Like the little cage-bred bird which instinctively crouches and trembles at the sight of the hawk, although ignorant of its ferocity, an honest man feels instinctive repugnance at the sight of a miscreant and thus signalises the abnormality of the criminal type.
_THE BORN CRIMINAL AND HIS RELATION TO MORAL INSANITY AND EPILEPSY_
No one, before my father, had ever recognised in the criminal an abnormal being driven by an irresistible atavistic impulse to commit anti-social acts, but many had observed (cases of the kind were too frequent to escape notice) the existence of certain individuals, nearly always members of degenerate families, who seemed from their earliest infancy to be prompted by some fatal impulse to do evil to their fellow-men. They differed from ordinary people, because they hated the very persons who to normal beings are the nearest and dearest, parents, husbands, wives, and children, and because their inhuman deeds seemed to cause them no remorse. These individuals, who were sometimes treated as lunatics, sometimes as diseased persons, and sometimes as criminals, were said by the earliest observers to be afflicted with moral insanity.
_Analogy._ Those who are familiar with all that Pinel, Morel, Richard Connon, and other great alienists have written on the morally insane cannot help remarking the analogy, nay identity, of the physical, intellectual, and moral characteristics of this type of lunatic and those of the born criminal.
The same physical anomalies already observed in criminals, as described in the first chapter (cranial deformities, asymmetry, physical and functional left-handedness, anomalies in the teeth, hands, and feet), are described by these older writers as being characteristic of the morally insane, as are also those mental and moral qualities already noted in the born criminal--vanity, want of affection, cruelty, idleness, and love of orgies.
Only the analogy of the origin and early manifestations was lacking to complete the proof of the identity of the two forms. It is true that moral insanity is more often found in the descendants of insane, neurotic, or dipsomaniac forebears than in those of criminals, and that the characteristics are manifested at an earlier age than is the case with born criminals, but these differences are not of fundamental importance.