O'SHEA — ASPECTS OF MENTAL ECONOMV. 63 



form of "broken reflex arcs" 1 or "rudimentary instincts." 2 In 

 ■the normal life these reverberations of a remote past are not 

 distinguished because of the strong tone of the higher psychic 

 life ; but let this supreme self yield its efficacy at any time and 

 then these recrudescences from phylogenesis well up into con- 

 sciousness. 



Lastly, it may be said, although it scarcely needs argument, 

 that ethical feeling, being a most highly complex social attitude 

 or attunement and a recent addendum to the ancestral record, is 

 quickly estranged by whatever disturbs the delicate normal func- 

 tioning of those material media through which spiritual charac- 

 teristics are made manifest in this physical world. Collin, 8 

 Wey, 4 Morrison, 5 Wright, 8 Lombroso, 7 Eibot 8 and Mercier, 9 

 who have studied moral degeneracy as a social and as an indi- 

 vidual phenomenon, have testified in confirmation of the doc- 

 trine that moral obliquity is generally the accompaniment of de- 

 fective physical conditions, and in all probability is the legiti- 

 mate issue of these. When the highest and most essential cere- 

 bral structures become impaired through dissipation of vital en- 

 ergies or improper nutrition, whether due to ignorance, excess, 

 or asceticism, one becomes then a fit instrument for anti-social 

 and immoral impulses ; but let him preserve within himself as 

 an individual the vigor of those organs which nature has with 

 unending patience developed in the evolution of the race and he 

 will have a superior chance, to say the least, of adjusting him- 

 self in harmonious relations to his social environment. 



iRibot. 

 3 Spencer. 



'Papers in Penology, 1891, pp. 27-28. 

 ♦Ibid., pp. 57-69. 

 "Juvenile Offenders, Part II. 



•American Journal of Neurology and Psychiatry, vols. II and III, pp. 135 et 

 seq. 



''Female Offenders. 



'Psychology of the Emotions, chap. XIV. 



'Sanity and Insanity, p. 308. et seq. 



