Criminal psychology : a manual for judges, practitioners, and students / by Hans Gross ; translated from the 4th German edition by Horace M. Kallen ; with an introduction by Joseph Jastrow.
- Gross, Hans, 1847-1915.
- Date:
- 1911
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Criminal psychology : a manual for judges, practitioners, and students / by Hans Gross ; translated from the 4th German edition by Horace M. Kallen ; with an introduction by Joseph Jastrow. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard Medical School.
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![model; the practised chess-master plays games without having the board before him; persons half asleep see the arrival of absen- tees; persons lost in the wood at night see spirits and ghosts; very nervous people see them at home, and the lunatic sees the most extraordinary and disgusting things — all these are] imaginations beginning with the events of the daily life, ending with the visions of diseased humanity. Where is the boundary, where a lacuna? Here, as in all events of the daily life, the natural development of the extremely abnormal from the ordinary is the incontrovertible evidence for the frequency of these events. Of course one must not judge by one's self. Whoever does not believe in the devil, and never as a child had an idea of him in mind, will never see him as an illusion. And whoever from the beginning possesses a restricted, inaccessible imagination, can never under- stand the other fellow who is accompanied by the creatures of his imagination. We observe this hundreds of times. We know that everybody sees a different thing in clouds, smoke, mountain tops, ink blots, coffee stains, etc.; that everybody sees it according to the character and intensity of his imagination, and that whatever seems to be confused and unintelligible is to be explained as determined by the nature of the person who expresses or possesses it. So in the study of any work of art. Each is the portrayal of some generality in concrete form. The concrete is understood by anybody who knows enough to recognize it. The generality can be discovered only by him who has a similar imagination, and hence each one draws a different generalization from the same work of art. This variety holds also in scientific questions. I remember how three scholars were trying to decipher hieroglyphs, when that branch of archaeology was still very young. One read the inscription as a declaration of war by a nomadic tribe, another as the acquisition of a royal bride from a foreign king; and the third as an account of the onions consumed by Jews contributing forced labor. Scien- tific views could hardly of themselves have made such extraordinary differences; only imagination could have driven scholars in such diverse directions. And how little we can apprehend the imaginations of others or judge them! This is shown by the fact that we can no longer tell whether children who vivify everything in their imagination see their fancies as really alive. It is indubitable that the savage who takes his fetish to be alive, the child that endows its doll with life, would wonder if fetish and doll of themselves showed signs of](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21173540_0484.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
