Part 29 (2/2)

There is an additional quality of which we must beware-that is the tendency of experts to take pride in some different, incidental, and less important little thing than their own subject. Frederick the Great with his miserable flute-playing is an example. Such people may easily cause mistakes. The knowledge of their attainment in one field causes us involuntarily to respect their a.s.sertions. Now, if their a.s.sertions deal with their hobbies many a silly thing is taken at its face value, and that value is counterfeit.

Section 88. (4) Inclination.

Whether a scientific characterization of inclination is possible, whether the limits of this concept can be determined, and whether it is the result of nature, culture, or both together, are questions which can receive no certain answer. We shall not here speak of individual forms of inclination, i. e., to drink, to gamble, to steal, etc., for these are comparatively the most difficult of our modern problems. We shall consider them generally and briefly. Trees and men, says the old proverb, fall as they are inclined. Now, if we examine the inclination of the countless fallen ones we meet in our calling we shall have fewer difficulties in qualifying and judging their crimes. As a rule, it is difficult to separate inclination, on the one hand, from opportunity, need, desire, on the other. The capacity for evil is a seduction to its performance, as Alfieri says somewhere, and this idea clarifies the status of inclination. The ability may often be the opportune cause of the development of an evil tendency, and frequent success may lead to the a.s.sumption of the presence of an inclination.

Maudsley points out that feelings that have once been present leave their unconscious residue which modify the total character and even reconstruct the moral sense as a resultant of particular experiences. That an inclination or something similar thereto might

develop in this way is certain, for we may even inherit an inclination, -but only under certain conditions. This fact is substantiated by the characteristics of vagabonds. It may, perhaps, be said that the enforcement of the laws of vagabondage belongs to the most interesting of the pyschological researches of the criminal judge. Even the difference between the real bona fide tramp, and the poor devil who, in spite of all his effort can get no work, requires the consideration of a good deal of psychological fact. There is no need of description in such cases; the difference must be determined by the study of thousands of details. Just as interesting are the results of procedure, especially certain statistical results. The course of long practice will show that among real tramps there is hardly ever an individual whose calling requires very hard or difficult work. Peasants, smiths, well-diggers, mountaineers, are rarely tramps. The largest numbers have trades which demand no real hard work and whose business is not uniform. Bakers, millers, waiters are hence more numerous. The first have comparatively even distribution of work and rest; the latter sometimes have much, sometimes little to do, without any possible evenness of distribution. Now, we should make a mistake if we inferred that because the former had hard work, and an equivalent distribution of work and rest, they do not become tramps, while the latter, lacking these, do become tramps. In truth, the former have naturally a need and inclination for hard work and uniform living, have, therefore, no inclination to tramping, and have for that reason chosen their difficult calling. The latter, on the other hand, felt an inclination for lighter, more irregular work, i. e., were already possessed of an inclination for vagabondage, and had, hence, chosen the business of baking, grinding, or waiting. The real tramp, therefore, is not a criminal. Vagabondage is no doubt the kindergarten of criminals, because there are many criminals among tramps, but the true vagabond is one only because of his inclination for tramping. He is a degenerate.

Possibly a similar account of other types may be rendered. If it is attained by means of a statistic developed on fundamental psychological principles, it would give us ground for a number of important a.s.sumptions. It would help us to make parallel inferences, inasmuch as it would permit us to determine the fundamental inclination of the person by considering his calling, his way of approaching his work, his environment, his choice of a wife, his preferred pleasures, etc. And then we should be able to connect this inclination with the deed in question. It is difficult to fix upon the

relation between inclination and character, and the agreement will be only general when a man's character is called all those things to which he is naturally, or by education, inclined. But it is certain that a good or bad character exists only then when its maxims of desire and action express themselves in fact. The emphasis must be on the fact; what is factual may be discovered, and these discoveries may be of use.

Section 89. (5) Other Differences.

The ancient cla.s.sification of individuals according to temperaments is of little use. There were four of them, called humors, and a series of characteristics was a.s.signed to each, but not one of them had all of its characteristics at once. Hence temperaments determined according to these four categories do not really exist, and the categorical distinction can have no practical value. If, however, we make use of the significant general meaning of temperament, the apparatus of circ.u.mstance which is connected with this distinction becomes superfluous. If you call every active person choleric, every truculent one sanguine, every thoughtful one phlegmatic, and every sad one melancholy, you simply add a technical expression to a few of the thousands of adjectives that describe these things. These four forms are not the only ones there are. Apart from countless medial and transitional forms, there are still large numbers that do not fit in any one of these categories. Moreover, temperament alters with age, health, experience, and other accidents, so that the differentiation is not even justified by the constancy of the phenomenon. Nevertheless, it is to some degree significant because any form of it indicates a certain authority, and because each one of these four categories serves to connect a series of phenomena and a.s.sumes this connection to be indubitable, although there is absolutely no necessity for it. When Machiavelli says that the world belongs to the phlegmatic, he certainly did not have in mind that complex of phenomena which are habitually understood as the characteristics of the phlegmatic humor. He wanted simply to say that extremes of conduct lead to as little in the daily life as in politics; that everything must be reflected upon and repeatedly tested before its realization is attempted; that only then can progress, even if slow, be made. If he had said, the world belongs to the cautious or reflective person, we should not have found his meaning to be different.

When we seek clearly to understand the nature and culture of

an individual, an investigation into his temperament does not help us in the least. Let us consider then, some other characteristic on which is based the judgment of individuals. The proverb says that laughter betrays a man. If in the theater, you know the subject of laughter, the manner of laughter, and the point at which laughter first occurred, you know where the most educated and the least educated people are. Schopenhauer says that the intelligent man finds everything funny, the logical man nothing; and according to Erdmann (in <u:>ber die Dummheit), the distressing or laughable characteristics of an object, shows not its nature, but the nature of the observer. It would seem that the criminalist might save himself much work by observing the laughter of his subjects. The embarra.s.sed, foolish snickering of the badly observing witness; the painful smile of the innocent prisoner, or the convicted penitent; the cruel laughter of the witness glad of the damage he has done; the evil laughter of the condemning accomplice; the happy, weak laughter of the innocent who has adduced evidence of his innocence, and the countless other forms of laughter, all these vary so much with the character of the laugher, and are so significant, that hardly anything compares with them in value. When you remember, moreover, that concealment during laughter is not easy, at least at the moment when the laughter ceases, you see how very important laughter may be in determining a case.

Of equal importance with laughter are certain changes which may occur in people during a very short time. If we observe in the course of the daily life, that people, without any apparent reason, so change that we can hardly recognize them, the change becomes ten times more intense under the influence of guilt or even of imprisonment. Somebody said that isolation has revealed the greatest men, the greatest fools, and the greatest criminals. What, then, might be the influence of compulsory isolation, i. e., of imprisonment! We fortunately do not live in a time which permits imprisonment for months and years in even the simplest cases, but under certain circ.u.mstances even a few days' imprisonment may completely alter a person. Embitterment or wildness may exhibit itself, just as sorrow and softness, during the stay under arrest. And hence, the criminalist who does not frequently see and deal with his subjects does not perform his duty. I do not mean, of course, that he should see them for the purpose of getting a confession out of an attack of morbidity; I mean only, that this is the one way of getting a just and correct notion of the case. Every criminalist of experience will

grant that he sees the event, particularly the motives of the criminal, otherwise after the first examination than after the later ones, and that his later notions are mainly the more correct ones. If we set aside the unfortunate cases in which the individual held for examination is instructed by his prison-mates and becomes still more spoiled, I might permit myself the a.s.sertion that imprisonment tends to show the individual more correctly as he is; that the strange surroundings, the change from his former position, the opportunity to think over his situation may, if there are no opposing influences, help the criminalist a great deal, and this fact is confirmed in the superior results of later to earlier examinations.

In addition, the bodily condition and the health of the prisoner change almost always. The new mode of life, the different food and surroundings, the lack of movement, the moral effect, work directly on the body, and we must confess, unfortunately, on health. There are, however, cases in which health has been improved by imprisonment, especially the health of people who have led a wild, irregular, drunken life, or such who have had to worry and care too much. But these are exceptions, and as a rule the prisoner's physique suffers a great deal, but fortunately for a short time only. The influence of such effects on the mind is familiar. The bodily misfortune gives a wide opening for complete change in moral nature; health sustains the atheist in darkness. This fact, as mentioned by Bain, may serve to explain the origin of many a confession which has saved an innocent person at the last moment.

Nor must we forget that time-and for the prisoner, imprisonment is time endowed with power-effects many an adjustment of extremes. We know that utter evil is as rare as perfect virtue. We have nothing to do with the latter, but we almost as infrequently meet the former. The longer we deal with ”bad men,” the more inclined are we to see the very summit of devilment as the result of need and friendlessness, weakness, foolishness, flightiness, and just simple, real, human poorness of spirit. Now, what we find so redistributed in the course of years, we often find crushed together and fallen apart in a short time. Today the prisoner seems to us the most dreadful criminal; in a few days, we have calmed down, have learned to know the case from another side, the criminal has shown his real nature more clearly, and our whole notion of him has changed.

I frequently think of the simple story of Charles XII's sudden entry into Dresden. The city fathers immediately called an ex-

traordinary session for the next day in order to discuss, as the Swedish king supposed, what they should have done the day before. Every examined prisoner does the same thing. When he leaves the court he is already thinking of what he should have said differently, and he repeats his reflections until the next examination. Hence, his frequently almost inexplicable variety of statements, and hence, also, the need of frequent examination.

Finally, there is the fact Mittermaier has pointed to-the importance of the criminalist's own culture and character. ”If a girl testifies for her lover and against her brother, the question in judgment arises, which voice is the more powerful? The judge will not easily be able to divorce this standard of judgment from himself and his own view of life.” This is a frequent occurrence. You consider a difficult psychological case in all its aspects, and suddenly, without knowing how or why, you have found its solution: ”It must have been so and not otherwise; he has acted so and so for this reason, etc.” A close examination of such a definite inference will convince you that it is due to the pathetic fallacy, i. e., you have so inferred because you would have done so, thought and desired so, under similar circ.u.mstances. The commission of the pathetic fallacy is the judge's greatest danger.

Section 90. (6) Intelligence and Stupidity.

The three enemies of the criminalist are evil nature, untruth, and stupidity or foolishness. The last is not the least difficult. n.o.body is safe from its attacks; it appears as the characteristic of mankind in general, in their prejudices, their preconceptions, their selfishness, and their high-riding nature. The criminalist has to fight it in witnesses, in jurymen, and frequently in the obstinacy, dunder- headedness, and amusing self-conceit of his superiors. It hinders him in the heads of his colleagues and of the defendant, and it is his enemy not least frequently in his own head. The greatest foolishness is to believe that you are not yourself guilty of foolishness. The cleverest people do the most idiotic things. He makes the most progress who keeps in mind the great series of his own stupidities, and tries to learn from them. One can only console oneself with the belief that n.o.body else is better off, and that every stupidity is a basis for knowledge. The world is such that every foolishness gets somebody to commit it.

Foolishness is an isolated property. It is not related to intelligence as cold to warmth, Cold is the absence of heat, but foolishness

is not the absence of intelligence. Both are properties that look in the same direction. Hence, it is never possible to speak of intelligence or stupidity by itself. Whoever deals with one deals with the other, but it would be a mistake to conceive them as a developing series at one end of which is intelligence, and at the other, stupidity. The transition is not only frequent, but there are many remarkable cases in which one pa.s.ses into the other, gets mixed up with it, and covers it. Hence, a thing may often be at one and the same time intelligent and stupid, intelligent in one direction and stupid in another; and it is not incorrect, therefore, to speak of clever stupidities, and of clever deeds that are heartily foolish.

The importance of stupidity is due not only to the fact that it may lead to important consequences, but also to the difficulty of discovering it in certain cases. It is before all things correct, that foolish people often seem to be very wise, and that as a rule, much intercourse alone is able to reveal the complete profundity of a man's foolishness. But in our work we can have little intercourse with the people whom we are to know, and there are, indeed, persons whom we take to be foolish at the first encounter, and who really are so when we know them better. And even when we have learned the kind and degree of a man's foolishness, we have not learned his way of expressing it, and that discovery requires much wisdom. Moreover, an incredible amount of effort, persistence, and slyness is often made use of for the purpose of committing an immense act of foolishness. Every one of us knows of a number of criminal cases that remained unexplained for a long time simply because some one related event could be explained by a stupidity so great as to be unbelievable. Yet the knowledge that such stupidity actually exists could explain many a similar matter, simply and easily. This is especially true with regard to the much discussed ”one great stupidity,” which the criminal commits in almost every crime. a.s.sume that such a stupidity is impossible, and the explanation of the case is also impossible. We must never forget that it is exactly the wise who refuse to think of the possibility of foolishness. Just as everything is clean to the cleanly, and everything is philosophic to the philosopher, everything is wise to the wise. Hence, he finds it unintelligible that a thing may be explained from the point of view of pure unreason. His duty therefore, is, to learn as much and as accurately as possible about the nature of foolishness.

There are, perhaps, few books on earth that contain so many clever things as Erdmann's little text ”Concerning Foolishness ”

(<u:>ber die Dummheit). Erdmann starts with small experiences. For example, he once came early to the Hamburg Railway Station and found in the waiting-room one family with many children, from whose conversation he learned that they were going to visit a grandfather in Kyritz. The station filled up, to the increasing fear of the smallest member of the family, a boy. When the station grew quite full he suddenly broke out: ”Look here, what do all these people want of grandfather in Kyritz.” The child supposed that because he himself was travelling to Kyritz all other people in the same place could have had no different intention. This narrowness of the point of view, the generalization of one's own petty standpoint into a rule of conduct for mankind is, according to Erdmann, the essence of foolishness. How far one may go in this process without appearing foolish may be seen from another example. When, in the sixties, a stranger in Paris spoke admiringly of the old trees on a certain avenue, it was the habit of the Parisians to answer, ”Then you also do not agree with Haussmann?” because everybody knew about the attempt by the Parisian prefect, Baron Haussmann, to beautify Paris by killing trees. If, however, the trees in the churchyard of the little village are praised, and the native peasant replies, ”So you know also that our Smith wants to have the trees chopped down,” the remark is foolish, because the peasant had no right to a.s.sume that the world knows of the intentions of the village mayor.

Now, if you decrease the number of view-points, and narrow the horizon, you reach a point where the circ.u.mference of ideas is identical with their center, and this point is the kernel of stupidity, the idiot. Stupidity is the state of mind in which a man judges everything by himself. This again may be best ill.u.s.trated by a figure of speech. If you go about a room and observe its contents you soon notice how the objects change place and appearance with the change in your point of view. If you look *only through the key-hole, you do not, however, recognize that fact; everything seems equal. The idiot is he whose egoistic eye is the only key-hole through which he looks into the decorated parlor we call the world. Hence, the defective individual, l'homme born'>, who has real narrowness of mind, possesses only a small number of ideas and points of view, and hence, his outlook is restricted and narrow. The narrower his outlook, the more foolish the man.

Foolishness and egoism are privileges of the child; we are all born foolish and raw. Only light sharpens our wits, but as the process is very slow, there is not one of us who has not some blunt edges.

To distinguish objects is to be clever; to confound them, to be foolish. What one first notices in defective minds is the unconditional universality of their remarks. The generalizations of stupid people are then unjustly called exaggerations. Where they say ”always,” the clever will say, ”two or three times.” The foolish man interrupts his fellow because he presses to the front as the only justified speaker. What is most characteristic of him is his attempt to set his ego in the foreground, ”*I do this always,” ”This is one of *my traits,” ”*I do this thing in quite another way.” Indeed, every high grade of foolishness exhibits a certain amount of force which the fool in question uses to bring his personality forward. If he speaks about reaching the North Pole, he says, ”Of course, I have never been at the North Pole, but I have been at Annotook,” and when the subject of conversation is some great invention, he a.s.sures us that he has not invented anything, but that he is able to make brooms, and incidentally, he finds fault with the invention, and the more foolish he is, the more fault he finds.

These characteristics must, of course, be kept apart, and foolishness must not be confused with related qualities, although its extent or boundaries must not be fixed too absolutely. Kraus, e. g., distinguishes between the idiot, the fool, the weak-minded, the idea-less, etc., and a.s.signs to each distinguis.h.i.+ng character-marks. But as the notions for which these expressions stand vary very much, this cla.s.sification is hardly justified. A fool in one country is different from a fool in another, an idiot in the South from an idiot in the North, and even when various individuals have to be cla.s.sified at the same place and at the same time, each appears to be somewhat unique. If, for example, we take Kraus's definitions of the idiot as one who is least concerned with causal relations, who understands them least, and who can not even grasp the concept of causation, we may say the same thing about the weak-minded, the untalented, etc. Kant says, rightly, that inasmuch as fools are commonly puffed-up and deserve to be degraded, the word foolishness must be applied to a ”swell-headed” simpleton, and not to a good and honest simpleton. But Kant is not here distinguis.h.i.+ng between foolishness and simplicity, but between pretentiousness and kindly honesty, thus indicating the former as the necessary attribute of foolishness. Another mode of distinction is to observe that forgetfulness is a quality of the simpleton who is defective in attention, but not of the fool who has only a narrow outlook. Whether or not this is true, is hard to say. There is still another differentiation in which foolish-

ness and simplicity are distinguished by the lack of extent, or the intensity of attention.

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