Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/214

crime is in its nature really a mental defect at all—is of course a psychological one. I do not wish to disparage the anthropological investigations of the Italian school as far as they have been made with due severity of method—as some of them have not—but, allowing that much has been done and that much more will be done by the investigation of the physical side, it still remains true that the closer approach to the real criminal must be from the psychological side. Suppose, for example, we should admit the results of Lombroso, Ferri, and the rest, and say that there are certain physical "stigmates," or signs, which are found more often singly or together in law-breakers than in any law-abiding group of people, still two very important questions would have to be asked and answered before we should have the first start toward a real science of the criminal as such. First, What proportion of people who are potential criminals do not become law-breakers?—and, second, What proportion of the law-breakers are not criminals? The first question asks us to decide what type of mind is a potential criminal, or what degree of abnormity, social obliquity, etc., a man must have to be a criminal. This calls for a psychological definition of criminality. The second question takes us in exactly the same direction; for to ask how many law-breakers are not criminals is to admit that there are degrees of abnormal defect which the law takes cognizance of simply because more appropriate agencies do not. There are men and women in the jails who ought to be in reformatories, and others in the reformatories who ought to be in the asylums. This, then, calls upon us for a psychological determination of the lower limit of criminality—the limit below which we are dealing with the insane and the irresponsible—as the former question calls for the upper limit, that which sets bounds to the class of criminals who are never caught by the law at all. Both of these are accordingly psychological questions; and the main value of the results of the so-called criminal anthropology, as so far worked up, is to set these problems clearly in the light, especially the latter one. To establish moral atavism for one class of men, and degeneracy for another class, and criminal heredity in this fashion or that, is to throw these classes out of the really criminal class altogether, as far as any psychological definition which is now in sight would seem to indicate.

 

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It is mentioned as a characteristic of Japanese artists that they will not repeat identical elements. They, in fact, understand the difference between the meanings of the terms "likewise" and "also," and they will have none of the latter. Accordingly, of fifty stencils of theirs recently published in an art work, there is not one which in all respects reproduces another, although there are many which resemble one another.