MORAL SENSE IN MAN. 171 



is also common. There is a whole group of phenomena de- 

 nominated moral insanity, and moral perversion is perhaps 

 the most frequent of the precursors of insanity that which 

 first attracts notice. Just as in idiots and imbeciles, and 

 among many savages, human insanity in the midst of the 

 highest civilisation is marked frequently by absence of all 

 decency, modesty, chastity ; by incapacity, in certain cases, 

 of understanding or conceiving ideas of right and wrong ; by 

 propensities to theft, debauchery, and other vices. In short, 

 there may be said to be, for the time, no moral sense. 



A want or perversion of the moral sense characterises 

 also the whole criminal class of the most highly civilised 

 peoples. In French as in British criminals Dr. Despine 

 and Dr. Bruce Thomson alike describe even entire absence of 

 a moral sense, with a singular want also of emotionalness. 

 There is no sense of duty to control the will, the criminal's 

 acts being the ' result of the strongest instinct, appetite, or 

 passion prevailing at the time. . . . Like brutes, savages, 

 and idiots, they yield to natural appetites and passions, un- 

 restrained and unreproached by any feeling of impropriety.' l 



Of American criminals Dr. Macdonald, of the State 

 Asylum for Insane Criminals, Auburn, New York, tells us, 

 * According to my observation, the chief characteristics of 

 these cases are absence of moral sense, absence of delusions, 

 while the intellectual faculties, such as they are, apparently 

 remain intact. They seem to have the arts of lying and theft 

 developed to the highest degree, the former of which they 

 diligently make use of to create mischief and disturbance. 

 They have bad tempers, which they not infrequently exhibit, 

 their paroxysms of passion being followed by a sullen, moody 

 state.' 2 These defects or perversions of the moral sense, then, 

 are equally common in the insane and the criminal, and are 

 equally familiar to the physicians of lunatic asylums and of 

 prisons. Such phenomena are matters of daily observation 

 to myself in my professional rounds as a hospital physi- 

 cian. 



In classes that are not distinctively criminal, and some 



1 Reviewer in the ' London Medical Record ' of May 1875. 

 8 Seventeenth Annual Report of said Asylum (1877), p. 14. 



