I9I4.] PSYCHOLOGY OF JURORS AND JURIES. 321 



other half saw in the paper the most vital evidence not, however, 

 because the judge admitted it but because it appealed to their sense 

 of business honor. Another judge might have ruled it out entirely 

 as it lacked some factors of a formal document. What is evidence 

 to some is not evidence to all, and no line can be drawn for testi- 

 mony. Should not jurors have some right to demand such infor- 

 mation as seems to them to be evidence? The " rules of evidence " 

 are sometimes as wooden as they are usually useful. The mind of 

 the average jury is in danger of being befogged by the ins and outs of 

 matter ofifered as testimony. 



It is true that a jury has more power than it usually takes in ex- 

 amining witnesses or inquiring of the court. But that is in large 

 degree because the juror feels his automatism and his incarceration. 

 Many a juror would like to ask questions but he has not been invited 

 and he is afraid of attitude. He works under threat and all pen- 

 ologists are agreed that timidity and fear under threat do not make 

 for strong intitiative or moral control. 



In no situation in life is what Bergson calls the " professional 

 comic " more evident than in the court room. It is always con- 

 spicuous in convocations of the clergy, of physicians, and even of 

 men of science. The professional comic is the all-enveloping rut 

 and the discerning layman is usually the stone that throws the wheel 

 out on to new ground. This is the value of the jury. The juror is 

 a layman but unfortunately he is too much a strangled and manacled 

 servant to have either a layman's self-respecting freedom or the self- 

 imposed constrictions of professionalism. He is never quite himself 

 because he is under duress involuntarily doing work of professional 

 nicety — involving complex calculation and insight to human motives, 

 a gift of interpretation, a sense of probability, the elimination of 

 personal bias. He is physiologist, pathologist, physicist, psycholo- 

 gist, detective, financier, moralist, jurist. And he is only a lackey 

 without personality. 



It is comparatively seldom that the witness who is sworn to give 

 the " whole truth " is permitted to do so. The juror sees the effort 

 of counsel to prevent his getting hold of it. He notes how the wood- 

 en " rules of evidence '' sometimes cut out a body of testimony, the 



PROC. AMER. PHIL. SOC. , l.UI. 2I5 p, PRINTED DEC. 23, I9I4. 



