680 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of responsibility from tlie fear of punishment, but still lie liolds 

 that animals have a rudimentary sentiment of responsibility. In 

 dogs this sentiment is far from rudimentary. The theme, how- 

 ever, deserves a more extended study, which in this place would 

 have led Ferri too far afield. In any case, as he points out, pun- 

 ishment is not merely a means adopted by man toward man and 

 animals, but is not unknown among the latter themselves. It 

 is above all among animals that punishments are efficacious as 

 deterrents from crime. If monkeys are so thievish in India it is 

 because they are not punished, being held sacred. On the other 

 hand, no punishment can have any effect on certain perverse in- 

 stincts which have become organic from long heredity. There- 

 fore, where crime is an inborn organic tendency, the need of 

 substituting segregation for the usual punitive methods is evi- 

 dent, in accordance with the conclusions of science which have 

 confirmed the efficacy of penal substitutes for punishment even in 

 the animal world. 



That crime is a natural phenomenon can be still better seen 

 when studying the group determined by an antisocial instinct. 

 Ferri asserts that for man as well as for animals every action is 

 determined by a movement of passion, which will be stronger in 

 proportion to the gravity and importance of the act effected, but 

 it always exists, however imperceptible, whatever be the action, 

 and therefore, in studying criminal activity, the principle now 

 dominant in schools and jurisprudence is erroneous, by which 

 passions in their relation to responsibility are distinguished by 

 the degree of their violence — for example, that an overmastering- 

 passion can cancel or diminish the responsibility of the individual. 

 This is an empirical criterion, which in studying criminology in 

 man as well as in animals it is needful to substitute by the more 

 scientific distinction of passions which are useful and passions 

 which are harmful to the species, motives which are social and 

 motives which are antisocial. For crimes provoked by social 

 motives have a natural and juridic character of their own and 

 must be judged apart. 



In this group of murders of an antisocial character are in- 

 cluded those determined by covetousness, ingratitude, war, per- 

 sonal vendetta, antipathies, anger, and the like, which, whether as 

 isolated motives or as concomitants of crime, bear the stamp of 

 individual perversity. The motor impulse must not be con- 

 founded with that thus designated by the classical school of crim- 

 inalists who, when they do not find the cause proportionate to the 

 crime, invent the stock phrase of bloodthirstiness. Thus homi- 

 cides induced by vendetta, by covetousness, etc., are, according to 

 them, acts of bloodthirstiness. On the contrary, the experimental 

 study of delinquency reveals that homicide without apparent or 



