LAW AND INSANITY. 85 



In the case of Stevens v. The State of Indiana, the instruction to 

 the jury, that, if they believed the defendant knew the difference be- 

 tween right and wrong in respect to the act in question, if he was con- 

 scious that such act was one which he ought not to do, he was respon- 

 sible — was held to be erroneous. 



It would appear, then, that the American courts, which, having 

 inherited the common law of England, at first followed docilely in 

 the wake of the English courts, are now exhibiting a disposition to 

 emancipate themselves from an authority which they perceive to be 

 founded on defective and erroneous views of insanity, and a desire to 

 bring the law more into accordance with the results of scientific obser- 

 vation. The decisions of the court of New Hampshire in Boardman 

 V. Woodman^ State v. Jones, and State v. Pike, are especially worthy 

 of attention for their searching discussion of the relations of insanity 

 to jurisprudence, and for the decisive abandonment of the right-and- 

 wrong test of responsibility. In the case of State v. Pike, Chief-Jus- 

 tice Perley instructed the jury that they should return a verdict of not 

 guilty " if the killing was the offspring of mental disease in the defend- 

 ant ; that neither delusion nor knowledge of right and wrong, nor de- 

 sign or cunning in planning and executing the killing, and in escaping 

 or avoiding detection, nor ability to recognize acquaintance, or to 

 labor or transact business or manage affairs, is, as a matter of law. a 

 test of mental disease ; but that all symptoms and all tests of mental 

 disease are purely matters of fact to be determined by the jury." 



"A striking and conspicuous want of success," said Judge Doe in the same 

 case, "has attended the efforts made to adjust the legal relations of mental dis- 

 ease. ... It was for a long time supposed that men, however insane, if they 

 knew an act to be wrong, could refrain from doing it. But whether that sus- 

 picion is correct or not is a pure question of fact; in other words, a medical 

 supposition — in other words, a medical theory. Whether it originated in tlie 

 medical or any other profession, or in the general notions of mankind, is imma- 

 terial. It is as medical in its nature as the opposite theory. The knowledge- 

 test in all its forms, and the delusion-test, are medical theories introduced in 

 immature stages of science, in the dim light of earlier times, and subsequently, 

 upon more extensive observations and more critical examinations, repudiated by 

 the medical profession. But legal tribunals have claimed these tests as immu- 

 table principles of law, and have fancied they were abundantly vindicated by a 

 sweeping denunciation of medical theories — unconscious that this aggressive de- 

 fense was an irresistible assault on their own position. ... In this manner, 

 opinions, purely medical and pathological in their character, relating entirely to 

 questions of fact, and full of errors, as medical experts now testify, passed into 

 books of law, and acquired the force of judicial decisions. Defective medical 

 theories usurped the position of common-law principles. . . . Whether the old 

 or the new medical theories are correct is a question of fact for the jury; it is 

 not the business of the court to know whether any of them are correct. The 

 law does not change with every advance of science; nor does it maintain a fan- 

 tastic consistency by adhering to medical mistakes which science has corrected. 

 The legal principle, however much it may formerly have been obscured by patho- 



