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

In this connection questions of honor offer a broad field of examples.

It is well known that German is rich in words that show personal dislikes, and also, that the greater portion of these words are harmless in themselves. But one man understands this, the other that, when he hears the words, and finally, German is in the curious position of being the cause of the largest number of attacks on honor <p 383>

and of cases of slander in the world. Where the Frenchman laughs and becomes witty, the German grows sullen, insulting, and looks for trouble. The French call sensitiveness to insignificant and worthless things, the German way of quarreling (faire querelle d’allemand).

Many a slander case in court is easily settled by showing people the value of the word. Many who complained that they were called a creature, a person, etc., went away satisfied as soon as the whole meaning of the words had been explained to them.

In conclusion, just a word concerning the influence of time on conception. Not the length of past time, but the value of the time-span is what is important in determining an event. According to Herbart, there is a form of temporal repetition, and time is the form of repetition. If he is right it is inevitable that time, fast-moving or slow-moving, must influence the conception of events. It is well-known that monotony in the run of time makes it seem slow, while time full of events goes swiftly, but appears long in memory, because a large number of points have to be thought through. M<u:>nsterberg shows that we have to stop at every separate point, and so time seems, in memory, longer. But this is not universally valid.

Aristotle had already pointed out that a familiar road appears to be shorter than an unfamiliar one, and this is contradictory to the first proposition. So, a series of days flies away if we spend them quietly and calmly in vacation in the country. Their swiftness is surprising. Then when something of importance occurs in our life and it is directly succeeded by a calm, eventless period, this seems very long in memory, although it should have seemed long when it occurred, and short in the past. These and similar phenomena are quite unexplained, and all that can be said after numerous experiments is, that we conceive short times as long, and long times as short. Now, we may add the remarkable fact that most people have no idea of the duration of very small times, especially of the minute. Ask any individual to sit absolutely quiet, without counting or doing anything else, and to indicate the passing of each minute up to five. He will say that the five minutes have passed at the end of never more than a minute and a half. So witnesses in estimating time will make mistakes also, and these mistakes, and other nonsense, are written into the protocols.

There are two means of correction. Either have the witness determine the time in terms of some familiar form, i. e., a paternoster, etc., or give him the watch and let him observe the second hand. In the latter case he will assert that his ten, or his five, or <p 384>

his twenty minutes were, at most, no more than a half or a whole minute.

The problem of time is still more difficult when the examination has to be made with regard to the estimation of still longer periods—

weeks, months, or years. There is no means of making any test.

The only thing that experience definitely shows is, that the certainty of such estimates depends on their being fixed by distinct events.

If anybody says that event A occurred four or five days before event B, we may believe him if, e. g., he adds, “For when A occurred we began to cut corn, and when B occurred we harvested it. And between these two events there were four or five days.” If he can not adduce similar judgments, we must never depend upon him, for things may have occurred which have so influenced his conception of time that he judges altogether falsely.

It often happens in such cases that defective estimates, made in the course of lengthy explanations, suddenly become points of reference, and then, if wrong, are the cause of mistakes. Suppose that a witness once said that an event occurred four years ago.

Much later an estimation of the time is undertaken which shows that the hasty statement sets the event in 1893. And then all the most important conclusions are merely argued from that. It is best, as is customary in such cases, to test the uncertainty and incorrectness of these estimates of time on oneself. It may be assumed that the witness, in the case in question, is likely to have made a better estimate, but it may equally be assumed that he has not done so.

In short, the conception of periods of time can not be dealt with too cautiously.

Section 84. (e) Nature and Nurture.

Schopenhauer was the first to classify people according to nature and nurture. Just where he first used the categories I do not know, but I know that he is responsible for them. “Nature” is physical and mental character and disposition, taken most broadly; “nurture”

is bringing up, environment, studies, scholarship, and experience, also in the broadest sense of those words. Both together present what a man is, what he is able to do, what he wants to do.

A classification, then, according to nature and nurture is a classification according to essence and character. The influence of a man’s nature on his face, we know, or try to know, but what criminal relationships his nurture may develop for us, we are altogether ignorant of. There are all sorts of intermediaries, connections and <p 385>

differences between what the goddess of civilization finds to prize, and what can be justified only by a return to simplicity and nature.

Section 85. I. The Influence of Nurture.

Criminologically the influence of nurture on mankind is important if it can explain the development of morality, honorableness, and love of truth. The criminalist has to study relations, actions, and assertions, to value and to compare them when they are differentiable only in terms of the nurture of those who are responsible for them.

The most instructive works on this problem are those of Tarde,[1]

and Oelzelt-Newin.[2] Among the older writers Leibnitz had already said, “If you leave education to me I’ll change Europe in a century.”

Descartes, Locke, Helvetius assign to nurture the highest possible value while Carlyle, e. g., insists that civilization is a cloak in which wild human nature may eternally burn with hellish fire. For moderns it is a half-way house. Ribot says that training has least effect at the two extremes of humanity—little and transitively on the idiot, much on the average man, not at all on the genius. I might add that the circle of idiots and geniuses must be made extremely large, for average people are very few in number, and the increase in intellectual training has made no statistical difference on the curve of crime. This is one of the conclusions arrived at by Adolf Wagner[3]

which corroborates the experience of practicing lawyers and we who have had, during the growth of popular education, the opportunity to make observations from the criminalistic standpoint, know nothing favorable to its influence. If the general assertion is true that increased national education has reduced brawling, damages to property, etc., and has increased swindling, misappropriations, etc., we have made a great mistake. For the psychological estimation of a criminal, the crime itself is not definitive; there is always the question as to the damage this individual has done his own nature with his deed. If, then, a peasant lad hits his neighbor with the leg of a chair or destroys fences, or perhaps a whole village, he may still be the most honorable of youths, and later grow up into a universally respected man. Many of the best and most useful village mayors have been guilty in their youth of brawls, damages to property, resistance to authority, and similar things.

[1] G. Tarde: La Philosophie P<e’>nale. Lyon 1590 La Criminalit<e’> Compar<e’>e 1886. Les Lois de l’Imitation. 1890. Psych. Economique. 1902

[2] Kosmodicee. Leipzig and Vienna 1897.

[3] A. Wagner: Statistisch-anthropologische Untersuchung. Hamburg 1864.

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But if a man has once swindled or killed anybody, he has lost his honor, and, as a rule, remains a scoundrel for the rest of his life. If for criminals of the first kind we substitute the latter type we get a very bad outlook.

Individuals yield similar experiences. The most important characteristic of a somewhat cultivated man who not only is able to read and to write, but makes some use of his knowledge, is a loudly-expressed discontent with his existence. If he once has acquired the desire to read, the little time he has is not sufficient to satisfy it, and when he has more time he is always compelled to lay aside his volume of poetry to feed the pigs or to clean the stables. He learns, moreover, of a number of needs which he can not satisfy but which books have instilled in him, and finally, he seeks illegal means, as we criminalists know, for their satisfaction.

In many countries the law of such cases considers extenuating circumstances and defective bringing-up, but it has never yet occurred to a single criminalist that people might be likely to commit crime because they could not read or write. Nevertheless, we are frequently in touch with an old peasant as witness who gives the impression of absolute integrity, reliability, and wisdom, so much so that it is gain for anybody to talk to him. But though the black art of reading and writing has been foreign to him through the whole of his life, nobody will have any accusation to make against him about defective bringing-up.

The exhibition of unattainable goods to the mass of mankind is a question of conscience. We must, of course, assume that deficiency in education is not in itself a reason for doubting the witness, or for holding an individual inclined to crime. The mistakes in bringing-up like spoiling, rigor, neglect, and their consequences, laziness, deceit, and larceny, have a sufficiently evil outcome. And how far these are at fault, and how far the nature of the individual himself, can be determined only in each concrete case by itself. It will not occur to anybody to wish for a return to savagery and anarchy because of the low value we set on the training of the mind. There is still the business of moral training, and its importance can not be overestimated. Considering the subject generally, we may say that the aim of education is the capacity of sympathizing with the feeling, understanding, and willing of other minds. This might be supplemented, perhaps, also with the limitation that the sympathy must be correct, profound, and implicative, for external, approximate, or inverted sympathy will obviously not do. The servant girl knows <p 387>

concerning her master only his manner of quarreling and his manner of spitting but is absolutely unaffected by, and strange to his inner life. The darker aspects of culture and civilization are most obvious in the external contacts of mankind.

When we begin to count an intelligent sympathy, it must follow that the sympathy is possible only with regard to commonly conceivable matters; that