Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/79

Rh removes moral responsibility, and which substitutes the anthropologist and the physician for the judge and jury, cannot be carried out, even by its fervent apostle, without some want of severe logic. Thus we find Lombroso frequently drawing distinctions between "habitual" or "born" criminals and what he calls "occasional" criminals, without explaining the phenomenon of "occasional crime," and saying how he thinks this ought to be regarded by society. Moreover, he almost wholly ignores the possibility of correcting criminal tendencies by appeal to reason, by establishing habits of self-restraint, and by the employment of such means as hypnotic suggestion. Yet experience and the common practice of the world prove that these remedies are not wholly inefficacious; and indeed the passage from childish savagery to moralised manhood, on which he lays so great a stress, is daily effected by the employment of such measures in combination with the fear of punishment and the desire to win esteem.

The final word upon Lombroso's book is this: Having started with the natural history of crime, as a prime constituent in nature and humanity, which only becomes crime through the development of social morality, and which survives atavistically in persons ill adapted to their civilised environment, he suddenly turns round and identifies the crime thus analysed with morbid nerve-conditions, malformations and moral insanity. Logically, it is impossible to effect this coalition of two radically different conceptions. If