J.— PSYCHOLOGY. 223 



aspect of punishment is placed in the foreground, the only psychological 

 problems of serious import are those involved in the question of the 

 responsibility of the offender. This question of responsibilitj^ is one over 

 which medical and legal minds have long been at loggerheads. The source 

 of this age-old controversy between lawyer and medical man lies primarily 

 in the fact that the two use the word ' responsibility ' in entirely different 

 senses. For the lawyer ' responsibility ' is purely a legal term, and the 

 question of responsibility is to be determined on the basis of evidence 

 germane to its legal meaning. For the medical man ' responsibility ' is 

 an ethical term, and the question of responsibility therefore raises much 

 wider issues. As the controversy develops it becomes more and more 

 entangled, owing to the fact that the lawyer insists on discussing psycho- 

 pathology and medicine, which he is not competent to discuss, and the 

 medical man insists on discussing ethics, which, however competent he 

 may be to discuss such topics, has little relevancy to the problem whether 

 an individual is to be regarded as legally ' responsible.' 



It is by no means easy to define clearly what we mean by ' responsi- 

 bility,' even in the legal sense. The legal position would appear to be, in 

 the words of the leading authority on criminal law already quoted : ' No 

 act is a crime if the person who does it is at the time when it is done pre- 

 vented either by defective mental power or by any disease affecting his 

 mind (a) from knowing the nature and quality of his act, or {b) from knowing 

 that the act is wrong, or (c) from controlling his own conduct, unless the 

 absence of the power of control has been produced by his own default. 

 But an act may be a crime if the person who does it is affected by disease, 

 if such disease does not in fact produce upon his mind one or other of the 

 effects above mentioned in reference to that act.' I need not in a gathering 

 of psychologists point out the extreme difficulty of the psychological 

 problems involved in that definition, more especially in so far as the 

 question of control is raised. I do not believe, however, that responsibility 

 in this sense is a practical issue at all in connection with any penal system. 

 At least it does not arise in the form in which it is usually raised, nor at 

 the point at which it is usually raised, in a practical consideration of the 

 problems of punishment as affecting the individual who has infringed 

 social laws. It is a question wliich we inherit from an antiquated and 

 outworn theory of punishment. So far as real, urgent, and soluble psycho- 

 logical problems are involved, these arise at an entirely difierent point 

 and in an entirely different connection, as we shall see presently. 



It is when we emphasise the protective and particularly the reformatory 

 aspects of punishment that the vital psychological problems emerge. So 

 far as we base our practice in social punishments upon these two functions, 

 it is not too much to say that our whole practice must be guided primarily 

 by the outcome of psychological inquiry. The two functions are not in 

 conflict. We may aim at the protection of society by the reform of the 

 delinquent. Treatment which is successful in eliminating a particular 

 tendency to delinquency in an individual will ipso facto protect the com- 

 munity against the repetition of this delinquency by the same individual. 

 Of course it will not necessarily protect society against the same form of 

 delinquency in another individual. That is why we have to consider 

 punishment, rather than reformation pure and simple, and that is why 



