Lombroso’s positivism had one consequence of great importance to criminal anthropology. “Anthropology,” in his view, embraced all the facts which, proximately or remotely, determine the being and life of man. But he had a preference for observing and utilizing _states_—_i.e._, persistent facts—in place of observing and utilizing _processes_. Thus it happened that Lombroso’s all-embracing anthropology, which was far more comprehensive than anthropology as understood by Virchow, Broca, and Mantegazza, availed itself more frequently and more thoroughly of anthropometrical and descriptive data than of the results of experiment, which must first be planned and then registered, whereas congenital or acquired physical characters are always ready for observation, and may easily be submitted to serial study and to statistical treatment. He had little inclination for the clinical observation of transient, morbid processes, although he did not disregard this field. In spite of his conviction that mental disorders are diseases of the brain, he did not regard the brain as something which man carries about in his skull as he carries his watch in his pocket; he studied the sick brain of an acute maniac in its organic connection with the entire life-process, in its dependence upon the social conditions of life, in its subordination to hereditary influences—and this inheritance he was accustomed to trace back to the first beginnings of organic life, regarding man as the final product of a cosmic causal chain. Thus, to him the permanent documents, the “stigmata,” in which these resultant effects of remote causality find a universal and permanent expression, necessarily seemed to him to be of greater importance than the transient phenomena of clinical observation. The “types,” the categories of criminals, of geniuses, pseudo-geniuses, and cretins, must, he considered, be more worthy of observation than the impulses to speech and movement of the maniac or the katatonic. So, also, he was fascinated by epilepsy, by the trance-state of “spiritualistic” mediums, exhibiting in a high degree phenomena always alike, always recurring in the same manner, whereas the internal processes in the psyche which eluded objective research attracted his observation less, although he was one of the first who appreciated at its true value Fechner’s idea of psycho-physics.