_Character of the Child._--The view that the child possesses all the vices and all the peculiarities of the criminal is as erroneous as the opinion that the criminal, owing to the arrest of mental development, remains for ever a child, and that he is one in nature with the savage who, unaffected by conditions of time or place, preserves unchanged the type of humanity in the childhood of our race. As yet no proof has ever been supplied of the hypothesis, that concealed within the child’s nature lies the tendency to do evil. But it is an incontestible fact that the child entirely lacks power to withdraw itself from harmful influences, and that if criminal inclinations are artificially implanted in the child, they will infallibly develop if no counteracting influences come into play. The child is a virgin soil, which will in due course bring forth good fruit or bad fruit according to the nature of the tillage; at birth the child is qualitatively and quantitatively incomplete; but all the faculties are there in embryo, and ready for their further development. The smaller the circle of ideas, the stronger will be the influence, the greater will be the effect, of any new idea that enters this circle. In the child, above all, the circle of ideas is so small, that every new idea will constitute a quite appreciable fraction of all the ideas that already exist. _Limits of Educability._--Education is able to develop the useful capacities and qualities of human beings, and to repress those capacities and qualities that are useless and harmful; but it is beyond the power of education to develop qualities and capacities of which the germs do not previously exist in the child. Even the best education is incompetent to improve a character which is congenitally altogether bad, or to do anything for a child whose character, though congenitally good, has been completely corrupted by evil influences. Unfortunately, science is not yet sufficiently advanced to enable us to determine with absolute certainty which children are educable. As long as our knowledge of this matter remains defective, society must undertake the fruitless education of such children. Educability depends, first of all, upon the inherited dispositions of the brain; when the deviations from the average in this respect are considerable, we have to do with a diseased brain. According to the kind and the degree of the deviation, we distinguish several groups of mental abnormality occurring in childhood, namely: (_a_) Morbid psychical (psychopathic) constitutions. (_b_) Congenital feeble-mindedness (debility). (_c_) Fully developed and well-marked mental disorders.