Crime & criminals : being the jurisprudence of crime, medical biological, and psycological / by Charles Mercier... with an introduction by Sir Bryan Donkin.

  • Charles Arthur Mercier
Date:
1918
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Crime & criminals : being the jurisprudence of crime, medical biological, and psycological / by Charles Mercier... with an introduction by Sir Bryan Donkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    73/334 page 51
    51 by the same motive ; and when he makes inquiries to discover the best school, extends his business so that he may afford to send his sons to the university and his daughters to complete their education in France, he is prompted indirectly by the same motive. Whatever the motive for any act—and it is often im¬ possible for the observer to assign the motive, often difficult or impossible for the actor himself to do so— no one doubts that every act of every sane human being is prompted by some motive, which is all that we need insist upon now. We can always assign some motive for every act we perform or witness, and, though we may not be correct as to the particular motive we assign, we take it for granted that the act had some motive ; and if we cannot assign any motive at all, we regard the act as mad. The perpetration of a motiveless act, by which we mean an act for which no motive is apparent, is always regarded as a sign of madness ; and this of itself shows how constantly and inevitably we take it for granted that acts are prompted by motives. And by a motive we mean a desire or an aversion. Motives, as we have seen, may act directly or indirectly. In the first case the act is predominantly instinctive : in the second it contains an infusion of reason ; and the more indirect the motive—that is to say, the longer the series of acts by which it seeks satisfaction —the larger is the share of reason in the whole operation. We have already seen that instinct, by which we now mean in¬ stinctive desire, dictates with imperious necessity the ultimate end to be pursued, and that reason discovers and devises the means by which the end may be com¬ passed. We have seen, also, what a long series of suc¬ cessive steps may be required to compass one of these ultimate purposes and satisfy one of these primitive
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