320 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Yet I may say that it "will appear true, I trust, to any one who 

 may take the pains to observe the child's tentative endeavors to 

 act up to social usages in the family and school. One may then 

 actually see the growth of the sort of judgment which I am de- 

 scribing. Psychologists are coming to see that even his sense of 

 his own personal self is a gradual attainment, achieved by the 

 child through his imitative responses to his personal environ- 

 ment. His thought of himself is an interpretation of his thought 

 of others, and his thought of another is due to further accommo- 

 dation of his active processes to changes in his thought of a pos- 

 sible self. And around this fundamental movement in his per- 

 sonal growth all the values of his life have their play. So I say 

 that his sense of truth in the social relationships of his environ- 

 ment is the outcome of his very gradual learning of his personal 

 place in these relationships. 



We reach the conclusion, therefore, from this part of our 

 study, that the socially unfit person is the person of poor judg- 

 ment. He may have learned a great deal ; he may in the main 

 reproduce the activities required by his social tradition ; but with 

 it all he is to a degree out of joint with the general system of 

 estimated values by which society is held together. This may 

 be shown to be true even of the pronounced types of unsocial 

 individuals whom we had occasion to speak of at the outset. 

 The criminal is a man of poor judgment. He may be more than 

 this, it is true. He may have a bad strain of heredity, what the 

 theologians call " original sin"; he then is an "habitual crimi- 

 nal" in Lombroso's distinction of types, and his own sense of his 

 failure to accept the teachings of society may be quite absent, 

 since crime is so normal to him. But the fact remains that in 

 his judgment he is mistaken; his normal is not society's normal. 

 He has failed to be educated in the judgments of his fellows, 

 however besides and however more deeply he may have failed. 

 Or, again, the criminal may commit crime simply because he is 

 carried away in an eddy of good companionship, which repre- 

 sents a temporary current of social life ; or his nervous energies 

 may be overtaxed temporarily or drained of their strength, so 

 that his education in social judgment is forgotten : he is then 

 the " occasional " criminal. It is true of him also that while he is 

 a criminal he has lost his balance, has yielded to temptation, has 

 gratified private impulse at the expense of social sanity ; all this 

 shows the lack, of that sustaining force of social consciousness 

 which represents the level of righteousness in his time and place. 

 Then, as to the idiot, the imbecile, the insane, they, too, have no 

 good judgment, for the very adequate but pitiful reason that they 

 have no judgment at all. 



\_To be continued.~\ 



