The criminal mind / Maurice de Fleury.

  • Maurice de Fleury
Date:
1901
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The criminal mind / Maurice de Fleury. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The modern scientific ideas concerning the criminal brain are displeasing to the great majority of magistrates and jurists, and are most strenuously repudiated by those who have had no leisure to study them otherwise than super¬ ficially. These personages have been brought up in a firmly-fixed belief in Free Will, and accus¬ tomed from their school-time to regard that faith as fundamental and indispensable to the proper working of civilized society ; nothing can be less surprising than their refusal to adopt new theories, which, being accepted, might give en¬ couragement to evil. Let it be observed also that these doctrines seem to tend towards the restriction of the rôle of the jurist and the magis¬ trate respectively, and to diminish the importance of their office and rank, by regarding them no longer as judges discerning the intentions of men, and appointed to punish those who have volun¬ tarily chosen the path of evil, but simply as defenders of public order and the civic peace. Their repugnance is quite natural, and de¬ serving of respect, and it is supported and fortified by popular feeling and the opinion of the greater number. When the newspapers report a monstrous crime, with a hundred sensational details, a great
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