A prevailing inability to judge of evidence is common among many peoples and classes, and this is a marked sign of mental deficiency. They mistake associations of time and place for relations of cause and effect, and their reasoning is vitiated in consequence. Superstition is fostered by this mental obliquity. The casual objective relation is mistakenly assumed as the subjective necessity. This is especially common among savages, and the illiterate classes of higher culture. It is a mark of mental inferiority tending to irrational action and confusion of thought.
In civilised communities those of the population who are thus constituted form the “dependent” class, incapable of making their own living, and supported either by their families or the state. They may thus survive and reproduce their kind, but ethnic groups afflicted with such intellectual retardation either perish or become subject to those with higher gifts.
_(b) Criminality._—Criminality in its common forms must be classed as a condition of intellectual deficiency brought about by one or several of the causes I have already rehearsed. It is not necessary, here, to enter into the discussion as to whether a criminal is born or made, nor do I speak now of those violators of the law in favour of a higher law, the reformers, apostles, martyrs to a faith and a truth in advance of their time and place, nor of those who have yielded for a moment to some mastering temptation. I speak of the ordinary criminal who for selfish ends habitually violates the usages of the group in which he lives, and to this extent aims at its destruction.
This class cannot be disciplined into the rules necessary to the peace and welfare of the society in which they live. Researches on their psychology show them, as a rule, defective in physical sensibility, more frequently colour-blind, mental instability is always present, vanity is exaggerated, the emotions are violent, and the general intelligence is below the average. We must regard them as pathological, rapidly approaching a self-destructive degree of degeneration. When they are numerous in a group it is a sure sign of its general inferiority.
The most advanced criminologists of to-day have returned to the opinion advocated a generation ago by Quetelet in these words: “Society creates the germs of all crimes which are committed. She instigates them, and the criminal is merely the instrument of their execution.”