inherited
characters, and many examples of it are cited. According to Ribot,
suicide is hereditary; according to Despine, kleptomania; according to
Lucas, vigorous sexuality; according to Darwin, hand-writing, etc. Our
personal acquaintances show the inheritance of features, figure, habits,
intellectual properties, particularly cleverness, such as, sense of
space and time, capacity for orientation, interests, diseases, etc. Even
ideas have their ancestors like men, and we learn from the study of
animals how instincts, capacities, even acquired ones, are progressively
inherited. And yet we refuse to believe in the congenital criminal! But
the contradiction is only apparent.
A study of the works of Darwin, Weismann, DeVries, etc., shows us
indubitably that no authority asserts the inheritance of great
alterations appearing for the first time in an individual. And as to the
inheritance of acquired characteristics, some authorities assert this to
be impossible.
Until Darwin the old law of species demanded that definite traits of a
species should not change through however long a period. The Darwinian
principle indicates the inheritance of minute variations, intensified by
sexual selection, and, in the course of time, developed into great
variations. Now nobody will deny that the real criminal is different
from the majority of other people. That this difference is great and
essential, is inferred from the circumstance that a habit, a single
characteristic, an unhappy inclination, etc., does not constitute a
criminal. If a man is a thief it will not be asserted that he is
otherwise like decent people, varying only in the accidental inclination
to theft. We know that, besides the inclination to theft, we may assign
him a dislike for honest work, lack of moral power, indifference to the
laws of honor when caught, the lack of real religion,--in short, the
inclination to theft must be combined with a large number of very
characteristic qualities in order to make a thief of a man. There must,
in a word, be a complete and profound change in his whole nature. Such
great changes in the individual are never directly inherited; only
particular properties can be inherited, but these do not constitute a
criminal. Hence, the son of a criminal need not in his turn be a
criminal.
This does not imply that in the course of generations characters might
not compound themselves until a criminal type is developed, but this is
as rare as the development of new species among the animals. Races are
frequently selected; species develop rarely.