130 Insanity and Crime. 



for an unqualified acquittal." It is not, however, a question 

 of punishment only, but of the treatment most likely to amend 

 its subject. 



Unreasonable opinions should not too readily be allowed to 

 lead to the inference of insanity as a disease ; and certainly 

 not when those opinions take a form quite consonant with the 

 motives a criminal would be likely to cherish. Suppose after 

 a murder, a man should say that he believed all people were 

 blind instruments of fate, and it should be found that he had for 

 many years represented himself as compelled to do whatever 

 acts he performed. There would in this, be no indication of 

 insanity, intellectual or moral. But if it could be shown that, 

 after leading a life of average self-control, he had from a par- 

 ticular date believed himself - impelled by a power he could 

 not resist, there would at any rate appear very strong ground 

 for inquiry whether he had fallen under the thraldom of a^ 

 disease. 



Judges have shown no disinclination to believe that disease 

 may cause intellectual insanity; but the only form of moral 

 insanity they have been willing to admit, is that non-existent 

 kind, in which persons capable of cleverly concocted crimes are 

 supposed incapable of knowing what the law deems right and 

 wrong. Such errors show how exclusively professional ten- 

 dencies may warp the mind, so that in particular directions 

 it cannot see the plainest truth. If the brain be admitted 

 to be the organ of animal propensities, moral faculties, and 

 intellectual faculties, it is illogical to deny that its disorder may 

 lead to an excess or a deficiency of action in any one of these 

 departments, and from thence may arise a degree and kind of 

 insanity, by which moral responsibility may be lessened to ;v 

 greater or less extent. A state of general bodily health 

 requires tli.it there shall be a certain proportion between the 

 rate at which work is done by the several organs of which our 

 frame is composed. Too much vitality in the lungs or liver 

 would disturb the condil ion of health, even though those organs 

 did nothing wrong in kind. Thus looking to the body as a 

 whole, it may he diseased simply by processes of supply and 



e going on loo last or too slow in particular parts. 



Physiologists have as yet failed to explain how the brain 

 manages to do its multifarious work; but without presuming 

 to map it out into distinct organs^ we may believe that its 

 healthy act ion as a whole requires an exact, regulation of the 



rah' at which its different parts undergo change, and thus there 

 may he cerehral disorder without any obvious exhibition of 

 inflammation, or other violent action. Microscopic investigation 

 may ultimately throw mueh tight upon these questions; but 

 however obscuro the nature of insanity may he, we must never 



