MORAL EDUCABILITY. 647 



MORAL EDUCABILITY. 



By EDWAKD PAYSON JACKSON. 



FOR a long time the brain has been accepted, popularly as well 

 as scientifically, as a gauge of intellectual capacity ; less 

 widely it has been known as an equally accurate gauge of physi- 

 cal and also of moral energy. If narrow compass and few and 

 shallow convolutions in what are known as the intellectual 

 " areas " infallibly indicate mental deficiency, the same conditions 

 in the moral areas as infallibly indicate moral deficiency. It is a 

 hard saying, but, whatever bearing it may have upon the doctrine 

 of free moral agency and personal responsibility for action, it is 

 as true as it is hard. 



But there is a great difference in the results of feeble or ar- 

 rested development in the three different sets of brain areas. 

 Each case is attended with disadvantages peculiar to itself ; only 

 in the case of the moral areas are these disadvantages looked upon 

 as " penalties." If the physical basis of intellect is ill developed, 

 the subject may be doomed to obscurity, neglect, and perhaps hard 

 manual labor for his livelihood ; if the ganglia which supply his 

 muscles and vital organs with nerve-force are small and weak, he 

 must suffer life-long invalidism ; in either case he is simply " un- 

 fortunate " ; but if Nature has allowed him only an ill-developed 

 physical basis for the moral faculties, his unhappy deficiency is 

 visited with the abhorrence and indignation of his fellow-men ; 

 he is a criminal, and he must suffer the " just punishment of his 

 misdeeds " in prison or on the gallows. 



Whether these differences involve an element of injustice on 

 the part of Nature or her controller, or on the part of man, is not 

 our question. Suffice that they exist, and that they are, in a meas- 

 ure at least, inevitable, since society does not need to be protected 

 from the mental or the physical imbecile as it does from the moral 

 imbecile. Both justice and policy demand, however, that the chief 

 motive and purpose of society in dealing with the moral imbecile 

 should be self -protection rather than punishment for the sake of 

 punishment. We do not slay mad dogs to punish them for the 

 crime of rabies, but simply to prevent ourselves and others from 

 being bitten. 



The idea is gradually gaining strength that the most just as 

 well as the most effective means of protection from the moral im- 

 becile is moral education. If there is injustice involved in the 

 fact that he was created a moral imbecile, then this is the most 

 direct and obvious means of righting that wrong ; if there is no 

 such injustice, it still remains the best possible policy, both as re- 

 gards society and the subject himself. 



