When such nostalgiacs confess their deed they never, so far as I know, confess its motive. Apparently they do not know the motive and hence cannot explain the deed. As a rule one hears, “I don’t know why, I had to do it.” Just where this begins to be abnormal, must be decided by the physician, who must always be consulted when nostalgia is the ground for a crime. Of course it is not impossible that a criminal in order to excite pity should explain his crime as the result of unconquerable home-sickness--but that must always be untrue because, as we have shown, anybody who acts out of home-sickness, does not know it and can not tell it.
Reflex actions are also of greater significance than as a rule they are supposed to be. According to Lotze,[103] “reflex actions are not limited to habitual and insignificant affairs of the daily life. Even compounded series of actions which enclose the content even of a crime may come to actuality in this way ... in a single moment in which the sufficient opposition of some other emotional condition, the enduring intensity of emotion directed against an obstacle, or the clearness of a moving series of ideas is lacking. The deed may emerge from the image of itself without being caused or accompanied by any resolve of the doer. Hearings of criminals are full of statements which point to such a realization of their crimes, and these are often considered self-exculpating inventions, inasmuch as people fear from their truth a disturbance or upsetting of the notions concerning adjudication and actionability. The mere recognition of that psychological fact alters the conventional judgment but little; the failure in these cases consists in not having prevented that automatic transition of images into actions, a transition essentially natural to our organism which ought, however, like so many other things, to be subjected to power of the will.” Reflex movements require closer study.[104] The most numerous and generally known are: dropping the eyelids, coughing, sneezing, swallowing, all involuntary actions against approaching or falling bodies; then again the patellar reflex and the kremaster reflex, etc. Other movements of the same kind were once known and so often practised that they became involuntary.[105] Hence, for example, the foolish question how a person believed to be disguised can be recognized as man or woman. The well known answer is: let some small object fall on his lap; the woman will spread her limbs apart because she is accustomed to wear a dress in which she catches the object; the man will bring his limbs together because he wears trousers and is able to catch the object only in this way. There are so many such habitual actions that it is difficult to say where actual reflexes end and habits begin. They will be properly distinguished when the first are understood as single detached movements and the last as a continuous, perhaps even unconscious and long-enduring action. When I, for example, while working, take a cigar, cut off the end, light it, smoke, and later am absolutely unaware that I have done this, what has occurred is certainly not a reflex but a habitual action. The latter does not belong to this class in which are to be grouped only such as practically bear a defensive character. As examples of how such movements may have criminological significance only one’s own experience may be cited because it is so difficult to put oneself at the point of view of another. I want to consider two such examples. One evening I passed through an unfrequented street and came upon an inn just at the moment that an intoxicated fellow was thrown out, and directly upon me. At the very instant I hit the poor fellow a hard blow on the ear. I regretted the deed immediately, the more so as the assaulted man bemoaned his misfortune, “inside they throw him out, outside they box his ears.” Suppose that I had at that time burst the man’s ear-drum or otherwise damaged him heavily. It would have been a criminal matter and I doubt whether anybody would have believed that it was a “reflex action,” though I was then, as to-day, convinced that the action was reflex. I didn’t in the least know what was going to happen to me and what I should do. I simply noticed that something unfriendly was approaching and I met it with a defensive action in the form of an upper-cut on the ear. What properly occurred I knew only when I heard the blow and felt the concussion of my hand. Something similar happened to me when I was a student. I had gone into the country hunting before dawn, when some one hundred paces from the house, right opposite me a great ball rolled down a narrow way.