Criminal Psychology by Hans Gross (best book recommendations .TXT) 📕

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construction of the thought. One reading will of course not bring you far, but if the reading is repeated and taken up anew, especially as often as the writer is met with or as often as some new fact about him is established, then it is almost impossible not to attain a fixed and valuable result. One gets then significantly the sudden impression that the thing to be proved, having the expression of which the properties are to be established, rises out of the manuscript; and when that happens the time has come not to dawdle with the work. Repeated reading causes the picture above-mentioned to come out more clearly and sharply; it is soon seen in what places or directions of the manuscript that expression comes to light—

these places are grouped together, others are sought that more or less imply it, and soon a standpoint for further consideration is reached which naturally is not evidential by itself, but has, when combined with numberless others, corroborative value.

Certain small apparently indifferent qualities and habits are important. There are altogether too many of them to talk about; but there are examples enough of the significance of what is said of a man in this fashion: “this man is never late,” “this man never forgets,” “this man invariably carries a pencil or a pocket knife,”

“this one is always perfumed,” “this one always wears clean, carefully brushed clothes,”—whoever has the least training may construct out of such qualities the whole inner life of the individual.

Such observations may often be learned from simple people, especially from old peasants. A great many years ago I had a case which concerned a disappearance. It was supposed that the lost man was murdered. Various examinations were made without result, until, finally, I questioned an old and very intelligent peasant who had known well the lost man. I asked the witness to describe the nature of his friend very accurately, in order that I might draw from his qualities, habits, etc., my inferences concerning his tendencies, and hence concerning his possible location. The old peasant supposed that everything had been said about the man in question when he explained that he was a person who never owned a decent tool. This was an excellent description, the value of which I completely understood only when the murdered man came to life and I learned to know him. He was a petty lumberman who used to buy small wooded tracts in the high mountains for cutting, and having cut them down would either bring the wood down to the valley, or have it turned to charcoal. In the fact that he never owned a decent tool, nor had one for his men, was established his <p 60>

whole narrow point of view, his cramped miserliness, his disgusting prudence, his constricted kindliness, qualities which permitted his men to plague themselves uselessly with bad tools and which justified altogether his lack of skill in the purchase of tools. So I thought how the few words of the old, much-experienced peasant were confirmed utterly—they told the whole story. Such men, indeed, who say little but say it effectively, must be carefully attended to, and everything must be done to develop and to understand what they mean.

But the judge requires attention and appropriate conservation of his own observations. Whoever observes the people he deals with soon notices that there is probably not one among them that does not possess some similar, apparently unessential quality like that mentioned above. Among close acquaintances there is little difficulty in establishing which of their characteristics belong to that quality, and when series of such observations are brought together it is not difficult to generalize and to abstract from them specific rules. Then, in case of need, when the work is important, one makes use of the appropriate rule with pleasure, and I might say, with thanks for one’s own efforts.

One essential and often useful symbol to show what a man makes of himself, what he counts himself for, is his use of the word *we.

Hartenstein[1] has already called attention to the importance of this circumstance, and Volkmar says: “The *we has a very various scope, from the point of an accidental simultaneity of images in the same sensation, representation or thought, to the almost complete circle of the family *we which breaks through the *I and even does not exclude the most powerful antagonisms; hatred, just like love, asserts its *we.” What is characteristic in the word *we is the opposition of a larger or smaller group of which the *I is a member, to the rest of the universe. I say *we when I mean merely my wife and myself, the inhabitants of my house, my family, those who live in my street, in my ward, or in my city; I say *we assessors, we central-Austrians, we Austrians, we Germans, we Europeans, we inhabitants of the earth. I say we lawyers, we blonds, we Christians, we mammals, we collaborators on a monthly, we old students’

society, we married men, we opponents of jury trial. But I also say *we when speaking of accidental relations, such as being on the same train, meeting on the same mountain peak, in the same hotel, at the same concert, etc. In a word *we defines all relationships from the [1] Grundbegriffe der ethisehen Wissensehaft. Leipzig 1844.

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narrowest and most important, most essential, to the most individual and accidental. Conceivably the *we unites also people who have something evil in common, who use it a great deal among themselves, and because of habit, in places where they would rather not have done so. Therefore, if you pay attention you may hear some suspect who denies his guilt, come out with a *we which confesses his alliance with people who do the things he claims not to: *we pickpockets, *we

house-breakers, *we gamblers, inverts, etc.

It is so conceivable that man as a social animal seeks companionship in so many directions that he feels better protected when he has a comrade, when he can present in the place of his weak and unprotected *I the stronger and bolder *we; and hence the considerable and varied use of the word. No one means that people are to be caught with the word; it is merely to be used to bring clearness into our work. Like every other honest instrument, it is an index to the place of the man before us.

Section 13. (Cc Particular Character-signs.

It is a mistake to suppose that it is enough in most cases to study that side of a man which is at the moment important—his dishonesty only, his laziness, etc. That will naturally lead to merely one-sided judgment and anyway be much harder than keeping the whole man in eye and studying him as an entirety. Every individual quality is merely a symptom of a whole nature, can be explained only by the whole complex, and the good properties depend as much on the bad ones as the bad on the good ones. At the very least the quality and quantity of a good or bad characteristic shows the influence of all the other good and bad characteristics. Kindliness is influenced and partly created through weakness, indetermination, too great susceptibility, a minimum acuteness, false constructiveness, untrained capacity for inference; in the same way, again, the most cruel hardness depends on properties which, taken in themselves, are good: determination, energy, purposeful action, clear conception of one’s fellows, healthy egotism, etc. Every man is the result of his nature and nurture, i. e. of countless individual conditions, and every one of his expressions, again, is the result of all of these conditions.

If, therefore, he is to be judged, he must be judged in the light of them all.

For this reason, all those indications that show us the man as a whole are for us the most important, but also those others are valuable which show him up on one side only. In the latter <p 62>

case, however, they are to be considered only as an index which never relieves us from the need further to study the nature of our subject. The number of such individual indications is legion and no one is able to count them up and ground them, but examples of them may be indicated.

We ask, for example, what kind of man will give us the best and most reliable information about the conduct and activity, the nature and character, of an individual? We are told: that sort of person who is usually asked for the information—his nearest friends and acquaintances, and the authorities. Before all of these nobody shows himself as he is, because the most honest man will show himself before people in whose judgment he has an interest at least as good as, if not better than he is—that is fundamental to the general egoistic essence of humanity, which seeks at least to avoid reducing its present welfare. Authorities who are asked to make a statement concerning any person, can say reliably only how often the man was punished or came otherwise in contact with the law or themselves. But concerning his social characteristics the authorities have nothing to say; they have got to investigate them and the detectives have to bring an answer. Then the detectives are, at most, simply people who have had the opportunity to watch and interrogate the individuals in question,—the servants, house-furnishers, porters, corner-loafers, etc. Why we do not question the latter ourselves I cannot say; if we did we might know these people on whom we depend for important information and might put our questions according to the answers that we need. It is a purely negative thing that an official declaration is nowadays not unfrequently presented to us in the disgusting form of the gossip of an old hag. But in itself the form of getting information about people through servants and others of the same class is correct.

One has, however, to beware that it is not done simply because the gossips are most easily found, but because people show their weaknesses most readily before those whom they hold of no account.

The latter fact is well known, but not sufficiently studied. It is of considerable importance. Let us then examine it more closely: Nobody is ashamed to show himself before an animal as he is, to do an evil thing, to commit a crime; the shame will increase very little if instead of the animal a complete idiot is present, and if now we suppose the intelligence and significance of this witness steadily to increase, the shame of appearing before him as one is increases in a like degree. So we will control ourselves most before people <p 63>

whose judgment is of most importance to us. The Styrian, Peter Rosegger, one of the best students of mankind, once told a first-rate story of how the most intimate secrets of certain people became common talk although all concerned assured him that nobody had succeeded in getting knowledge of them. The news-agent was finally discovered in the person of an old, humpy, quiet, woman, who worked by the day in various homes and had found a place, unobserved and apparently indifferent, in the corner of the sitting-room. Nobody had told her any secrets, but things