Chapter XVI: Part 16

This is why I, although I am an extremist in my partisanship for the death-penalty, cannot approve the shooting of the Communards and the hanging of the anarchist martyrs of Chicago. I deem it highly necessary to suppress born criminals, when they reach the persuasion that being born for evil they can do nothing but evil; and I believe that their death thus saves the lives of many honest men. But we have to do with a very different thing here, where the criminal type is, as shown above, less frequent than among born criminals.

It is also necessary to consider here the youthful condition of almost all these persons—Lingg 23 years, Schwab 33 years, Neebe 32 years. For at this age men are at the maximum point of their audacity and misoneism; and I remember a leading Russian Nihilist saying to me that there was not an honest man in Russia who was not a nihilist at 20 years of age and ultra-moderate at 40 years. If the inclination to evil here exists in greater proportion than in law-abiding men, it nevertheless takes an altruistic turn, which is quite the contrary to that which is observed among born criminals, and which commands our admiration and arouses our just pity. This inclination, in associating itself with the want of the new, which is also abnormal in humanity, could, if it were properly directed and were not crossed by misery, prove itself of great value to humanity; it could trace for it new routes, and in every case be practically useful to it. A born criminal imprisoned for life will kill some gaoler, in a colony will ally himself with the savages, and will never work; while political criminals in a colony will become more useful pioneers even than law-abiding men. An example is seen in Louise Michel, who in New Caledonia was the most charitable of the sick nurses.

And then there is no political crime against which the punishment of death can be directed. An idea is never stifled with the death of its abettors: it gains with the death of the martyrs if it is good, as is the case in revolutions; and it falls at once into vacuity if it is sterile, as is the case, perhaps, with the anarchists. And then, as judgment cannot be formed of a great man during his life, so a generation cannot in its ephemeral life judge with certainty of the justice of an idea, and for that reason it is not proper to inflict so radical a punishment on its abettors.

CESARE LOMBROSO.

INNOVATION AND INERTIA IN THE WORLD OF PSYCHOLOGY.

I. MISONEISM.

In the moral world the law which is seen to dominate all the others is the law of inertia. This law of inertia is so powerful that even after having been overcome by the friction of ages it always leaves, even among beings that have most progressed, traces of its original oscillation, in survivals, in rudimentary organs, when it is not renewed in all its completeness in certain atavistic forms.

_Inertia in the moral world._—Granting that it were possible and desirable to contest this law in the organic world, it could certainly not be done in the moral world. In fact, although we are thought to be making great progress, yet if we form a graphic chart showing the progress made on the globe, we shall see to what miserable proportions it is reduced. It may be said that all Africa, except certain points encroached on by the Aryans, Australia, and a good half part of America, are almost in the prehistoric state, or at best in the state of the great Asiatic empires of the earliest historic epochs. Or perhaps (as in South America, Hayti, and Siberia) civilisation has only changed the appearances of primitive life, by substituting for immobility an unstable equilibrium, which is almost worse still.

The most certain proof of the extension and of the predominance in the moral world of the law of inertia, is the hatred of novelty, so little noticed, which we call Misoneism, and which arises from the effort and the repugnance we experience when we have to substitute a new sensation for an old one. And this is so common among animals that it can be regarded as a physiological character.

Minds feeble, enfeebled, or primitive in character, show themselves the most susceptible of repugnance to what is novel; it being understood, however, that it is not a question here of small innovations, such as fashion for women, the change from the elliptic to the circular, tattooing for savages, and sports for children; for not only have the latter no dread of such changes, but on the contrary they wish heartily for them, as they excite the nervous centres, which require change, without irritating them, and without causing pain.

But when the innovation is too radical, it is not merely the savage and the child who repel it with dread; the great majority of men, for whom misoneism is a law of nature, are sensible of a feeling of repugnance, as the result of the pain produced by the necessity in which they are placed of causing their brains to be traversed by too rapid transitions, a task not within their power, inertia and the repetition of movements (individual or atavistic) before performed, being natural to ordinary men, as to all animals.

_Misoneism in manners._—This may be seen, for example, in the manners and customs of the modern Greeks; notwithstanding the vicissitudes of time, we find in them the ancient Greek.

The French of the nineteenth century are still in many respects such as they are depicted by Strabo (IV, 4), and by Cæsar (De Bello Gallico, IV, 5), lovers of arms and of ostentation, incurably vain, facile of speech, easily carried away by words, and imprudent in their resolves.

_Misoneism in religion._—As much can be said of this in relation to religion, literature, and art, where we see misoneism triumph. With respect to religion it can even be affirmed that this is the institution most completely based on misoneism; to the extent that we see the Christian religion preserve of ancient religions, not only musical harmony (the chant), sacred vestments (the mitre and fibula of the Egyptian priests), the scapular and the sandals of the Roman plebeian, etc., but also the Mithraic legends in certain dogmas which have relation to the sun, and even to ancient fetichism.

_Misoneism in morality._—The misoneistic instinct, fed by religion, may leave traces profound enough to form a morality _sui generis_, and provoke among savages remorse at having failed in a brutal custom, be it ever so repugnant, such as among us is provoked in good men by crime.

_Misoneism in science._—In the domain of science the history of the various persecutions of men of genius, inventors or reformers, will suffice to prove the terrible influence of misoneism, which is the more intolerant and the more fanatical the more ignorant it is; and we need only cite the names of Columbus, of Galileo, and of Salomon de Caus, the first inventor of steam apparatus, who was sent to the Bicêtre by Richelieu.

_Misoneism in literature._—Likewise to misoneism we owe, in great part, our admiration for old works and ancient ruins, however hideous they may be. Because admired by our fathers and by our forefathers they obtain, so to say, a way of entrance into us, to impose themselves on our veneration. Thus the Sanscrit language for the Hindoo, the Hebrew language for the Jews, and to some extent Latin for many Christian Europeans have become a kind of sacred tongue and linguistic fetich even outside the precincts of religious usage.

The enormous influence of grammarians in imperial Rome, and afterwards during the epoch of decadence, as well as in the middle ages, explains also the persistence of the modern fetichism for grammar, which seems absurd in an age of naturalists and mathematicians.

And from thence comes the not less absurd and yet unshakable faith in classicism, rooted deeply even in men worthy of respect, who cause us to lose the best years of life in stammering in an almost useless tongue.

_Misoneism in politics._—The same may be said with much more fitness of many social and political institutions which are thought to be modern and which are only relics of other times; it is for this reason only that they attract the admiration and the respect of the majority of people, constituting true conventional lies, as Nordau calls them, but which have their _bourgeois_ believers and apostles.

In fact, the past is so incorporated in our inward being that even the most refractory of us feel a powerful attraction towards it. Thus we may be as unbelieving as can be wished, and yet at every hour of the day we feel ourselves struck and attracted by the cajoleries of priests. We may be lovers of equality, but, as we have already said, we feel a secret veneration for the heirs of our barons. It is in vain that the uselessness of certain laws is accepted; he who upholds and defends them will meet with the approbation of multitudes, called forth by the sole circumstance that the laws have existed. And if civilisation progresses often, it is because it finds in the changes of climate, of race, or in the appearance of men of genius or madmen, circumstances which end in combining a great many small movements in such a manner as to make of them in time a great one. Max Nordau thinks (with some exaggeration) that progress is due more to a few enlightened despots than to all revolutionists. But this progress was very slow; he who wished to precipitate it, contravened the physiological nature of man; consequently a revolution which is not an evolution, is pathological and criminal.

_Misoneism in the punishment of crimes against custom._—This is why in primitive legislation we see offences against custom constitute the _maximum_ of delict, of immorality.

II. PHILONEISM.

This theory of misoneism, previously expounded in my "Delitto Politico," has aroused opposition from all sides; especially in France, on the part of Brunetière, Proal, Tarde, Joly, and Merlino. "Children," say they, "women, savages are curious, lovers of novelties, and misoneists are so far from being ignorant that you yourself refer to them as being among the academicians, (these last are still it appears in the Latin world admirers of good faith); artists have success only in attempting new paths; all peoples have the love of change; they prove it by their emigrations and by their invasions; the great invasions of the barbarians were an example of it."

"Besides, if there are _misoneists_, there are also _neophiles_, and the one makes up for the other."

"In each of us," writes Tarde, "by the side of habit, a sort of physiological misoneism, exists caprice; by the side of the inclination to repeat, the inclination to innovate. The first of these two necessities is fundamental, but the second is the essential, the _raison d'être_ of the others."[73]

[73] _Revue Philosophique_, October, 1890.

In order to reply to all these objections it is necessary above all to be well understood. As to minor innovations, and caprices that satisfy the need of movement of our organs, from the very fact that they are animate, it is certain that we are all very eager for these; in proportion of course to our sex, our age, and our degree of intellectual culture. The little child will be happy with a toy, he will experience fear or dread at the sight of a mask, of a large animal or even of a small one; I have seen children frightened by a sparrow, by a fly. Woman takes pleasure in disguising herself in a striking manner, in wearing new garments in which to attend great plays in the theatres, but she has a horror of new religious rites, and of new discoveries, to such a degree that a great number still refuse to use linen and knitted work made by machinery; sewing machines themselves find their way among them only very slowly. (Merlino.)

When it is claimed (Merlino) that savages love novelties, from the fact, related by Ellis, that some of them endeavored to procure Bibles, (taking them, perhaps, for playthings,) or arms of which they had seen the useful effects, their nature is misjudged; since even after many years passed in contact with European civilisation, after having worn its clothing and ornaments, they return naked to their forests, where a warm garment would certainly not be an object of embarrassment. To believe with Cardinal Massaia that they offer themselves voluntarily for vaccination, that they even ask it, is to ignore that even among ourselves, vaccination encounters a great number of adversaries. Does not Stanley relate that in his last journey, an epidemic of smallpox having broken out in the camp, many of the porters, although they saw that the vaccinated Zanzibaris did not die, refused to submit to vaccination?

According to Tarde, the superstitious admiration, the enthusiastic veneration by barbarous peoples of various forms of insanity, often baptised as prophetism and saintliness, scarcely accords with the aversion for novelties, that is to say for singularities, which I attribute to them too liberally. But the cause of that admiration is nothing else than the fear, the ignorance which leads them to take a disease for the inspiration of a God. Nevertheless, I am far from denying the influence of madmen in philoneism and in revolutions (as we shall see in the sequel of this article); yet if we observe the Santons of Africa and their obscenities, we see that it is not for their useful and innovating ideas that barbarians venerate madmen.

The Academician will admire a new species of snail, he will thrill with joy at the discovery of a Phœnician inscription that will enable him to learn the name of a tribal chief, he will go into ecstasies before a greater curvity given to a screw, but he will excommunicate the telephone, the telegraph, the railway, the new laws of Darwin.

The artist, also, will love to trace a new arabesque, to change to blue the prevailing color of the rose, but he will never attempt, directly, with success, new methods. The hatred by all the elevated and academical classes which still besets Zola, Balzac, and Flaubert, the action brought against the last named, and the universal scandals raised by De Goncourt, Boito, Rossini, and Verdi, are there to prove it. The first, at least, who attempts a new method in painting, in literature, etc., will encounter only hatred and contempt. And when we smile at models unchangeably fixed by Egyptian art, we do not think that the Madonna and the Jesus of our painters have not changed for eighteen centuries.

Horace wrote:

"Adeo sanctum est vetus omne poema.

* * * * *

Indignor quicquam reprehendi, non quia crasse
Compositum, illepideve putetur, sed quia nuper."

It is then not true, as is objected against me in France (_Journal des Economistes_, 1890), that in extending misoneism to the academies, its greatest intensity is excluded from among the ignorant. Each class, each caste has a proportionate ignorance, and a repugnance equally proportional for that of which it is ignorant. We have demonstrated it for genius itself, which is sublime on certain sides only to be the lowest on some others, and we could have a proof of it even in the opposition that the most ardent neophiles, the anarchists, make to this theory of misoneism, of which they are thus themselves a confirmation.

Bismarck despises parliamentarianism, peace, arbitration, and even the Latin, or rather European, alphabet. Flaubert and Rossini had a dread of railways. The statesmen who govern Europe are not all geniuses, but they are men not destitute of intellectual culture; and yet how can it be explained that they so strive with ever increasing tenacity and zeal to increase armaments and armies, to the extent of causing ruin to their peoples,—a greater and more complete ruin perhaps, than that which even a disastrous war might occasion? And this for the purpose, they declare, (and it seems to be sincere,) of more surely escaping war, when as a fact one fourth of the money spent for that end would be sufficient to assure the happiness of the peoples governed by affording the social questions which they all pretend to have at heart, a solution which, as things now are, it is ever becoming more difficult to reach. The true cause is in the repugnance they experience to the idea of starting on a fresh path, in the tendency to adhere to old habits which go back even to the epochs of the warrior castes. Indeed in the minds of a very great number, at least among the Germans, a good corporal of the guard is more worthy of consideration than a great scholar; debate in parliament on the erection of a fortress is not permitted, however costly it may be, whilst every one may speak on the establishment of a school; in France, in Italy, and in Germany, to touch the war budget, unproductive and ruinous as it may be, is to raise the hand to the ark of the covenant,—a veritable state crime. But science is a new thing, while the art of war goes back to remotest antiquity; it descends from Achilles and from Cain.

I was not guilty of a self-contradiction when I said that the modern French love novelty as much as their ancestors did. I am too much the friend and too fond of the French to flatter them, and not to tell them exactly what I think. France is undeniably at the head of the Latin races, but to the same extent, and perhaps more than they, it prefers novelties to the new. It has always had the stormy agitations, rather than the useful results, of revolutions. The great religious reform, Protestantism, touched it without affecting it; the great constitutional reform has taken but slight root, and that two centuries and a half after it was accomplished in England.

Balzac wrote: "In France the provisional is eternal although the French are suspected of loving change."

Novelties to be accepted by the French must be such as do not interfere with their habits. And it is they who have invented the words _routine_, _blague_, and _chauvinism_. It is because they are still in the military period of Spencer. So far as that goes, they have cried out beware! to the English, then, beware to the Russians, now beware to the Germans and the Italians. They change voluntarily their dress, their ministers, their external form of government, but always there remains in them at bottom a slight attachment to the ancient druidical and Cæsarian tendencies. It is not many years since the priest still commanded in Vendée. We have seen the French, while extreme republican, make war for the Pope.

After having a Fourier and Proudhon and, what is more, universal suffrage, they have not yet a social law which gives satisfaction to the just demands of the indigent, or of workingmen, beyond that of the "probi viri."

It is true that they have had their peasant wars—their Jacquerie—and '89; but these were explosions that aroused them but for a moment only to allow them afterwards to fall much lower. Indeed, but a few centuries after the Jacquerie, they saw the same peasants who had raised the insurrection, kiss the horses of the couriers who brought good news of the health of the king. And what a king! Louis XV, who might rather be called the executioner, than the administrator of his people. And after having driven away so many Cæsars, little was wanting to make them fall again under such a trumpery Cæsar as Boulanger if the highest classes of the capital had not been opposed to it.

Moreover certain particular facts, which portray much better their physiognomy, show how fundamentally conservative they are.

Let us cite for example the veneration exhibited by the high classes for the Academies and the passion for heraldic titles and decorations. "France is academic," wrote De Goncourt in _Manette Salomon_.

Sarcey relates that during the siege of Paris, the flesh of the animals of the Jardin des Plantes, having been put up for sale, the common people preferred to suffer hunger rather than eat of it, so that the educated classes alone fed on it.

We know what resistance the French made, under a thousand pretexts, to the reform of their orthography, which is in part merely the relics of the old pronunciation.

Recently, an engineer at Bordeaux wrote to me, that, on his inventing machinery for the easy transference of merchandise from ships to the quays, sturdy opposition was met with on the part of the stevedores of the port, who would have been the first to derive great advantage from it.

The medical faculty at Paris has not only anathematised tartar emetic, vaccine, ether, and the antiseptic method, but also the physicians who substituted the use of horses for the ancient employment of mules to expedite their visits to their patients.[74]

[74] _Revue Scientifique_, 1889.

Is it not in learned Germany that we find Anti-semitism in fashion? And has not Russia made it a law of the state?

In certain districts of Sicily is not the ancient method still preserved of embalming and of painting the bodies of the dead which was practised among the ancient Egyptians?

A recent law-suit tried at Turin has proved that not only the lower classes, but also numbers of persons belonging to the higher classes protect themselves by practices that distinctly recall those of the sorcerers of antiquity. All this would prove that philoneism is rather the exception than the rule.

It is objected to my position, that nations and peoples are such lovers of change that they have always emigrated. But before making this affirmation, we ought to study the causes which impel them to emigration.

Day by day the peasants see their wages decrease; yet even then they do not remove from the land that they love more than themselves, and to which they are more closely bound than they ever were by feudal laws. When epidemics produced by the bad quality of cereals, as pellagra and acrodynia, when mortal diseases and the most cruel famine destroy them by thousands, then only, and even then not always, do they come to a determination; while for many years they keep before them the remembrance of their native soil, of that country, which, like a true stepmother, gave them only diseases and sufferings.

I have listened to poor emigrants say to me: "We have only to die! The life that we lead is certain death; and it is for this reason alone that we have determined to emigrate."

As to the invasions of the barbarians, only ill-informed minds can believe that it was the effect of a sudden movement, of a caprice hurrying away masses almost without a reason. On the contrary, all now admit (as was really mentioned in Tacitus, Bk. II., Chap. 2, of the Annals) that it was a very slow movement, already begun three centuries before Christ, and of which that of the Cimbri, who came from Jutland, was an episode. The crossing of the Baltic was an easy enterprise. The inhabitants of the coast had a sufficient number of vessels, and from Carlsroon to the nearest ports of Russia and of Pomerania was only a distance of thirty-four leagues.

If the tribes of Germans, Suevians, and Goths were repulsed from Italian soil, they had already taken a firm position on the soil of Gaul. Cæsar (De Bello Gallico) speaks of Ariovistus and the Suevians whom he met there as his most formidable enemies. They did not appear to him as forming an isolated body, detached from Germany; on the contrary, he relates that the Germans time and again forced their way into Gaul. Movements within continued, for even after Augustus we find that the Romans did not always encounter the same peoples in the same countries. This is affirmed by Procopius, Paulus Diaconus, and many others.

Let us recall here that already after the death of Nero, Civilis, who was in the service of Rome, led eight cohorts from his country into Gaul where he was defeated, but he was able to make an arrangement, thanks to which he could settle as an ally at a small distance from the borders which he had betrayed (Gibbon).

The Germans (a people composed of voluntary associations of soldiers, almost savages) being hunters rather than cultivators, were naturally obliged to change their residence; we know indeed with what rapidity the game was exhausted, which obliged those who live by it to overrun an immense extent of territory and continually to transfer their residence to other places; this is why emigration is in this case the result of the law of inertia, the people not knowing how to replace a precarious form of existence by one that is more stable. They had no towns, but real movable villages that could be compared to those of the Arabs of Africa. Like all nomad peoples and hunters, when the hope of a conquest shone before them, they abandoned their forests and, desiring to reach warmer regions, went from them with their wives and children to war. During long years their efforts were impotent, because until the time of Marcus Aurelius they were divided, precisely like the savages of America, into a great number (40) of small tribes, dispersed over an immense territory and enemies of one another; it was, consequently, the more easy to subdue them, the rather that not knowing the use of the breast-plate and but little that of iron and of cavalry, they found themselves powerless against the Roman legions, of whose tactics besides they were ignorant.

But when Rome, at the decadence, commenced to recruit its army with Germans, and when less vigilant in guarding the frontiers, she allowed German families, if not even tribes, to pass the same, she found herself in great part disarmed against an enemy who had already set foot against her, bearing her own weapons, and what is worse, who knew her treasures, her tactics, and her weaknesses. Under Tiberius even, it was known that the auxiliary soldiers constituted the principal force of the Roman armies (nihil validum in exercitibus nisi quod externum); at first equal in number to the legionary soldiers, they much exceeded them afterwards, when the citizens evaded military services, and when under Gallienus the Senators were forbidden to command the army. To all these causes can still be added secondary ones.

Before the historic invasion, emigration had taken place. "When," says Gibbon, "a cruel famine befell the Germans, they had no other resource than to send a third or a fourth part of their young men to seek their fortune elsewhere."

According to the national historians, emigration was due to the disproportion between the size of the population and the means of subsistence in the region where they dwelt (Paulus Diaconus): the Germans were very prolific. As they were not agriculturists, nothing bound them to the soil; pestilence or famine, a victory or a defeat, an oracle of the Gods, or the eloquence of a chief sufficed to attract them to the warmer countries of the south. Germany was then much colder than it is at present. (Gibbon.)

The necessity of fleeing from the domination of a victorious enemy forced the Huns towards the west; religious fanaticism drove the nomad Arabs towards the great Byzantine and Persian empires; religious terror urged the Cimbri and the Teutons to throw themselves on the Gauls and on Italy.[75] Often also the taste for wine and liquors led them to invade rich countries for these gifts of God.

[75] _Revue des deux mondes._ June 11, 1889. Berthollet.

According to a legend, doubted by some historians, but accepted by others, among them Cipolla, the descent of the Lombards into Italy appears to have been caused by the fact that some of their companions, after having served Narses, conveyed into their country some Italian fruits which excited their curiosity.

All this will suffice to explain the movement we are considering, which commenced slowly among the Northern peoples and afterwards became unrestrainable, and to show how the law of inertia was counteracted among them.

And it is necessary to remark that this need of movement thus begun, did not end with the conquest; but, obeying perfectly the law of inertia, according to which a movement being started it continues indefinitely if friction does not occur to arrest it, it was continued by the crusades, by the Norman invasion of Sicily, and by the epidemics of pilgrimage that may be regarded as the continuation of the movement towards the South, begun three centuries before Christ, and become a habit when even the necessity was no longer so great as at other times, and when it was even no longer urgent.

Here is still another cause of philoneism; the successive movements which grow out of those first started.

As the historians very well observe, Mahomet was a continuation of the Judaic Christian revolutionary initiative. "Mahomet was a Nazarene, a Judæo-Christian. Semitic monotheism regained its rights through him, and avenged itself for the mythological and polytheistic complications that Greek genius had introduced into the theology of the first disciples of Jesus." (Renan.) There is more of this in revolutions and still more in rebellions; progress, philoneism, following the law of accelerated movement and of the same law of inertia, once begun, blindly precipitates itself to opposite excesses, the very thing that causes its ruin. Thus Cromwell in a country almost feudal and ultra-monarchical reached, or rather was driven by his party, to regicide, and to the foundation of a democratic republic in which the peers were consigned to oblivion and his partisans (of the Barebones parliament) went so far as to wish to do away with lawyers and universities, to forbid dances, theatrical representations, and even Christmas festivities, to mutilate statues on behalf of decency, and to burn sacred pictures. (Macaulay.) This led to a reaction which under Charles II. reached absolute power by consent of parliament. In Christianity castration, and even the abolition of property was reached. We know the excesses of '89.

Passion explains many of these facts, which proceed even to insanity. St. Paul, from an enemy became an apostle of Christ. Clarendon after abandoning himself to despair at seeing his son go over from the service of James to that of William, became a rebel at the end of fifteen days. The parliament of James, ultra-monarchical as it was, rebelled. The conventional Baudot said: "There are men who have fever for twenty-four hours. I have had it for ten years." "In the days of terrible crises," wrote Valbert, "the law of cause and effect seems suspended, the work is accomplished in an hour. To ask revolution to be wise, is to ask the tempest to break nothing."[76]

[76] _Valbert._ _Le centennaire de 1789._ Paris, 1889.

"In every revolution," writes Renan, "the authors of it are absorbed and suppressed by those who succeed them. The first century of the Hegira saw the extermination of the relations and friends of Mahomet by those who pretended to confiscate for their own profit the revolution he had created. In the Franciscan movement the true friends of Saint François d'Assisi, were, after a generation, regarded as heretics and as dangerous men, and were led to the stake by hundreds."

An idea in the first days of creative activity proceeds with giant steps, and we can say, the movement once begun continues by virtue of the law of inertia always to increase; its originator falls behind, and becomes an obstacle to his own idea which persists in moving forward in spite of him. The Ebionites who gave to Christianity its first start became after a century a scandal to the church; their doctrine a blasphemy.[77]

[77] Renan. _L'Eglise chrétienne._

It is this very tendency, caused by the arousing of passion, that makes all revolutions abortive, that causes them through their own excesses to be the authors of their own destruction, and which neutralises or much decreases the progress made by revolutions.

The gravest objection against misoneism constitutes, accordingly, the strongest proof of it. Like the plant, the animal, and the stone, man remains motionless, unless a disturbance of his state occurs through other forces, and through the law of inertia itself, which after having at first rendered him immovable afterwards drives him to opposite excess, but to replunge him anew into immobility.

The most potent cause is that of physical environment, change of climate. Next comes the crossing of one race with another, and it is to this we owe in great part the marvellous productions of Greek art that arose in Magna Grecia. Then, often, the influence of climate is active, to which is owing the transformation of the Jew; so persecutions, and the great calamities which races experience and which determine the selection of the strongest. And to this result contribute above all the impulses impressed by geniuses and by mattoids, who, as I have already pointed out in my work on "Genius" alone possess an intense love for the new, for the very reason that their organisation is different from that of other people. The intensity of individual violence and power here unbalances the tendency to immobility; but almost always—and I show it in the work referred to—when that intensity is not favored by circumstances, when it does not arise as the final synthesis of a general desire, a latent and universal necessity, but simply as a pathological phenomenon, it becomes again valueless, for the very reason that it is individual. It is owing to this that the efforts of a madman like Cola de Rienzi, and of such geniuses as Alexander, Napoleon, Pombal, and Peter the Great, result in nothing. To beneficent geniuses, as Bolivar, the Gracchi, etc., are attributed all the merit of revolutions which triumph because they were prepared long before by history and by circumstances, and which were only precipitated by them and summed up in them. It suffices to note that the genius of Garibaldi, of Cavour, and of Mazzini, has been able to give us nothing more than Italy as it now is, in order to comprehend that in spite of geniuses and, up to a certain point, in spite of circumstances the work of revolution is durable only when the circumstances that have commenced it persist, and men are profoundly modified by it.

However, the law of inertia always prevailing, (since primitive tendencies always concern it,) these changes are but very slow and, as we have seen, give place to easy relapses; they become fixed and swell to new movements only when the causes which provoke them continue and become more intense.

In fine, philoneism, progress, also sometimes triumphs—at least with the white race and frequently with the yellow races; but it is not the result of a sudden movement or of a natural human tendency, but the effect of external physical forces, whether social, historical or the like, which have caused the law of inertia to change its direction. It is therefore the slow result, we might say, of the small and sensible variations peculiar to men according to their condition, added to grander movements, as well as momentarily barren ones, of geniuses and forces, and to those more powerful ones of the physical and historical environment. Of the resulting product we see only the effects, because without the telescope of history and of sociology we do not perceive the slowness with which they have reached us, and the smallness of the efforts which contribute to it. It is thus that we do not imagine that the great Coral Islands can be the work of billions of small zo-ophytes accumulated the one on the other during thousands of years. The organic kingdom, like the social, is made up of the sum total of slow and small efforts.

The idea of the Christ and that of Buddha, the way for which had been prepared for several centuries by other geniuses less fortunate than they, miscarries among the people in which it was conceived, and becomes fruitful elsewhere. But dating from the epoch in which its votaries, nihilists of the reverse type, began to multiply and spread, in the lowest and least intelligent strata of society, employing as arms not violence but gentleness, more than three centuries elapsed before it was tolerated and officially recognised. For two hundred and fifty years the plebeians fought at Rome for their liberty. Yet they always heard the Senators say, "Your propositions are too novel." And liberty was granted by the one, and acquired by the others, only soon to be lost, first, in anarchy, then under the dictatorship, and then under the empire.

It is in this sense, that revolutions at the start can be the work of a small number, but they represent, they are the sign of a latent universal sentiment; this is why they grow in direct proportion to time (and time is very long) and gain partisans among their own adversaries. The apostles of Christ numbered only twelve, but a hundred and fifty years later, at Rome alone, there were in the catacombs 737 tombs of Christians; and Renan calculates that at the time of Commodus 35,000 Christians existed. We know that Saint Paul himself was one of the bitterest adversaries of the Christians.

The English revolution, up to the time Charles I. sought to cause the arrest of the four parliamentarians, was anti-republican, and strictly royalist even; but ultimately revolutionary ideas spread throughout all England, and the zealous but not blind partisans of the king were the first to turn against him after his excesses and his treasons.

In the revolution of Flanders, the chief citizens and a great part of the nobility, held aloof from the movement for a long period; but all possessed in embryo the feeling uttered by the first apostles and pioneers of the movement. Time, in its slow development, gives rise to the complete expansion of the latent sentiments expressed by misoneism.

For example let us now transfer ourselves to another field; I wish to speak of the abolition of classical studies. There are perhaps actually five or six of us in Italy who proclaim without fear its absolute necessity; as we were only three when we proclaimed the necessity of changing the penal laws and of bringing them to examine the criminal rather than the crime.

The first statesman who should attempt to carry out our ideas would fall amid universal scandal; and yet these very ideas are entertained by all who are not blinded by archæological and academic misoneism. But they have not the courage to avow them and still less to realise them. In a few years these ideas will no longer admit even of discussion.

That is revolution. Let us look, on the other hand, at the ideas of the anarchists; they are in the heads, and unfortunately in the hands of certain diseased persons, but they are not in the thought of the majority; consequently all their agitation will be in vain, and result only in isolated commotions and frays.

That is revolt, insurrection. And let no one say that philoneism and progress are found as proportional reaction to misoneic action, an oscillation of the pendulum excluding the law of inertia. The pendulum itself does not oscillate, but remains perpetually motionless until moved; and its oscillations, even the smallest, are produced the most often by external causes entirely accidental. And the law of inertia is here also so constant, that if it did not find in the friction of the atmosphere a cause of impediment the movement once begun would continue _ad infinitum_. So a ball flies and rebounds, when a force propels it; and here also if friction did not retard it, it would continue forever the motion once commenced. Inertia is the rule, and mutations are produced by special external incidents, which being usually less persistent, less tenacious, change more the appearance than the reality. And these modifications which are very slow and proceed from external causes, are produced not only among men and among animals, but are met with even in the inorganic world; it is thus that the salts of copper and of lime, in certain conditions of a warm medium, change their color but not their nature nor their molecular arrangement, and always give the same chemical reactions.

CESARE LOMBROSO.

THE QUESTION OF DUALITY OF MIND.

It is certainly conceded by all who come in general estimation within the category of thinkers, that psychology, as formerly studied, without basis in physiology, was most unfruitful, as compared with the modern study of it upon that basis. It is therefore quite remarkable to find in quarters of repute, where psychological problems are discussed, some into which enter, even inferentially, either momentary obliviousness, or temporary disregard of truths that are held indisputable by modern thinkers within the lines of the subjects indicated. Yet such contradiction and conflict are found in the constantly recurring attempted demonstration of the dual nature of the mind or the soul, call the entity what one will. That man has within his organisation tendencies which are relatively higher or lower than others within himself, is not to be disputed; but that such mixture of nature is to be regarded as constituting him of dual mental nature, is a proposition untenable coincidently with the maintenance of the proposition that he is in nature physiologically single. It has been maintained lately, that he is physiologically double, but this view has not met with any acceptance worthy of the name. In short, it would seem, from all that we know, that in every individual, psychical being must bear the same relation to physiological that the latter does to physical, and that they are all interdependent. And if this be true, the same relations must hold good when the physical and physiological nature degenerate into the pathological, and we find by observation that they do hold good. So far, therefore, as the lesson inculcated by Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde presents to the popular mind the idea of dual mental nature in man, it is false. Viewed from the scientific standpoint, the case exhibits nothing more or less than a phase of physical, physiological, and psychical action, terminating in pathological manifestations. Gradually, the physical, physiological, and psychical natures suffer, _pari passu_, and the whole being exhibits profound retrograde metamorphosis, through the continuous degenerations that have been so often and so ably described by Dr. Henry Maudsley, in which all will-power passes away, the whole being becomes involved, and direful death of all higher attributes finally ensues. That, during the struggle in this decadence between the will and the instincts it is natural that it should seem to the outside uninstructed view, and even to the individual sufferer himself, that the phenomenon witnessed is evidence of a dual nature of mind, is not surprising; but it is surprising to find any one of the present day who deems himself scientific, implying that the observed changing mental, moral, and bodily manifestations are not witnesses to co-ordinated change; it is surprising that any scientific inquirer should lend the slightest countenance to the belief that changed psychical phenomena are possible without changed physical and physiological conditions, and yet that is what we often see proclaimed through maintenance of the proposition of the duality of mental nature.

The point mentioned belongs to the most flagrantly unscientific view of the relations and effects of the forces in play under the conditions discussed. But there may be in the inclusive subject-matter of the question minor points as to which erroneous views are sometimes presented to the public as emanating from sources otherwise scientific. Such a one it is my intention to make the principal subject of this paper. In the October number of _The Monist_, in the article "The Magic Mirror," Max Dessoir, the author, says, pages 111 and 112:

"The theory from which I shall proceed in attempting an
explanation, has already been frequently touched upon in the
course of this article; for certain observations indicated it
so clearly that mention of it was not to be avoided. It is
the doctrine of the double consciousness of the human soul.
Acts are done in the course even of our every-day life, which
presuppose for their origin and execution all the faculties
of the soul, yet nevertheless occur without the knowledge of
the individual; they require a sort of consciousness and a
separate memory beyond the _cognisance_ of the normal person.
One of the most frequent cases in practical experience is
where the thoughts of a person reading aloud wander and become
occupied with an entirely different subject; and where despite
this aberration the person in question reads correctly with
the proper emphasis and expression, turns the leaves, and in
short performs acts which without intelligent control are
hardly conceivable. An English psychologist, Mr. Barkworth,
has acquired such expertness in the practice of this, that
during an animated debate he can rapidly and correctly
add long columns of figures without having his attention
diverted in the least. This points not only to an unconscious
intelligence, but—which is of still greater consequence—to
an unconscious memory. Mr. Barkworth must keep two series of
figures in his mind in order to obtain from them a third;
this latter sum he is again obliged to retain in order to
add to it a newly acquired fourth; and so on. The latter
chain of memories, let it be remarked, performs its office
entirely independently of that upon which the recollection
of the debate is constructed; and it may therefore be
reasonably maintained that there exists beyond the cognisance
of the individual, both consciousness and memory; and if
the essential components of the ego are found in these two
last-mentioned factors, then every person conceals within
himself the germs of a second personality. I designate the
two halves of consciousness that thus operate in greater or
less independence of each other,—in a figurative sense of
course,—as super-and sub-consciousness, and comprehend the
whole as the doctrine of double consciousness or the double
ego."

No one will at this late day, it is to be presumed, dispute the existence in the same individual of subconsciousness, as contra-distinguished from superconsciousness; superconsciousness being that which is more familiarly known as self-consciousness, and subconsciousness as that latent consciousness of which we are not at all conscious, and which yet receives impressions which may or may not rise soon, late, or at all into the sphere of self-consciousness; an impress which cannot be summed into self-consciousness by an effort of will, for the obvious reason that the memory has yet taken no cognisance of them. That this subconscious function of the brain is simply a phenomenon dependent upon cell-storage of the brain, the product of which may or may not ever reach self-consciousness, is proved by many circumstances attested by our memory of collated facts concerned in our waking and dream life. Sir Walter Scott, in his story of the "Tapestried Chamber," gives an admirable account of its working under the lead of a sleeper's unconscious cerebration risen to self-consciousness, for let it be here parenthetically noted that it is absurd, as is sometimes attempted, to rule dream-thoughts out of the realm of self-consciousness, the individuality of the dreamer never being lost, however modified the mental and moral ideation of that individuality may be.

But Max Dessoir evidently confounds subconsciousness with unconscious cerebration. He makes subconsciousness, in the intellection described, a primary factor in execution. Now subconsciousness is the mere tablet, as it were, upon which impressions are made, and unconscious cerebration that faculty of the brain which, without immediate, and perchance future, cognisance of self-consciousness, may evolve from all brain-impressions, whether subconsciously or self-consciously received, thought of which not even the individual himself becomes aware that he is the possessor until it is presented to him as a free gift. This proceeds during sleep as well as during waking, sometimes anticipating, coincidently with waking, the routine subject of thought for the day. It sometimes in sleep, as well as in waking moments, presents itself with the startling effect of a revelation. Subconsciousness, therefore, is a condition of passivity, and unconscious cerebration one of activity, although, of course, of even unknown existence unless a product of it reaches self-consciousness. They are not to be crudely conceived of as different manifestations of the same thing, any more than an emotion is to be thought of as another aspect of the sensation which produced it, the emotion being qualitatively an entirely new departure from the sensation. Both sensation and emotion represent conditions of activity, whereas, so far as self-consciousness is equal to differentiating them, subconsciousness and unconscious cerebration respectively represent passivity and activity.

But the admission of the coexistence in the same individual of unconscious cerebration with self-consciousness does not involve the concession of the existence of dual mentality, any more than recognised possession of striped and unstriped, voluntary and involuntary muscle, involves the concession that man is physically dual in mechanical motive power. Yet it is upon the basis of the recognised coexistence of double consciousness in man that Max Dessoir reaches the conclusion that, figuratively speaking, as he says, there is a double ego, by means of whose duplex action different mental processes are simultaneously carried forward. Now, neither figuratively nor otherwise, as should be clearly apparent from what has been said, is there in man a double ego. For although while there is life subconsciousness must exist, and unconscious cerebration proceed, nothing is more open to observation than that subconsciousness and unconscious cerebration, although always present, do not always rise into the sphere of self-consciousness. That, during self-conscious activity of thought on a particular subject, if continued for a long time, subconsciousness may, through unconscious cerebration, in a measure yield tribute to self-conscious thought is undeniable, for we see their effect sometimes visible in the sudden inspiration of the orator and the writer, but that they are factors in ordinary thought-evolution, for immediate use, within very limited spaces of time, is impossible, for we by definition limit subconsciousness and unconscious cerebration to pure unguided automatism, while to self-consciousness we concede the direction of all automatic processes that represent conceptions of the mind. Obviously, to imagine that we direct that which may or may not appear at all in the sensorium, to be directed, and which from its nature, as known from observation, is not likely to appear within moderate time-limits of special thought-evolution, is inadmissible, involving the assertion of two contradictory propositions, for, as matter of experience, we know that the product of unconscious cerebration, even when it appears clearly recognisable as such, seldom manifests itself before the lapse of a few hours.

The simple and complete explanation of the phenomenon observed, in what are deemed simultaneous mental processes, is that they are not absolutely simultaneous. The best illustration that can be given of the manner in which they take place is afforded by the system known as synchronous multiple telegraphy, in which, by means of an admirable apparatus, points on discs, representing makes and breaks of electric current, are, at stations distant from each other, adjusted to synchronous relations with each other, by means of electro-magnetic agency, tuning-forks, and self-adjusting varying resistances to the currents, so that receiving and transmitting proceeds with a continuousness just short of perfect continuity. I am not attempting to liken the rapidity of thought to that of electricity, even when electricity is embarrassed and slowed by mechanism of man's construction; but otherwise the analogy between so-called simultaneous mental processes and the results obtained from so-called synchronous multiple telegraphy, is as perfect as any analogy can be. Thus the make and break impulses of the will direct the self-conscious flow of nerve-force in receiving and transmitting impulses of almost synchronous time upon various subject-matter successively taken up and dropped. The thought for each is not simultaneous, nor of equal duration, but so nearly simultaneous as to appear so, and of duration sufficient for its task. The individual thought-times are not, therefore, represented, as in the telegraphic instrument described, by equal spaces of time, but bear due relations to the respective difficulties of the subject-matter almost synchronously attacked. It is self-conscious thought that is here involved, whether in sleeping or waking, that is, will-directed thought, for even in sleep we observe the will as imperfectly directing; striving, however, always to direct. As has been admitted, if the process of self-conscious cerebration last over a long space of time, it is possible that some fragment derived from unconscious cerebration may contribute to the grand total of primary flow. This, however, is not of normal occurrence, seeing that unconscious cerebration often deals with matter entirely alien to present self-conscious mental occupation. The fruits of such cerebration are therefore impossible to be counted upon, and therefore cannot be insisted upon as proving from the experience cited by Max Dessoir the existence, even figuratively speaking, of double consciousness construed as forming with self-consciousness a double self; while the well-known action of subconsciousness, unconscious cerebration, and conscious cerebration, as related to one another, amply explain all the phenomena in waking, sleep, and even in hypnotism if we include in that hysteric diathesis.