It may be doubted, however, by some of my readers whether this sense
of social values called judgment is the outcome of suggestions
operating throughout the term of one's social education. This is an
essential point, and I must just assume it. It follows from what we
said in an earlier chapter to be the way of the child's learning by
imitation. It will appear true, I trust, to any one who may take the
pains to observe the child's tentative endeavours to act up to social
usages in the family and school. One may then actually see the growth
of the sort of judgment which I am describing. Psychologists are
coming to see that even the child's sense of his own personal self is
a gradual attainment, achieved step by step through his imitative
responses to his personal environment. His thought of himself is an
interpretation of his thought of others, and his thought of another
is doe to further accommodation of his active processes to changes in
his thought of a possible self. Around this fundamental movement in
his personal growth all the values of his life have their play. So I
say that his sense of truth in the social relationships of his
environment is the outcome of his very gradual learning of his
personal place in these relationships.
We reach the conclusion, therefore, from this part of our study, that
the socially unfit person is the person of poor judgment. He may have
learned a great deal; he may in the main reproduce the activities
required by his social tradition; but with it all he is to a degree
out of joint with the general system of estimated values by which
society is held together. This may be shown to be true even of the
pronounced types of unsocial individuals of whom we had occasion to
speak at the outset. The criminal is, socially considered, a man of
poor judgment. He may be more than this, it is true. He may have a bad
strain of heredity, what the theologians call "original sin"; he then
is an "habitual criminal" in the current distinction of criminal
types; and his own sense of his failure to accept the teachings of
society may be quite absent, since crime is so normal to him. But the
fact remains that in his judgment he is mistaken; his normal is not
society's normal. He has failed to be educated in the judgments of his
fellows, however besides and however more deeply he may have failed.
Or, again, the criminal may commit crime simply because he is carried
away in an eddy of good companionship, which represents a temporary
current of social life; or his nervous energies may be overtaxed
temporarily or drained of their strength, so that his education in
social judgment is forgotten: he is then the "occasional" criminal. It
is true of the man of this type also that while he remains a criminal
he has lost his balance, has yielded to temptation, has gratified
private impulse at the expense of social sanity; all this shows the
lack of that sustaining force of moral consciousness which represents
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