But the question still awaits a final solution. It is not easy to prove that crime does not involve any voluntary perversion of the will—that it is purely an organic defect, a sort of malformation of the brain; nor is it easy to disprove it either. It cannot be denied that education and environment have a profound influence on mentality. It cannot be denied, again, that crimes abound in particular classes of society rather than others. These and similar reasons give plausibility to the theory, just referred to.
Whichever way the question may be decided, the ethical significance of the theory is very important. Once the theory is accepted, the moral colour of crime will at once change; and one’s view of responsibility must undergo a revision. If a lunatic is pitied rather than condemned, and if, in the eye of law as well as of ordinary mortals, he is free from responsibility for what he does, then, why should a different attitude be maintained towards the criminal, who also is diseased? Why should not the prison yield place to the hospital? Why should not the police and the magistracy be shown the door and, instead, why should not all civilised states strengthen the medical services and the clergy? Since the good old days of the celebrated ‘Vicar of Wakefield,’ the question has been insistently asked, and philosophic thought is waiting for an answer.
That crime is not a moral phenomenon only—that it is a a “phenomenon of complex origin and the result of biological, physical and social conditions”—has come to be pressed upon our attention with very great emphasis. But that this view of crime involves a change in our moral out-look and that this change in its turn, is fraught with other consequences, has not perhaps been equally emphasised. We regarded the criminal as a bad man; we are beginning to look upon him as a sick man; this means that the responsibility for a phenomenon like crime, is shifted from the will of the agent to his environment. And if doctoring the body and through it, the mind, is the proper way to mitigate crime, then, the whole
