Criminal Psychology, Hans Gross [motivational books for students .txt] 📗

cannot easily have criminal significance, but which tend to make that significance clearer. One is the circumstance that there are reflexes which work while you sleep. That we do not excrete during sleep depends on the fact that the faeces pressing in the large intestine generates a reflexive action of the constrictors of the rectum. They can be brought to relax only through especially powerful pressure or through the voluntary relaxation of one’s own constrictors.

The second suggestive circumstance is the fact that even habitual reflexes may under certain conditions, especially when a particularly weighty different impression comes at the same time, not take place. It is a reflex, for example, to withdraw the hand when it feels pain, in spite of the fact that one is so absorbed with another matter as to be unaware of the whole process; but if interest in this other matter is so sufficiently fixed as to make one forget, as the saying goes, the whole outer world, the outer impression of pain must have been very intense in order to awaken its proper reflex. The attention may, however, not be disturbed at all and yet the reflex may fail. If we suppose that a reflex action is one brought about through the excitement of an afferent sensory nerve which receives the stimulation and brings it to the center from which the excitement is transferred to the motor series (Landois[106]), we exclude the activity of the brain. But this exclusion deals only with conscious activity and the direct transition through the reflex center can happen successfully only because the brain has been consciously at work innumerable times, so that it is coöperating in the later cases also without our knowing it. When, however, the brain is brought into play through some other particularly intense stimuli, it is unable to contribute that unconscious cöoperation and hence the reflex action is not performed. On this point I have, I believe, an instructive and evidential example. One of my maids opened a match-box pasted with paper at the corner by tearing the paper along the length of the box with her thumb-nail. Apparently the box was over-filled or the action was too rapidly made, for the matches flamed up explosively and the whole box was set on fire. What was notable was the fact that the girl threw the box away neither consciously nor instinctively; she shrieked with fright and kept the box in her hand. At her cry my son rushed in from another room, and only after he had shouted as loudly as possible, “Throw it away, drop it,” did she do so. She had kept the burning thing in her hand long enough to permit my son to pass from one room into another, and her wound was so serious that it needed medical treatment for weeks. When asked why she kept the burning box in her hand in spite of really very terrible pain she simply declared that “she didn’t think of it,” though she added that when she was told to throw the thing away it just occurred to her that that would be the wisest of all things to do. What happened then was obviously this: fear and pain so completely absorbed the activity of the brain that it was not only impossible for it consciously to do the right thing, it was even unable to assist in the unconscious execution of the reflex.

This fact suggests that the sole activity of the spinal cord does not suffice for reflexes, since if it did, those would occur even when the brain is otherwise profoundly engaged. As they do not so occur the brain also must be in play. Now this distinction is not indifferent for us; for if we hold that the brain acts during reflexes we have to grant the possibility of degrees in its action. Thus where brain activity is in question, the problem of responsibility also arises, and we must hold that wherever a reflex may be accepted as the cause of a crime the subject of the degree of punishment must be taken exceptionally into account. It is further to be noted that as a matter of official consideration the problem of the presence of reflexes ought to be studied, since it rarely occurs that a man says, “It was purely a reflex action.” He says, perhaps, “I don’t know how it happened,” or, “I couldn’t do otherwise,” or he denies the whole event because he really was not aware how it happened. That the questions are here difficult, both with regard to the taking of evidence, and with regard to the judgment of guilt, is obvious,—and it is therefore indifferent whether we speak of deficiency in inhibition-centers or of ill-will[107] and malice.

Section 19. (6) Dress.

It is easy to write a book on the significance of a man’s clothes as the expression of his inner state. It is said that the character of a woman is to be known from her shoe, but actually the matter reaches far beyond the shoe, to every bit of clothing, whether of one sex or the other. The penologist has more opportunity than any one else to observe how people dress, to take notes concerning the wearer, and finally to correct his impressions by means of the examination. In this matter one may lay down certain axioms. If we see a man whose coat is so patched that the original material is no longer visible but the coat nowhere shows a hole; if his shirt is made of the very coarsest and equally patched material but is clean; and if his shoes are very bad but are whole and well polished, we should consider him and his wife as honest people, without ever making an error. We certainly see very little wisdom in our modern painfully attired “sports,” we suspect the suggestively dressed woman of some little disloyalty to her husband, and we certainly expect no low inclinations from the lady dressed with intelligent, simple respectability. If a man’s general appearance is correct it indicates refinement and attention to particular things. Anybody who considers this question finds daily new information and new and reliable inferences. Anyway, everybody has a different viewpoint in this matter, a single specific detail being convincing to one, to another only when taken in connection with something else, and to a third when connected with still a third phenomenon. It may be objected that at least detailed and prolonged observations are necessary before inferences should be drawn from the way of dressing, inasmuch as a passing inclination, economic conditions, etc., may exert no little influence by compelling an individual to a specific choice in dress. Such influence is not particularly deep. A person subject to a particular inclination may be sufficiently self-exhibiting under given circumstances, and that he was compelled by his situation to dress in one way rather than another is equally self-evident. Has anybody seen an honest farm hand wearing a worn-out evening coat? He may wear a most threadbare, out-worn sheep-skin, but a dress-coat he certainly would not buy, even if he could get it cheap, nor would he take it as a gift. He leaves such clothes to others whose shabby elegance shows at a glance what they are. Consider how characteristic are the clothes of discharged soldiers, of hunters, of officials, etc. Who fails to recognize the dress of a real clerical, of democrats, of conservative-aristocrats? Their dress is everywhere as well defined as the clothing of Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Americans, formed not by climatic conditions but by national character in a specific and quite unalterable way. Conceit, carelessness, cleanliness, greasiness, anxiety, indifference, respectability, the desire to attract attention and to be original, all these and innumerable similar and related qualities express themselves nowhere so powerfully and indubitably as in the way people wear their clothes. And not all the clothes together; many a time a single item of dress betrays a character.

Section 20. (7) Physiognomy and Related Subjects.

The science of physiognomy belongs to those disciplines which show a decided variability in their value. In classical times it was set much store by, and Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras were keenly interested in its doctrines. Later on it was forgotten, was studied in passing when Baptista Porta wrote a book about human physiognomy, and finally, when the works of Lavater and the closely related ones of Gall appeared, the science came for a short time into the foreground. Lavater’s well known monograph[108] excited great attention in his day and brought its author enthusiastic admiration. How much Goethe was interested in it is indicated in the popular book by Von der Hellen and the exchange of letters between Goethe and Lavater. If Lavater had not brought the matter into relation with his mystical and apodictic manner, if he had made more observations and fewer assertions, his fame would have endured longer and he would have been of some use to the science; as it was it soon slipped from people’s minds and they turned to the notorious phrenology of Gall. Gall, who to some degree had worked with his friend Spurzheim, committed the same error in his works[109] as Lavater, inasmuch as he lost himself in theories without scientific basis, so that much that was indubitably correct and indicative in his teaching was simply overlooked. His meaning was twice validated, once when B. v. Cotta[110] and R. R. Noel[111] studied it intensively and justly assigned him a considerable worth; the second tune when Lombroso and his school invented the doctrine of criminal stigmata, the best of which rests on the postulates of the much-scorned and only now studied Dr. Gall. The great physiologist J. Müller declared: “Concerning the general possibility of the principles of Gall’s system no a priori objections can be made.” Only recently were the important problems of physiognomy, if we except the remarkable work by Schack,[112] scientifically dealt with. The most important and significant book is Darwin’s,[113] then the system of Piderit[114] and Carus’s “Symbolik,”[115] all of them being based upon the earlier fundamental work of the excellent English anatomist and surgeon, Bell.[116] Other works of importance are those of LeBrun, Reich, Mantegazza, Dr. Duchenne, Skraup, Magnus, Gessmann, Schebest, Engel, Schneider, K. Michel, Wundt, C. Lange, Giraudet, A. Mosso, A. Baer, Wiener, Lotze, Waitz, Lelut, Monro, Heusinger, Herbart, Comte, Meynert, Goltz, Hughes, Borée,[117] etc. The present status of physiognomics is, we must say, a very subordinate one. Phrenology is related to physiognomics as the bony support of the skull to its softer ones, and as a man’s physiognomy depends especially upon the conformation of his skull, so physiognomics must deal with the forms of the skull. The doctrine of the movement of physiognomy is mimicry. But physiognomics concerns itself with the features of the face taken in themselves and with the changes which accompany the alterations of consciousness, whereas mimicry deals with the voluntary alterations of expression and gesture which are supposed to externalize internal conditions. Hence, mimicry interests primarily actors, orators, and the ordinary comedians of life. Phrenology remains the research of physicians, anthropologists and psychologists, so that the science of physiognomy as important in itself is left to us lawyers. Its value as a discipline is variously set. Generally it is asserted that much, indeed, fails to be expressed by the face; that what does show, shows according to no fixed rules; that hence, whatever may be read in a face is derivable either instinctively by oneself or not at all. Or, it may