ment furnishes motives sufficiently powerful to prevent them from stealing. The sentiment of cunning, too, may be very much developed, while the other faculties are more or less deficient. Among the lower orders of society are many imbeciles a little more intelligent than these, and not considered as utterly devoid of understanding, who, nevertheless, have but vague and imperfect notions of social duties and of justice. They engage in occupations that require no great extent of intellect, and even in the simplest of the mechanic arts. If they do not pass among their acquaintances for imbeciles, they are at least regarded as singular beings with feeble understandings, and are teazed and tormented in innumerable ways. Many of them, for want of some powerfully restraining motive, indulge in drinking, and become lazy, drunken, and dissipated, and finally fall into the hands of justice in greater numbers than is generally suspected. They steal adroitly, and hence are considered as very intelligent; they recommence their offences the moment they are released from confinement, and thus are believed to be obstinately perverse; they are violent and passionate, and the slightest motive is sufficient to plunge them into deeds of incendiarism and murder. Those who have strong sexual propensities, soon become guilty of outrages on female chastity. I have had occasion to see many examples of this class in prisons, who had been judicially decided to be rational, but whose demi-imbecility was manifest enough to me."1 If this is a correct representation of the moral character of the lesser grades of imbecility-and the accuracy and good faith of Georget are not to be doubted-it may be easily imagined, without the help of further description, what it must be in the higher degrees. § 71. By imbecility is ordinarily understood a deficiency of intellect; but it has been seen above (§ 56) that its signification is here extended, in order to include that class of subjects in whom the mental defect consists in a great defi 1 Discussion médico-légale sur la Folie, 140; and Des maladies mentales, considérées dans leurs rapports avec la legislation civile et criminelle, 8. ciency, if not utter destitution of the higher moral faculties, the intellectual, perhaps, not being sensibly affected. The following case will illustrate this form of the disorder. E. S., aged thirty-four, who had been ten years an inmate of the Richmond Lunatic Asylum in Dublin, was brought before Mr. George Combe, during a visit to that institution, on the 20th of April, 1829, to be subjected, with several others, to a phrenological examination. A few months after, Dr. Crawford, the physician of the asylum, addressed a letter to Mr. Combe respecting this patient, from which the following description is taken. "You observe in your notes, 'I am surprised he was not executed before he became insane.' This would lead to the supposition that he had been afflicted with some form of insanity, in addition to a naturally depraved character. Such, however, is by no means the case; he never was different from what he now is; he has never evinced the slightest mental incoherence on any one point, nor any kind of hallucination. It is one of those cases where there is great difficulty in drawing the line between extreme moral depravity and insanity, and in deciding at what point an individual should cease to be considered as a responsible moral agent, and amenable to the laws. The governors and medical gentlemen of the asylum have often had doubts whether they were justified in keeping E. S. as a lunatic, thinking him a more fit subject for a Bridewell. He appears, however, so totally callous with regard to every moral principle and feeling- so thoroughly unconscious of ever having done any thing wrong pletely destitute of all sense of shame or remorse when reproved for his vices or crimes and has proved himself utterly incorrigible throughout life, that it is almost certain that any jury before whom he might be brought would satisfy their doubts by returning him insane, which, in such a case, is the most humane line to pursue. He was dismissed several times from the asylum, and sent there the last time for attempting to poison his father; and it seems fit he should be kept there for life as a moral lunatic; but there has never been the lest symptom of diseased action of the brain, so com which is the general concomitant of what is usually understood as insanity." 1 § 72. Nothing can be more certain than that this individual was denied by nature the possession of those moral faculties, the due development and exercise of which constitute an essential element of responsibility. By the aid of kind and intelligent friends, he was secluded from scenes in which he was unfitted to mingle; but if, on the contrary, he had been suffered to go at large, with his animal propensities uncontrolled by the higher powers of our moral nature, and constantly meeting with opportunities for indulgence, what else could have been expected but some deed of violence that would have brought upon him the tender mercies of the law? Dr. Crawford is altogether too sanguine in believing that a jury would have pronounced E. S. insane; for the melancholy termination of the cases above given, teaches how little we can here rely on the intelligence of courts and juries. Had he committed a capital crime, he would probably have been condemned and executed, while the intelligent and the educated, the philosopher and the man of the world, would, for the most part, have joined the unthinking populace, in thanking God, that a monster of wickedness had fallen beneath the arm of the law. The § 73. In a class of cases by no means unfrequent, this moral imbecility is particularly manifested in a morbid activity of the destructive propensity. An interesting case of this kind is related at length by Parent Duchâtelet. subject of it was a little girl fourteen years old, who lived with her grandmother, a very respectable and religious woman, till the age of seven, when she returned to the charge of her parents. At this time, she is described as never playing, nor crying, nor laughing. She had been taught to read, sew, and knit, though quite averse to all instruction. Her mother being sick, she expressed regret that she was not dead, because in that case she would inherit her mother's clothes 1 Edinburgh Phrenological Journal, vi. 147. which she would alter so as to wear them herself. She declared that she would have killed her while sick if she could have evaded the observation of the attendants, and told her mother, who asked how she would have accomplished her purpose, that she would have plunged a poignard into her bosom. She said she was aware her father would put her in prison, but that would not deter her. A few months afterwards, on the occasion of the murder of a child, she told her mother that if she had killed her with a knife she would have got blood on her clothes, which would have led to discovery, and therefore she would have taken care to undress, before committing the act. Subsequently she said, she would use poison, in order to kill her mother. She frequently declared that she never loved her father, nor mother, nor grandmother. It appears that from the age of four years she was addicted to the practice of self-abuse, and no precautions nor persuasions could deter her from this dreadful habit. Such was the moral state of this child, now eight years old, when she was examined by a commissary of the police, and sent to a convent. At the age of fourteen, she appears to have abandoned her murderous designs, but continued dejected and silent. § 74. This form of insanity, which is above denominated moral imbecility, in order to distinguish it from that in which the intellect is affected, is not very rare in receptacles for the insane, and is more common in society than is generally suspected. It is seldom regarded in its true light, and when its subjects have occupied a high place in society, and thus been enabled to indulge more freely their mischievous propensities, they have often been consigned by the historian to the eternal execrations of mankind. Count Charolais, brother of the duke de Bourbon Condé, whose sanguinary character has been commemorated by Lacretelle, was undoubtedly a case of this kind. He manifested an instinct of cruelty in the very sports of his childhood. He took a pleasure in torturing animals, and committing the most ferocious acts of violence against his domestics. He would stand at his window and shoot the artizans at work upon the neighboring buildings, merely for the pleasure of seeing them tumble from the roofs and ladders. It is said that he loved to stain even his debaucheries with blood, and committed many murders from no motive of interest or anger. Dr. Rush says that in the course of his life he had been consulted in three cases of moral imbecility; and nothing can better express the true characters of their physiology, than his remark respecting them. "In all these cases," he observes, "there is probably an original defective organization in those parts of the body which are occupied by the moral faculties of the mind,"2an explanation that will receive but little countenance in an age that derives its ideas of the mental phenomena from the exclusive observation of mind in a state of acknowledged health and vigor. To understand these cases properly, requires a knowledge of our moral and intellectual constitution, to be obtained only by a practical acquaintance with the innumerable phases of the mind, as presented in its various degrees of strength and weakness, of health and disease, . amid all its transitions from brutish idiocy to the most commanding intellect. § 75. The prevalent error of looking at mind in the abstract, as a unique principle endowed with a certain appreciable measure of strength and activity, has been the cause of much dispute and discrepancy of opinion, in cases where the acts of persons affected with Hoffbauer's first degree of imbecility, have been made the object of judicial investigation. One witness has observed a range and tenacity of memory which he could not square with his notions of mental weakness; another, perhaps, has seen the party whose acts are in question conducting himself with the utmost propriety, and observing the social usages proper to his station, and this he has deemed incompatible with imbecility of mind; while another has heard him replying to questions on commonplace subjects, readily and appropriately, and he also draws similar conclusions. On the other hand, he is seen engag-. ing in occupations and amusements, and associating with company seemingly below the dignity of his age or station, 1 Histoire de France, ii. 59. 2 Diseases of the mind, 357. |