THE METHOD OP AGE GRADATION 75 



stincts are not yet developed, whereas with children 

 who are arrested at about the mental age of nine, 

 the instincts do show themselves without getting far 

 enough along to develop the inhibition and so be- 

 come a moral defect. 



We may leave undecided the question of the cor- 

 rectness of this explanation, but in any event the 

 fact remains that pronounced retardation in moral- 

 ity is not associated ivith equally pronounced intel- 

 lectual deficiency. The moral deficiency therefore 

 displays a certain independence in its existence, and 

 to that extent the old designation "moral insanity " 

 was not utterly devoid of significance. 



We may allude, also, at this point, to a very sim- 

 ilar conclusion reached by Kramer, who must, natu- 

 rally, have encountered this type frequently among 

 his criminal subjects. He says: "We have to do 

 here with individuals whose defectiveness is on the 

 moral side and in whom there can be noted even 

 from their early youth a decided lack of moral ideas 

 and altruistic spirit. In raising the question as to 

 in how far these moral defects exist independent of 

 intellectual deficiency, it is worth noting that in the 

 examination a number of these children obtained a 

 result that corresponded with their actual age. And 

 even in the cases in which the mental ability fell be- 

 low the norm, there was no parallelism at all be- 

 tween the two kinds of deficiency. ' ' 20 



20 See Reference 54, p. 28. We may mention also in this connec- 

 tion the results obtained by Frau Dosai-RevSsz (4) with separate 

 tests. She compared the efficiency in computation, memory and 

 report of normal children, simple feeble-minded and morally feeble- 

 minded and found that the results for the last-named group fell 

 almost entirely between the results for the two other groups. 



