Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/478

 464 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

special renovating and stimulating treatment in order to bring them up to the standard of regular training.

Viewed en masse, prisoners are characterless, they lack positiveness, are without an inward dominant purpose. They are unduly influenced by instant, trivial circumstances, or by hidden transient impulses. The most dangerous, therefore interesting, sane young prisoner I have ever known, abnormally cunning, well illustrates this ungeared characteristic. He said: "I know, sometimes, I am what you call good and then again bad. In my good moods I am ashamed that I was ever bad ; and equally in the bad mood I am ashamed of ever being good." His alternate self -disapprobation had no content of intellectual stability or moral responsibility. Although he was only eighteen years old, he was by heredity and habit a confirmed and desperate criminal. Fortunately he died while imprisoned.

Morbidity of body, mind, or the moral sense diminishes indi- vidual industrial efficiency and in turn narrows opportunity; leading on to indolence, privations, dissipation, and crimes. The source is held to be in physiological defects; the declaration of Ribot and other eminent psychologists is credited as true that: "The character is but the psychological expression of a certain organized body drawing from it its peculiar coloring, its special tone, its relative permanence." The nature and the habit of living matter must exert so powerful influence upon volition that the conception of the individual will dominating and un- affected by constituents and conditions of the total personality is deemed no longer tenable. On the contrary it is confidently believed that, quite independent of the immediate conscious choice and will of the prisoner, agencies foreign to himself may be made effective to change his character; that the material living substance of being is malleable under the simultaneous reciprocate play of scientifically directed bodily and mental exer- cises ; and that the agencies are irresistible.

The doctrine of the interaction of body and mind is so well established and altogether reasonable that there is no need here to guard against a fancied materialistic tendency. Rather there is occasion to guard against too fanciful idealism. There may