A Plea for the Criminal: Being a reply to Dr. Chapple's work: 'The Fertility of the Unfit', and an Attempt to explain the leading principles of Criminological and Reformatory ScienceKayll, James Leslie Allan
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A Plea for the Criminal: Being a reply to Dr. Chapple's work: 'The Fertility of the Unfit', and an Attempt to explain the leading principles of Criminological and Reformatory Science
Kayll, James Leslie Allan
Chapple, William Allan, 1864-1936. The fertility of the unfit; Crime; Criminals; Reformatories
In the normal man the sexual instinct is inherited but the passion is
submissive to the control of the will. The will is supreme and
self-restraint is always possible. The immoral man has refused to
exercise this restraining power, he has, in fact, by his immoral
thoughts, lent his mind to the strengthening of the passion until it has
gained an ascendancy. Continual sexual excitement has resulted in the
nervous centres controlling the sexual organs becoming so powerfully
developed as to act almost automatically, and independently of the will.
In the normal man, sexual excitement results upon the mental vision; in
the sensualist the excitement precedes the vision. Another effect is
noticed in the physiognomy which changes in accordance with the
development of the nerve centres and presents all the appearances of the
typical sensualist or prostitute.
In some cases the sensualist transmits this highly organised or
disordered nervous system to his descendants, and consequently when they
arrive at a certain age they find their bodies invaded by a passion over
which they have small, and sometimes no, control. It is distinctly a
case of functional insanity with them. Their will power is weak because
of undue stress, but it has not been perverted. Perversion may follow;
but may also be avoided, and even the will sufficiently strengthened so
that it may re-assume control and subject the passion to control. The
influence of heredity is here also confined to the nervous system. That
is, the direct influence, the influence which was first felt and before
it received any support which the mind of the victim may give it. The
cases of hereditary suicides, murderers and assassins afford a very
large field for investigation, and we cannot do more than suggest some
causes which seem to give strong evidence of their existence. These
causes if their existence be allowed, and we see every reason that it
should, will restrict the influence of heredity to a much narrower
sphere than is popularly supposed. The old story of the devil preaching
upon the horrors of hell serves somewhat to illustrate our meaning. When
the abbot enquired whether it was not contrary to his interests to draw
so vivid and terrible a picture he replied in the negative and gave as
his reason that the man who contemplated the horrors of hell was the man
who was bound to find his way there.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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