acute, become habitual, and at last you have a ready-made person “marked
for evil.” Add to this the indubitable fact that the marked persons are
considerably wiser and better-instructed than the others. Whether this
is so by accident or is causally established is difficult to say; but
inasmuch as most of them are compelled just by their deformities to
deprive themselves of all common pleasures and to concern themselves
with their own affairs, once they have been fed to satiety with abuse,
scorn and heckling, the latter is the more likely. Under such
circumstances they have to think more, they learn more than the others
to train their wits, largely as means of defense against physical
attack. They often succeed by wit, but then, they can never be brought
into a state of good temper and lovableness when they are required to
defend themselves by means of sharp, biting and destructive wit.
Moreover, if the deformed is naturally not well-disposed, other dormant
evil tendencies develop in him, which might never have realized
themselves if he had had no need of them for purposes of
self-defense--lying, slander, intrigue, persecution by means of
unpermitted instruments, etc. All this finally forms a determinate
complex of phenomena which is undivorceably bound in the eyes of the
expert with every species of deformity: the mistrusting of the deaf man,
the menacing expression of the blind, the indescribable and therefore
extremely characteristic smiling of the hump-back are not the only
typical phenomena of this kind.
All this is popularly known and is abnormally believed in, so that we
often discover that the deformed are more frequently suspected of crime
than normal people. Suspicion turns to them especially when an unknown
criminal has committed a crime the accomplishment of which required a
particularly evil nature and where the deed of itself called forth
general indignation. In that case, once a deformed person is suspected,
grounds of suspicion are not difficult to find; a few collect more as a
rolling ball does snow. After that the sweet proverb: “Vox populi, vox
dei,” drives the unfortunate fellow into a chaos of evidential grounds
of suspicion which may all be reduced to the fact that he has red hair
or a hump. Such events are frightfully frequent.[90]
Section 15. (2) _Causes of Irritation._
Just as important as these phenomena are the somatic results of psychic
irritation. These latter clear up processes not to be explained by words
alone and often over-valued and falsely interpreted. Irritations are
important for two reasons: (1) as causes of crime, and (2) as signs of
identification in examination.
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