Pedagogical Anthropology, Maria Montessori [online e book reader TXT] 📗

and that such stigmata were often accompanied by a predisposition to maladies tending to shorten life. Side by side with his somatic chart, Lombroso painstakingly prepared a physio-pathological chart of criminal subjects, based upon a study of their sensibility, their grasp of ideas, their social and ethical standards, their thieves' jargon and tattoo-marks, their handwriting and literary productions.

And, by deducing certain common characteristics from these complex charts, he distinguished, in his classic work, Delinquent Man, a variety of types, such as the morally insane, the epileptic delinquent, the delinquent from impulse or passion (irresistible impulsion), the insane delinquent, and the occasional delinquent.

In this way, he succeeded in classifying a series of types—what we might call sub-species—diverging from the somatic and psycho-moral charts of normal men. But the common biopathological foundation of such types (with the exception of the last) was degeneration. We may well agree with Morselli that, in many parts of his treatise, Lombroso completed and amplified Morel, whose classic work, A Study of the Degeneration of the Human Species, was published in France at a time when Lombroso had hardly started upon his anthropological researches.

Both of these great teachers based their doctrine upon a naturalistic concept of man, and then proceeded to consider him, through all his anomalies and perversions, in relation to that extraneous factor, his environment. Morel, indeed, considers the social causes of degeneration, that is to say, of progressive organic impoverishment, as more important than the individual phenomena; they act upon posterity and tend to create a human variety deviating from the normal type. Such causes may be summed up as including whatever tends to the organic detriment of civilised man: such (in the first rank) as alcoholism, poisoning associated with professional industries (metallic poisons), or with lack of nutriment (pellagra), conditions endemic in certain localities (goitre), infective maladies (malaria, tuberculosis), denutrition (surménage). It may be said that whatever produces prolonged suffering, or whatever we class under the term vices, or even the neglect of our duties, chief among which is that of working (parasitism of the rich), or any of the causes which exhaust, or paralyse, or perturb our normal functions, are causes of degeneration, of impoverishment of the species.

Such is the doctrine which underlies the etiological concept of abnormal personality in psychiatry as well as in criminology, or points the way to its bio-social sources.

Accordingly, just as general Anthropology sought to investigate the origins of races or that of the human species in the very roots of life, so criminal Anthropology searches the origins of defective personality in its social surroundings.

The ethical problems which are raised by such a doctrine cannot fail to be of interest to us. The Lombrosian theories, by raising these problems, have not only shaken the foundations of penal law, but have even brought about a moral renovation of conscience. We will leave to the jurists the great civic labor resulting from having brought the individual as well as the crime under consideration, in relation to the social phenomenon of delinquency—in other words, of having substituted an anthropological for a speculative attitude. Whether the delinquent should be cured, or simply isolated, or even subjected to punishment; whether the prison should be transformed into an asylum for the criminal insane; whether the penal laws should be reformed on principles of a higher order of civil morality: these are problems which interest us only secondarily.

What does interest us directly as educators is the necessity of laying our course in accordance with the standard of social morality which such a doctrine reveals and imposes upon us: since it is our duty to prepare the conscience of the rising generation. And, furthermore, to consider whether the organisation of our schools and of their methods is in conformity with such social progress.

If we cast a general glance at social ethics, from the primitive beginnings of human intercourse, we witness the evolution of the vendetta. There was, first, the individual vendetta. It was a form of primordial justice, with which were associated the sentiments of dignity, honour and solidarity; the injured party avenged himself by slaying; and the family of the slain retaliated by a new vendetta against the family of the slayer; and thus from generation to generation the tragic heritage continued to be handed down. Even now, in certain districts of civilised countries there exist survivals of these primitive forms of justice. In such cases, the slayer is held to be, not only honourable but virtuous. Analogously, in course of time, the individual vendetta, regulated by special formalities, developed into the duel for a point of honour.

At a more advanced period, in the course of the organisation of society, the task of vengeance was taken away from the individual, and the social administration of justice was established. Thereafter, the act of an offender was punished by the people collectively, and the victims of the act had no other recompense from society than that of a sense of satisfied hatred.

But throughout all civil progress, from the most primitive forms of society down to our own times, there persisted, as a fundamental principle, the concept of vengeance, coupled with the two great moral principles, individually and collectively, of human society: honour and justice. The naturalistic concept introduced by the Lombrosian doctrine, namely, living man entering as a concrete reality into the midst of abstract moral principles, shatters this association of ideas, and by so doing prepares the way for a new order of things—which is not a process of evolution, but the beginning of an epoch. Vengeance disappears in the new conception of the defense of society and of an active campaign for the progress of humanity; and it ushers in an epoch of redemption and of solidarity, in which all limitations of human brotherhood are swept away.

The theories of Morel and Lombroso have resulted in calling the attention of civilised man to all the types of the physiologically inferior; the mentally deficient, epileptics, delinquents; shedding light upon their pathological personality, and transforming into interest and pity the contempt and neglect that were formerly the portion of such creatures. In this way science has accomplished in their behalf a work analogous to that of certain saints on behalf of lepers and sufferers from cancer in the middle ages. At that epoch, and even down to the beginning of modern times, the sick were abandoned to themselves and languished, covered with sores, in the midst of the horrors of infection; lepers were universally shunned, and their bodies decomposed without succor. It was only when these miserable beings began to awaken pity, in the place of loathing and repulsion, and to attract the charity of saints, instead of spreading panic among egoists and cowards, that the care of the sick began upon a vast scale, with the foundation of hospitals, the progress of medicine, and later of hygiene.

To-day those purulent plague-spots of the middle ages no longer exist; and infection is being combated with progressive success, in the triumph of physical health.

Yet, we are standing to-day on the selfsame level as the middle ages, in respect to moral plague-spots and infections; the phenomenon of criminality spreads without check or succor, and up to yesterday it aroused in us nothing but repulsion and loathing. But now that science has laid its finger upon this moral fester, it demands the cooperation of all mankind to combat it.

Accordingly we find ourselves in the epoch of hospitals for the morally diseased, the century of their treatment and cure; we have initiated a social movement toward the triumph of morality. We educators must not forget that we have inaugurated the epoch of spiritual health; because I believe that it is we who are destined to be the true physicians and nurses of this new cure. From the middle ages until now, the science of medicine has slowly been evolving for us the principles required to guarantee our bodily health; but we know very well that while cleanliness and hygiene are signs of civilisation, it is its moral standard that establishes its level.

This moral solidarity is something which it is our duty to understand thoroughly, if we wish to undertake the noble task of educators in the Twentieth Century, which was prepared in advance by the intensive intellectual activity of the century of science.

Granting the social phenomenon of crime, we ought to ask ourselves: where does the fault lie? If we are to acquit the individual criminal of responsibility, it falls back necessarily upon the social community through which the causes of degeneration and disease have filtered. Accordingly, it is we, every one of us, who are at fault: or rather, we are beginning to awaken to a consciousness that it is a sin to foster or to tolerate such social conditions as make possible the suffering, the vices, the errors that lead to physiological pauperism, to pathology, to the degeneration of posterity. The idea is not a new one: all great truths were perceived in every age by the elect few; the fundamental principles of the doctrine of Lombroso are to be already found in Greek philosophy and in that of Christ; Aristotle, in his belief that there is some one particular organism corresponding to each separate manifestation of nature, foreshadows the concept of the correspondence between the morphological and psychic personality; and St. John Chrisostom expounds the principle of moral solidarity in the collective responsibility of society, when he says: "you will render account, not only of your own salvation, but of that of all mankind; whoever prays ought to feel himself burdened with the interests of the entire human race."

Now, if it is not yet in our power to achieve a social reform based on the eradication of degenerative causes—since society can be perfected only gradually—it is nevertheless within our power to prepare the conscience for acceptance of the new morality, and by educational means to help along the civil progress which science has revealed to us. The honest man, the worthy man, the man of honour, is not he who avenges himself; but he who works for something outside himself, for the sake of society at large, in order to purify it of its evils and its sins, and advance it on its path of future progress. In this way, even though we fail to prepare the material environment, we shall have prepared efficient men.

In addition to this momentous principle of social ethics, the Lombrosian doctrines confront us squarely with the philosophic question of liberty of action, the controverted question of Stuart Mill, namely that of "free will." The libertarians admit the freedom of the will as one of the noblest of human prerogatives, on which the responsibility for our acts depends; the determinists recognise that the act of volition obeys certain predetermined causes. Now the Lombrosian theories find these causes, not after the fashion of the Pythagoreans, in cosmic laws or astrology, but in the constitution of the organism, thus serving as a powerful illustration of that physiological determinism, under whose guidance modern positive philosophy draws its inspiration.[1]

In the case of criminality, the actions of the degenerate delinquent are dependent upon a multiplicity of internal factors, that are almost necessarily governed by special predispositions. But, also in accordance with the Lombrosian doctrine, there are external factors which concur in determining acts of volition, factors relating to the environment, studied in accordance with rather vast conceptions: the actions of the individual are determined in advance by that social intercourse in which the great phenomena of any given civilisation have their necessary origin—phenomena such as crime, prostitution, the grade of culture accessible to the majority, the character of industrial products, the limits of general mortality. Now, just as there are necessary fluctuations in the tables of mortality, so also there are fluctuations in the quantity and quality of those individual phenomena that are looked upon