CESARE LOMBROSO
A MODERN MAN OF SCIENCE
BY
HANS KURELLA, M.D.
AUTHOR OF “NATURAL HISTORY OF THE CRIMINAL,” ETC.
TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY
M. EDEN PAUL, M.D.
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
REBMAN COMPANY
1123 BROADWAY
_All rights reserved_
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PREFACE
The subject of this little book is, as its title shows, Cesare Lombroso,
the man and the investigator; it makes no attempt to deal adequately
with Lombroso, the reformer of criminology and criminal sociology. To do
justice to Lombroso’s work in the latter respect would be impossible,
without at the same time writing the history of the Italian school of
“positive criminal jurisprudence” and that of the influence of that
school upon important tendencies of the public life of all the leading
civilized peoples. It would also be impossible without dealing at the
same time with the plan of the new German criminal code. For many
reasons I have refrained from any such attempt; above all, in view of
limits of space. None the less, I have dealt with Lombroso’s activity as
a reformer as far as this was essential in order to do justice to the
personality of the deceased investigator.
Certain brief sections of this book have, with considerable
modifications, been taken over from my earlier publications upon the
development of criminal anthropology. Entirely new, however, is the
attempt here made to demonstrate how high is the position Lombroso may
justly be said to have occupied in a brilliant epoch of positive study
of the world, of mankind, and of society. In order to illustrate the
positive mode of thought, I have in an Appendix, to which I especially
direct the reader’s attention, attempted a tabular statement of the
facts and documents of positivism during the middle decades of the
nineteenth century. The inclusion in this tabular statement of the
principal writings of Herbert Spencer is the result of mature
consideration and of a renewed careful study of his essay entitled
“Reasons for Dissenting from the Philosophy of M. Comte.” Comte’s
philosophy represents merely the reflection of positivism about itself,
and is no more than the introduction to the completer development of
positivism.
HANS KURELLA.
BONN, _Whitsuntide, 1910_.
PREFATORY NOTE BY THE TRANSLATOR
I take this opportunity of expressing my grateful acknowledgments to Mr.
Havelock Ellis, who read my translation in manuscript, and made many
valuable suggestions as to terminology.
M. EDEN PAUL.
MOORCROFT, PARKSTONE, DORSET.
_Christmas, 1910._
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
PREFACE v
I. ANTECEDENTS—LOMBROSO’S PREDECESSORS IN RESEARCH 1
II. CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY 18
III. OPPOSITION TO LOMBROSO’S VIEWS—WOMAN AS CRIMINAL—THE
POLITICAL CRIMINAL—CRIMINAL PSYCHOLOGY 55
IV. GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS REGARDING LOMBROSO’S LIFE-WORK AS A
SOCIAL REFORMER, HIS METHODS, AND HIS PHILOSOPHY 106
V. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CRIMINAL ANTHROPOLOGY 130
VI. CRIMINAL JURISPRUDENCE—PELLAGRA—AGRARIAN REFORM 139
VII. ENVIRONMENT AND THE THEORIES AS TO THE NATURE OF
GENIUS—LOMBROSO’S GENIUS AND PERSONALITY 158
APPENDIX A. LOMBROSO’S SPIRITUALISTIC RESEARCHES 167
APPENDIX B. LIST OF BOOKS CONSULTED 177
APPENDIX C. FACTS AND DOCUMENTS OF POSITIVISM 178
INDEX 182
CESARE LOMBROSO
CHAPTER I
ANTECEDENTS—LOMBROSO’S PREDECESSORS IN RESEARCH
Cesare Lombroso was born in Verona, as an Austrian subject, on November
6, 1835, and was the second child in a family of five. His father Aron
sprang from a Venetian mercantile family, whose origin can be traced
back to a colony of North African Jews, trading with Leghorn, Genoa, and
Venice. Again and again members of the Lombroso family settled in one or
other of these ports. The branch to which he himself belonged had lived
for several centuries in Venice and the Venetian territories on the
mainland, of which from the year 1448 onwards Verona formed a part; they
were patrician merchants, to whom the French occupation, occurring
before Lombroso’s father grew up, had brought full and equal privileges
of citizenship.[1] Several members of this Venetian family were
distinguished by characteristic and vigorous action on behalf of the
cause of enlightenment. In Virginia, North America, in the seventeenth
century, the brother of a direct ancestor of Cesare Lombroso, at a great
risk to himself of being burned alive, protested most energetically
against the belief in witchcraft, and declared that the reputed witches
were “hysterical” merely.
The French emancipation of Upper Italy was followed in 1814 by the
Austrian reaction, but the family suffered at this time from the decline
in economic prosperity (interrupted for a while in 1830, when Venice
became a free port) upon which its own well-being and patrician position
had been dependent.
The formation of the Hapsburg Kingdom of Lombardy and Venice put an end
for the time being to equality of civil rights for the Jews; and Verona
was one of the few towns of the district in which Jewish boys were
allowed to attend the Gymnasium (public school), now removed from the
control of the freethinkers, and handed over to that of the Jesuits.
When Lombroso’s mother, Zefira Levi, married Aron Lombroso in the year
1830, she stipulated that her children must be brought up in a place in
which it would be possible for them to attend the higher schools.
The marriage with Zefira Levi, who belonged to a rich family engaged in
the higher branch of industrial life, did not suffice to prevent the
onset of poverty; and the youth of the five children of the marriage was
passed in narrow circumstances. The mother, richly endowed both in mind
and in character, and deeply concerned regarding the upbringing and
culture of her children, remained her son’s confidant. She nourished in
him the love of freedom and the sense of independence, both of which
were dominant in her parental home at Chieri, one of the centres of
activity of the Carbonari. Chieri, an industrial town of Piedmont, lay
beyond the sphere of influence of Haynau and Radetzky, who, with the aid
of their Croats and Tschechs, encouraged the feudal and clerical
reaction in Venice, Verona, and Milan.
Lombroso’s father was an amateur as regards practical life, a man who
had grown up under the influence of the French spirit and in a perfectly
free social state, a man of great goodness of heart, but as little
fitted to cope with the influences of the economic decay of the Venetian
State as he was with those of the Austrian reign of terror.
During Lombroso’s childhood there occurred a conspiracy on the part of
certain Veronese patriots against the Austrian occupation, which was
suppressed by the wholesale hanging and shooting of the conspirators;
and when he was only thirteen years of age there took place the
temporary freeing of Milan and Venice from the Austrian yoke (1848), an
event in which the young men of Milan, the second largest town of the
old Venetian Republic, played a lively part.
Lombroso’s revolutionary tendencies in the field of science, and his
small respect for what was traditionally established, were doubtless
dependent upon the joint effect of the inherited tendencies and the
youthful impressions I have described. An important additional factor in
his development was his family’s loss of fortune, consequent upon the
political disturbances in Italy, which lasted until the re-establishment
of the Austrian dominion. It was only the courage and capacity of the
mother which saved the children from sinking into the ranks of the
proletariat; but some loss of social position was inevitable, and the
effect of this on Lombroso’s distinctive temperament may be traced in
the fact that he was a rebel from youth onwards, and strongly opposed
the (vitalistic) doctrines professed at the Universities by the sons of
the well-to-do. Thus it was also that he ventured a serious attack upon
the interests of the great landed proprietors of Upper Italy by his
descriptions of agrarian poverty and his bold exposition of the causes
of pellagra.
The influence of the philosopher Vico, whose works were eagerly studied
in secret at the Gymnasium (public school) of Verona, made him
acquainted at an early date with the importance of the principle of
organic development in relation to the structure and life of human
society. Vico was studied _in secret_, because the Gymnasium was under
the control of Jesuits with Austrian sympathies, who deliberately
discouraged all advanced ideas. In 1861 Lombroso wrote in his diary as
follows: “It may be said of my schooldays without exaggeration that I
was thrust back into an environment of persistent medievalism—not the
later sentimental revival of the Middle Ages in romance and drama—but
into the conditions that prevailed prior to 1789, literally restored by
the might of the bayonets of 1814. The memory of this forcible
discipline, which did violence to the inborn logical spirit, and visited
with severe punishment any protests against its methods, is so hateful
to me that even now it visits me in dreams like a nightmare.” At the
time of the introduction of Italian scholastic methods into the lands
under Austrian rule, the well-known utterance of the Kaiser Franz is
said to have originated: “I want, not educated, but obedient subjects.”
While still at school, Lombroso was also introduced to the evolutionary
idea by the writings and the powerful personal influence of the
physician Marzolo, who endeavoured by means of comparative philology to
explain the origin of the earliest religious and legal institutions.
Ceccarel, Marzolo’s biographer, in his first work on this investigator,
published in 1870 (by Priuli of Treviso), writes as follows: “In 1850,
when the first volume of Marzolo’s ‘Monumenti storici rivelati dall’
analisi della parola’ was published, certain periodicals reviewed the
book in the most favourable terms. But the writer himself was
disappointed by their remarks, for he saw that his well-meaning critics
had not really understood his ideas. Then one day he read in a journal
published in Verona an article in which full justice was done to his
book; he desired to make the acquaintance of this critic, whose name was
unknown to him, and whose real understanding of Marzolo’s views had
delighted the latter for the first time in several years, and had at
length rewarded him for his long and arduous labours. He imagined that
the writer of the notice must be an advanced but lonely scientific
thinker, one who owing to his private circumstances or on account of the
disturbed times had hitherto lived in retirement. But when the writer of
the review came to see Marzolo at Treviso, it proved to be a youth only
sixteen years of age—Cesare Lombroso—the first in all Italy to recognize
the genius of Marzolo, bringing the love of a son and the devotion of a
disciple.”
At the outset of Lombroso’s studies he was greatly influenced by reading
Burdach’s “Handbuch der Physiologie,” a work rich in anthropological
ideas. At the University of Pavia, Panizza[2] was the only man who had
much effect in shaping Lombroso’s mental development.
During the decade 1850 to 1860, on the other hand, Lombroso, as a
self-taught man, was simultaneously influenced by three great
contemporary and complementary tendencies—that of French positivism,
that of German materialism, and that of English evolutionism. With the
last-named he became acquainted through French intermediation. He never
had any clinical instruction in psychiatry. He read the works of
Charuigi, Griesinger, and the great psychiatrists of the school of
Esquirol.
Lombroso’s attitude towards German materialism, by which in youth he was
so powerfully influenced, is shown most clearly by two utterances of his
regarding Moleschott. The first of these occurs in the preface to his
Italian edition of Moleschott’s “Kreislauf des Lebens,” a translation
not published till 1869, though written in the early sixties. (In the
year 1854 Moleschott was expelled from Heidelberg on account of the
publication of this work; from 1861 to 1879 he was professor of
physiology in Turin.) The passage runs as follows (II.-III.): “At a late
hour, perhaps, and yet when the time was ripe, and unquestionably with
greater sincerity and fervour than has been the case with the other
Latin peoples, Italy took part in the scientific movement of which this
book formed the starting-point. But just because she was so tardy an
adherent, and in the endeavour, as it were, to make up for lost time,
some persons in this country are apt to go too far; not only do they
contest the old prejudices and the false authorities, but they also deny
or misunderstand facts, simply for the reason that those in the other
camp admit these facts, or because these facts appear to support the old
doctrines. Thus they often follow leaders who are not entirely to be
trusted, such as Büchner, Renan, and Reich; and they mistake
declamations and confused rhapsodies for sound arguments, oppose
fanaticism with fanaticism, and offer to their enemies the tools needed
for the reconstruction of the buildings which have just been razed to
the ground.”
The other passage occurs in his obituary notice on Moleschott, written
in 1893: “The whole course of modern science shows that the impulse it
received from the life-work of Moleschott is destined, not only to
persist, but to make further and more rapid progress. Moreover, the
reputed philanthropists, whose objection was not so much to the truth
itself as to the injurious consequences which they believed would follow
from its publication, must see to-day that certain truths, however
dangerous and alarming they may at first appear, lead ultimately to the
general advantage, and to the advantage even of that morality on which
it was at first supposed they would have a damaging effect. It no longer
distresses us when we see that morality, thanks to social physics and
political economy, must descend from its glittering but fragile
metaphysical altar, in order to find in utility a modest but secure
foundation, from which it becomes possible to render harmless or to
diminish that crime which hitherto has mocked at penal methods.”
In Vienna, in 1856, Lombroso passed the official examination for his
medical degree. Here the influence of Skoda, and Lombroso’s becoming
acquainted with the early works of Virchow, did not tend to induce in
him sentiments of toleration towards the vitalistic doctrines dominant
at the Italian Universities or towards the narrow circle of professors
owing their appointment to Austrian influence and interested in the
maintenance of these doctrines. He never ceased to be affected by this
early opposition to academic tradition and to academic circles; in fact,
it accentuated in him a certain natural tendency to paradoxes and
heresies.
The inclination to exact observation,[3] acquired through his contact
with German science, led him to the study, with record of weights and
measurements, of cretinism in Upper Italy;[4] from this to the
utilization of these methods for the instigation of an anthropometrical
investigation of the population of Upper Italy; and also to the study of
clinical psychiatry, at that time entirely neglected in Italy.[5] The
translation of Moleschott’s epoch-making writings gave a finish to
Lombroso’s conception of the world; he broke loose from the speculative
tendency of the psychiatry of the day, which at that time in Germany
also was assuming the most remarkable forms; he turned with repugnance
from the interminable discussions regarding the freedom of the will, and
began, in the case of the insane, of criminal lunatics, and of
criminals, to study their pathological anatomy (assisted here by Golgi),
their sensory impressions, and their anthropological—and more especially
craniological—peculiarities.
It is a well-known fact that from that day to our own the pathological
anatomy of the psychoses has not furnished much in the way of positive
results, not even to the most accomplished virtuosos of the methods of
staining the fibres of the brain. Lombroso, to whom in Pavia Golgi for a
long time acted as assistant, wisely refused to limit himself to the
study of pathological anatomy, but always investigated side by side with
this the clinical features of the psychoses and neuroses.
From the first he inclined to the view that the exact measurement and
description of skulls and brains would lead to the discovery of definite
distinctions between sane and insane criminals, between lunatics and
epileptics, etc.
Whilst he never ignored clinical observation and the study of the
sensory functions, he gave the first place to weights and measurements:
these were to him the guarantees of an exact method of procedure; and he
was led to borrow the instruments and methods of anthropology on account
of his postulate for an anthropology of lunatics and criminals. In his
interpretation of the facts thus obtained he was guided chiefly by the
sane materialism of Moleschott and by the Darwinian idea of the
variability of races. As a disciple of Vico, he saw nothing absurd in
the view that an apparently purely social phenomenon, such as crime, can
be organically caused.
The chance discovery of theromorphism (the expression is Virchow’s, and
denotes the presence in man of certain bodily peculiarities of one of
the lower animals) in the skulls of certain criminals, in the year 1870,
finally gave rise to the formulation of a uniform hypothesis regarding
the nature of criminality. Before the publication, in 1871, of the
elements of this theory, Lombroso was able to devote a year to the study
of the inmates of a large prison, being at the time Medical
Superintendent of the Provincial Asylum at Pesaro, where there was also
a large penitentiary. During the years 1871 to 1876, when he was once
more lecturer and professor-extraordinary at Pavia[6]—years during which
he published his studies on pellagra, and, in addition, a number of
anthropological and purely psychiatric works—he was also much occupied
with the anatomical post-mortem study of the bodies of criminals. After
1876, when he came to Turin[7] as professor of forensic medicine, being
also physician to the great prison in that town for prisoners awaiting
trial, he was able to examine most minutely, according to his own
methods, two hundred prisoners every year, whilst a much greater number
were subjected at least to ordinary clinical examination. This
inconsiderable and very poorly-paid official position led him, without
abandoning his unwearied researches into pellagra, to devote his chief
attention day by day to the subject of criminal anthropology.
It was in the course of these investigations, and of the controversies
to which the publication of his results gave rise, that he first became
acquainted with the work of his predecessors in the same field. This has
been demonstrated to me by incontrovertible evidence.
As predecessors must be named some of the adherents of Gall’s theories
regarding the skull: the French physiologist and physician, Despine; the
French psychiatrist, Morel; and three English medical men—one, the
psychiatrist and distinguished anthropologist, Prichard, the other two
prison surgeons, Nicolson and Bruce Thomson.
Gall is apt to be judged, very unjustly, only by his errors; for he was,
in truth, the originator of the principle of the localization of the
functions of the brain, and gave the first impulse to the scientific
study of criminals, though he did not himself make any definite
discoveries in this field. His pupil, Lauvergne, prison surgeon at
Toulon during a long period of years, examined thousands of criminals,
and left interesting plaster-casts of skulls; certain types were
admirably described by him. Despine made a thorough study of the
psychology of the criminal, and showed that the principal
characteristics of the habitual criminal are idleness, irresolution, and
lessened sensibility, both mental and physical. Supplementary to
Despine’s investigations was the great work of Lucas upon heredity, in
which he demonstrated the hereditary transmissibility of the disposition
to theft, murder, rape, and arson, and furnished extensive materials
regarding the congenital nature of the tendency to crime.
Morel’s work lacked thorough analysis, and was also destitute of a firm
biological foundation; but it was based upon extensive materials, and
was animated by a certain instinct for what was important. His “Traité
des Dégénérescences” was published in 1859. Thus originated the
catchword “degeneration,” which remains current to-day, without having
even yet acquired any definite signification. Now it is used to denote
the neuropathic constitution; now, again, to denote the hereditary
predisposition to psychoses. According to some this predisposition is
latent, and manifests itself only by physical stigmata of degeneration;
others regard the degenerate as being mentally as well as physically
abnormal, and as suffering, either before the onset of actual insanity
or in the entire absence of the latter from mutability of mood and
temper, obsessive ideas, moral defects, and one-sided intellectual
endowment; yet others use the term “degeneration” to denote a vague
diathesis—a mingling of tendencies to disturbances of metabolism and to
neuropathies.
More recent French investigators distinguish between “higher” and
“lower” degenerates, and include in these categories almost the entire
province of mental disturbances, severe neuroses, and criminality.
German investigators go so far as to explain that most human beings are
degenerates, and Moebius held that the repulsiveness of the majority of
his fellow-creatures spoke in favour of this view.
Morel, through the vagueness of his definition of degeneration
(“déviation maladive du type humain”), was himself partly to blame for
the unsatisfactory development of the whole doctrine. He had correctly
observed that unfavourable conditions of life—for example, the lack of
legislative enactments for the protection of factory workers during the
middle of the last century—transformed the entire outward appearance of
those exposed to such conditions; but he failed to distinguish between
inherited and acquired characteristics, nor did he ask himself if and
how acquired characteristics are inherited; and he omitted to determine
at the outset of his inquiry what were the precise characteristics of
the type, deviations from which he was recording. With the exception of
Lombroso, those who, after Morel, dealt with the problem of degeneration
ignored the fact that these problems transcend the narrow limits of
pathology to trespass on the wider province of biology, and failed to
see that the problems in question are those of human variability, of the
laws of inheritance, and other anthropological questions. Prichard, the
distinguished ethnologist, widely regarded (in company with the English
prison surgeons Thomson and Nicolson) as a predecessor of Lombroso, was
the first to detect what is typical in the outward appearance of old
“gaol-birds,” and to put forward, in explanation of confirmed
criminality, the conception of moral insanity. This moral monstrosity
was to be regarded as correlated with the abnormal physical
characteristics.
Lombroso found it necessary again and again to elaborate the doctrine of
moral insanity; and in the long-continued campaign against the
misunderstandings to which his theory of the _homo delinquens_ was
exposed, that doctrine played a much more important part than Morel’s
theory of degeneration.
It is incorrect to speak of Prichard and Morel as _predecessors_ of
Lombroso, in a sense implying that the latter was influenced by either
of the two former in the inception or development of his teachings. Just
as little is it true of Gall, whose work was justly estimated by
Lombroso as early as the year 1853, as we learn from his brief work on
the correlation between sexual and cerebral development—“Di un fenomeno
fisiologico commune ad alcuni nevrotteri.”[8]