p 
 
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 Cornell University Law Library f 
 
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 The School of Law of Cornell University 
 
 And Presented February 14, 1893 
 
 IN nenoRY of 
 
 JUDQE DOUGLASS BOARDMAN 
 
 FIRST OEAN OF THE snPOOL 
 
 By his Wife and Daugliter 
 A. M. BOARDMAN and ELLEN D. WILLIAMS 
 
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Cornell University Library 
 KD 7897.B92 
 
 Unsoundness of mind in relation to crimi 
 
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UNSOUNDNESS OF MIND 
 
 IN RELATION TO 
 
 CRIMINAL ACTS. 
 
 TO WHICH THE FIR^T .SlfiGDEN PRIZE WAS 
 THIS YmRifWiEfDtPD, 
 
 KING AND QDEEN'S COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS IN IRELAND. 
 
 JOHN CHARLES gJJCKNILL, M.D., 
 
 IJCBNTIATE OP THE BOTAL COLLEGE OP PHYSICIANS, FELLOW OP UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, AND FELLOW 
 
 OF THE BOYAt MEDICAL AND CraRDBOICAL SOCIETY, LONDON, AND PHYSICIAN ID THE 
 
 DEVON COUNTY LUNATIC ASYLUM. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA: 
 
 T. & J. W. JOHNSON & CO., 
 LAW BOOKSELLERS AND PUBLISHERS, 
 
 No. 197 CHESTNUT STREET. 
 
 1856. 
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Eobb, Pile & M'Elroy, Pr a. 
 Lodge Street. 
 
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TO THE 
 
 RIGHT HONORABLE THE LORD ST. LEONARDS. 
 
 My Loed : — 
 
 The honor your Lordship has conferred in permitting me to dedicate 
 these pages to your Lordship, has greatly enhanced the value of that 
 Prize, which, provided by your Lordship's enlightened liberality, invited 
 the Author to express his opinions on the important subject of this 
 Essay. 
 
 Your Lordship, having held successively the GtEEAT Seal in England 
 and in Ireland, has been the legal guardian of all insane persons in this 
 kingdom. Your Lordship has also effected an extensive revision of the 
 statutes, regulating the care and treatment of the insane and the pro- 
 tection of their property. Great, therefore, have been your opportuni- 
 ties of knovfing to what extent this helpless and afflicted class has suf- 
 fered from legislative error, and from the shortcomings of science. The 
 spirit of free inquiry, which of late years has been steadily directed to 
 this subject, has been fruitful of the happiest results in the treatment of 
 insanity; and it is to be hoped that the same spirit will, ere long, furnish 
 indications by which that condition may with certainty be recognized ; 
 and by which an act, otherwise criminal, may be known without doubt 
 as the result of physical necessity dependent upon disease of the brain. 
 
 That your Lordship has encouraged and patronized this spirit, must 
 seem to a physician not the least honorable act in your honorable and 
 noble career. 
 
 That one of the most distinguished Lawyers of the age should have 
 afforded to a College of Physicians the means of offering Prizes for 
 Essays like the one contained in these pages, affords new ground for the 
 
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iv PREFACE. 
 
 belief that the principles of criminal jurisprudence cannot be deemed 
 irreconcilable with those of physical science. It also affords me a just 
 reason to feel proud of the honor of dedicating to your Lordship this 
 humble effort to promote the agreement of these principles. 
 
 I remain, 
 Your Lordship's most obedient humble Servant, 
 
 THE AUTHOK. 
 Devon County Lunatic Asylum, 
 October 24th, 1854. 
 
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CONTENTS. 
 
 The pages referred to are those between brackets [ ]. 
 
 Question proposed ....... 1 
 
 Range and Boundaries of Insanity . . . . .2 
 
 Degrees and Nature of ReaponsibiKty ..... 4 
 
 Knowledge of Bight and Wrong . . . . . .5 
 
 Sensationalism and Rationalism ...... 7 
 
 Bcleeticism most congenial to Medical Philosophy . . .9 
 
 The Somatic and Psychical Schools of Mental Pathology . . 13 
 
 Freedom of Will partially affected by Insanity .• . . . . 16 
 
 Absolute Equity unattainable . . . . . .17 
 
 Ends of Punishment . . . . . _ . .19 
 
 Cousin's Opinion upon . . . . . . .20 
 
 Definitions of Insanity — Guislain's . . . . .22 
 
 Haslam's Denial of Sanity to all men . . . . .25 
 
 Opinions of Johnson, Boileau, and Cicero . . . .26 
 
 Author's Definition of Insanity .... .28 
 
 Habitual Passion not Insanity . . . . . .29 
 
 Pathological Change the Essential Element . . . .30 
 
 Ethology of Insanity . . . . . . .33 
 
 Tests of Insanity . . . . . . . .34: 
 
 Effects of Remedies . . . . . . . ib. 
 
 Detection of Cerebro-Mental Disease . . . . .37 
 
 Opinions of Coke and Hale . . ... 38 
 
 Of Erskine ........ 40 
 
 Of Gibbs and Mansfield ....... 42 
 
 Of Lyndhurst ........ 43 
 
 Sir A. Cockburne's Defence of MacNaughten . . . .44 
 
 Exposition of the Law given by the Judges to the Lords . . 46 
 
 Criticisms upon . . . . . . . .47 
 
 Knowledge of Good and Evil, Locke's Definition of . . .49 
 
 Bentham's Utility and Inconvenience . . . . .50 
 
 Case in point . . . . . . . .51 
 
 Fiction that "all persons know the Law," criticised . . .52 
 
 Principle of Duty the True Foundation of Obligation . . .66 
 
 Responsibility dependent upon Power, not upon Knowledge . .59 
 
 Knowledge of Right and Wrong in the Abstract and in the Particular, 
 Baron Hume upon ....... 60 
 
 Illustrations . .... . . 63 
 
 Collective Opinion of Judges found Untenable . . . .66 
 
 Delusion Test, with Illustrations . . . . 68 
 
 The Nature of Delusion Discussed . . . . 70 ' 
 
 Definition of Delusion . . . . . . .73 
 
 No Single Symptom of Insanity Decisive . . . . ib. 
 
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VI 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 The Group of Symptoms NeedM 
 
 Characteristics of Delusions of the Insane 
 
 DiflSculties of Eecognizing Cerebro-Mental Disease 
 
 Aspects of Mental Disease, Beoognition of by Experience 
 
 Different Practices in this and other Countries in the Examination of 
 
 Criminal Lunatics 
 Moral Insanity ..... 
 Bsquirol's Classification of Homicidal Insanity 
 Impulsive Insanity Doubted 
 
 Examples of Homicidal Insanity from Esquirol and Marc 
 Examples giyen by Author .... 
 
 Uncertain Action of English Law, Mr. Taylor's Reflgctions on 
 Burton's Case at Huntingdon 
 Reports from the Annales Psychologiques 
 Case from American Journal of Insanity 
 Author's Classification of Homicides by the Insane 
 Punishment of the Partially Insane, Pritchard upon 
 Emotional Theory of Insanity 
 
 Minor Forms of Insanity ■without Delusion : Pyromania 
 Kleptomania ..... 
 
 Wordsworth upon .... 
 
 Vampirism ..... 
 
 Suggested Changes of Legal Procedure when Insanity is pleaded 
 Opinion of H.M, Inspectors of Asylums in Ireland 
 Legal Procedure in France 
 The Criminal Ward at Bethlem 
 
 Medical Amici Curiae suggested like Masters of Trinity Comp. 
 Public Prosecutors Needful .... 
 
 73 
 
 T5 
 11 
 18 
 
 80 
 
 82 
 
 83 
 
 84 
 
 87 
 
 89 
 
 93 
 
 ib. 
 
 96 
 
 98 
 
 100 
 
 102 
 
 103 
 
 106 
 
 108 
 
 110 
 
 112 
 
 113 
 
 116 
 
 117 
 
 119 
 
 121 
 
 123 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Note A. The Difficulties of Definition no Obstacle to Justice . . 125 
 Note B. Do Vicious Habits of Mind constitute Insanity with Immunity 
 
 from Punishment ? . . . . . . .126 
 
 Note C. Hallucinations as Tests of Insanity .... 131 
 
 Note D. Trial of Ann Brough at Guilford .... 133 
 
 NoteE. The Emotional Theory of Insanity .... 137 
 
 Note F. A State Asylum necessary for Lunatics of Criminal Disposition 141 
 
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AN ESSAY. 
 
 What is Insanity? what its responsibility? and its negation? what 
 is the relation between the two ? Such are the questions propounded 
 by the subject for the Sugden Prize Essay. 
 
 Questions they are which have for ages invited the critical and specu- 
 lative power of physicians, moralists, and jurists, and have eluded the 
 grasp of the most acute and the most erudite minds. 
 
 The difficulty of solving these questions has not only been humiliating 
 to the proud intellect of man, but has been attended with great practical 
 inconvenience and with no inconsiderable or unfrequent danger of the 
 exercise of human justice being perverted from the strict line of recti- 
 tude ; of its being forced to deviate on the one side towards a mischiev- 
 ous and *sentimental sympathy for peculiarities and infirmities of p:|c9-i 
 temper, or on the other towards an inflexible administration of L J 
 penal and vindictive reprisals. 
 
 The difficulty inherent in the question appears to depend upon the 
 impossibility of establishing a strict relation between qualities of which 
 the one is infinitely fluctuating and variable, the other is fixed and 
 definite. ^'^ 
 
 Insanity is a condition or the human mind ranging from the slightest 
 aberration from positive health to the wildest incoherence of mania, or 
 the lowest degradations of cretinism. Insanity is a term applied to con- 
 ditions measurable by all the degrees included between these widely sepa- 
 rated poles, and to all the variations which are capable of being produced 
 by partial or total affection of the many faculties into which the mind 
 can be analyzed. ^ 
 
 There is no quality of anything cognizable to our senses or to our 
 understanding, more variable in its degrees or its combinations than in- 
 sanity. But legal responsibility is strictly defined.. It is bounded by a 
 line, a Rubicon, on one side of which Caesar is the servant of the state, 
 on the other a traitor and a rebel. It is also uniform, it admits not of 
 degrees of greater or smaller, of more or less. If this uniformity i-^^q -i 
 *is unreal and inconsistent with the actualities to be found in L J 
 nature, and if the boundary line is capable of being moved to and fro, 
 these circumstances will increase the difficulty of making the character- 
 istics of insanity correspond with the common law essence of irresponsi- 
 
 Deoember, 1856. — 23 
 
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8 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 bility. It is no doubt of importance that under all possible circum- 
 stances the administrators of our laws should have landmarks erected for 
 their guidance ; for the smaller the latitude of private opinion which is 
 permitted to the executive, the surer will be the guarantees of liberty 
 and of the impartial administration of justice. Fixed points therefore 
 are rightly decided upon whenever it is possible to do so. Thus the 
 responsibilities of manhood are made to commence at the termination of 
 the three hundred and sixty-fifth day of the twenty-first year of life, 
 notwithstanding some men grow up to be old boys, and some prematurely 
 wear "old heads upon young shoulders." The plea of infancy protects 
 the child of five and the boy of ten years, as much and not more than 
 the man of twenty; while its exemptions are as completely removed from 
 the man of twenty-one, as from the most mature and experienced occu- 
 pants of manhood's robust age. Forty shillings might as well be fixed 
 T-^i-, upon as the boundary between larceny *and felony as any other 
 L J sum ; and although the nloral difierence between the man who 
 stole thirty-nine shillings to indulge himself in dissipation or in idleness, 
 and he who abstracted forty-one shillings to save his children from starva- 
 tion might be all in favour of the latter, legal distinctions not the less 
 made the first a larcener, the second a felon. 
 
 Although these fixed beacons may create a " border land of injustice," 
 they are nevertheless very necessary to steer by, and serve to keep the 
 bark in the proper channel. But of what service would they be, if they 
 could be brought into no certain relation with the circumstances upon 
 which their utility was intended to bear ? They would resemble a sta- 
 tionary lighthouse at the entrance of a harbour, the bar of which was 
 composed of shifting sands ; which at one time might guide the mariner 
 into safety, and at another inveigle him to shipwreck. To make such a 
 beacon useful it must be capable of changing like the dangers it is in- 
 tended to obviate, it must be adaptable to the variable circumstances of 
 time and place. 
 
 To measure degrees of responsibility and adapt them to the variable 
 conditions of disordered mind is a problem, upon the solution of which 
 P^r -, the whole medico-legal question of *insanity rests. But how can 
 L J responsibility be measured ? Extension in time and place can be 
 measured by duration and by substance ; gravitation can be measured 
 by weight, and power of various kinds by its effect on gravitation ; even 
 color and such like qualities can be measured by comparison with a stand- 
 ard : but in what practical balance shall the responsibility of man for his 
 actions be estimated ? As the weight of a body is measured by the power 
 it overcomes, so degrees of responsibility must be measured by the de- 
 grees of mental disorder, and by the amount of inflection they produce 
 from the standard of health. 
 
 A man having the knowledge of right and. wrong, and in the posses- 
 sion of the power of choosing the one and refusing the other, is rightly 
 held to be responsible for his conduct to his God, to his neighbours, and 
 to himself. A man knowing and capable of discharging his duties to 
 his Grod, to his neighbours, and to himself, is a sane man. A man who 
 from any mental imperfection or infirmity is incapable of discharging 
 
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AN ESSAY. 9 
 
 these duties cannot be considered to be in a state of mental sanity, and 
 cannot with justice be held responsible to do that which he is morally 
 unable to do. 
 
 It will be hereafter seen, that the neglect of *this distinction r jjsf. -i 
 between knowledge and power, forms one of the fundamtotal diffi- <- J 
 culties of the question. 
 
 Having thus indicated the direction of this inquiry, the investigation 
 into the nature and the characteristics of insanity must be commenced. 
 A scientific inquiry into the nature of insanity may at first sight appear 
 superfluous, and of little interest or importance in legal questions. To 
 a practical lawyer, indeed, speculations verging on the domain of meta- 
 physics may possess no attractions and no utility. But the jurist must 
 excavate the foundations of his system as far below the surface as he 
 can reach, and seek, if possible, to place his basement theories upon the 
 solid rock of abstract truth. " Bentham became an ethical philosopher 
 for the sake of becoming a jurist," (Mackintosh,) and those who would 
 unravel the relationships of insanity and irresponsibility must be content 
 to exercise some patience in finding the beginning of the threads. All 
 theories of mental disease must be founded upon theories of healthy 
 mental action, as every peculiar system of pathology presupposes and 
 relies upon its corresponding physiology. If it be said, that of opposing 
 systems only one can be true, and that if it is not possible to distinguish 
 the true one, it will *be a worthless expenditure of diligence to r-ii^n-, 
 gain equal acquaintance with the true and the false ; it may be L -■ 
 answered, that such theories which bear practical fruits, whether true or 
 false, are worthy of attentive consideration, and that theories of insanity 
 come under this category in an especial manner. 
 
 Whether sensationalism or rationalism is the true philosophy of the 
 human mind, or that eclectic combination of the two, which owing to 
 the labors and the genius of Cousin, now holds so high a position in the 
 philosophic world, is a question the scope of which extends beyond the 
 present inquiry. But whether the doctrines of spiritualism or of mate- 
 rialism find favor with psychopathists is of the utmost importance. This 
 is proved when we reflect that the latter doctrines, when followed out to 
 their logical result, can have no weak place by which the actions of men 
 may free themselves from the laws of physical necessity. The materialist 
 is by logical necessity a fatalist. When the teaching of Locke had 
 reached its ultimate development in that of Cabanis, who maintained 
 " that all intelligence consists in sensation, and that all sensation resides 
 in the nerves," the doctrine of fatalism was inevitable, and required no 
 further support or development from Coombe or Owen. *Fatal- p ^(jo -i 
 ism supersedes all idea of responsibility, and the question of sanity L J 
 or insanity with reference to punishment becomes mere trifling : since to 
 punish any one for actions committed under the inevitable coercion of 
 physical necessity would be unjust, absurd, and brutal. It would be 
 foreign to the purpose of this essay to trace the progress of the sensa- 
 tional philosophy from the first great impulse it received in the " Essay 
 on the Human IFnderstanding," through its change into downright ma- 
 terialism in the writings of Condillac and Cabanis, proceeding onwards 
 
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10 EUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 in its development in those of Spurzheim and Coombe, and in the 
 "Vestiges of Creation," to its ultimate expression in the Criminal Juris- 
 prudence of Simpson. It is true that in Grermany, rationalism ending 
 in absolute nihilism, has led to results of the same nature. All strict 
 and coherent systems of metaphysics hitherto propounded appear to have 
 been subjected to the malign fate of terminating, when pursued to their 
 logical results, in conclusions antagonistic to the principles on which reli- 
 gion and society are founded, and at variance with the common sense of 
 niankind. Groethe, who scorned metaphysics, said : " A man who specu- 
 lates is like an animal led round in a circle by some malignant spirit on 
 r *Q T ** dreary heath, while beyond the circlfe lies the beautiful pas- 
 L ^ J ture." 
 
 The eclectic metaphysics, taking as they do from all sides, whatever 
 is intelligible and credible concerning the operations of mind, and adapt- 
 ing these materials to each other without any pervading bond of union, 
 can scarcely be considered as a coherent system. To the psychopathic 
 physician, whose intelligence revolts against imprisonment within the 
 boundaries of the sensational school, and who cannot coerce his belief 
 within the sterile and narrow limits of the laws of matter, the eelectric 
 doctrines are peculiarly attractive. He cannot withhold recognition from 
 the vast field of operations within which the senses work. His very 
 name and functions mark him as the student and exponent of physical 
 laws. If there is such a thing as disease of the spiritual part of man, 
 he leaves that to the clergy, and only concerns himself about cerebro- 
 mental affections. The brain and its functions are his peculiar province 
 of study, and thus he is urged into close proximity to materialism. But 
 neither his knowledge nor his belief can be restrained within the con- 
 fines of physical law. Though his main duty may lie within such con- 
 fines, his inquiries must extend beyond them, or his knowledge of mental 
 r *1 m "^iss^^ *will be a thing of shreds and patches. As well might 
 L J a painter expect to become a great artist by mere copying and 
 color grinding, without intuitive or acquired perception of aesthetic 
 truth, as the physician to acquire accurate notions of cerebro-mental 
 affection by the sole employment of anatomy, comparative and pathologi- 
 cal, of chemistry, and the microscope. The true psychopathic physician 
 is, and must be, a materialist, but he must also become something more. 
 Unless a one-sided course of study has warped his faculties, and left him 
 an intellectual cripple, he must perceive " that there are more things in 
 heaven and earth than are dreamt of in that philosophy." He must 
 believe in an existence not material, or believe that matter was self- 
 created. Recognizing in the hemispherical ganglia of the brain the 
 physical instrument of mental action, he will see that some power must 
 exist capable of putting this in motion, some influence ■\<hich he may 
 call essence, or spirit, or anima, or ipvxri, and the existence of which he 
 is as much compelled to believe, as a man unacquainted with steam 
 power, introduced into the engine-room of a factory where nothing but 
 the effects of power were visible, would be compelled to assume the pre- 
 P ^w ^ -. sence of some hidden and to him unknown *force. Our senses 
 L -I inform us of the existence of matter, our reason assures us of the 
 
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AN ESSAY. 11 
 
 existence of mind. The mystic union indeed of the two is veiled from 
 our knowledge, and has been well said to present " An adamantine wall 
 against which the human intellect in vain beats itself." (Whewell.) It 
 is in the attempt to pass this impediment that the main difficulties of 
 psychology occur. We can find no logical bond of connection between 
 the world of matter and that of spirit, and being unable either to bridge 
 over or outflank the chasm which separates them, are compelled to accept 
 the two as distinct though indubitable realities. 
 
 Such being the case, any theories of mental action which omit either 
 the one or the other of these fundamental realities, must be one-sided 
 and vicious. Those indeed who honestly adhere to the double fact, may 
 find their pursuit of abstract truth a tardy process, but whatsoever move- 
 ment they are able to make will be likely to be progressive. Like parallel 
 lines, the conjoined inquiries will serve as a guide to each other; whereas 
 those who leave either one of the two out of their calculations will find 
 their course erratic, turning upon itself, and not progressive. Let it be 
 borne in mind, that from sensationalism and materialism it is impossible 
 *to educe the freedom of the will and the responsibility of man ^^^„ - 
 for his actions ; and the vast importance of systematic philosophy L J 
 in the medico-legal question of irresponsibility on account of insanity, 
 will at once be seen. A portion of the phrenological and somatic school 
 attempt to deny that their doctrines destroy the freedom and responsi- 
 bility of man, but this can only be done by carrying the vicious logic £(, 
 few steps further. Mr. Maeaulay observes that, "There is one excellent 
 way of avoiding the drawing of a false conclusion from a false major, 
 and that is, by having a false minor; inaccurate history is an admirable 
 corrective of unreasonable theory." — (Essay on Gladstone's Church and 
 State.) The converse is equally true. Bad logic may save the credit 
 of false observation; and those who make all mental power solely de- 
 pendent upon cerebral development, escape from the results of the hypo- 
 thesis by shuffling out of the meaning of the word responsibility, and 
 rendering it as if it only implied liability. We must refrain from further 
 pursuing this topic, and proceed to consider its immediate bearing upon 
 the theories of insanity. 
 
 From the sensational, the rationalistic, and eclectic systems of philoso- 
 phy, are respectively *developed materialism, spiritualism, and r :|!-i o -i 
 that mixed form of opinion which may not inaptly be expressed L J 
 as the cerehro-mental doctrine. 
 
 From these three sources issue three distinctive theories of insanity : 
 namely, the somatic, the psychic, and the somato-psychic. The bearing 
 of each upon the question of responsibility must be traced. 
 
 " The somatic theory assumes the operations of the mind to be an 
 emanation from those of the body, and considers mental disorders to be 
 merely bodily ailments." — (Feuchtersleiben.) This theory in a developed 
 form is the one entertained by the phrenologist, and has been expounded 
 in a manner equally candid and exact by Dr. A. Coombe, in his work on 
 mental derangement. 
 
 Many find themselves unable to assent to its truth, because for reasons 
 above stated, they cannot renounce belief in the separate existence of the 
 
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J2 BUOKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 soul, because they find insanity both caused and cured by purely psychi- 
 cal influences ; and lastly, because necroscopic observations are adverse. 
 In several hundreds of careful dissections of persons dying insane, we 
 have hitherto been unable to discover any cerebral lesions which are not 
 r *1A 1 ^'^^ ^°'*°'^ '^^ *^^ brains of persons who have died without the 
 L J *previous occurrence of any mental disorder. This experience 
 coincides with that of Pinel and Esquirol, and of that experienced 
 pathologist Dr. Boyd, of the Somerset asylum, and with that of most 
 others who have made this subject their study. 
 
 The purely psychical school of insanity has scarcely gained a footing 
 in this country. In Grermany it has counted among its advocates some 
 of the most profound writers on mental disease. Heinroth is generally 
 considered the founder of this school. He teaches that insanity is a per- 
 version of the soul, that in fact it is equivalent to sin. The more judi- 
 cious Ideler, with views fundamentally similar to these, avoids the reli- 
 gious bearing of the question, and prefers to dwell on the ethical relations 
 of insanity. He appears to consider that mental disease possesses the 
 characteristics of immorality, rather than those of irreligion ; that it is 
 vicious, rather than sinful. He " quits the domain of the physician to 
 make incursions on that of the ethical philosopher, rather than on that of 
 the theologian." It will at once be apparent that according to these writers, 
 the irresponsibility of no insane person can be insisted upon. The pure 
 somatists are unable to maintain the responsibility of the sane portion of 
 P ^1 _ -. mankind, the pure psychists find the ^irresponsibility of the 
 L -1 insane an equally untenable position. The extreme opinions on 
 either side lead to conclusions equally opposed to the common verdict of 
 mankind. Fortunately, there is a middle course. The psychosomatists 
 find in the liability of the cerebral instrument to disease, a reasonable 
 basis for the irresponsibility of the insane ; and, in the freedom of the 
 spiritual will, a just ground for the responsibility of the sane. 
 
 The difficulty which perplexes them is the union of the two states. A 
 concrete case is presented to the observation and judgment. The cere- 
 bral disease is observed to be not complete, but partial. It is not in the 
 nature of disease to be Complete ; it is always partial. So long as the 
 functions of any organ of the body are carried on, however imperfectly, 
 that organ cannot be said to suffer from complete disease; and thus cere- 
 bral disease must up to the point of death be always partial. Sometimes, 
 indeed, insanity is spoken of as a loss of mind (^amentia,') as one would 
 speak of the loss of a limb. The term, however, is only to be considered 
 as a metaphorical one, or to imply loss of mental health. Insanity then 
 being a condition of partial change, it is difficult for the psycopathic 
 r *1 R T P^ys''<'i*'^ *" deduce *from it the result of total irresponsibility. 
 L J Logically, the loss of responsibility must be held to be coexten- 
 sive with the amount of disease. 
 
 On the other hand, freedom of will, the fountain-head of responsi- 
 bility, is interrupted by the cerebral disease, but not wholly interrupted. 
 If strong motives are addressed to the patient, he is capable of controlling 
 the manifestations of the malady under which he suffers. 
 
 " I am convinced," says Langerman, " that even in the highest degree 
 
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AN ESSAY. 13 
 
 of insanity, there still remains a trace of moral discrimination, with 
 which we may conneot the train of the patient's ideas." The extent to 
 which the insane are capable of controlling their actions, is conspicuous 
 in the wards of a well-ordered lunatic asylum. The medical officers of 
 such an institution find some two or three per cent, of the patients 
 whom no moral influences appear to touch; but the vast majority are 
 enabled, with a little encouragement and assistance, to control their pas- 
 sions and emotions with nearly as much success as the people out of 
 doors. 
 
 Therefore, in the supposed case on which the decision is pending, the 
 physician finds the power of the will weakened, not lost ; its freedom 
 impeded and embarrassed, not destroyed. To what extent, therefore, 
 will sound reason ^justify him in maintaining the deterioration r ^-i 7 -i 
 or total loss of responsibility? To arrive at a perfectly just esti- L J 
 mate, it would be necessary for him, according to the phraseology of Lord 
 Denman, " to dive into the mind of the patient," and see what is going 
 on below the surface, and in the mud at the bottom. This is not per- 
 mitted man to do — God only knows the heart ; Omniscience alone can 
 estimate accurately the degree of irresponsibility produced by cerebral 
 disease, the degree of moral freedom and of responsibility left by the 
 same. It is a Gordian knot, which no human power can perfectly unra- 
 vel, and which the most acute forensic intellects have in vain attempted 
 to cut by the sharp line of a legal definition. 
 
 In this world, however, neither is absolute truth nor absolute equity 
 attainable. Mankind are compelled to content themselves with an 
 approximation to the former; and to limit themselves to a well-inten- 
 tioned administration of justice in the rough. If complete freedom 
 were necessary to establish responsibility, who could be found in the 
 possession of it? Certainly no criminal. "Who can venture to say 
 of himself, ' I am free' ? none but the best of men, and even they should 
 add 'perhaps.' AVTio is there, man or woman, young or old, r^io-i 
 *who is not subject to passion, to extraneous impressions ? The <- -> 
 law cannot here avoid a certain degree of harshness, from which fate 
 itself does not exempt us. It punishes even our unintentional errors, 
 our natural incapacity. We must e'en bear the consequences thence 
 arising, of being what we are." (Feuchtersleiben.) The interests of 
 society demand that men should be held responsible to the law for 
 actions detrimental to those interests : and thus, when the freedom of 
 the will has become embarrassed through the intervention of criminal 
 desires, a counteracting motive is supplied in the fear of punishment. 
 Uprightness of conduct getting a one-sided push from the passions would 
 incline to many a lapse if the fear of legal correction did not supply a 
 countervailing prop. If crime is a disease (as some maintain) education 
 may be an effective prophylactic, but punishment is the only cure. It 
 is one, moreover, which, like the cold water cure of an hysterical girl, 
 has a considerable influence in checking a repetition of the attack ; and 
 also imposes a beneficial restraint on lookers-on who under an indulgent 
 system might become prone to similar affections. It has often, like 
 other remedies, to be applied in a certain crude and off-hand manner. 
 
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J4 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 r*icn ^^ physicians never administered *medicine until they had 
 L -I ascertained with positive accuracy, not only the drug, but the 
 quantity thereof required, no patient vrould ever be prescribed for. 
 The drug and the dose are suited to the requirements of the patient as 
 closely as medical knowledge can ascertain; it is probable, however, 
 that too much or too little is constantly given. 
 
 So also with those who purge the humors of the body social ; they do 
 the best they can with imperfect knowledge, and look to general good 
 results rather than to an unattainable exactness. Punishment, however, 
 to be either a remedy or an example, must be administered with some 
 discrimination of the end desired. The petulant child alone beats the 
 table against which it has hurt itself. No person capable of reasoning 
 would imitate the child j he might desire a piece of furniture standing 
 in a position to cause accidents to be removed or destroyed, but the idea 
 of punishment could never be connected with that which had no shadow 
 of moral attributes, no intelligence, and consequently no responsibility. 
 The intelligence, moral attributes, and responsibility of men are perverted 
 or annulled by cerebro-mental disease ; and to visit a lunatic with the 
 same punishment for an offence as would be awarded to a sane criminal, 
 r*901 ^°^l'i *resemble the castigation inflicted by a child upon an 
 L J inanimate object, with this difference, that cruelty would be 
 superadded to folly. Whatever may be the effect of punishment as an 
 example to evil doers, or a remedial correction to the offender himself, 
 to be useful in either way it must be founded in justice. The same 
 punishment inflicted on an insane or a partially insane, and on a sane 
 offender, can never have this foundation ; for the insanity which occa- 
 sioned the crime may itself have been occasioned by actions of the most 
 virtuous nature, by extremes of duty, religious, paternal, or patriotic. 
 The following quotation from the eloquent Cousin may appropriately 
 close our remarks upon this subject. 
 
 "Publicists still seek for the foundation of penalty. Some who 
 regard themselves as enlightened politicians find it in the utility of 
 punishment for those who witness it, who are deterred from crime by its 
 threatenings and its preventive efficacy. This is indeed one of the 
 effects of punishment, but not its foundation; others through affectation 
 of greater humanity wish to consider the legitimacy of punishment as 
 grounded wholly on its utility to him who endures it, by its corrective 
 r *21 1 ^^"^^'^''y • this agajn is certainly one of the possible *effects of 
 L J punishment, but not its foundation ; for in order that the punish- 
 ment be corrective, it is necessary that it should be submitted to as 
 just. We are therefore always compelled to return to the idea of justice. 
 Justice is the true foundation of punishment ; personal and social utility 
 is only a consequence. It is an undeniable fact, that after every wrong 
 act the unjust man thinks, and cannot but think, that he is ill-deserving, 
 that is, is worthy of punishment. In the intelligence the idea of punish- 
 ment corresponds to that of injustice ; and when the injustice has been com- 
 mitted in the social sphere, the punishment ought to be inflicted by society. 
 Society can only do it because it ought. The right here has no other source 
 
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AN ESSAY. 15 
 
 than the duty to inflict, — duty the most strict, the most evident, and the 
 most sacred, — ^without which this pretended right would be nothing but 
 that of force, that is to say, an atrocious injustice, even though it be to 
 the moral advantage of him who received it, and a salutary spectacle for 
 the people ; which in fact could not then be the case, for the punish- 
 ment would then find no sympathy, no echo, neither in the public con- 
 science, nor in that of the individual punished. Punishment is not just 
 because it is ^useful as a preventive or a corrective : but it is -^ „„ -.' 
 useful in either or both these toai/s, because it is just." (Cousin's >- -^ 
 Plato, vol. iii. p. 169.) 
 
 This theory of punishment, by demonstrating the falseness, the incom- 
 plete and exclusive character of the two theories which divide publicists, 
 completes and explains them, and gives to both a centre, and legitimate 
 " basis." It is obvious that to he founded in justice, the punishment of 
 any offender, of whose perfect sanity a doubt can exist, must have refer- 
 ence to very partial states of mental disease : and that such conditions 
 must be allowed to modify responsibility quantum valeant. 
 
 Assuming the consideration of the question in its more practical 
 bearings, let us inquire. What is insanity ? Is it a condition capable of 
 verbal definition ? The ill-success which has hitherto attended endea- 
 vours to effect this, would suggest a negative reply. If by a definition 
 is understood, " a brief description of a thing by its properties," the 
 variety and uncertainty of the properties predicable of insanity would 
 render a comprehensive description of them anything but brief, and 
 would in that sense preclude a satisfactory definition. Take for instance, 
 the definition which Guislain, one of the best and most recent authorities, 
 arrives *at through the medium of a painstaking analysis. He ^ ^„n -i 
 concludes, " Thus reducing these elementary phenomena to a L J 
 more concrete forpiula, we may say that insanity is — a malady chronic, 
 and apyretic, in which the ideas and the conduct are under the empire 
 of an irresistible powerj in which a change has taken place in the 
 manner of feeling, perceiving, thinking, and acting; in the attributes of 
 the character, and in the habits. A state which contrasts with the 
 sentiments, the thoughts, and the acts of those around ; an affection 
 which renders him incapable of acting with a view to his own preserva- 
 tion, to his responsibility, and his duties to God and society. This 
 definition as I have given it, errs nevertheless by its diffuseness ; it is 
 necessary to condense its materials more, thus we become able to say : 
 Alienation is a derangement of the mental faculties, morbid, apyretic, 
 chronic, which removes from man the power of thinking and acting 
 freely, with a view to his welfare, his preservation, and his responsibility." 
 
 One might take objection to the predicates, apyretic and chronic, on 
 the ground that the occasional occurrence of febrile and of transitory 
 insanity show them to be not invariably correct; objection also must be 
 taken to a consequence *of insanity being substituted for a r-*9A.-\ 
 definition. This error, if it be one, appears still more clear from L J 
 the following sentences added by the author to elucidate his meaning : 
 "Man ceases to be free. In the absence of. liberty consists all that we 
 find in mental disease ; absence of that which permits us as sane men to 
 
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16 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 live in accordance with divine and human laws : absence of a power of 
 ductility, of moral elasticity, if such an expression is permissible, absence 
 of the conservative force which responds to the exigencies of our organiza- 
 tion. It is a state, in one word, of which the cause is a disease." 
 (Logons Orales, tom i., p. 66.) M. Guislain shows us plainly enough 
 what insanity is not, but disappoints any. expectation which might be 
 entertained of learning from him what it is. He defines the cause of 
 insanity to be disease; the effect of insanity to be loss of moral freedom; 
 but insanity itself, as an actual reality, eludes his grasp. The examina- 
 tion of the numerous other descriptive definitions which have (according 
 to the phrase) been hazarded, would be absolute waste of time, and may 
 therefore be judiciously pretermitted. 
 
 A definition may however be given in another sense, as " the explana- 
 r*9f;n ^^^"^ '^^ *^® essence of a *thing by its kind and difference." 
 L J When the condition understood by insanity is examined, with a 
 view to such a definition, it will at once be remarked that it is expressed 
 by terms signifying deprivation or subduction. Insanity, alienation, 
 derangement, respectively implying sanity, possession (of mind,) order 
 (of mind.) The condition, therefore, is essentially a relative one, and 
 must be examined as such. 
 
 Dr. Haslam was accustomed to assert, that all men were insane, that 
 the only instance of perfect sanity was the mind of God. He main- 
 tained this opinion in place and out of place, for certainly such an 
 opinion must be considered to have been out of place when expressed in 
 the witness box of a court of justice. 
 
 Lord Campbell, in the House of Lords in 1853, said, " I know a very 
 distinguished medical practitioner, Dr. Haslam, who maintained not only 
 that there were many who were more or less insane, or that all of us had 
 been insane at one period of our lives, but that we all were actually in- 
 sane. I have heard him say it repeatedly, and he would have been 
 ready to prove it." 
 
 Dr. Haslam, however, was not alone or original in this notion, poets 
 and philosophers have for ages past amused themselves with it. The 
 r*9fi n *''o*i'"^ *^^* "semel insanavimus omnes," appears to have been 
 L J a pretty general one. 
 
 It is thus stated in Easselas, "If we speak with rigorous exactness, 
 no human mind is in its right state. There is no man whose imagina- 
 tion does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate 
 his attention wholly by his will, and whose ideas will come and go at his 
 command. No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not 
 sometimes tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of 
 sober probability. All power of fancy over reason is a degree of in- 
 sanity." 
 
 Boileau says, 
 
 " Tons les hommes sont fous, et malgre tons leurs soins, 
 Ne different entre eux, que du plus ou du moins." 
 
 Horace hints at it frequently. Cicero discourses upon it. 
 
 "Omnes insipientium animi in morbo sunt: omnes insipientes igitur 
 insaniunt : sanitatem enim animorum positam in tranquilitate qu§,dam 
 
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AN ESSAY. 17 
 
 oonstanti§,que censebant (pMlosopH); his rebus mentem vacantem ap- 
 pellarunt insanam, propteria quod in perturbato animo, sicut in corpore, 
 sanitas esse non possit. *Itaque nibil melius, quam quod est in ^ ^„„ -, 
 consuetudine sermonis Latini; cum exisse expotestate dicimus eos, L J 
 qui effrenati feruntur aut libidine aut iracundia. Qui igitur exisse ex 
 potestate dicuntur ; idcirco dicuntur, quia non sunt in potestate mentis ; 
 cui regnum totius animi a natura tributum est." 
 
 In this place, however, our task is not to discuss what is, or is not, 
 a departure from abstract notions of mental perfection ; we have to deal 
 with insanity, not as mere folly or emotion outstepping the bounds of 
 reason, or fancy bounding free with the reins of judgment for a moment 
 relaxed ; but with the realities of that prosaic common sense upon which 
 society and its laws are founded. [See Appendix, Note A.] 
 
 In this sense, then, what is the condition to which insanity, mental 
 alienation, unsoundness, derangement, is opposed ? It is that condition 
 of the mind in which the emotions and the instincts are in such a state 
 of subordination to the will, that 4he latter can direct and control their 
 manifestations ; in which moreover the intellectual faculties are capable 
 of submitting to the will sound reasons for its actions. Such co-ordi- 
 nate action of the faculties is termed sanity ; a condition in which that 
 is lost is *termed insanity, or derangement, or alienation, or un- ^ ^„o -, 
 soundness, all terms having reference to the deprivation of the L J 
 power of the will so directed. 
 
 It is evident that in this definition of sanity there are three terms, the 
 subjected emotions, the directing intellect, and the middle term of free 
 will. Supposing our nature to be fallible throughout its composition, it 
 is evident that erroneous action may originate at any of these points : 
 the mutinous emotions may be indomitable, the power of the will may be 
 abortive, or the intellect may mislead by false guidance. Insanity may 
 thus be Intellectual, Emotional, or Volitional, and though in the con- 
 crete it is not easy to find pure and unmixed cases under either of these 
 heads, such cases do occasionally subject themselves to observation. 
 The experienced psyohopathist will also find little difficulty in appor- 
 tioning a vast number of the other cases according to their predominant' 
 character, under one or other of these headings. 
 
 Insanity therefore m.ay he defined as, A condition of the mind in 
 which a false action of conception or judgment, a defective power of the 
 will, or an uncontrollable violence of the emotions and instincts, have 
 separately or conjointly heen produced hy disease. 
 
 *The above definition has the advantage of brevity, and will, ^ ^„q -. 
 we think, be found to include most varieties of mental condition. L J 
 There are, however, some few, especially those characterized by defect 
 of the emotional or intellectual functions, as in idiopathic dementia, 
 which it may be thought not to include. Objection also may be taken 
 to it on account of the last words. It may be argued, that long con- 
 tinued indulgence of the emotions and inattention to the intelligent will, 
 is capable of producing insanity without disease. That when slavish 
 submission to the rule of the passions and instincts has become habitual, 
 it also becomes uncontrollable, and therefore that bad habits may const!- 
 
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18 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 tute insanity, without the intervention of cerebro-mental disease. This 
 is a question worthy of a patient and thorough investigation, but one for 
 which the limits of our space prevent us from more than touching upon 
 in this place. The question will, to some extent, turn upon whether 
 vicious habits, however inveterate, are positively uncontrollable. From 
 a long personal experience in the discipline of such natures, we feel our- 
 selves justified in affirming that such is not the case ; that the certainty 
 of incurring an amount of pain as a punishment, greater than the 
 r *^ft 1 amount of pleasure *afforded by indulgence, will effectually keep 
 L -I in check the most inveterate habits of unbridled passion or in- 
 stinct. [See Appendix, Note B.] 
 
 The principles laid down by Beccaria, that punishments should be 
 certain and immediate, and proportioned to the offence, are so thoroughly 
 founded on the principles of human nature, that, when capable of being 
 fully carried into practice, they will keep in effective check the vicious 
 habits of the most unreasoning and instinctive of the human family. It 
 is, moreover, not a little instructive to find, from an excellent work on 
 dog-breaking, by Col. Hutcheson, that his maxims founded upon his 
 experience with brutes, (if that term is not a libel upon the four-footed 
 friends of men) tally exactly with those of the philosophic Italian. 
 
 For many years much of our own time has been occupied in subduing 
 the vicious habits of persons of weak intellect : these efforts have been 
 attended with a sufficient amount of success to convince us that no 
 amount of emotional or instinctive self-indulgence, however established 
 and confirmed by inveterate habit, can maintain its ground against a cor- 
 rective discipline, watchful, patient, untiring, and systematic. The cor- 
 rective discipline of society, systematized into the form of law, " sup- 
 r*Qi 1 P^'®^ *those motives which strike the senses, and which are 
 L J necessary to prevent the despotism of each individual from 
 plunging society into its former chaos. Such motives are the punish- 
 ments established against the infraction of the laws." Such agencies 
 may well be employed to correct or to cure insanity dependent upon 
 vicious mental habit alone. 
 
 Whether insanity can exist founded upon habit alone, without disease, 
 may be left to be determined by future research, and such a condition, 
 like that of drunkenness, must be held to confer but a partial immunity 
 from punishment. 
 
 That the insanity of bad habit is the condition of the majority of 
 criminals, was a fact recognized by Sir Matthew Hale ; and it is proba- 
 ble that, notwithstanding an habitual indulgence in vicious propensities, 
 the particular offence would seldom have been committed, could the 
 criminal have foreknown with certainty that detection and punishment 
 would follow. 
 
 As the element of disease, therefore, is essential to a strict medico- 
 legal definition of insanity, it becomes necessary to inquire in what man- 
 ner its existence is to be ascertained. Care must be taken at this point 
 r *qo -I to avoid the argumentum *in circulam, educing disease from 
 L J insanity, and insanity from disease. The real test of cerebro- 
 mental, as of physical disease, appears to be a change for the worse from 
 
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AN ESSAY. 19 
 
 the normal condition of the individual, an appreciable deterioration from 
 the normal state of the functions : a change distinct from development 
 and from natural decay. The term disease, as generally understood, im- 
 plies a change frem a previous state. We should scarcely call a conge- 
 nital malformation of any of the organs of an infant a disease, though 
 one born with the small-pox would correctly be said to be diseased from 
 a previous though foetal state of health. To prove cerebro-mental dis- 
 ease, therefore, the existence of a changed condition must be established; 
 and this can only be done by comparing the individual with his former 
 self. But it may with truth be said, that the character of all men is 
 subject to constant change, without the suspicion of disease; that no 
 man lives through a year of his life without undergoing modifications of 
 opinion and sentiment. The deteriorating change produced by cerebro- 
 mental disease is, however, sufficiently different in its degree and nature 
 from this ; and it might as well be said that, because a man's outward 
 appearance is ever undergoing a gradual development from infancy to 
 *manhood, and a gradual decadence from manhood to age, that p ^qo -i 
 therefore a physician can never pronounce, from a change in the L J 
 aspect of any man, that he is the subject of bodily disease. A change, 
 therefore, with impairment or perturbation of function, is the chief test 
 of cerebro-mental disease. 
 
 It may take the same direction as the original character, and persons 
 naturally timid or daring, cautious or reckless, generous or selfish, may 
 have their natural bias of mind quickly developed in excess. Or the 
 change may reverse the character, and the patient may exhibit a striking 
 contrast to his former self ; or it may take some strange direction which 
 no one could guess at beforehand. Nothing can appear more wayward 
 and uncertain than the direction which insanity takes in its develop- 
 ment. Doubtless there are facts and laws, could they be seized upon 
 and subjected to computation, by which, the original character and the 
 disturbing cause being given, the extent and direction of the diseased 
 movement might be predicted ; but as yet, if cerebro-mental science is 
 in its infancy, the science of Ethology may be said to be in a fcetal con- 
 dition ; and where such knowledge exists it appears to be the intuitive 
 and incommunicable privilege of genius. 
 
 *Another test of cerebro-mental disease is the relation between ^ ^q . ., 
 cause and effect, and the operation of remedies. Continuing the L J 
 parallel illustration of bodily disorder, if a stimulating substance taken 
 into the stomach, instead of a feeling of comfortable warmth, produced 
 intense pain and vomiting ; if, to allay these symptoms, large doses of 
 opium were given, and large quantities of blood extracted without pro- 
 ducing the usual effects of opium and loss of blood in healthy persons ; 
 no doubt could be left in the mind of any one capable of reasoning, that 
 a state of bodily disease (gastritis, or something else,) had been induced. 
 In like manner, if a mental shock of grief or disappointment, instead of 
 producing the usual consequences of sorrow or chagrin, has been followed 
 by extravagant and unbounded spirits, and if such excitement, bidding 
 defiance to advice and reason, gives way under the judicious administra- 
 tion of pharmaceutical remedies, and to the influence of that atmosphere 
 
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20 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 of control designated moral treatment ; such circumstances will not 
 admit the insinuation of a doubt concerning the existence of disease. 
 
 In all obsbure cases of medicine the Icedentia et juvantia become im- 
 portant means of diagnosis. ' In many cases of mental disease, however, 
 r*qcn these *indications are little palpable, and their detection will 
 L J often bafle the acumen of the most astute observer. In crimi- 
 nal trials wherein insanity has been pleaded, it becomes a matter of the 
 most vital importance to ascertain the existence of disease. It is indeed 
 on account of this characteristic of insanity, that the evidence of the 
 physician becomes necessary. Medical -men, experienced in the phe- 
 nomena of insanity, are not examined in courts of justice because they 
 may, to some extent, be mental philosophers, and acquainted with the 
 origin of crime, the laws of responsibility, and such matters; but be- 
 cause they are physicians, and supposed to be capable of detecting the 
 existence of disease. 
 
 If the speculations of the school or the closet lead us to the belief that 
 insanity may sometimes occur through the dominating power of a mental 
 habit, without the intervention of disease, such opinions will be found 
 foreign to the practical questions to be decided in courts of criminal jus- 
 tice. However interesting it may be to the psychologist to trace the 
 growth of a vicious indulgence in some passion or instinct through all 
 the gradations of mental habit, until he feels himself justified in denomi- 
 nating the result, a state of insanity ; he must not forget that in the 
 r *mi 1 trials of criminals supposed to be *insane, the question is not 
 L J alone respecting the existence of insanity, but respecting that of* 
 irresponsibility also. The man who would claim for a criminal exemp- 
 tion from punishment on the plea of insanity, arising from the vicious 
 and uncontrolled indulgence in some passion or emotion, would have to 
 establish not only the existence of such a form of insanity, but to defend 
 two other positions ; namely, that a man is not responsible for conduct 
 resulting from vicious habits of mind, provided the latter gain over hipi 
 a complete mastery, and compel him, contrary to all dictates of prudence, 
 to actions injurious to society and ruinous to himself. And secondly, 
 that neither the fear, nor the infliction of punishment, will prove effica- 
 cious in preventing the repetition of such acts. 
 
 It would be a puerile employment to show the untenable nature of 
 such positions, and it must suffice to express in this place our conviction, 
 that insanity resulting solely from vicious habits of mind without disease, 
 cannot confer irresponsibility for criminal acts ; and that punishment, or 
 more properly speaking, corrective discipline, is competent to restrain its 
 mischievous manifestations. 
 
 Cicero says, that all fools are insane ; and Hale, that all criminals are 
 r H537 ■] insane ; and when *folly and criminality have reached their cli- 
 ■- -^ max and borne their fruits, it is not an edifying spectacle to 
 behold the psychological physician stepping forward for the purpose of 
 claiming immunity for the offender." ' 
 
 The element of disease therefore in abnormal conditions of mind is 
 the touchstone of irresponsibility, and the detection of its existence or 
 
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AN ESSAT. 21 
 
 non-existence is the' peculiar and oftentimes tte difficult task of tte 
 psychopatliist. 
 
 Before proceeding to examine the means whereby this task may be ac- 
 complished, it will be needful to pass in review those occasional and secon- 
 dary ingredients of insanity which have at various times been thought 
 to be pathognomonic of the condition. Two methods present themselves 
 for the performance of this duty. The symptoms of insanity may be 
 treated systematically as they affect the intellectual or emotional func- 
 tions of the mind or the free will itself; or the most striking of them 
 may be examined as they in succession have been made to do service as 
 infallible tests of insanity under the authority of judicial decree. 
 
 Fearing that in attempts to seize upon fundamental principles we may 
 too much ignore their practical application to overt acts of insane crimi- 
 nality, we shall adopt the latter course. 
 
 *Lord Coke made of insane persons four classes, whom he thus p ^„q -, 
 described : " 1st, An Idiot, who, from his nativity, by a perpetual L J 
 infirmity is non compos ; 2nd, He that by sickness, grief, or other accident, 
 wholly loseth his memory and understanding ; 3rd, A lunatic that hath 
 sometimes his understanding and sometimes not, 'altquando gaudet luci- 
 dis intervaUis ;' and therefore he is called mow compos mentis, so long as 
 he hath not understanding ; 4th, He that by his own vicious act for a time 
 depriveth himself of his memory and understanding, as he that is drunken." 
 The learned and acute Pritchard having observed that idiotcy is usually 
 neither congenital nor complete, remarked respecting this classification of 
 Lord Coke's : " Nor is any place to be found in either of these depart- 
 ments for the ordinary cases of insanity, which constitute the remainder 
 of the instances for which writs are issued. It is obvious that cases of 
 madness do not belong to the first class. From the second, comprehend- 
 ing persons who have lost their memory and ' understanding, meaning 
 those whose faculties have been obliterated by disease or extreme age, 
 they are equally excluded. The third class, restricted to madmen who 
 have lucid intervals, comprehends a very *small proportion indeed ^ ^„g -. 
 of insane persons ; and the fourth admits only those who have <- J 
 destroyed their mental faculties by intemperance." 
 
 " An attempt to enumerate the forms of mental unsoundness, which 
 excludes by incorrect definitions nearly all the objects which it was in- 
 tended to distribute, could hardly fail more completely of its design." 
 
 The next judicial doctrine taken in chronological order was that made 
 by Sir Matthew Hale, who distinguished insanity as total ox partial, the 
 former alone being permitted to confer irresponsibility for crime. By 
 total madness the Lord Chief Justice appears to have meant frantic 
 mania ; and the melancholy records of crime inform us that, under the 
 unfortunate dogma of this great and good man, many insane persons 
 paid the penalty of their lives for offences strictly occasioned by mental 
 disease. 
 
 Sir Matthew permitted partial insanity to invalidate civil actions, but 
 refused to it the privilege of palliating or excusing criminal offences ; 
 thus affording reason for Georget's indignant remark, " that this judge 
 set a higher value upon property than upon human life." 
 
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22 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 r *ift 1 *The dictum of Sir Matthew Hale received its refutation at 
 L J the hands of Mr. Erskine, on the occasion of his celebrated de- 
 fence of Hadfield for shooting at King George III. in Drury Lane The- 
 atre, in 1800. In reply to -the then usual argument of the counsel for 
 the prosecution, that irresponsibility could only be permitted to a person 
 laboring under total deprivation of memory and understanding, Mr. 
 Erskine remarked that, in the literal sense of these expressions, " no 
 such madness had ever existed in the world." " In all the caaes that 
 have filled Westminster Hall," said he, " with the most complicated con- 
 siderations, the lunatics and other insane persons, who have been the 
 subjects of them, have not only had memory in my sense of the expres- 
 sion, they have not only had the most perfect knowledge and recollec- 
 tions of all the relations they stood in toward others, and of the acts and 
 circumstances of their lives, but have in general been remarkable for 
 subtilty and acuteness. Defects in their reasonings have seldom been 
 traceable ; the disease consisting in the delusive sources of thought, all 
 their deductions, within the scope of their malady, being founded on the 
 |- ^ , .. -. immovable assumptions of matters as realities, either ^without any 
 L -I foundation whatever, or so distorted and disfigured by fancy, as 
 to be nearly the same thing as their creation." 
 
 The test of delusion was thus for the first time laid down, and, though 
 in itself delusive from its want of comprehensiveness, its temporary es- 
 tablishment did good service by overthrowing and replacing the unfor- 
 tunate dogma of Hale. Lord Campbell observed that, in the particular 
 case in which Erskine insisted upon the test of delusion, he had nothing 
 to lose by thus narrowing the limits of the issue. And even Mr. 
 Erskine has acknowledged that exceptions occur to his own rule. In 
 the case of a young woman, indicted for the murder of her paramour, 
 and acquitted on the ground of insanity, though it was not pretended 
 that she laboured under any delusion, Mr. Erskine remarked, "It must 
 be a consolation to those who prosecuted her, that she was acquitted ; as 
 she is at this time in a most undoubted and deplorable state of insanity ; 
 but I must confess, if I had been upon the jury who tried her, I shoidd 
 have entertained great doubts and difficulties ; for, although this unhappy 
 woman had before exhibited strong marks of insanity, arising from grief 
 r *4.2 1 ^^^ disappointment, yet she acted upon facts and *circumstances 
 L -I which had an existence, and which were calculated, upon the 
 ordinary principles of human action, to produce the most violent resent- 
 ment. 
 
 "Mr. Errington having just cast her ofi", and married another woman, 
 or taken her under his protection, her jealousy was excited to such a 
 pitch, as occasionally to overpower her understanding ; but, when she 
 went to Mr. Brrington's house, where she shot him, she went with the 
 express and deliberate purpose of shooting him." 
 
 In the trial of Bellingham, for shooting the Eight Honourable Spencer 
 Percival, which occurred twelve years after the offence of Hadfield, the 
 test of delusion was repudiated by the Attorney Greneral. Sir Vicary 
 Gibbs insisted that, "upon the authority of the first sages in the countiy, 
 and upon the authority of the established law in all times, which law 
 
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AN ESSAY. 23 
 
 has never been questioned, fhat, although a man may be incapable of 
 conducting his own affairs, he may still be answerable for his criminal 
 acts, if he possess a mind capable of distinguishing right from wrong." 
 And Lord Mansfield, who tried the case, remarked, "If such a person 
 were capable in other respects of distinguishing right from wrong, there 
 was no *excuse for any act of atrocity which he might commit ^ ^ , „ -. 
 under this description of derangement." L J 
 
 Bellingham, it must be remembered, was undoubtedly insane, and 
 had various delusions, to the influence of which his crime was clearly attri- 
 butable. He was tried, condemned, and executed, and his body was on 
 the dissecting-room table within eight days of the commission of the 
 offence. In 1812, postal and travelling arrangements were slow, and 
 sufficient time for the production of witnesses from his native town of 
 Liverpool was refused. The whole affair of Bellingham's trial was a la- 
 mentable mistake. 
 
 Lord Lyndhurst, in the trial of The King v. Orford, indicated a dis- 
 position to extend the immunities of the insane beyond the limits con- 
 tended for by Erskine, by directing the jury, "to acquit the prisoner if 
 satisfied that he did not know, when he committed the act, what the 
 effect of it, if fatal, would be with reference to the crime of murder." 
 Under a judicial direction of this nature, if applied in a liberal spirit, it 
 woidd appear improbable that any insane person could be condemned, for 
 the idea of murder includes that of forethought and malice. Perhaps 
 from it may be dated the *more merciful administration of erimi- ^ ^ , , -. 
 nal justice to persons of unsound mind, which, during late years, L -■ 
 has prevailed in this country. 
 
 It will not be necessary to enter into any refutation of the earlier 
 opinions we have briefly mentioned ; the fallacy of them has been shown 
 by Pritchard, Winslow, aad others in this country, by G-eorget and Ray 
 in France and America ; they have fallen into disuse, and have been su- 
 perseded. To attack them would be to imitate the inebriated hero in 
 Dryden's ode, "And thrice to slay the slain \" The test of delusion 
 forms a part of the authoritative and comprehensive announcement of the 
 law in relation to crime and insanity made by the English judges to the 
 House of Lords after McNaughten's trial, and will require to be con- 
 sidered in connection therewith. 
 
 The trial of McNaughten and its consequences form a new era in the 
 criminal jurisprudence of insanity. The history of this person and his 
 offence are too well known to require recital. The present Attorney- 
 Creneral, then Mr. Cockburn, defended him with surpassing ability, and 
 placed society in general under an obligation for a truly enlightened ex- 
 position of the plea- 6f insanity. The prosecution itself, conducted by 
 Sir Wm. FoUett, ^presented a remarkable contrast to that of i-^^k-i 
 Bellingham. L J 
 
 The circumstances of McNaughten's offence were in most respects 
 strangely similar to those of Bellingham. Both men sought to take 
 away the life of the Premier, although the former made a mistake in the 
 person; both appear to have been driven to the commission of their 
 crime by delusions of a very similar nature ; Here, however, the parallel 
 
 DECEMBEa, 1856. — 24 
 
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24 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 terminates and the contrast begins : Gibbs and Follett, natives of the 
 same place, (Exeter,) differed greatly from each other in character ; and 
 the conduct of the latter prosecntion was distinguished and honored by 
 that dignified impartiality, becoming a servant of the crown, and a high 
 public prosecutor, which is not to be discovered in the earlier one ; the 
 result in <)ne instance cannot be contemplated without a shudder, or in 
 the other without satisfaction and approval. 
 
 The House of Lords, however, appear to have been taken by surprise 
 at the result of the trial, and the bench of judges was desired to explaii 
 the principles upon which insane persons accused of crime were to be 
 considered free from responsibility, and exempt from punishment. To 
 r *A(\ 1 1^^^^^ propounded by the *House of Peers the judges in confe- 
 L J rence enunciated the following dicta as the law of the land on 
 this subject. 
 
 " Notwithstanding a party commits a wrong act while labouring under 
 the idea that he was redressing a supposed grievance or injury, or under 
 the impression of obtaining some public benefit, he is liable to punish- 
 ment. The jury ought in all cases to be told, that every man should be 
 considered of sane mind until the contrary was clearly proved in evidence. 
 That before a plea of insanity should be allowed, undoubted evidence 
 ought to be adduced that the accused was of diseased mind, and that at 
 the time he committed the act, he mas not conscious of right or wrong. 
 Every person was supposed to know what the law was, and therefore 
 nothing could justify a wrong act, except it was clearly proved that the 
 party did not know right from wrong. If that was not satisfactorily 
 proved, the accused was liable to punishment. If the delusion under 
 which a person labored were onlj j>artial, the party accused was equally 
 liable with a person of sane mind. If the accused killed another in 
 self-defence, he would be entitled to an acquittal ; but if the crime were 
 r *47 T committed for any supposed injury, *he would then be liable to 
 L J the punishment awarded by the laws to his crime." 
 
 This exposition of the law deserves the most attentive and respectful 
 consideration J inasmuch as it is the deliberate expression of opinion 
 emanating from the highest authority, expressed on the most solemn 
 occasion, and in the most deliberate manner. The form of this opinion, 
 expressed as a series of answers to certain definite queries, makes the 
 whole spirit of it somewhat difficult to understand. The first sentence 
 appears to have no reference to the subject of insanity. 
 
 In the third sentence the tests of insanity allowable as a plea against 
 punishment are declared to be diseased mind, and unconsciousness of 
 right and wrong at the time of the o fence. 
 
 The sentence respecting delusion is explicit but scarcely intelligible ; 
 while the concluding one is extremely obscure. Any man who kills 
 another in self-defence is entitled to an acquittal on a charge of murder. 
 It would seem therefore that in this paragraph there is an ellipsis, and 
 that it should have stood thus : "if the prisoner killed another under the 
 delusion that he was acting in self-defence, he would be entitled to an 
 acquittal." 
 
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AN ESSAY. 25 
 
 The concluding sentence is plain enough, *though it appears p ^.o -. 
 to be in direct opposition to the manner in whiq^ the law was L J 
 g-dministered in the very case which rendered this exposition necessary. 
 Judges consenting to this opinion not only presided at the trial of 
 McNaughten, but actually stopped the defence, convinced of the prisoner's 
 insanity by the overwhelming weight of medical testimony. 
 
 In examining critically the opinion of the judges it will be necessary 
 to separate the two symptoms or consequences of diseased mind upon 
 which they make irresponsibility to depend, namely, unconsciousness of 
 right and wrong, and delusion. The issue is not limited to either one 
 or other of these conditions, neither is there any indication that the 
 former is conceived to be exclusively dependent upon the latter. We 
 will commence therefore by an examination of the weightier question, 
 and endeavour to ascertain how far insane persons who commit offences 
 are conscious of right and wrong ; and to what extent the presence of 
 this attribute may justly expose persons of unsound mind to punishment 
 for actions detrimental to society. On this subject we must first briefly 
 appeal to philosophy, and then refer to experience. 
 
 Upon what does the knowledge of right and *wrong, or of ^ ^ , „ -, 
 good and evil (for the judges have used these as convertible L J 
 terms) depend ? 
 
 Mr. Locke says, that " conscience is nothing else but our own opinion 
 or judgment of the moral rectitude or pravity of our actions." 
 
 The judges therefore have placed the test of responsibility upon the 
 normal and healthy action of conscience. 
 
 Mr. Locke, having cited many instances of enormities practised by 
 whole nations as commendable and virtuous, remarks that, " If we look 
 abroad and take a view of men as they are, we shall find that they have 
 remorse in one place for doing or omitting that, which others in another 
 place think they merit by." Again, « Good and evil, as hath been 
 shown, are nothing but pleasure or pain, or that which occasions or pro- 
 cures pleasure or pain to us. Moral good and evil, then, is only the con- 
 formity or disagreement of our voluntary actions to some law, whereby 
 good or evU is drawn on us by the will and power of the law-maker ; 
 which good and evil, pleasure or pain, attending our observance or breach 
 of the law, by the decree of the law-maker, is what we call reward and 
 punishment." 
 
 Locke then distinguishes three laws or rules, namely, the divine law, 
 the civil law, and the *law of opinion or reputation. " By the ^ ^r „ .. 
 relation they bear to the fitrst of these, men judge whether their L J 
 actions are sins or duties ; by the second, whether they be criminal or 
 innocent ; and by the third, whether they be virtues or vices." 
 
 Mr. Bentham, whose whole system of jurisprudence is affiliated on the 
 sensational ethics, adopts the same views, and refers the parentage of all 
 knowledge of right and wrong, all actions of conscience, to ideas of utility 
 or inconvenience, of pleasure and pain. 
 
 If the opinions of these great authorities are correct in this point, the 
 power of discriminating between right and wrong must ever depend upon 
 the exercise of the intellectual faculties alone, and the alienation of this 
 
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26 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 power of conscience can only be caused by want of intellectual power, 
 experienced either in» the faculties of perception, conception, or judg- 
 ment. When a machine is out of order, it is of course a great advan- 
 tage t6 be able to pronounce what parts thereof must defective ; and if 
 the above views are correct, the question of the responsibility of the 
 insane will be much simplified. According to them, if the perceiving 
 and comparing faculties act with sufficient power to indicate the sources 
 _ ^--j , of utility *or inconvenience, of pleasure and pain, whatever may 
 L J be the condition of the emotional or instinctive faculties, crimi- 
 nals possess the knowledge of right and wrong, and are responsible. 
 But the sources of utility and inconvenience, or pleasure and pain, being 
 depejident upon the society in which we live, and the education we may 
 happen to receive, our knowledge of right and wrong might teach us to 
 adopt the custom of fattening and eating our own children, of burning 
 our parents alive, of stealing with courage and adroitness like the youth 
 of Lacedaemon in old times, or of marrying thirty wives like the Mor- 
 monite elders in the new. Even in this Christian country, and in this 
 nineteenth century, the pleasures and pains of another life might exer- 
 cise no influence upon our judgment; because, like thousands of the 
 criminal poor in our great cities, and of our industrial poor in mines, or 
 like that wretched criminal in the following notice, we might never have 
 heard of them. " Conviction for murder. At the Tyrone Assizes, Mr. 
 Justice Torrens sentenced Alexander MuUan to be executed on the 20th 
 of August, for the murder of his aunt, Jane Mullan, at Kirkpatrick, in 
 May, 1852. His lordship stated that he named the most distant day his 
 r *f^9 n ^^^^^ ^^ ^^^ permitted, *in consequence of having learned from 
 •- J the Gaol Chaplain that the culprit was utterly ignorant of the 
 principles of the Christian religion ; so much so, as not even to be aware 
 of the name of the Saviour ; and he earnestly besought him to bestow 
 the time he had to remain in this world in repentance and prayer." 
 
 In this lamentable case, punishment was deferred, in order that the 
 development of the knowledge of good and evil might be commenced, 
 even when the power of choice was about to be destroyed for ever. 
 
 According to the philosophical opinions prevalent in this country, the 
 knowledge of right and wrong originating from ideas of pleasure and 
 pain is determined in reference to virtue and sin, by Divine law ; in 
 reference to innocence and guilt, by human law. It is with the latter 
 only we are now concerned ; and it is obvious, that if the civil law is the 
 measure of crime and innocence, the knowledge of right and wrong is 
 dependent upon the knowledge of civil law. But the decision of the 
 Judges includes the old dogma, that " every person is " supposed to 
 know what the law is," consequently every person is supposed to possess 
 r*fcq-i * knowledge of right and wrong. But, notwithstanding *the 
 ■L J legal fiction to t^ie contrary, it is notorious that a vast number of 
 sane persons are ignorant of the civil law ; therefore, to the extent which 
 their ignorance reaches, they are unconscious of right or wrong. And 
 the judicial test of insanity is shown to be an attribute of the uneducated 
 sane, and merely a synonyme for ignorance. 
 It may properly be objected to this conclusion, that the assumption 
 
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AN ESSAY. 27 
 
 that " all persons know the law" is not a fiction, but a reality, as far as 
 the consequences of great crimes are concerned. But this objection does 
 not invalidate the argument, inasmuch as an equal certainty exists that 
 insane persons committing deliberate crimes have the same linowledge of 
 the legal consequences of these crimes upon themselves ; and indeed, in 
 many instances, have perpetrated the most heinous offences for the ex- 
 press purpose of incurring such legal consequences. Hadfield shot at 
 the king in order that he might lose his own life at the hands of the 
 executioner. The Honourable Koss Touchett shot his victim for the 
 same purpose ; and similar cases have been numerous. It is highly im- 
 probable that any criminal, whose insanity was not so obvious and pro- 
 nounced as to leave no room for doubt, *and no real necessity for y !j._ , -. 
 trial, has ever deliberately taken away the life of a fellow creature L J 
 without the knowledge that, in so doing, he was rendering himself 
 amenable to lose his own life. 
 
 The assumption, therefore, that all sane persons are in the above sense 
 conscious of right and wrong, is proved to be illogical and incorrect ; and 
 the value of this attribute, as a distinctive mark between the sane and 
 the insane, is entirely lost. 
 
 It is due to that great jurist Bentham to state, that, in making re- 
 sponsibility dependent upon the knowledge of right and wrong, and in 
 acknowledging the civil law to be. the measure of the latter, he did not 
 adopt the dogma that all men must know the law. On the contrary, his 
 benevolence, as well as his sagacity, pointed out that in this respect so- 
 ciety has its duties as well as its rights ; and he proposed that every 
 citizen of the state should be comp^elled to become acquainted, not only 
 with the laws affecting himself in common with all others, but also with the 
 laws having especial reference to his own duties and position in society. 
 
 Suppose one of Mr. Catlin's Ojibbeway friends, when in this country, 
 had upon ^trespass and without a license provided himself with r ^cr -i 
 amusement and a dinner, by the destruction of some furred or L J 
 feathered game ; it would have been useless on his part to plead igno- 
 rance of the game laws in bar of punishment, for every one is supposed 
 to be acquainted with the laws. It is an undeniable and notorious fact, 
 that a large portion of our indigenous population are as ignorant of law 
 as the red skins themselves can be. When society has done its duty in 
 the education of its lowest members, it will then be time for the officers 
 intrusted with the enforcement of its rules, to insist upon a responsibility 
 founded upon a knowledge which at present is oftentimes unattainable. 
 In the existing state of our populations the dogma under discussion is 
 scarcely more reasonable than it would be to decree, that in this country 
 every one is supposed to have his stomach full of nutritious food at least 
 once a day. 
 
 There is, however, another view of the question of responsibility and 
 of the knowledge of right and wrong, approaching infinitely nearer to 
 philosophic truth, than the one founded upon the metaphysics of Mr. 
 Locke or the ethics of Mr. Bentham. 
 
 The following lucid explanation of this view *is quoted in the ^ ^^p, -. 
 fifth chapter of M. Cousin's analysis. L J 
 
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28 BUCKNILL ON CKIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 "The most superficial observation, provided it be impartial, easily de- 
 monstrates, tbat in the human mind, in its present actual development, 
 there is the idea of right and wrong, altogether distinct the one from the 
 other. It is a fact that, in the presence of certain actions, reason quali- 
 fies them as good or bad, just or unjust. And it is not merely in the 
 select circle of the enlightened, that reason puts forth this judgment. 
 There is not a man, ignorant or instructed, civilized or savage, provided 
 he be a rational and moral being, who does not exercise the same judg- 
 ment. As the principle of causality errs and rectifies itself in its appli- 
 cation without ceasing to exist, so the distinction between right and 
 wrong may be incorrectly applied, may vary in regard to particular ob- 
 jects, and may become clearer and more correct in time, without ceasing 
 to be with all men the same thing at the bottom. It is an universal 
 conception of reason, and hence it is found in all languages, those pro- 
 ducts and faithful images of the mind. Not only is this distinction 
 universal, but it is a necessary conception. In vain does the reason 
 after having once received, attempt to deny it, or to call in question its 
 r*f;7l **'^*^- It cannot. One cannot at will regard the same action 
 L J as just and unjust. These two ideas baffle every attempt to com- 
 mute them, the one for the other; their objects may change, but never 
 their nature. Still further : reason cannot conceive the distinction be- 
 tween right and wrong, just and unjust, without instantly conceiving 
 that the one ought to be done and the other ought not to be done. The 
 conception of right and wrong, instantly gives that of duty, of law ; and 
 as the one is universal and necessary, the other is equally so. Now a law 
 necessary for the reason, in respect to action, is, for a rational but free 
 agent, a simple obligation, but it is an absolute obligation. Duty obliges 
 us, though without forcing us ; but at the same time, if we can violate 
 it, we cannot deny it. Accordingly, even when the feebleness of the 
 liberty and the ascendancy of passion, make the action false to the law ; 
 yet reason, independent, asserts the violated law as an inviolable law, 
 and imposes it still with supreme authority upon the wayward conduct, 
 as its imprescriptable rule. The sentiment of reason and of moral obli- 
 gation which reason reveals and impresses, is consciousness in its highest 
 degree and office ; it is moral consciousness, or conscience properly so 
 r ^^iS 1 '^^^^^^- *Observe distinctly, however, with what it is that obli- 
 L J gation has to do. It refers to right doing. It bears upon no 
 other point,'but there it is absolute. It is, then, independent of every 
 foreign consideration; it has nothing to do with the facilities or diffi- 
 culties which its fulfilment may encounter, nor with the consequences 
 it may entail, with pleasure or pain, that is, with happiness or misery, 
 that is again, with any motive of utility whatever. For pleasure and 
 pain, happiness and misery, are nothing but objects of sensibility; while 
 moral good and moral obligation are conceptions of the reason. Utility 
 is hut an accident which may or may not he; duty is a principle." 
 
 If this philosophy is correct, every one possessing the mental attributes 
 of humanity may justly be supposed to be conscious of right and wrong, 
 irrespective of the societies for promoting christian or useful knowledge, 
 or national systems of education, or Mr. Bentham's proposed instruction 
 
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AN ESSAY. 29 
 
 in civil law ; and so long as the laws are founded upon justice, every 
 member of society, however uneducated or degraded he may be, may 
 justly be held amenable to their penalties. 
 
 The sense of duty, the feeling of right and wrong, is an innate prin- 
 ciple of the human *mind implanted by the Almighty, and ^ ^-„ -, 
 serving as a sure foundation for the responsibility of man for his >- J 
 actions ; which is thus not left to chance development, but is rendered 
 an essential and necessary part of human nature. It seems needful to 
 inquire to what extent this absolute and necessary part of human 
 nature becomes capable of being perverted or destroyed under the 
 influence of cerebro-mental disease. It may be taken as an axiom, that 
 the innate and essential principles of mind are ever present where mind 
 exists. It may also be asserted as the result of observation and expe- 
 rience, that in all lunatics, and even in the most degraded idiots, when- 
 ever manifestations of any mental action can be educed, the feeling of 
 right and wrong may be proved to exist. The education of idiots and 
 cretins has proved that there is no zero in the human mind ; and the 
 success of the moral treatment prevailing in lunatic asylums has 
 demonstrated, that insanity does not neutralize the influences by which 
 the moral government of the world is effected. But if insanity does 
 not remove these innate principles, does it on that account leave persons 
 under their influence wholly responsible for their actions ? Certainly 
 not : Responsibility depends upon power, not upon knowledge, still less 
 upon * feeling. A man is responsible to do that which he can do, r-^r-n-\ 
 not that which he feels or knows it right to do. If a man is L J 
 reduced under thraldom to passion by disease of the brain, he loses 
 moral freedom and responsibility, although his knowledge of right and 
 wrong may remain intact. 
 
 It may be here remarked, that the English judges have made use of 
 the terms, " knowledge of right and wrong," " knowledge of good and 
 evil," "conscious of right and wrong," as if the terms were convertible. 
 This is far from being correct ; for that which is morally good, is not 
 always legally right; otherwise legislators would always be infallible, 
 which the contradictory nature of their work at different times proves 
 them not to be. Besides, the innate consciousness of right and wrong 
 must be carefully distinguished from the knowledge of right and wrong 
 in a particular instance. Baron Hume, the great Scottish authority on 
 criminal law, avoids this error of confusing the two, and dwells upon the 
 important distinction of knowledge of right and wrong in the abstract 
 and in the particular. He observes, " Whether it should be added to 
 the description, that he must have lost all knowledge of good and evil, 
 right and wrong, is a more delicate ^question, and fit, perhaps, p ^^, , 
 to be resolved differently, according to the sense in which it is L J 
 understood. If it be put in this sense in a case, for instance, of murder. 
 Did the panel know that murder was a crime ? would he have answered 
 on the question, that it was wrong to kill a neighbour ? This is hardly 
 tq be reputed a just criterion of such a state of soundness as ought to 
 make a man accountable in law for his acts. Because it may happen to 
 a person to answer in this way, who is yet so absolutely mad as to have 
 
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30 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 lost all true observation of facts, all understanding of the good or bad 
 intention of those who are about him, or even the knowledge of their 
 persons. "But if the question is put in this other and more special sense, 
 as relative to the act done by the panel, and his understanding of the 
 particular situation in which he conceived himself to stand : — ^Did he at 
 that moment understand the evil of what he did ? was he impressed 
 with the consciousness of guilt and fear of punishment ? — it is then a 
 pertinent and a material question, but which cannot to any substantial 
 purpose be answered, without taking into consideration the whole circum- 
 r*R9l stances of the situation. Everyjudgmentinthematterof rightand 
 L J *wrong supposes a case or state of facts, to which it applies. And 
 though the panel may have that vestige of reason which may enable him 
 to answer in the general, that murder is a crime, yet if he cannot dis- 
 tinguish his friend from his enemy, or a benefit from an injury, but 
 conceived everything about him to be the reverse of what it really is, 
 and mistook the illusions of his fancy for realities in respect of his own 
 condition and that of others, those remains of intellect are of no use to 
 him towards the government of his actions, nor in enabling him to form 
 a judgment on any particular situation or conjunction of ■yp^hat is right 
 or wrong with regard to it ; if he does not know the person of his friend 
 or neighbour, or if he do know him, if he is possessed with the vain 
 conceit that he is come there to destroy him, or that he has already done 
 him the most cruel injuries, and that all about him are engaged in one 
 foul conspiracy to abuse him, as well might he be utterly ignorant of the 
 quality of murder. Proceeding as it does on a false case or conjuration 
 of his own fancy, his judgment of right and wrong, as to any responsi- 
 bility that may attach to it, is truly the same as none at all. It is there- 
 r *fiR 1 ^°^® ""^'y ^^ ^^® complete *and appropriated sense as relative to 
 L -' the particular thing done, and the situation of the panel's feel- 
 ings and consciousness on that occasion, that this inquiry concerning his 
 intelligence of moral good or evil is material, and not in any other or 
 larger sense." 
 
 With the sentiment of duty, the consciousness of right and wrong 
 unimpaired or even stronger than usual, the insane are frequently unable, 
 in consequence of delusion, to distinguish right from wrong in the par- 
 ticular instance. Thus, a poor woman, imbued with the sentiments of 
 piety and maternal affection, suffocated her two children between pillows, 
 because she had been told by the Holy Grhost to do so, in order that they 
 might inherit the kingdom of heaven. During the many years that this 
 patient was under our care she was docile, industrious, and in every 
 respect well conducted ; when alone she held conversations with imagi- 
 nary beings ; in all the ordinary transactions of life, her feeling of right 
 and wrong was precise and sensitive. In the matter of her offence, she 
 believed that she performed a righteous deed ; she knew, indeed, that 
 she was transgressing the laws of men, but what were they, in compari- 
 son with the direct mandate of the Most High ! The sentiment of duty 
 r *64 1 *^*^ misdirected in its action. Hoffbauer suggests that, " in 
 L J regard to the acts of insane persons, the dominant impression in 
 which their delusion consists ought to be regarded, not as an error, but 
 
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AN ESSAY. 81 
 
 as truth ; in other terms, their actions ought to be considered as if they 
 had been committed under the circumstances under which the individual 
 believed himself to act. A soldier at Brieg killed a child, believing that 
 he saw the Deity at hand, commanding him to perpetrate the deed. In 
 his judgment on this case, Dr. Glanwitz ordered that the man should be 
 confined in a mad-house. If the imaginary circumstances made no 
 change as to the imputability of the crime, they should have no effect 
 on the case under consideration ; if they would have lessened or destroyed 
 culpability, had they existed, they should have the same effect in the sup- 
 posed instance." 
 
 With other insane offenders, acting under the influence of delusion, 
 the knowledge of right and wrong, even in the particular instance, ap- 
 pears to have remained intact ; as in Hadfield's case, who shot at the 
 king, for the express purpose of obtaining the punishment of crime. In 
 some instances the idea of criminality is induced by the attempts of in- 
 sane offenders to *esoape or conceal the crime. Dadd, the artist, p:|tf.c -i 
 who committed parricide at Cobham Park, escaped to France. L J 
 Frost, the insane shoemaker, washed the blood from the hammer with 
 which he had killed his children. Cleptomaniacs also show their sense 
 of wrong-doing, by the stealthy manner in which they perform their 
 thefts, and the care with which they often conceal the booty. In other 
 instances the offence has been the result of the malign emotions, unduly 
 .excited by intellectual delusion ; as in McNaughten's case, who shot Mr. 
 Drummond because " he was driven to desperation by (imaginary) perse- 
 cutions." 
 
 Not a few of the homicides committed by insane persons, are perpe- 
 trated without premeditation or thought of consequences. A half-witted 
 man, at work on the road-side, was tormented by a pack of mischievous 
 boys ; he struck at one of them with his spade, and split his scull open. 
 If, instead of a spade, he had had only a stick in his hand, the same 
 mental operations would have instigated a blow, but the event would not 
 have been of a tragical nature. The blow was given as a horse would 
 kick a cur yelping at his heels ; probably without malevolence, or the 
 feeling that it was wrong. During many years that this patient j- ^„^ -, 
 *has been under our own care, a so-called criminal lunatic, he L J 
 has displayed a docile and even gentle disposition. Many offences com- 
 mitted by idiots are of this nature j many others however indicate the 
 . influence of the malign emotions unrestrained by the intelligent will. 
 
 The proof of the existence of moral insanity would, of course, entirely 
 destroy the validity of the collective opinion of the judges, or would give 
 us as an alternative, a decision that disease of the brain, producing results 
 detrimental to society, through the medium of one set of cerebral func- 
 tions, may leave the person suffering from it, liable to punishment ; that 
 acting through another set of functions, it may confer upon him immu- 
 nity. The consideration of moral insanity must be postponed. 
 
 We claim thus far to have proved, that, according to one great school 
 of philosophy, a large proportion of sane criminals do not know right 
 from wrong ; that, according to the other great school, no human beings 
 in the possession of any mental power can be without the consciousness 
 
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32 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 of right and wrong ; that the judges use the terms, " knowledge" and 
 " consciousness/' indiscriminately; that, many criminals, whose insanity 
 is so ohvioas that the common sense of mankind would revolt at their 
 r *fi7 1 punishment, ^indicate, nevertheless, a correct knowledge of right 
 L -I and wrong, not only in the abstract, but in the particular instance 
 of their offence. We must, therefore, conclude that this, the main por- 
 tion of the judges' condition of exemption from responsibility and pun- 
 ishment on the plea of insanity, is erroneous in principle and inapplicable 
 in practice. 
 
 Circumstances, indeed, soon compelled one of the judges to act in open 
 rebellion against its authority. In the trial of Frost for the murder of 
 his children, Mr. Justice Williams said in charging the jury, " It was 
 not merely for them to consider whether the prisoner knew right from 
 wrong, hut whether he was at the time he committed the offence deranged 
 or not." 
 
 We cannot understand that portion of the judges' opinion wherein 
 they say, " If the delusion under which a person labored were ovAj par- 
 tial, the party accused was equally liable with a person of sane mind." 
 A person may have one delusion or many, and his conduct may be more 
 or less affected by delusion ; but the idea of a partial delusion is unin- 
 telligible, inasmuch as every delusion must be complete in itself. 
 
 On the whole, it is probable that the celebrated opinion above exam- 
 r *Ra -\ i'l®'^ "^'i ^° ''o 8°°*^ *&a.^ little harm ; for not one of the able men 
 L -I engaged in its construction will be likely to do violence to his 
 good sense or his humanity, by allowing himself to be either restrain,ed 
 or constrained by it, in opposition to trustworthy evidence of undoubted 
 cerebro-mental disease. 
 
 The subject of delusion must be further pursued. It would appear to 
 be the law that, in order to exempt from punishment, a delusion must 
 be of a nature likely to suggest motives for the criminal act. 
 
 This principle, although not without plausibility in theory, is not 
 likely to be of any practical utility. The existence of delusion is the 
 proof of insanity; and an acknowledged lunatic cannot justly be held to 
 be wholly responsible for his actions, whether we are able to trace the 
 motives for them to delusive opinion or not. The insane inmates of 
 asylums occasionally commit homicides under the influence of malignant 
 emotion, of passion, hatred, or revenge ; yet they are not held responsi- 
 ble, although the motives of the deed have not arisen from delusive 
 opinion. Not only are delusions frequently concealed, but when known, 
 the connection between them and the overt act is often extraordinary, 
 and scarcely conceivable to a sane mind. We once attended a young 
 r *RQ T gentleman *who had committed a frightful assault upon a child ; 
 L J cutting the calves of its legs through to the bone with a knife ! 
 He was in love with windmills, and being placed by his friends in a part 
 of the country where none of these objects existed, he committed the 
 assault in the hope of being removed in consequence therefrom, to some 
 place where windmills did exist. 
 
 What sane mind could have guessed the connection between this young 
 man's delusion and his offence ? 
 
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AN ESSAY. 33 
 
 Tte ease is mentioned in Taylor's Medical Jurisprudence. 
 
 The following may serve as a curious example of motiye-guessing by 
 an experienced psychopathist. 
 
 In McNaughten's trial, Sir W. Follet, in cross-examining Dr. Monro, 
 asked, 
 
 " May insanity exist with a moral perception of right and wrong ? 
 
 " Dr. M. Yes, it is very common. 
 
 " Sir W. F. A person may have a delusion and know murder to be 
 a crime ? 
 
 " Dr. M. If there existed antecedent symptoms I should consider the 
 murder to be an overt act ; the crowning piece of his insanity. But if 
 he had stolen a ten pound note it would not have tallied with his delu- 
 sion. 
 
 *"Sir W. F. But suppose he stolen the note from one of his ^ ^^^ , 
 persecutors?" L J 
 
 The necessity of connecting the overt act with the delusion cannot be 
 maintained ; but the existence of any delusion in the medico-legal sense 
 of the term must be accepted as a proof of diseased mind, and a bar to 
 the punishment due to a sane criminal. What then is, and what is not 
 a delusion f 
 
 The term applied to ordinary topics is used in two senses, namely, in 
 that of deception, and in that of error and mistake. Its original signifi- 
 cation must have been the former of these two, arising as it did from the 
 practice of gladiators to pretend to fight before the real combat com- 
 menced ; when they made an end of this, they were said de ludere, to 
 cease from playing : the term afterwards came to be applied to the mock 
 battle itself, and from thence to any act of deception, especially to decep- 
 tion in opinion. The term however is now more used in the sense of an 
 error or mistake : — 
 
 "And fondly mourned the dear delusion gone." — Prior. 
 It is in this latter sense that the term is applied to the intellectual errors 
 of the insane. In common parlance, a delusion is either a deception or 
 an error of opinion. The feats of a conjurer *are delusions as j- ^„-| -, 
 deceptions ; but if a person believed in their reality, such belief L -• 
 would be a delusion in the sense of a mistake or intellectual error. In 
 the insane false appearances owing to faulty sense (dysaesthesia) may pro- 
 duce delusions by deception. To these however the term illusion is more 
 properly applied ; unless their reality being credited, they are permitted 
 to influence the conduct. When this occurs, the false perceptions from 
 dysaesthesia are not improperly called delusions. The term however is 
 more strictly applied to intellectual errors immediately affecting the judg- 
 ment. Thus a man who perceiving a bad taste in all his food should 
 think that noxious substances were introduced therein, might be said to 
 labour under a deceptive delusion ; while a patient who believed himself 
 to be the Deity, or some brute animal, or inanimate substance, would be 
 the subject of a delusion of error. 
 
 Sir John NichoU gave it as his opinion that, "a delusion is a belief of 
 facts which no rational reason would have believed." This is a very 
 pretty example of "petitio principii." 
 
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34 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 Lord Brougliain. defines a delusion as a « belief of things as realities 
 wWcli exist only in the imagination of the patient." To this definition 
 r *79 n *tliere are two obj ections, that it includes many erroneous opinions 
 L -I entertained by sane people ; and that it excludes many of the de- 
 lusions of the insane. All delusions founded upon the false perceptions 
 of sense are omitted in this definition ; for sensations cannot be said to 
 exist only in the imagination of the patient. They are owing to changes 
 either in the nerves of sense, or'in the sensorium commune ; sensational 
 impressions whether true or false, whether occasioned by contact with 
 the external world, or originating abnormally in the nervous system 
 without such contact, cannot be said to exist only in the imagination of 
 the patient. Delusions founded upon such impressions are common, and 
 their existence destroys the value of the above definition. It is vitiated 
 also by comprehending all the unfounded and absurd beliefs of the sane 
 portion of mankind. Spirit-rapping, ghost-seeing, clairvoyance, mesmeric 
 prophecy, are all delusions, according to Lord Brougham's definition. 
 The worship of Buddha, or of Vishnu, and other false religions, also 
 come under it. 
 
 In the common acceptation of the word, no doubt all these opinions 
 are delusions. The medico-legal sense of the term, however, is not the 
 r *7^ 1 common sense, but is used to imply an *operation of the mind 
 L -I peculiar to insane persons. In this sense we venture to offer the 
 following definition : A delusion is a belief in the existence of things 
 which have no existence in reality, or an erroneous perception of the 
 nature of things, or of their relation to each other, occasioned hy cerehro- 
 mental disease. 
 
 It may be said that this also is begging the question, and leaves the 
 difficulty as great as before. This is to some extent true, but unavoidable. 
 For it must be admitted, that there is no certain method of distinguish- 
 ing between the erroneous intellectual operations of a diseased mind, and 
 those of the sane but imperfect reasoners who abound in society. In- 
 sanity is a disease recognizable with sufficient certainty by many symptoms 
 when grouped together, not one of which, however, can safely be trusted 
 to by itself, or considered pathognomonic. Most of the symptoms are 
 occasionally to be observed singly where insanity does not exist. In 
 illustration from another disease : pain in the breast is a symptom of 
 pneumonia, which although it does not always occur in that affection, 
 and does occur in some others, is not without value when taken in con- 
 nection with other symptoms and signs. In the same manner, an absurd 
 P ^- , -. opinion, which taken by itself would possess little value *as an 
 L J indication of insanity, when considered in a group with other 
 symptoms, may become of great diagnostic value. Thus the belief of the 
 unfortunate parricide, Mr. Dadd, in Osiris and the religion of ancient 
 Egypt, was far more dignified, and scarcely more absurd, than the reli- 
 gion of the Mormons, the Lampeter brethren, the followers of Johanna 
 Southcott, or Swedenborg. It could not therefore on its own merits or 
 demerits be pronounced to be an insane delusion ; but when taken in 
 connection with sudden change of habits and disposition ; with bodily 
 indisposition, loss of rest, and other indications of nervous disturbance j 
 
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AN ESSAY, 35 
 
 and followed by the homicide of a beloved parent, that strange opinion 
 is at once recognized as the fantasy of a diseased brain. 
 
 Not unfrequently, but by no means constantly, the delusions of the 
 insane possess characteristic features, by which they maybe distinguished 
 from the absurd opinions of the foolish and ignorant. The following are 
 some of the most prominent. 
 
 1st. The delusions of the insane are generally independent of the 
 opinions of others j they isolate the persftn who entertains them from his 
 kind : whereas the sane portion of mankind are gregarious in their ab- 
 surdities ; fools who *are to be considered sane, follow each other |- ^_- _ 
 through a gap like a flock of sheep ; oftentimes indeed following L J 
 some bellwether who is more rogue than fool ; they have neither the 
 confidence nor the courage to walk alone. Mr. Dadd was probably the 
 only person in England who believed in Osiris ; had there been a few 
 hundreds or even a few scores of persons entertaining the same belief, 
 his ideas on this subject would have been of infinitely less value as a 
 symptom of insanity. 
 
 2nd. The faith of the insane in the truth of their delusive opinions is 
 steadfast and unflinching. It almost surpasses the religious faith of the 
 Mahomedan or Hindoo, and renders pale by contrast the attenuated 
 belief which sane men accord to the absurdities of the hour. The dilet- 
 tanti philosopher or religionist concedes to clairvoyance, to rapping 
 spirits, or to Mr. Prince, a certain amount of belief, which may give 
 way under the assault of ridicule, or logic, or misfortune ; but the lunatic 
 believes in his delusion with all his soul; he may outlive it or be cured 
 of it, but can never be driven from it by any influences, however potent ; 
 " no one who has not been insane," says a convalescent patient, " can 
 imagine how terribly real the delusions of lunatics are." [See Appendix, 
 Note C] 
 
 *3rd. The delusions of the insane come on after some physical ^ ^„„ -. 
 or moral shock, and often present strange contrasts to the pre- L J 
 vious habits of thought, or have no relation thereto. The absurdities 
 of the foolish or the ignorant have no such starting point, and are gener- 
 ally consistent with their customary attempts at thinking. 
 
 4th. The delusions of. the insane in many instances have relation to 
 the patients alone, and are often of a kind which renders their nature 
 apparent ; no one could for an instant doubt that a man was insane who 
 conceived himself turned into the screw of a cider-press, and for months 
 revolved on his own axis, making a creaking noise with his mouth. The 
 idea of loss of personal identity in an infinite variety of ways is a frequent 
 source of delusion, and indicates so complete an overthrow of the normal 
 action of the mind, that it must generally be considered the result of 
 disease. Even where such delusion is to a certain extent endemic, and 
 therefore loses its isolated character, as in the "loup garous" of France 
 it is found to be caused by disease. 
 
 These characteristics of insane delusions are not constant. In a great 
 number of instances they afford a clue to the formation of a right judg- 
 ment, but not unfrequently they are altogether *wanting. In j- ^„_ -, 
 such doubtful and difficult cases the psycopathist can only form L J 
 his opinion by a careful estimate of all concomitant circumstances. 
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36 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 The true test of delusion as a isymptom of insanity is its origin or 
 mode of production. Its existence^ corroborates the testimony of various 
 physical and rational symptoms of cerebro-mental disease, and its own 
 nature is discovered by their existence : they mutually prove each other. 
 No mental test, therefore, of insanity being trustworthy, it becomes of 
 the utmost importance to ascertain what rational symptoms and physical 
 signs taken in combination and ratifying each other, are sufficient to 
 place beyond doubt the. existence of cerebro-mental disease. 
 
 It must be acknowledged, that the recognition of cerebro-mental 
 disease is often encompassed with difficulties, not to be surmounted 
 except by the most patient, as well as the most skilful and experienced 
 observation. There are many bodily diseases, the recognition of which 
 is attended with similar though not with equal difficulties. The organ 
 of mind being enclosed within its bony case, impenetrable to our senses, 
 and performing its functions without any outward manifestations, except 
 P^ „Q -, the result of those functions in speech and action ; physical *signs 
 L J of its disease are almost unattainable. There can be no cranio- 
 scope to give information of the operations in the higher bodily cavity, 
 corresponding with the instrument which has of late years made us so 
 well acquainted with those in the cavity of the chest. 
 
 It would be superfluous to introduce in this place a lecture on the 
 symptoms of insanity as they affect the various bodily functions, and 
 especially the eye, aspect, and demeanour of the patient ; and it must 
 suffice to mention that in most instances they enable the experienced 
 physician to recognize without difficulty the existence of cerebro-mental 
 disease. The aspects of disease are so peculiar that oftentimes they 
 alone enable the practised eye to distinguish patients suffering from 
 numerous bodily disorders, for instance, from affections of the kidney, or 
 of the heart or lungs, or from malignant growth. It is not therefore 
 surprising that cerebro-mental disease which impresses its sign upon 
 every look, feature, and movement, should be easily recognized by its 
 aspect. This power of recognition becomes by experience a tact not 
 easily communicable in words, but sufficiently certain in practice. 
 
 Like the power of the skilful advocate over witnesses and jurymen ; 
 ™ „q -, like that of the Indian *with certainty pursuing his way through 
 L -I the pathless woods; it is gained by long and habitual practice 
 only, and is not altogether understood even by the possessor of it. 
 During the present summer, a physician visiting a County Lunatic 
 Asylum, observed a group of twenty or thirty female patients dressed in 
 the same costume; and at the distance of a gun-shot, from the aspect 
 and carriage of one of those women he pronounced her to be of sane 
 mind, and was informed by the Medical Superintendent that she indeed 
 had already received her discharge as cured. The assertion of this 
 power in a court of justice would scarcely be admitted, and the physician 
 would be required to explain his process of deduction. He woidd have 
 to trace the effect of hereditary predisposition, and of a sufficient exci- 
 ting cause, to detail the particulars of change which had taken place 
 from the standard afforded by the patient's normal and healthy condi- 
 tion; change in the affections or in the modes of thought; change in the 
 
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AN ESSAY, 37 
 
 eye, the countenance, and tLe demeanour; the presence of restlessness 
 and sleeplessness, of altered temperature, vitiated secretions, and resist- 
 ance to the power of medicines. With sufficient opportunities for 
 making observations on all points, experienced and skilful physicians 
 *would be able to form opinions thoroughly trustworthy in all ^ ^q^, , 
 but the most rare and exceptional cases. Unfortunately it has L ■' 
 not been the practice in this country to affi)rd such opportunities. The 
 physician has been compelled to form his opinions from two or three 
 brief conversations held in the prison cell, during which, if the prisoner 
 is really insane and be on his guard, he will endeavour to conceal his 
 insanity, or if feigning, will act the part to the best of his ability. In 
 America and Prance these matters are conducted differently, and an 
 alteration in the practice of this country is urgently needed. Under the 
 present system an offender supposed to be insane is consigned to the 
 common gaol.- If the next sitting of the Criminal Court be near, no 
 sufficient opportunity for the observation of the prisoner can be obtained; 
 if on the other hand the court does not sit until some time after the com- 
 mittal, and the patient is suffering from recent insanity, the invaluable 
 opportunity of early treatment is lost; and by thus rendering the patient 
 liable to have his malady confirmed and rendered permanent, the most 
 unjust and fearful punishment may be inflicted upon him. The most 
 obvious and wise course would be, to consign without delay all offenders 
 supposed *to be insane to the custody and treatment of public p ^^-. , 
 medical officers, who should examine thoroughly and ascertain the L -I 
 mental condition of their charge, and report thereupon as witnesses or 
 experts. 
 
 The collective opinion of the judges has thus been subjected to detailed 
 examination ; and in the specification of disease of the mind it has been 
 found to contain the real test of irresponsibility from insanity ; although 
 this truth might almost be overlooked from being conjoined with, and ob- 
 scured by, the metaphysical and impractical subtilities concerning partial 
 delusion and consciousness of right and wrong. 
 
 We have seen that the authority of this opinion was very soon ne- 
 glected in practice by Mr. Justice Williams ; and Lord Campbell, in a 
 debate in the House of Lords, after alluding to his " very long experience 
 and very large attention to this subject," said, "he had looked into all 
 the cases that had occurred since Arnold's trial in 1723, and to the direc- 
 tions of the judges in the cases of Lord Ferrers,' BelUngham, McNaugh- 
 ten, Oxford, and Francis, and he must be allowed to say, that there was 
 a wide' difference, both in meaning and in words, in their description 
 ^of the law." — (Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, vol. Ixvii.) p ^oo -i 
 
 Monomania, homicidal mania, moral insanity, " mania sans <- J 
 delire," has sorely tested the patience of English judges, and the under- 
 standing of the English public. In Burton's trial, at the Huntingdon 
 Summer Assizes, 1848, Baron Parke spoke of the doctrine of moral in- 
 sanity as " a dangerous innovation coming in with the present century." 
 Our task, however, will not be to inquire whether the theory of moral 
 insanity without delusion is dangerous or new, but whether it is true, 
 and founded upon well observed and well authenticated facts. 
 
 The doctrine has, to some extent, suffered both from bad terminology 
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88 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 and from bad logic on the part of its advocates ; and especially from its 
 having been considered separately from the necessary and essential requi- 
 site of irresponsibility, a state of disease. The doctrine which derives 
 responsibility from the knowledge of right and wrong, and the knowledge 
 of law, necessarily fixes our attention on the condition of the intellectual 
 faculties alone. But neither the observations of fact, nor probabilities 
 educed from the nature of the thing, in the slightest degree indicate that 
 this portion of the mind is exclusively liable to pass into a diseased con- 
 r*8^n ^i*i°°- ^O'^ ^^ contrary, a sound philosophy points to the 
 L J emotive part of our nature, as the common, if not the only source 
 of mental disease. [See Articles on the Law and Theory of Insanity, 
 by the Author, in the British and Foreign Medical Review, vols, xxiv., 
 
 XXV.] 
 
 M. Esquirol's admirable monograph on the subject of homicidal in- 
 sanity is worthy of the most attentive study. He divides insane homi- 
 cides into three classes : 
 
 1st. Those who are moved to a desire to kill by motives more or less 
 chimerical and contrary to reason ; who are recognized as insane by all 
 men. 
 
 2nd. Those who have no known motives, imaginary or real ; who are 
 compelled to the commission of the act by a blind impulse, which they 
 resist and endeavour to escape from. 
 
 3rd. Those in whom the impulse is sudden, instantaneous, unreflected 
 on, and stronger than the will; the murder is commonly committed 
 without interest or motive, and often upon the most loved objects of the 
 affections. 
 
 The first class requires no further observation in this place ; and the 
 existence of the third class, in which the impulse is sudden and unre- 
 flected on, admits of grave doubt. The testimony in favor of the exist- 
 r *84. T ^^^^ °^ ^^'^^ *^ variety is very scanty and unsatisfactory : and 
 L J it is improbable that cerebro-mental disease can develope itself 
 in so rapid a manner. It is probable that the cases of insanity, which 
 have been placed under this head, were less recent and sudden than they 
 were supposed to be. The earlier stages of diseased feeling had been 
 unobserved by others, and unacknowledged by the patient. The case of 
 the irascible gentleman with disease of the liver, recorded in page 800 
 of Mr. Taylor's work, can in no way be perverted into one of insanity; 
 for, unfortunately, many men have a sudden impulse to beat their wives 
 with a poker. Had this person given way to his impulse, would he not 
 richly have deserved punishment ? 
 
 The use of the term " impulse" in these discussions has been particu- 
 larly unfortunate. [See Appendix, Note D.] It conveys the idea of 
 force communicated instantaneously, a rapid motive ; whereas the morbid 
 desires under consideration are not of instantaneous production, or of 
 rapid growth. They arise from a chronic disease, and are resisted up to 
 a certain point; sometimes they are altogether and successfully resisted; 
 sometimes, unhappily, they prove too strong for the power of the will. 
 P^j,--. In order to establish this form of insanity, the existence of *a 
 L J diseased emotion must be proved. The will itself is a faculty so 
 
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AN ESSAY. 39 
 
 siinple and undeoomposable, that it maywell be doubted whether it can ever 
 lapse into a diseased condition. It may indeed be weaker than natural; 
 while, to keep in subjection emotions strong and rebellious through the 
 operation of disease, it had need be stronger, otherwise it must give way. 
 Esquirol, however, speaks of lesion de volunti, and says : " Si 1' intelli- 
 gence peut Itre pervertie ou abolie ; s' il en est de m@me de' la sensibi- 
 lity morale pourquoi la volunt6, ce compUment de I' Stre intellectual et 
 moral, ne serait-elle pas pervertie ou aniantie ? Est-ce que la volunt6, 
 comme 1' entendement et les affections, n' ^prouve pas des vicissitudes, 
 suivant mille circonstances de la vie ?" 
 
 It would be well if the term insane impulse could at once be banished 
 from medico-legal discussions. The adjective in common use, uncon- 
 trollable, is also liable to serious objection. Whether an emotion is 
 uncontrollable or not, depends upon its relative strength to that of the 
 will; and Lord Denman's remark in the trial of Martha Prior, at 
 Chelmsford, March, 1848, was not altogether an unreasonable one : 
 " That one person could not dive into the mind of another, and express 
 an opinion with regard *to its being in an unsound state, when _ ^„„ -. 
 there was no evidence of any alteration of conduct, or any cir- L J 
 cumstances in the case to show alienation of mind." Unfortunately, 
 however, for the necessity of this remark, there were such circumstances 
 in this particular case. The woman, recently confined, was found by 
 her medical attendant in " a dangerous state, with complete prostration 
 of strength, her eyes were vacant and wild, her countenance haggard ;" 
 and, believing her mind to be affected, he gave orders that her child 
 should not be given to her ; that she was to be kept quiet, and not per- 
 mitted to be alone. He attributed the crime to uncontrollable impulse, 
 though he had himself watched the development of the emotional dis- 
 order. The term was inapplicable and unfortunate. It may be truly 
 said that every crime is the result of uncontrollable emotions; that is, 
 of passion or desire stronger under the circumstances than the intelligent 
 will. Besides, even the subjects of moral insanity do, in many instances, 
 control their emotions for a time, and refuse to obey their first sugges- 
 tions ; the fear of correction affording external aid to the will, oftentimes 
 enables both the sane and the insane to control their emotions. We have 
 known a patient, the *subject of cleptoinania, entirely cured of ^ ^q- ., 
 his thievish propensities, simply by having his pockets turned L -• 
 inside out every night and morning. The shame and certainty of periodi- 
 cal exposure and loss of booty were sufficient to enable him to control his 
 diseased appetency for the property of other people. 
 
 The real question is, not whether the emotions occasioning the overt 
 act are beyond the power of the individual to control, but whether they 
 are the result of disease. If the objectionable terms, impulse and 
 VMControUable, are disused, the simple and intelligible question of the 
 existence or non-existence of disease will take its rightful and prominent 
 place. 
 
 Esquirol relates from Gall the following good example of homicidal 
 monomania without delusion : " I know a young woman, twenty-six years 
 of age, at present in good health, who has been affected with homicidal 
 
 Decembee, 1856. — 25 
 
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40 BUCKNILL ON CKIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 madness. She felt, at the oatamenial periods, inexpressible anguish, the 
 temptation to destroy herself, and to kill her husband and her children, 
 who were infinitely dear to her : for a long time she had not the courage 
 to bathe the youngest of her children, because an inward voice said to 
 P ^„o -. her without ceasing, ' Let it drop ; let it drop !' She had often 
 L J ^scarcely the power, or the time, to throw away from her the 
 knife she had taken up in order to plunge into her own bosom and those 
 of her children. If she entered the chamber of her husband and 
 children, and found them asleep, the idea of killing them instantly 
 seized upon her ; sometimes she precipitately, closed the chamber upon 
 them, and threw the key to a distance, in order to prevent the possibility 
 of re-entering." 1 
 
 The case of Baron Humboldt's servant, related by Marc, is well known. 
 The following cases are also from Marc : 
 
 " A young married woman, who had placed herself in a maison de 
 santS, experienced homicidal desires, of which she was unable to indi- 
 cate the motives. Her reason was unaffected on any point, and every 
 time she felt this lamentable propensity recurring and strengthening 
 itself she shed tears, and entreated that the strait-waistcoat might be 
 put on her, that she might be well restrained until the attack, which 
 sometimes lasted several days, had passed away." 
 
 " A distinguished chemist, who was also an agreeable poet and had a 
 naturally sweet and sociable temper, came to a maison de santi, in the 
 r *8q n ft'iilt'oiirg Saint Antoine. Tormented *with a desire to commit 
 L J murder, he prostrated himself before the altars of churches, and 
 implored the Almighty to deliver him from so sinful and atrocious a 
 desire, of the origin of which he was unable to give any account. When 
 he felt his free will was about to submit itself to this sinful desire, he 
 ran to the chief of the establishment and made him tie his thumbs 
 together with a ribbon. This frail ligature sujEced to calm the unhappy 
 man ; who, however, at last attempted to murder one of his attendants, 
 and died in an accession of furious mania." — (Esquirol, torn, ii., p. 808.) 
 
 The following parallel case came under our own observation : — An 
 agricultural laborer, of steady and industrious habits, had thought, 
 talked, and read much on religious subjects; two years before his admis- 
 sion into the asylum he left the Church of England and joined the Inde- 
 pendents ; twelve months after that he became restless, gloomy, and 
 reserved, irregular at his labors, and distressed about his soul. He was 
 fully conscious of his state, and had great hopes of being cured in the 
 asylum. He had shown no outward disposition to suicide or violence, 
 but had the constant feeling that he must destroy some one. None of his 
 r *Q0 n '^^l^tio'^® ^^d been insane. On admission he was twenty-six 
 L J *years of age, a fine, powerful man, six feet high, with more than 
 the average intelligence of his class.. He was aware that his mind was 
 affected, and said, " that his head was filled with vain and evil thoughts, 
 and that the more he strove to get near the Scriptures, the further he 
 was from them; he felt a strong desire to commit murder, which he 
 struggled against, and thought a temptation from the devil." His head 
 was hot, and he had some pain in it ; but was otherwise in good health. 
 
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AN ESSAY. 41 
 
 In the course of a month he improved greatly, but relapsed after a visit 
 from his friends ; he however again improved, lost all his bad thoughts, 
 and for some weeks labored at spade-husbandry. Whilst thus engaged 
 he one day came to the physician, and begged to be taken from the 
 garden and placed in a safe ward, as he had experienced the strongest 
 desire to kill some of the patients with his spade. His request was com- 
 plied with, and from this time he never again lost the homicidal feeling. 
 To avoid the murderous assault to which he felt himself urged, he often 
 requested to be locked in his bedroom, and still more frequently tied his 
 own hands together with a piece of pack-thread, which he could have 
 snapped with the greatest facility, but which he said enabled him to 
 resist the temptation ; *he was sad and morose, but never dis- p ^q-. -■ 
 played the slightest violence. Six months after his admission he L -" 
 was attacked with pneumonia, first of one lung, and then of the other. 
 Partial softening took place, followed by haemorrhage, of which he died. 
 On post-mortem examination the membranes of the brain and the brain 
 itself bore evident traces of disordered nutrition ; the arachnoid was 
 thick and opaque, and the cerebral convolutions at the vertex were atro- 
 phied. 
 
 At the present time we have under treatment a woman, forty-five years 
 of age, who, twelve months since cut the throat of her child with a shoe- 
 maker's knife ; fortunately the cut, though deep and wide, was external 
 to the great vessels, and the child recovered. The woman was immedi- 
 ately placed in the asylum. She had symptoms of a typhoid nature, her 
 pulse was rapid, small, and compressible, her tongue brown and dry, her 
 teeth covered with sordes, her countenance pale and anxious; she refused 
 food, was sleepless, and could with difficulty be kept in bed. She was 
 greatly distressed on account of her criminal act, but was consoled when 
 after a few days she learned that the child was likely to recover. Twenty- 
 two years ago she had an attack of puerperal mania, but had quite reco- 
 vered, and had conducted herself *with great propriety and re- ^ ^q„ , 
 spectability ever since. The exciting cause of the recent attack L J 
 appears to have been a disagreement with an aunt, and the ill conduct of 
 her husband. She had no delusion, and greatly lamented the injury she 
 had done to her child ; she said a constant desire to take the child's life 
 preyed upon her, without her knowing why, as she loved the child ten- 
 derly. She gradually recovered, and after eight or nine months of com- 
 plete convalescence, was discharged as cured, on the 6th of September 
 last. She was re-admitted on the 16th, with all her old symptoms, mental 
 and bodily, although the latter were of a more sthenic character : her 
 mind had been upset by returning to her old residence, and she had for 
 many days felt the most intense desire to destroy herself or some one 
 else. For the first week after her return, she entreated to be allowed to 
 remain in seclusion, to avoid suicide or something worse. She got no 
 sleep without strong doses of morphia. Under active medical treatment 
 she is already (October 11th) much better, and is beginning to employ 
 herself in domestic occupations. 
 
 We shall not lengthen this essay by quoting the numerous trials on 
 
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42 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 r *Qq 1 ^^'^^^^ ^^ *^i8 ^^^ other countries, where the plea of homicidal 
 L J *insanity has been set up, sometimes with, sometimes without, 
 the acquittal of the prisoner. The most prominent of these are clearly, 
 but succinctly, referred to in Mr. Taylor's excellent work on Medical 
 Jurisprudence. Mr. Taylor remarks, truly enough, that the establish- 
 ment or rejection of this plea has been too much a matter of chance, or 
 too much dependent upon the skUl displayed in its advocacy, and the 
 amount of public attention directed to the case. 
 
 Comparing the cases of Touchet with that of Lawrence, the former of 
 whom was acquitted, the latter executed, he says, " What distinction 
 can possibly be made by physican or jurist between these two cases j or 
 how is it possible to lay down rules for the future guidance of medical 
 witnesses under such capricious decisions ? The acquittal of Touchet 
 may have been perfectly right; but the conviction and execution of Law- 
 rence was a public in^ong. 
 
 " The principles of the English law have been closely scrutinized by 
 medico-legal writers, and it has been abundantly proved, that the test of 
 responsibility assumed by it, is of a purely theoretical kind, and cannot 
 be carried into practice. With this admission it appears to me unneces- 
 r *QA 1 ^^T *° occupy space with metaphysical *diseussions regarding 
 L J criminal responsibility ; for however defective the rules, if the 
 practice of the law be in any one case in conformity with that which has 
 been advised by the best writers on the medical jurisprudence of in- 
 sanity, this is all with which we have to concern ourselves : the prin- 
 ciple is admitted. The great defect in the English law is, not that it 
 will not go to the full extent of the doctrine, but the uncertainty of its 
 application. The foregoing cases show, that an acquittal on the plea of 
 insanity is left to be a mere matter of accident." — ^p. 803. 
 
 He then compares the cases of Brixey, (Central Criminal Court, June, 
 1845,) who killed her master's child, with that of Burton, (Huntingdon 
 Summer Assizes, 1848,) who destroyed his wife and child ; the former 
 of whom was acquitted, the latter left for execution ; remarking, that 
 the most strenuous advocate of irresponsibility can desire no better a pre- 
 cedent than the acquittal of the former. 
 
 Mr. Taylor does not, however, appear to have been acquainted with 
 the termination of Burton's case. Upon the charge of Baron Parke, who 
 insisted upon the old delusion and consciousness of right and wrong test, 
 P ^Q, -. and declared his concurrence with Baron Rolfe's expression *of 
 L J alarm " at the admission of irresponsible impulse as an excuse 
 for crime," this poor man was found guilty of the murder of his wife, 
 and left for execution. Owing, however, to the strenuous exertions of 
 the medical men of Huntingdon, he was reprieved. He remained in the 
 Huntingdon gaol nine months ; during which time he was taciturn and 
 listless, his memory failed him, and his conduct was that of a child." — 
 ((raoler's note.) He several times attempted suicide. In April, 1849, 
 he was tried upon a second indictment, for the murder of his child ; the 
 first having been for the murder of his wife. The double murder had 
 been committed at the same time. In this second trial, he was acquitted 
 on the ground of insanity. He was then removed to the Bedford Luna- 
 
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AN ESSAY. 43 
 
 tio Asylum, where he remained in much the same condition for a few 
 months, and then died suddenly. 
 
 The reports of French and American trials of this kind are far more 
 instractive than any we possess, of those Trhich have occurred in our own 
 country ; owing to the greater facilities given to physicians in those 
 countries, for the formation and exposition of their opinions. 
 
 In the number of the Annates Medico Psychologiques for January 
 last, will be found the detailed ^reports of medical experts on two ^ ^q-. -, 
 cases of criminal insanity : namely, that of Dominique Miller, ac- L -" 
 eused of assassination, reported by M. Aubenal of Marseilles ; and the 
 other, that of Erangois RoUand, for an attempt on the life of his wife, by 
 MM. Launurier and Delaun^grie. 
 
 The former especially is an admirable example of accurate and pains- 
 taking investigation. The latter portion of the condensed analysis with 
 which he concludes his report, has so general a reference, that it de- 
 serves quotation. 
 
 After finding that the accused was subject to hallucinations and illu- 
 sions, which made him mistake a poor old man for the Mexican Consul, 
 who was always appearing to his disordered senses ; he says, 
 
 " 5th. The accused did not enjoy the integrity of his intellectual 
 faculties, and his free will was manifestly altered when he perpetrated 
 the assassination. 
 
 " 6th. He cannot be considered responsible for this act of assassina- 
 tion : the act of hilling is not a crime in itself; it is the motive hy which 
 the agent is actuated which renders it culpable, andjiable to all the sever- 
 ity of the law. 
 
 "7th, 8th, 9th, and' 10th. The insanity of the accused still exists, 
 and is indeed increasing; he is exceedingly dangerous, and *it r^isoY-i 
 will benecessaryforthejudicialauthoritiesto order hisconfinement L J 
 and rigorous surveillance : this confinement in an asylum should be per- 
 petual, since the remissions of his disease will not indicate a cure. The in- 
 sane homicide ought not to perish upon the scaffold, hut society has a 
 right to guarantee itself from danger hy Ms permanent sequestration. If 
 ever he should claim his liberty, the judicature should refuse it ; or at least, 
 order beforehand a scrupulous investigation as to his state of mind, eon- 
 ducted by experienced magistrates, and physicians devoted to mental 
 science." 
 
 The report on Roland, elicits from the able editor of the Annates, M. 
 Brierre de Boismont, some valuable remarks. He expresses his con- 
 viction that homicidal monomania has received, "une extension trop 
 considerable :" that it is evident, that homicides committed by the in- 
 sane, should be referred to different motives ; and that they should be 
 analyzed more rigorously than has yet been done. He objects to the ad- 
 vice of his colleagues, that Eoland after apparent cure should be set at 
 liberty ; and cites the testimony of Pinel respecting an inmate of the 
 Bicitre, who, sixteen years after strangling his children, contrived to 
 assassinate two of his fellow-patients. P ^qn -, 
 
 *He recommends a special asylum for the detention of those L J 
 insane persons who have committed murder or are peculiarly dangerous. 
 
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44 BUCKNILL OS CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 The American Journal of Insanity for October, 1852, contains a most 
 interesting and detailed report on the trial of Charles Furbush, for the 
 murder of John Pindy, at Lynn, U. S., June, 1851, by shooting him 
 with pistols. The most peculiar circumstance connected with this case 
 was, that the murderer placed a pistol bullet in his own ear, and inflicted 
 a superficial cut on his neck with a knife. These things he explained 
 at one time as the results of a duel in which Pindy had fallen ; at another, 
 as owing to attempts at suicide. Although insane, he appears to have 
 been by no means, "insons criminis." He was acquitted on the plea 
 of insanity. 
 
 The same journal for January, 1852, contains the particulars of the 
 trial of Margaret G-erraty, who was tried at Newark, New Jersey, for the 
 assassination, with a carving knife, of a young man who had seduced 
 her, and afterwards married another woman. 
 
 This trial presents a remarkable instance of perversion of the plea by 
 the jury ; in order to avoid the condemnation and execution of an ill- 
 r*Qcn used woman. The jury were sixty-two *hours in deliberation ; 
 L J their verdict, of "Not guilty on the ground of insanity," was 
 greeted with applause in the court house, and with universal congratu- 
 lation and rejoicing in the city. 
 
 The celebrated Hampshire verdict, " Served him right," would per- 
 haps have been more consistent, if not with the facts of the case, at least 
 with the temper of the public. After the trial, the court appointed a 
 commission consisting of six physicians, to examine her case, and decide 
 whether she should, be sent to the asylum or set at liberty. They 
 unanimously reported, that after careful investigation they found exist- 
 ing no evidences of unsound mind. ^^ 
 
 We do not give the indications derived from the nature and circum- 
 stances of the oflFence itself, by which, according to Esquirol, insane ho- 
 micides may be distinguished from murder, because they all appear to be 
 fallacious. Experience has shown, that any one or all of them may be 
 absent where there is undoubted insanity ; and that any one or all of 
 them may be present where the supposition of mental disease is quite 
 untenable. 
 
 A careful study of recorded cases, leads to the suggestion of the fol- 
 lowing improvement on Esquirol and Marc's classification of homicides 
 by the insane. 
 
 r*1 nm *^^^- Those wherein the crime has been occasioned by delu- 
 L J sion, and no reasonable person can doubt or object to the irre- 
 sponsibility of the offender. 
 
 2nd. Wherein the offender, through suffering from mental disease, has 
 committed the crime under the influence of some motive not of a delu- 
 sive character. 
 
 This class will include such cases as those of Lawrence, Touchett, 
 Hadfield, and others, where a person desiring to lose his own life at the 
 hands of the executioner, commits a homicide with suicidal intent. Also 
 those of Greensmith, Staniought, Burton, and others, who have destroyed 
 their wives and children, after real or supposed pecuniary losses, in order 
 to remove the beloved objects of their affections from the sufferings of 
 
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AN ESSAY. 45 
 
 poverty. This class will also include the most embarassing cases which 
 can be ptesented to a jury ; wherein, with evidence of pre-existing in- 
 sanity, a motive foT the crime is to be found in some of the malign emo- 
 tions J as in the case above cited from Mr. Erskine's speeches ; the case 
 of R. V. Farmer, York, 1837 j R. v. Goule, Durham, 1845; the still 
 more remarkable case of William Quinlaw, mentioned in the fifth report 
 of H. M. Inspectors of Asylums in Ireland, p. 12. *In these r;|fir.i-i 
 eases, the responsibility may be diminished or modified, but the <- J 
 most extended sympathy for the insane could scarcely claim for them, 
 that it should be altogether abrogated. 
 
 3rd. Where with general symptoms of cerebro-mental disease, neither 
 delusion, nor motive for the crime, are discoverable. 
 
 These latter are the oases which with a most unlucky phraseology have 
 been attributed to moral insanity/, insane impulse, uncontrollable impulse, 
 homicidal impulse, &c. These are the cases in which according to Marc, 
 " Le monomaniaque homicide est entrain^ par un instinct aveugle, par 
 quelque chose d'ind^finissible que le pousse h tuer." Such a case as the 
 one of the girl Brixey above referred to, from Taylor, and still more 
 perhaps, that of the poor woman, Martha Prior, who in December, 1848, 
 thirteen days after her confinement, cut her infant's throat with a razor. 
 She had puerperal mania, but confessed the crime to have been a pre- 
 meditated act. 
 
 Instances enough have been cited to prove the existence of homicidal 
 insanity without delusion. It is true that in most of these the power of 
 the will, aided by the moral restraint imposed by residence in asylums, 
 was sufficient *to prevent any criminal actj and persons of r:t;ino-i 
 severe temper and virtue may argue, that in all other cases, the L J 
 want of such victorious exercise of the will is deserving of punishment. 
 
 On this we shall quote the valued opinion of Dr. Pritchard. " In the 
 instance of instinctive insanity, or insane impulse to commit acts of 
 violence and atrocity, to play the incendiary or to violate the good order 
 and decency of social life, it is obvious that the only thing requiring 
 much consideration is the real existence of the disease, and its distinc- 
 tion from ordinary and real criminality. So soon as it is proved to exist, 
 there can be no doubt that the person who is visited by this deplorable 
 misfortune ought to be effectually separated from society, to prevent 
 mischief to himself and others. Whether he ought, in any case, to 
 undergo other punishment than this, is a question which I do not feel 
 disposed to discuss. As we have seen that a struggle has often taken 
 place between the desire to commit any violent act, and the conscien- 
 tious feelings of the unfortunate person who is thus tempted, it is pro- 
 bable that some have yielded to the temptation, though convinced that 
 they ought to have resisted it. Such persons must be admitted to be 
 morally guilty, and to deserve to *suffer. But the calamity r^ic-i no-i 
 with which we know them to be afflicted is already so great, that L J 
 humanity forbids our entertaining the thought of adding to it. Perhaps 
 all that we ought to aim at in such a case is to secure the community 
 against the evils to which it may be exposed." 
 
 Notwithstanding that we have objected to the terms hitherto used to 
 
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46 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 designate this form of insanity, we have none to recommend as sub' 
 stitutes. It is far better that things should be left unnamed, or at least, 
 undesignated by descriptive names, than that, before their nature is 
 thoroughly understood, they, should be clothed in an ill-chosen and pre- 
 mature phraseology, which may mislead the inquirer or supply a vantage 
 ground to the objector. •. 
 
 The form of disease under which the third class of insane homicides 
 suffer, may be simply termed insanity without delusion. Of late years 
 the opinion has been gaining ground among the best psychopathists, 
 that, with few exceptions, the embarrassment of the intellect is secondary 
 to, and consequent upon the disorder and perversion of the emotive 
 faculties. M. Guislain, in his recent treatise. Lemons Orales sur les 
 Phrenopathies, has developed this opinion with some success. His con- 
 clusions ,are thus stated : 
 
 r*i nn *" ^^^' ^® ^^^^ ^* grande majority des cas, on arrive k eon- 
 L J stater dans 1' alienation un 6tat phrfoalgique. 
 
 " 2nd. La douleur est au fond de 1' immense nombre des affections du 
 moral. 
 
 " 3rd. Son 'point de dipart est dans la sensibiliti qui determine les 
 affections, les Amotions. 
 
 " 4th. La mllancolie est le symptSme qui signale le plus souvent la, 
 p&iode d'ineubation et la p6riode de d^but des phr^nopathies en g§n6ral. 
 " 5th. Les causes pr^disposantes, les causes determinant agissent avant 
 tout sur la sensibility et non pas sur les id6es." 
 In another place he states : 
 
 " Une emotion est au fond du plus grand nombre des causes. 
 " Le coeur moral est atteint dans les plurality des cas. 
 " C estr emotion qu' on rencontre dans les phenom^nes exterieurs de 
 la maladie, qu' on decouvre au fond des 9-10 des phrenopathies vrais 
 essentielles." 
 
 The following passage in Dr. Pritchard's chapter on Pyromania shows 
 that this idea of the secondary nature of intellectual disturbance had pre- 
 r*inpn ^^'^^'^'^ itself to him; he does not, however, seem to have appre- 
 L -I ciated its *great importance, nor therefore to have pursued it. 
 " The delusion is perhaps rather consequent on the morbid desire than 
 the real motive of the act, since it is more in accord with the ordinary 
 phenomena and history of madness, that the active propensities to disease 
 should lead the understanding astray, than that a disorder of the intel- 
 lect should really be the origin and foundation of the whole disturbance 
 which the mind sustains." 
 
 We entirely agree with M. Guislain in the importance he attaches to 
 ajiisordered state of the affections in insanity; and we are convinced 
 that when the knowledge of mental disease becomes more extended and 
 exact, that so far from disease of the emotive faculties alone being con- 
 sidered a rare, and that of the intellect a common occurrence, the very 
 reverse of this will be acknowledged to be the truth. The doctrines 
 which now appear new and dangerous, with the lapse of a few brief 
 years may become the trite and unquestioned opinions of the vulgar^ 
 [See Appendix, Note E.] 
 
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AN ESSAY. if 
 
 This discussion on insanity without delusion, may be appropriately 
 concluded in the words of Esquirol. 
 
 "Au rests ce n' est pas le premiere fois que *les med^oins, r*-in/.-i 
 plus excretes que les autres hommes h. observer les infirmities L J 
 humaines, ont 6clair6 la justice sur les alterations de 1' esprit et du coeur 
 de pr^tendus coupables. 
 
 " A la fin du quinzi^me si^cle, Marescot, Kiolan, et Duret, charges d' 
 examiner Marthe Brossier, aecusee de sorcellerie, terminferent leur rap- 
 port par ces mots m^morables : IRMl d demone ; multa ficta, d, morbo 
 pauca." 
 
 " Cette d&ision servit depuis de r^gle aux juges qui eurent h, prononcer 
 sur le sort des sorciers et des magiciens. Nous, nous disons, en carao- 
 t6risant le meurtre des monomaniaques-homicides : Nihil d crimine, 
 nulla ficta, d, morbo tota." 
 
 It will be scarcely right to neglect all notice of what may be called 
 the minor forms of insanity without delusion, leading to special criminal 
 acts. The most serious of these, pyromania, is certainly of rare occur- 
 rence ; not more than five authentic cases are on record ; the most strik- 
 ing of these being two cases recorded by Gall. One, that of Marie Frank, 
 who was executed for house-burning, having fired thirteen houses in five 
 years. She was ignorant, unhappy, and intemperate; and whenever 
 under the influence of strong drink, she experienced *what is p^, f^ y-. 
 called an '" uncontrollable impulse" to commit arson. L -I 
 
 The other is that of a quiet and inoffensive young girl, who felt the 
 same "uncontrollable impulse" at the catamenial periods; and made seven 
 attempts to burn houses in a village near Cologne. She was acquitted 
 on the plea of insanity. 
 
 Jonathan Martin's case of insanity with delusion, and some others of 
 a like nature, have been most unaccountably included by some authors, 
 under the head of pyromania. 
 
 A' special commission was ordered by the Government of Prussia to 
 decide on the existence of this form of disease. It decided in the afiBr- 
 mative ; but another commission in the same country recently sat upon 
 the same question, and two years ago terminated its labours by reversing 
 the former decision. 
 
 We have always thought pyromania an absurd refinement on insanity 
 without delusion. As many forms of insanity might with as much 
 reason be invented, as there are modes of destroying property. In 
 asylums there might be especial monomanias for breaking glass and tear- 
 ing clothes, for noisy and filthy habits, and for profane discourse. If to 
 represent these peculiarities of insanity, we coin the words r:):inD-i 
 *klasmania, bromania, euromania, orcomania, &c., we shall L J 
 scarcely be guilty of uttering a more base mintage, than pyromania, 
 oinomania, and other new terms whose currency is accepted. 
 
 A diseased condition of what phrenologists call the acquisitive faculty, 
 constitutes a form of moral insanity, technically known as cleptomania, 
 the instances of the existence of which are numerous and well authenti- 
 cated ; we have ourselves not unfrequently met with it in the wards of 
 asylums. Our experience, however, would indicate that a mild and 
 
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48 BUCKNILL ON CKIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 watchful system of correction, without wounding the sensibilities of the 
 most humane, will effect a cure, permanent or transitory, according to 
 the state of the cerebral organ. 
 
 It is, however, probable that this form of insanity is more frequently 
 than otherwise made use of as a somewhat doubtful shield to the honor 
 of members of the higher classes of society, who, disregarding the dictates 
 of prudence and of honesty, have indulged themselves in shoplifting, or 
 any other unfashionable mode of appropriating property. 
 
 We do not hear this plea urged in extenuation of deviations from 
 honesty on a scale whose magnitude can redeem them from vulgarity ; 
 r*inqi ^° great railway or gambling transactions, for instance. *As 
 L J far as punishment in this world goes, a man of position in 
 society had better kill a fellow-creature in a duel, or seduce the wife of 
 his bosom friend, than be detected in the attempt to steal a piece of 
 jewellery or haberdashery, worth half-a-crown. Therefore, this plea is 
 seldom heard of, except in delinquencies of the nature above referred to : 
 the petty larcenies of the multitude being too numerous and unimpor- 
 tant to render them frequent objects of scientific discussion. The 
 plea of insanity is not often made .use of for minor crimes, because, if 
 allowed, it might expose the offender to a far more lengthened imprison- 
 ment than the one which would be awarded to the offence of a sane 
 man. Thus, in the case of Keynolds, tried at Bodmin, 1843, for an 
 assault, the judge said, "If the prisoner were pronounced insane, he 
 might be imprisoned for life, and therefore he did not think that finding 
 would benefit him." On a verdict of guilty being returned, the man 
 was sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment. 
 
 On these grounds it is that oleptomania is of little importance as a 
 form of mental unsoundness, in relation to responsibility for criminal 
 actions. It is, however, of much interest to the psychopathist, as fur- 
 P^, -. „-. nishing another *proof of the existence of insanity without de- 
 L J lusion. 
 
 The following illustration is selected from Pritchard :^A gentleman 
 of large fortune, whose benevolence was proverbial, bore a character 
 above all reproach, with the exception of petty thefts committed in 
 shops. This unfortunate disposition soon became known among the 
 shopkeepers of the town in which he lived ; when he entered their shops, 
 the well-disposed would remove the smaller articles from the counter, or 
 would keep so strict a watch upon him, that it was almost impossible for 
 him to exercise his diseased propensity ; if, however, he succeeded,' the 
 article stolen was directly returned by the family, and compensation 
 made, if demanded. For the purpose of extorting money, some heart- 
 less persons would put articles within his reach, and give him every op- 
 portunity to steal them. 
 
 We are tempted to give one more illustration, touohingly told in the 
 following lines, from the Poem by Wordsworth, called "The Two 
 Thieves :"— 
 
 " The one yet tinbreeched is not three birthdays old, 
 His grandsire that age more than thirty times told ; 
 
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^ 
 
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 AN ESSAY. 49 
 
 There are ninety good seasons of foul and fair weather 
 Between them, and both go a pilfering together. 
 
 With chips is a carpenter strewing hia floor 7 
 Is a cart-load of turf at an old woman's door ? 
 Old Daniel his hand to the treasure will slide, 
 And his grandson is busy at work by his side. 
 
 The pair sally forth hand in hand ; ere the sun 
 Has peered o'er the beeches, their work is begun ; 
 And yet into whatever sin they may fall 
 This child but half knows it, and that not at all. 
 
 Neither checked by the rich nor the needy they roam, 
 For the gray-headed sire has a daughter at home ; 
 Who will gladly repair all the damage that's done, 
 And three, were it asked, would be rendered for one. 
 
 Old man, whom so oft I with pity have eyed, 
 I love thee, and love the sweet boy by thy side ; 
 Long yet may'st thou live, for a teacher we see 
 That lifts up the veil of our nature in thee." 
 
 *The reasonable limits of an essay prevent us from entering r:|ci i -i -■ 
 upon an investigation of erotomania and oinomania ; leading re- L -• 
 spectively to indecent or ordinary assaults. Well might Pritchard say, 
 " there is scarcely any offence against public decorum, that has not been 
 frequently the result of mental disease." 
 
 A more frightful, and happily a rare manifestation *of emo- ^^-. -. „-. 
 tional perversion, is to be found in the crime called vampirism ; <- J 
 a terrible and interesting instance of which is recorded in the eighth 
 number of the Psychological Journal, of which, the following are the 
 leading particulars : — 
 
 Towards the close of the year 1848, the recent graves in the cemetery 
 of Mount Parnassus, in the neighbourhood of Paris, were found to have 
 been violated, the bodies were disinterred, and most horribly mutilated ; 
 t^e grave clothes were not stolen, and no motives could at first be guessed 
 at, as likely to suggest such atrocities. In later instances, however, the 
 mutilations exhibited proof that the motives of the criminal were erotic. 
 Disgust and horror filled the minds of the public. Strenuous endeavours 
 were made to detect the perpetrator; armed men guarded the place, spring- 
 guns and other machines were set for some time without avail : at length 
 the criminal was wounded by the discharge of a spring-gun, and was 
 detected in the hospital by his wounds. He was found to b^ a Sergeant 
 Bertrand, of the 74th regiment. Paris at that time being in a state of 
 siege, he was necessarily tried before a court martial : the detail of his 
 confession is revolting in the highest degree; he was, however, only 
 found guilty of a misdemeanor, and sentenced *to twelve months r-^^ -. „-. 
 imprisonment, and to be placed afterwards under the surveillance L J 
 of the police. The opinion prevalent among the French physicians was, 
 that the man was of unsound mind, and that his crimes were the result 
 of a horrible variety of erotomania. The inadequacy of the punishment 
 to the offence, does not, however, appear to have been due to this opinion 
 
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go BUCKNILL ON CKIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 Had the court considered him insane, he would have been imprisoned in 
 the Bicetre. 
 
 The embarrassments which have arisen in courts of justice, when in- 
 sanity has been pleaded, have not alone been owing to the intrinsic diffi- 
 culty of deciding what is and what is not insanity. They have been 
 multiplied and exaggerated by the forms of criminal procedure, and by 
 the inflexibility of that doctrine which insists upon a man being held to 
 be, either wholly responsible, or wholly irresponsible for his actions. 
 
 When insanity has been pleaded in answer to a charge of murder, 
 upon the issue of the trial has depended whether the prisoner should be 
 merely treated with Indian hemp by the doctors, or submitted to the 
 Russian hemp of the ultimate executive. 
 
 No middle course was possible : if found to be insane, no distinction 
 r*l 1 Al "o^^*^ ^® made between *the patient who, in obedience to the sup- 
 L ■ J posed command of the Deity, with a faith like that of Abraham, 
 sacrificed with bleeding heart the dearest object of his afiections ; and 
 the sea-captain who, in a fit of drunken delirium, deliberately and fero- 
 ciously hacked to pieces half of his crew. If to a judge, prejudiced 
 against all new-fangled doctrines, and to a dozen ignorant jurymen, the 
 plea is held to be " not proven," the horrible doom of an^ignominious death 
 must be inflicted, whether upon the malicious idiot, or the subject of de- 
 lusion inciting to acts of revenge, or of suicidal monomania with self- 
 inflicted wounds scarcely healed, or even conceded to the man longing 
 for death at the hands of others. 
 
 At the trial of Oxford, the attorney-general cited the case of Bowler. 
 When he came to the close of it, Mr. Baron Alderson interrupted him 
 with this observation : "Bowler, I believe, was executed, and ver^ bar- 
 barous it was." The present attorney-general. Sir A. Cockburn, at 
 McNaughten's trial, said : " Such was the expression of Mr. Baron Al- 
 derson, and / rejoice to be able to cite if. I reverence the Strength of 
 feeling which could alone have given rise to that strength of expres- 
 sion." 
 
 P^^-. p,^ *Lord Coke said : " Vt poena ad paucos meius ad omnesp^- 
 <- -I veniat ; but so it is not when a madman is executed, but should 
 be a miserable spectacle, both against law, and of extreme inhumanity 
 and cruelty, and can be no example to others." 
 
 It is the system of the English law to allow no degrees of responsi- 
 bility. A criminal is either responsible, or he is irresponsible ; there are 
 but two classes, in one of which room must be made for every one who 
 commits an' offence. In nature we find no such sharply defined classifi- 
 cation : even the exact boundary of the animal and vegetable kingdoms 
 is not ascertained ; and in the kingdom of mind, mind itself is scarcely 
 able to conceive the gradations of power and knowledge. Butnature 
 herself must bend to the laws of man ! and a dozen farmers and shop- 
 keepers are compelled to divide the world of mind into two parts ; and, 
 on the most awful and momentous occasion, on a question of the life, or 
 death of a fellow-creature, to discern what the most scientific often fail 
 to do, the exact position therein of a particular instance. 
 
 We are extremely happy to observe, that in Ireland the administra- 
 
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AN ESSAY. 51 
 
 tion of tlie law practised with such, inflexibility in England, is occasion- 
 ally departed from ; and, in such cases as *those of Wm. Quin- p^-, ^ „-, 
 law, L. G-rady, and others, mentioned in the Inspectors' Keports, L J 
 the lord lieutenant has sometimes commuted the sentence of death into 
 transportation, on the ground of imperfect responsibility. 
 
 The following observation on this subject by H. M. Inspectors of 
 Asylums in Ireland, is deserving of the deepest attention, not only on 
 account of the great experience of its authors, Drs. White and Nugent, 
 but also on account of the sound principles it inculcates. Fifth Keport, 
 p. 11: "Whilst immediately on this subject, we maybe further per- 
 mitted to observe, as the result of a minute examination into the many 
 real or simulated cases of criminal insanity that have come under our 
 notice, that ultimately no greater damage can be engendered to the very 
 object it would desire to serve, than an overstretched morbid disposition 
 to render lunacy the protector, as it were, of crime, and thereby to acquit 
 prisoners in the dock without a rigid inquiry, and the clearest evidence 
 of the correctness of the plea ; if there are extenuating circumstances 
 connected with the psychological condition of the accused, they are legiti- 
 mate subjects to be considered in meting out the after punishment, but 
 *certainly not in the first instance for an unqualified acquit- i-^-. -, ^-, 
 tal." L ^^'J 
 
 In cases of murder, our law permits juries to bring in a verdict of 
 guilty or not guilty only; and if the former, no course is open to the 
 judge except that of passing sentence of death. Until some middle way 
 is devised by which offenders neither altogether innocent, nor altogether 
 guilty, can have their proper meed of correction, juries in cases of mur- 
 der will continue to find verdicts of not guilty on the false plea of in- 
 sanity. As the power to attemper justice with mercy is accorded to 
 neither judge nor jury, the latter will seize the only opportunity to 
 ensure mercy and leave justice to take care of itself. 
 
 In France, the power of returning a verdict of guilty with extenuat- 
 ing circumstances, in the first, second, or third degree, is permitted to 
 the jury. This large discretionary power, vested in the hands of men so 
 partially educated, and so little responsible for their decisions, as the 
 ordinary members of juries are, is not unfrequently exercised in a most 
 unsatisfactory manner. 
 
 In the case of the Friar Llotaud, tried at Toulouse, in 1848, for the 
 murder of a young girl, after violating her, a verdict of " guilty, p^.. , „, 
 *with extenuating circumstances," was returned; the only as- L J 
 signable motive for extenuation being, the vow of chastity of the accused. 
 
 In the case of Madame Lafarge, the " extenuating circumstances," 
 which had weight with a French jury to palliate one of the most cold- 
 blooded and atrocious mui'ders on record, were, the existence of an old 
 husband and an agreeable lover. 
 
 " The judge has a kind of perpetual responsibility imposed upon him ; 
 the jury is sheltered by numbers, separates from the box, retires into 
 society, and is forgotten." We think, therefore, that any extension of 
 power to juries would be unwise ; but that a large discretion in awarding 
 punishment for murder should be intrusted to our judges, whenever the 
 
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52 BUCENILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 accused is proved to have labored under imbecility, or any kind or degree 
 of mental unsoundness. The judges do possess such discretionary power 
 in awarding punishment for other crimes j thus, for manslaughter, they 
 sentence one criminal to one taionth's imprisonment, and another to trans- 
 portation for life, according to the character of the offence, or the exist- 
 ence or not of extenuating circumstances. 
 
 We cannot here enlarge upon the kind of treatment which would be 
 r*l 1 QT ^^i*®^ ^° *^^ correction *of criminals, whose punishment has been 
 L J modified in consequence of partial unsoundness of mind. A 
 State Asylum, under skilful and enlightened government, like the One at 
 Dundrum, would appear essential to such an end. 
 
 In England, men who escape the punishment of heinous offences on 
 the plea of insanity are, for the most part, consigned to the criminal 
 ward of Bethlem ; a place which has been justly referred to, as a recep- 
 tacle of insane criminals. It is not a modern prison, for there is no cor- 
 rective discipline; it is not an hospital, for suitable treatment is impos- 
 sible ; it is not an asylum for the relief and protection of the unfortunate, 
 for it is one of the most gloomy abodes to be found in the metropolis. 
 It is simply a receptacle; into which the waifs of criminal law are swept, 
 out of sight and out of mind. The overflow of its numbers is farmed to 
 the proprietor of a private asylum at Pisherton ; from whose custody five 
 of these criminal lunatics, having combined against their keepers, recently 
 escaped in a body. 
 
 It is said that Government will permit no alteration in the criminal 
 ward at Bethlem. We trust this refusal arises from a conviction that 
 r*1 9m *^® whole treatment of criminal *lunatics in England requires 
 L -I complete revision, and that no modification of existing arrange- 
 ments can be satisfactory. 
 
 The experience of Drs. White and Nugent in the enlightened manage- 
 ment of criminal lunatics at Dundrum, so ably stated in .their sixth 
 Report, from the 14th to the 18th page, will afford invaluable guidance 
 to the English Government in any attempts to render the classification 
 and management of criminal lunatics what the justice, intelligence, and 
 humanity of the age demand that it should be. [The author treats on 
 this subject at length in his tract On the Classification and Management 
 of Criminal Lunatics. See Appendix, Note F.] 
 
 Of not less importance than some modifications of the inflexibility of 
 English law in relation to entire responsibility, or irresponsibility, is the 
 necessity of discovering some more fitting tribunal to decide upon the 
 delicate question of insanity, than that rough instrument of justice, a 
 common jury. Various suggestions have been made to effect this pur- 
 pose ; than which none appear more practical and less objectionable than 
 the Erench system of employing " experts." " These are persons ap- 
 pointed in the course of judicial proceedings, either by the court, or by 
 r*1 21 T *^® agreement of *the parties, to make inquiry under oath in 
 L J reference to certain facts, and to report thereon to the court. 
 They are not examined as witnesses, nor have they any power of decid- 
 ing the cause, like arbitrators ; their functions are more analogous to 
 
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AN ESSAY. 53 
 
 those of a Master in Chancery according to our own laws." — (Ray, p. 
 
 In reference to doubtful cases of insanity, their duties would, perhaps, 
 approximate more closely to those fulfilled in our own Admiralty Court 
 by the Masters of the Trinity Company. In intricate questions of colli- 
 sion, salvage, and cases of that nature, these experienced mariners are 
 summoned to aid the court, as amid curiae. They are not witnesses 
 either for plaintiff or defendant, and their position is consequently an 
 impartial one. Their opinions have the greatest weight, and are readily 
 deferred to, both in the court and in the maritime community. 
 
 If the' Commissioners or Inspectors in Lunacy, or any other expe- 
 rienced and impartial men, could be called upon to assist the court where 
 insanity was pleaded, as amid curice, the anomalies and uncertainties of 
 the law on this subject would be in a fair way of amendment. 
 
 It has always appeared to us, that the witness box is no proper place 
 for the psychopathic *physician in these cases ; and that the very j-^, „„-. 
 fact of his being called either " for the crown," or " for the de- •- -• 
 fence," renders it impossible for him to hold an impartial position : that 
 if his cross-examination is often damaging to his own character for exacti- 
 tude in scientific knowledge, it is not less damaging to that of the court 
 itself, as an institution whose purpose is to elicit truth and administer 
 justice. 
 
 The importance of an independent and impartial position from which 
 to announce a skilled opinion, was well illustrated in McNaughten's trial. 
 After the evidence of Sir A. Morrison, Dr. Monro, and several other 
 physicians of special experience, had been given, Mr. Aston Key, sur- 
 geon to Gruy's Hospital, and Dr. Forbes Winslow, neither of whom had 
 been summoned on either side, gave their testimony in favor of the in- 
 sanity of the prisoner. Chief Justice Tindal then said : " We feel the 
 evidence, espedally that of the two last medical gentlemen who have 
 been examined, and who are strangers to hoth sides, to be very strong, 
 and sufficient to induce my learned brother and myself to stop the 
 case." 
 
 The opinion of the psychopathic expert, acting as amicus curice, 
 would in all cases have the weight of the above gentlemen, who were 
 *strangers to hoth sides. Such opinion, founded upon a tho- r:(c-|oq-i 
 rough examination of each particular case, would carry convic- L J 
 tion with it, and neutralize the sophistries of the bar, the prejudices of 
 the bench, and the ignorance of the jury box. 
 
 Another modification of criminal law procedure, which can scarcely 
 be much longer denied to the English public, and which cannot fail to 
 increase the probability of justice being administered in difficult and 
 balancing cases, is the appointment of public prosecutors. The appoint- 
 ment of these officials would not only add dignity and impartiality to 
 the prosecution, but to that of the defence also ; for the animus of the 
 latter is naturally affected by that of the former, and the influence of 
 the responsible public officer would extend itself to both sides of the 
 question. 
 
 With these modifications of legal procedure ; with an enlarged discre- 
 
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54 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 tionary power, in the hands of the judges, in the awarding of punish- 
 ment where responsibility is modified by partial insanity ; and, above all, 
 with the total abolition of all arbitrary tests of insanity, founded upon 
 metaphysical subtilties ; and a recognition of insanity, as a disease mani- 
 r*i9d.n ^^^*i°S itself by a somewhat variable group of symptoms; we 
 L J ^anticipate that the difficulties which have embarrassed this 
 question will disappear, and that the administration of justice, attem;- 
 pered with mercy, will no longer remain either impracticable or un- 
 certain. 
 
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^APPENDIX. [*125] 
 
 Note A, Page 27. 
 
 The following, quoted from a leader in the Times Newspaper of the 
 22nd of July last, expresses similar opinions with characteristic vigour. 
 
 "Nothing can be more slightly defined than the line of demarcation 
 between sanity and insanity. Physicians and lawyers have vexed them- 
 selves with attempts at definition in a case where definition is impossible. 
 There has never yet been given to the world anything in the shape of a 
 formula upon this subject, which may not be torn to shreds in five 
 minutes by any ordinary logician. Make the definition too narrow, it 
 becomes meaningless; make it too wide, the whole human race are 
 involved in the drag-net. In strictness, we are all mad when we give 
 way to passion, to prejudice, to vice, to vanity; but if all the passionate, 
 prejudiced, vicious, and vain people in this world are to be locked up as 
 lunatics, who is to keep the key of the asylum ? As was very fairly 
 observed, however, by a learned Baron of the Exchequer, when he was 
 pressed by this argument, if we are all mad, being all madmen, we must 
 do the best we can under such untoward circumstances. There must be 
 a kind of rough understanding as to the forms of lunacy which can't be 
 tolerated. We will not *interfere with the spendthrift, who is p^, „^-] 
 flinging his patrimony away upon swindlers, harlots, and black- L J 
 legs, until he has denuded himself of his possessions and incurred debt. 
 We have nothing to say to his brother madman, the miser, who pinches 
 his belly to swell the balance at his banker's — being 73 years of age, 
 and without family, — ^but if he refuse to pay taxes, society will not accept 
 his monomania as pleadable in bar." 
 
 Note B, Page 30. 
 
 That delightful new work " Psychological Enquiries," which might 
 be truly called "Psychological Kecreations," or "Philosophy made 
 charming," contains some observations which we shall take the liberty 
 
 December, 1856. — 26 
 
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56 BUCKKILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 to quote, as they support our own vieVs on this subject. The learned 
 author puts them into the mouth of Crites, who is supposed to represent 
 a distinguished member of the bench. 
 
 " Ceites. All this is to me a matter of curious speculation ; but it 
 leads to another subject, in which I feel a still greater interest; partly 
 because, from the special nature of my pursuits, it is sometimes forced 
 on my attention, and partly- because out of it arise questions, which, as 
 they affect our social system, are of great practical importance to us all. 
 Some writers have described, under the name of moral or instinctive 
 insanity, a state of mind in which they say that there are no illusions, 
 nor any affection of the intellect ; but in which there is simply a per- 
 version of the moral sentiments; the individual labouring under an 
 impulse to perform certain extravagant and outragsous acts, injurious to 
 r*l 971 ^i™s®lf or others ; such impulse being irresistible, so that he is 
 L J to *be held as being no more responsible for his conduct than an 
 ordinary lunatic. Now I own that, looking at the question merely as 
 one who has some knowledge of human nature, and with no other aid 
 than that of my own common sense, I am very much inclined to doubt 
 the correctness of this doctrine, and I am certain that it is dangerous to 
 admit the plea of irresponsibility for those who labour under this so-called 
 moral insanity, to the extent to which Dr. Pritchard and others have 
 claimed it for them. Observe, that I use the term moral insanity not as 
 comprehending cases in which there is a belief in things that do not 
 exist in reality, or cases of idiotcy, or those approaching to idiotcy ; but 
 limiting it strictly and exclusively to the definition given by writers on 
 the subject. The law makes a reasonable allowance for the subsiding 
 of passion suddenly provoked. But we are not, therefore, to presume, 
 that the same allowance is to be made for those in whom a propensity to 
 set fire to their neighbours' houses, or commit murder, is continued for 
 months, or weeks, or even for hours. Is it true that such persons are 
 really so regardless of the ill-consequences which may arise, so incapa- 
 ble of the fear of punishment, and so absolutely without the power of 
 self-restraint, as they have sometimes been represented to be ? If not, 
 there is an end of their want of responsibility. Let me refer here to 
 the instance of the gouty patient some time since adduced by Ergates. 
 Under the influence of his disease every impression made upon his 
 nervous system is attended with uneasy sensations. If such a person has 
 exerted himself to acquire the habit of self-control, the evil ends with 
 himself; but otherwise he is fractious and peevish, flies into a passion, 
 without any adequate cause, with those around him, and uses harsh 
 words which the occasion does not justify; conduct of which he can 
 offer to himself no explanation, except that he cannot help it ; and for 
 which, if he be a right-minded person, he is sorry afterwards. If he 
 r*1 281 ^^^^ *o yield to the impulse of his temper so far as to inflict on 
 L J *another a severe bodily injury, ought it to be admitted as an 
 excuse, that Dr. Garrod had examined his blood, and found in it too 
 large a proportion of lithic acid ? Yet when Oxford yielded to what 
 was probably a less violent impulse, which caused him to endeavour to 
 take away the life of the Queen, the jury acquitted him, on the ground 
 
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APPENDIX. 57 
 
 of being the subject of "moral insanity." It seems to me, that juries 
 have not unfrequently been misled by the refinements of medical wit- 
 nesses, who, having adopted the theory of a purely moral insanity, have 
 applied that term to cases to which the term insanity ought not to be 
 applied at all. It is true, that the difierence in the character of indivi- 
 duals may frequently be traced to differences in their organizations, and 
 to different conditions as to bodily health j and that, therefore, one per- 
 son has more, and another has less difficulty in controlling his temper, 
 and regulating his conduct. But we have all our duties to perform, and 
 one of the most important of these is, that we should strive against 
 whatever evil tendency there may be in us, arising out of our physical 
 constitution. Even if we admit, (which I do not admit in reality,) that 
 the impulse which led Oxford to the commission of his crime, was at 
 the time irresistible, still the question remains, whether, when the notion 
 of it first haunted him, he might not have kept it under his control ; 
 and thus prevented himself from passing into that state of mind which 
 was beyond his control afterwards. If I have been rightly informed, 
 Oxford himself was of this opinion ; as he said when another attempt 
 had been made to take away the life of the Queen, " that if he himself 
 had been hanged, this would not have happened." We have been told 
 of a very eminent person, who had acquired the habit of touching every 
 post that he met with in his walks, so that at last it seemed to be a part 
 of his nature to do so ; and that if he found that he had inadvertently 
 passed by a post without touching it, he would actually retrace his steps 
 for the purpose. I knew a gentleman who *was accustomed to j-^-. ~^., 
 mutter certain words to himself (and they were always the same L J 
 words,) even in the midst of company. He died at the age of ninety, 
 and I believe that he had uttered those words for fifty or sixty years. 
 These were foolish habits ; but they might have been mischievous. To 
 correct them at last would have been a very arduous undertaking. But 
 might not this have been easily done in the beginning ? and if so, — if 
 instead of touching posts, or muttering unmeaning words, these indivi- 
 duals had been addicted to stealing or stabbing, — ought they to have 
 been considered as absolved from all responsibility? 
 
 " It has been observed by a physician, who has had large opportuni- 
 ties of experience in these matters, that ' A man may allow his imagina- 
 tion to dwell on an idea, until it acquires an unhealthy ascendency over 
 his intellect.' — (Anatomy of Suicide, by Forbes Winslow, M. D.) And 
 surely, if, under such circumstances, he were to commit a murder, he 
 ought to be held as a murderer, and would have no more claim to be 
 excused than a man who has voluntarily associated with thieves and 
 murderers until he had lost all sense of right and wrong ; and much less 
 than one who has had the misfortune of being born and bred among such 
 malefactors." 
 
 "There are many dogs whose natural and original instinct leads them 
 to run after and kill sheep ; but a proper discipline teaches them that 
 they are not to do so, and counteracts the instinct. There are, undoubt- 
 edly, instances without number, of illusions which not only have a fiercer 
 hold on the mind than the instinct of dogs, but which neither argument 
 
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58 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 nor discipline can remove or even control : but it is not so as to others ; 
 and surely there is no reason why those of the latter class should not be 
 overruled by means analogous." 
 
 We entirely concur with these opinions, only doubting the propriety 
 of allowing exaggerated mental habit, without cerebral disease, to be 
 r*i Qm considered *one form of insanity. We think it as different from 
 ■- -I real insanity, as an uneven gait, caused by an awkward habit of 
 walking, is to lameness from ulceration of the hip-joint. People may 
 agree to call things which are radically different by the same name; but 
 they cannot reasonably treat them in the same manner, or claim for them 
 the same immunities. 
 
 Corrective discipline may cure, and often does cure vicious habits of 
 the mind, however strange and monstrous their development ; and the 
 fear of such discipline, moreover, may prevent the indulgence of such 
 habits. But punishment is not corrective, and is scarcely even revenge- 
 ful when applied to the real madman. He may address his judge in the 
 words of Imogen — 
 
 " I beseech you, Sir 
 Harm not yourself with your vexation. 
 I'm senseless of your wrath: A touch more rare 
 Subdues all griefs, all fears." 
 
 We do not think the inferences from Dr. Garrod's discovery either 
 exact or appropriate. Lithic acid in the blood may unhinge the temper, 
 and inflame the joints. Tennyson tells us that Sir Edward Head was 
 
 " Vexed with a morbid devil in his blood, 
 ' Which veiled the world with jaandice." 
 
 But the inference he draws teaches compassion even for frailties. 
 
 " What know we of the secret of a man ? 
 His nerves were wrong. What ails us, who are sound, 
 That we should mimic this raw fool, the world, 
 Which chalks us all in its coarse blacks and whites. 
 As ruthless as a baby with a worm ?" 
 
 [*131] 
 
 *The illustration, however, is beside the question at issue ; for a 
 poison in the blood would destroy responsibility for crime, if it 
 was strong enough to cause the crime. Crites would scarcely hang a man 
 who had committed a homicide in the delirium caused by the poison of 
 typhus fever. 
 
 Note 0, page 75. 
 
 Hallucination is no index of insanity, unless the patient believes in its 
 reality. Mcolai, the Berlin bookseller, and many others, have recog- 
 nized the strongest and most vivid hallucinations for what they were, and 
 have escaped even the suspicion of insanity. On the other hand, patients, 
 convalescent from insanity, sometimes remain subject to hallucinations 
 
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APPENDIX. 59 
 
 of sense : they know them to be errors of sense, and they cease to be 
 the groundwork of delusions. 
 
 A . very able Lecture of M. Baillarger's, reported in No. 6 of the 
 Asylum Journal, contains some excellent remarks on this curious point. 
 He says — 
 
 " It is not rare, when an insane patient recovers, to see him retain a 
 remnant of his disease ; thus, we have at this moment, a very curious 
 example of the kind. A woman who was completely insane for seven or 
 eight months, some years ago, but *who now fills a situation of j-^-. „„-, 
 considerable difficulty in this establishment, with great ability, L J 
 nevertheless retains a very grave symptom of her former malady. She 
 remains subject to hallucinations of hearing, but at the same time 
 accounts to herself perfectly for the phenomena she experiences. This 
 causes me to say that, though neither insane or alienated, she neverthe- 
 less retains an important lesion of the intelligence. 
 
 " When insane, she was not conscious that her understanding was dis- 
 eased, she did not account to herself respecting the mistakes of her con- 
 dition, she did not notice them, or she believed them to be realities ; in 
 a word, she was deceived by her disease. 
 
 " The change that has taken place is, that she now judges altogether 
 differently ; she thinks of her actual hallucinations, in the same way as 
 the physician does, she judges and knows them as sensations without 
 objects, in a word, the patient knows that she has a nervous disease, and 
 consequently she is no longer insane. I have recently read the account 
 of a voyage, in which the author, not thinking, perhaps, of defining 
 insanity by its strongest pathognomic character, says, 'madness is a mis- 
 fortune which ignores itself;' nothing can be more true. 
 
 " Insanity has two distinct elements : first, the lesion of the intelli- 
 gence; and then, the loss of the consciousness of that lesion, or the im- 
 potence of the will. I need scarcely tell you, which of these two is the 
 most important to the physician, — it is the lesion ; for when you have 
 cured that, you have almost cured your patient. 
 
 " The same may be said of hallucination ; for, after having been for 
 a greater or less length of time recognized by the subject as an error of 
 the senses, it terminates by vanquishing the reason, and destroying the 
 consciousness. Here also, if you can cure the hallucination, you may 
 hope that the conscience and the reason will return to their integrity. 
 
 " But the lesion of the intelligence is not the most important p^.. on-. 
 *element for the magistrate ; for him, the question is the loss of L J 
 the conscience, or of the power of self-control. It is, indeed, the failure 
 of the free agency, or of the responsibility, that places the insane under 
 a different jurisdiction than that which governs the sane. 
 
 " The questions for the magistrate and for the physician are then very 
 different ; but these two create a general point of view, which should at 
 least be kept in sight in giving a veritable definition of insanity." 
 
 Note D, Page 84. 
 
 At the recent trial of Anne Brough at Guildford, August 9, 1854, 
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60 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 for the murder of her six children, the horrible details of whose crime 
 must be fresh in the recollection of our readers, Mr. Justice Erie in 
 summing up said, " That the evidence for the prisoner appeared to be 
 founded upon the supposition, that the crime had been committed under 
 the influence of some uncontrollable impulse, and he would only observe, 
 that this was a most dangerous doctrine, for undoubtedly every crime 
 was committed under some impulse, and the object of the law was to 
 control impulses of that description, and thus prevent crime." 
 
 Dr. Forbes Winslow, however, had not made use of the exact words 
 uncontrollable impulse. What he had said waS, " I have known many 
 r*1 ^d.1 instances where a person has made an attack upon a near *rela- 
 L J tive, with whom he had previously been on the most affectionate 
 terms, and it frequently occurs with mothers and children. In such 
 cases the patient suffers under a strong homicidal impulse which he 
 cannot control. And it has happened to me to hear a patient bitterly 
 lament being under the influence of such an impulse." 
 
 This trial appears to have been conducted in a calm and temperate 
 spirit, very unlike that in which its result has since been commented 
 upon in the newspapers : it is seldom, indeed, that medical evidence has 
 been more judiciously set before a jury. 
 
 Mr. Izod, a surgeon who had attended the prisoner professionally for 
 several years, deposed, that in 1852, after childbirth, she had paralysis 
 {hemiplegia') with loss of speech and distortion of the face. That she 
 had never entirely regained her powers, and that he had observed symp- 
 toms of disordered brain. Dr. Forbes Winslow said that " paralysis may 
 exist in some cases without actual insanity, but it is always symptomatic 
 of a disease of the brain. Bleeding at the nose is a symptom of conges- 
 tion of the brain, and is considered as an effort of the brain to relieve 
 itself. During my interview with the prisoner in the gaol, I did not 
 observe any symptom of insanity. Cases of temporary insanity resulting 
 in a desire to commit murder or suicide are very common." (In re-exami- 
 r*l '^K\ nation.)- " I am *of opinion that at this moment the prisoner is 
 L -1 suffering from disease of the brain." 
 
 Against this strong evidence the circumstances immediately preceding 
 the crime were to be weighed. 
 
 The prisoner, a married woman with a large family, and bearing a re- 
 spectable character in her village, had been in the habit of meeting a 
 paramour in London, and frequenting houses of ill fame with him. She 
 indulged her habits of depravity with an amount of secrecy and caution 
 more characteristic of a criminal than of a lunatic. She was detected, 
 renounced, and left by her husband, and in an agony of despair and 
 vindictiveness, she committed one of the most horrible domestic massa- 
 cres on record. We advisedly say vindictiveness, for she left a letter 
 addressed to a daughter, who was from home, stamped with this feeling. 
 It was attached to a box of plate and jewellery, and ran thus : " All for 
 my daughter Mary. Her father is only seeking to get money from them 
 as never injured him, or done him any harm; so help me Grod. Mary 
 Anne Brough." A more atrocious or vindictive libel, or one more calcu- 
 lated to poison the mind of the only child she could not reach, against 
 
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APPENDIX. 61 
 
 her father, could scarcely be conceived : yet strangely enough the import 
 of this letter seems to have been overlooked both at the trial and in sub- 
 sequent comments. 
 
 Thespiritof these comments deserves some *notice. Theyprove r:^iq/.-i 
 that the real question at issue, namely, the existence or not of ■- J 
 insanity, is liable to be overlooked in an angry squabble between those 
 who maintain the necessity of capital punishments and those who desire 
 to abolish them. Some journalists, in their anger that Mrs. Brough had 
 escaped hanging, have visited the medical witnesses with severe censure 
 for giving evidence which could not be controverted. Others have re- 
 criminated, that those who object to the verdict, "wanted more blood, 
 and thought the gallows an outraged institution," &c. We are sorry to 
 believe it, but we are convinced, that a large number of the humane and 
 excellent men who object to capital punishment, had far rather see a 
 great criminal escape from justice altogether, than that he should un- 
 dergo capital punishment. The feeling against capital punishment is 
 spreading among the class of men from which common juries are taken; 
 and sooner or later the executive will be compelled to devise the means 
 of inflicting severe secondary punishment. We entertain the strongest 
 conviction, that had the jury been able to find Mrs. Brough guilty with 
 extenuating circumstances, so as to escape capital punishment, but to 
 ensure the infliction of perpetual imprisonment, they would have found 
 that verdict. As it is, the punishment of perpetual imprisonment will 
 be ensured by the legal fiction that she is insane, and to be confined for 
 that reason during Her Majesty's pleasure. 
 
 *Note E, page 105. [*137] 
 
 The author cited in our text appears to have missed the true emotional 
 theory of insanity, from his gloomy views respecting the present condi- 
 tion of man. According to him, insanity is caused by grief or mental 
 pain alone. There can, however, be no doubt that emotions which in 
 moderation are pleasurable, become in excess the sources of insanity. 
 Pope was nearer the truth when he wrote. 
 
 " Love, hope, and joy, fair pleasure's smiling train ; 
 Hate, fear, and grief, the family of pain ; 
 
 These, mtxt with art, and to due bounds confined, , 
 
 Make and maintain the balance of the mind : 
 The lights and shades, whose well accorded strife 
 Gives all the strength and colour to our life. 
 
 These 'tis enough to temper and employ ; 
 But what composes man, can man destroy." 
 
 The author believes that, in his articles in the British and Foreign 
 Review, he has been the first to propound the emotional theory of 
 insanity on a broad and satisfactory basis. His views will be sufficiently 
 understood from the following extracts. 
 
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62 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 After quoting from Sir Jas. Mackintosh's Ethics, to prove that a being 
 capable of reason alone could never act; that in the sane mind the 
 springs of action are always to be found in emotion ; he proceeds : 
 r*l t!8T *^ °^^ reasoning faculties, when in a sound and healthy con- 
 L J dition, cannot conduct to action, still less will they be capable of 
 doing so when they are enfeebled by disease. 
 
 " All medical men of experience acknowledge the occasional existence 
 of mental disease without disorder of the intellectual faculties. The 
 problem now claiming attention is a more advanced and extensive one : 
 namely, whether, with certain admitted and well marked exceptions, 
 insanity does not invariably commence with and consist in emotional 
 disturbance. The exceptions include those cases which by some writers 
 are designated symptomatic insanity, and arise from recognized physical 
 causes : from drunkenness, gout, fever, phrenitis, apoplexy, epilepsy, 
 blows on the head, insolation, parturition, old age, etc. We believe that, 
 except in these cases, convincing arguments can be adduced to prove 
 that insanity is always in the first instance emotional; that intellectual 
 disturbance is always secondary; and that Dr. Pritchard's cases were 
 apparently emotional, because in them the secondary part of the disease 
 did not occur, from the unusual force of a conservative tendency in the 
 intellectual faculties. Any hesitation we may feel in adopting this 
 theory arises, not from any deficiency of argumentative proof, but 
 because in reconciling so many inconsistencies and in smoothing so many 
 difficulties, it appears to favour the dominion of that idol of the tribe 
 which leads us to expect and to require an amount of uniformity which 
 does not exist in the operations of nature. 
 
 " The pathological argument rests upon the facts well known to 
 physicians, that the causes of insanity are of a nature producing in the 
 first place emotional changes only, either by the sudden and violent 
 agitation of the passions, 
 
 'When all the heartstrings like wild horses pull 
 The heart asunder/ 
 
 or by the long-continued influence of circumstances operating more 
 insidiously upon the mind, and producing an habitual state of abnormal 
 feeling. 
 
 r*1RQ1 *" -^ ™^i W3'S never yet either reasoned into insanity, or 
 •L J reasoned out of it. The delusion-test may with propriety be 
 upheld by our judges, highly intellectual as they are and full of dialectic 
 power ; but should the test of insanity ever become a part of statute 
 law, it is inconceivable that the large experience of our Houses of Par- 
 liament will permit them to allow it to rest upon any kind or amount of 
 bad reasoning. 
 
 " The larger portion of the treatment of insanity consists in what is 
 emphatically denominated moral treatment, in restoring the equipoise of 
 the emotions, in repressing the monster passion which swallows up the 
 rest, and in renewing the activity and vigour of the little passions which 
 have been thus unceremoniously dealt with. 
 
 "No sane man would attempt to reason away the erroneous opinions 
 
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APPENDIX. 63 
 
 of the insane ; even lunatics of asylum experience come to recognize the 
 hopeless nature of such a task, and respect the delusions of others, 
 although they may be antagonistic to their own. 
 
 " In the prodromic period of the disorder the emotions are always per- 
 verted, while the reason remains intact. In the period of convalescence, 
 the return of correct judgments is an uncertain and fallacious indication 
 of cure, so long as the emotions remain, even in a slight degree, per- 
 verted from their normal condition ; but immediately the latter are put 
 straight, the cure may be considered complete. Lastly, and chiefly, with 
 the exceptions above indicated, there is no description of insanity which, 
 if traced to its source, will not be found either to consist in perverted 
 emotion, or to emanate from that origin. Such will the causes of 
 insanity ever be found by those who diligently investigate them, although 
 by secondary disorders of the intellectual faculties its symptoms may, 
 and usually do become so transformed and disguised, that its essential 
 nature is subsequently not easy of recognition. 
 
 " For aught we know to the contrary, injuries to the head, poisoned 
 blood, and other similar causes, are capable of producing i-;);i j^-i 
 ^insanity in any human being ; but moral causes, on the con- L J 
 trary, appear to be efficient only when the mind is in a condition favora- 
 ble to the reception of the morbid influence. When this predisposing 
 condition exists, trivial causes become influential and effective ; when it 
 does not exist, men have for lengthened periods been subjected to every 
 kind, degree, and combination of mental sufiering, without lapsing from 
 the healthy states of vigorous resistance or of patient endurance. The 
 nature of this predisposing condition appears to consist in abnormal 
 motivity or impressibility of some emotion or set of emotions, combined 
 with a weak and deficient power of will. Too much weight cannot be 
 attached to the recognition of this state of mind, with the view either 
 to the prevention of insanity by a properly adapted education, or with a 
 view to its prodromic treatment. 
 
 " The ever-changing, increasing, and indefinite operation of causes 
 producing insanity, is also a strong reason for supposing that their 
 power is exerted upon the emotional part of man's nature. Whatever 
 operates upon the reason produces .a definite efiect. The intellect cannot 
 refuse either assent or dissent, qualified or entire, to any and every argu- 
 ment or theorem propounded to it. The dialectic function is impassive 
 as machinery, and there is little doubt, if it were possible to submit the 
 premises, that logical engines could be constructed as efficient in their 
 work as Mr. Babbage's celebrated calculating machine, or Mr. Clarke's 
 ingenious instrument for grinding Latin hexameters. The logical 
 engine which every man possesses often does its work badly enough, 
 but whatever the results may be, they are definite and precise. 
 
 « The intellectual faculty forms an opinion, general or particular — 
 erroneous or correct — there it stops ; and according to the materials sub- 
 mitted, the quantity and quality of the work done, a man becomes full 
 or empty, stupid or wise, a dolt or a Newton. A man may be an idiot 
 from congenital deficiency of this faculty, or may become demented from 
 
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64 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 r*14.n ^^"^y *''^ i* ; ^^ ™^y ^® crotchety from its imperfection, hut it 
 L J appears to us impossible that any condition of the reasoning 
 faculty can produce madness." 
 
 Note F, page 120. 
 
 The author does not disagree with other superintendents of asylums in 
 thinking that a state asylum is unnecessary, or that county asylums do 
 not contain inmates for whose detention such an institution is desirable. 
 He only attempts to show that it is generally a matter of accident, whe- 
 ther an insane person becomes a so-called criminal lunatic or notj and 
 that a special institution is not needed for the class of criminal lunatics, 
 which includes, perhaps, an average proportion of patients vhose habits 
 are quiet and inoffensive, and whose dispositions are gentle : but that it 
 is necessary for those lunatics who are cursed with criminal dispositions, 
 whether they have committed overt acts or not. He says : 
 
 " The formation of a central asylum for criminal lunatics, might be 
 decided and acted upon without further difficulty than the expenditure 
 of a certain sum of public money; and this investment could even be 
 made a source of economy. But if, for the sake of present expediency, 
 the question is thus solved, the real difficulties will be left untouched. 
 Harmless patients will be taien from the places of appropriate treatment, 
 where they now are, and perplexing cases of criminal character will be 
 r*l d.91 ^®^* behind. If all lunatics confined under powers "given by 39 
 L A*^J & 40 Geo. m. chap. 94 ; 1 & 2 Vict. chap. 14 ; and 3 & 4 Vict, 
 chap. 54, are classed as criminal lunatics, and are placed in the same esta- 
 blishment, and under the same system, the difficulties of classification 
 and management, which have been felt in some asylums, will only be 
 removed from one place to another, and will be greatly increased by the 
 greater number of incongruous elements. Those who have become in- 
 sane from the long indulgence of criminal propensities, will be con- 
 founded with those who have become criminal for want of timely pro- 
 tection during their insanity; those in whom some degree of imbecility 
 renders a vicious character still more intractable, with those who have 
 done wrong conscientiously believing it to be right ; those accused of 
 some slight offence for which they have never been tried, with those con- 
 victed of heinous offences, and after conviction become insane." 
 
 " It will appear, from cases cited, how purely accidental it is, whether 
 an insane person is admitted into an asylum under a state warrant, or 
 under the ordinary justices' order, and how arbitrary is the present clas- 
 sification of so-called criminal lunatics. There are few insane persons 
 who, if left at large and neglected, would not be liable to commit offences 
 of some kind against the law : and a large number of patients admitted 
 into asylums under the ordinary forms have committed offences which 
 would have subjected them to imprisonment and trial, had not their 
 mental infirmity been obvious. When the invasion of the disease is 
 sudden and pronounced, its nature is not likely to be overlooked, and 
 the subject of it is sent at once to a proper place for treatment. But if 
 
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APPENDIX. 65 
 
 the disease comes on, as it frequently does, in a gradual and insidious 
 manner, it may lead to the commission of offences before it is observed, 
 and the visiting justices of the jail, or the jury impannelled to try the 
 prisoner, may be the first to recognize its existence. When persons 
 known to be insane commit offences, they are not usually sent to jail, 
 but direct to the asylum, under the common admission forms — a general 
 but not a universal exception *being made in cases of homicide. nj)i-|^Q-| 
 It therefore appears to depend more upon the manner in which L J 
 insanity develops itself, and upon the persons who first appreciate its 
 nature, than upon any distinctive kind of the malady, whether a patient 
 happens to be classed as a criminal or as an ordinary lunatic. Patients pre- 
 viously confined as criminal lunatics, are sometimes re-admitted as ordi- 
 nary patients, and the latter after discharge are sometimes re-admitted as 
 criminal lunatics. So long as the distinction between criminal and other 
 lunatics leads to the same treatment, no inconvenience arises from its 
 being dependent upon contingencies of this kind ; but if different esta- 
 blishments and management are provided for the two classes, some more 
 rational and certain system of classification than the present one will be 
 required. 
 
 " It should not be forgotten, that there is a distinction between vice 
 and crime ; and that the removal from county asylums of all lunatics 
 who have committed offences against the law, would still leave behind 
 the depraved and vicious persons, whose society is more contaminating 
 than that of the violent and thievish. Drunkenness and debauchery are 
 not crimes, and those who have become insane after a life spent in their 
 excesses, could not be dismissed from a public asylum as criminal luna- 
 tics ; yet I have seen infinitely more mischief produced by the example 
 and contagion of the latter than of the former. When a wretched and 
 debased prostitute is admitted into the wards of an asylum, suffering 
 from maniacal excitement, the unblushing profligacy of her language 
 and conduct is often such as to shock the least fastidious : when she has 
 passed into a quieter state, or is progressing towards recovery, her beha- 
 viour and the tone of her conversation become less offensive, because 
 more guarded towards the officers ; but are more insidious, and therefore 
 perhaps still more mischievous to the pure-minded and innocent women 
 with whom she is necessarily associated. Who would not prefer for a 
 young woman, even the society of those who, under the influence of 
 mental ^disease, had committed what are called heinous offences, p^^ ..-, 
 to that of the miserable beings referred to ? Among the male •- J 
 patients also are to be found those who have spent their years in vice 
 and debauchery, but who have never been detected in crime. The 
 meshes of the law do not catch all the scoundrels in society, but they 
 are all liable to become insane. Yice is probably more infectious and 
 polluting than crime; and while the latter is often the result of insanity, 
 the former is very frequently the cause of it. My experience leads me 
 to believe that vicious and depraved inmates of lunatic asylums are more 
 objectionable as companions to the other patients than the so-called crimi- 
 nal lunatics." 
 
 " In the management of lunatics a large number can, by wise and 
 
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66 B0CKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY.] 
 
 kind treatment, be influenced through the operation of their higher 
 moral feelings ; but unfortunately there are others whose character has 
 been fixed in a baser mould, and who must be influenced by more direct 
 appeals to their selfishness. This influence cannot conTeniently be exer- 
 cised in a place where a mild and indulgent regime is established, and 
 hence the demand and necessity for a separate asylum for lunatics of 
 criminal disposition. These persons cannot, with justice or expediency, 
 be treated like sane criminals. They cannot, even for heinous off"enoes, 
 be hung out of the way, for public feeling would revolt at it. Long- 
 continued solitary confinement would increase their mental infirmity, and 
 would deteriorate rather than improve their condition. For the same 
 reason, they cannot be worked or transported in company with other 
 criminals, to whom they would be most mischievous companioiis ; for an 
 imbecile or insane man is the worst comrade a vicious one can have, be- 
 coming a butt, a disguise, and a ready tool. 
 
 " By exclusion from criminals and from lunatics, the mixed character 
 needs a place of treatment distinct from the asylum and the prison, and 
 partaking of the characteristics of both; with more variety, leniency, 
 P^-. . _-. and indulgence than are to be *found in the latter; with a stricter 
 L J discipline and a compulsory industry unsuited to the former." 
 
 " It may be said that this distinction of all offenders against the laws 
 into Griminals, Lunatics of Criminal Disposition, and Lunatics, will not 
 be easy to carry into practice, because there will be some persons on each 
 side of the intermediate class whose proper position it will be dif&cult to 
 decide. To this objection it may be answered, that at present there are 
 only two classes instead of three ; that while, in nature, all changes are 
 gradual, human classification must ever be more or less imperfect. Be- 
 sides, it is to be hoped, that the system of treatment adopted for the 
 middle class would not be formal and arbitrary like prison discipline, but 
 would be made to accommodate itself to many different phases of charac- 
 ter, and degrees of insanity or vice ; would be a wholesome and reforma- 
 tory discipline, sufficiently disagreeable in its operation on the vicious 
 man, but not hateful or oppressive to the insane." 
 
 " Some alteration is desirable in the present practice of detaining in 
 gaol supposed lunatics, who have committed serious offences, to await 
 trial at the next ensuing assizes, which may take place after such a brief 
 interval that it becomes impossible to ascertain the mental condition of 
 the prisoner ; and the evidence on this point being imperfect, the verdict 
 is a matter of chance. The very insufficient opportunities afforded to 
 medical witnesses to form an opinion of the mental condition of a prisoner, 
 must often have struck the most casual observer. Grenerally, the physi- 
 cian giving evidence can at most say, that he has paid two or three visits 
 to the accused, and conversed with him in his cell in prison; sometimes 
 he can only say that he has observed the demeanor of the prisoner in 
 court, and has heard the evidence of other witnesses, from which he 
 forms his opinion. In cases of concealed delusions, or of disease affect- 
 ing the propensities, no medical man ought to give an opinion on such 
 shallow grounds. I am not ashamed to acknowledge that I have often 
 
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APPENDIX. 67 
 
 observed patients daily for ^several weeks -without being able to r-^-. , „-. 
 detect existing delusion. The plan adopted in France of send- L J 
 ing a supposed lunatic to an asylum, for observation before trial, meets 
 this diflSculty, and deserves imitation." 
 
 " It may occur that the Court of Assize will not sit until six months 
 after the committal, and if the mental disease is of a recent and curable 
 nature, a most cruel injustice may be exercised towards an innocent 
 person, by withholding seasonable treatment, and rendering a curable 
 case of insanity incurable. Dr. Thurnam proves that treatment delayed 
 from the third month to the twelfth month, reduces the probability of 
 cure from one in three, to four in one ; that is, there is one chance of 
 cure left instead of twelve. Treatment delayed from the commencement 
 of the disease to the sixth month, the interval being spent in prison, is 
 likely to be fully as disadvantageous. In the new gaols for separate con- 
 finement a noisy lunatic proves such a nuisance, from the reverberation 
 of his cries through the resonant structure of the building, that every 
 effort is sure to be made to have him transmitted to an asylum with- 
 out delay ; but this evil is not felt in the old prisons, nor in the new 
 ones with a silent or melancholic patient." — (On the Classification and 
 Management of Criminal Lunatics, by Dr. Bucknill. London : Churc- 
 hill, 1861.) 
 
 We have been much pleased to observe, from their two last Annual 
 Reports, that the Commissioners in Lunacy now entertain opinions on 
 this subject similar to those which have been warmly urged by ourselves 
 
 In their Report, published last year, the Commissioners state — 
 
 " In considering the subject in all its bearings, it is obvious that there 
 exist certain difficulties which prevent our drawing a strict line, within 
 which all such patients (and such patients only) as are unfit to associate 
 with the ordinary inmates of *Lunatie Asylums shall be compre- r^i 4^7-1 
 hended. In the first instance, those persons who have been L J 
 acquitted on the ground of having been insane at the time of committing 
 the offence, are to be distinguished from those who were sane at such 
 time, and have become subsequently insane. Secondly, the persons who 
 have committed minor are to be distinguished from such as have com- 
 mitted heinous offences. Whilst persons who have been committed for 
 want of sureties, may in some cases, and others who have been summarily 
 convicted for vagrancy, may, perhaps in all cases, be excluded altogether 
 when the question of association is considered. 
 
 " It is clear, moreover, that a patient of decidedly homicidal tendency, 
 or one who has perpetrated or attempted some heinous offence, and has 
 only been saved from the category of criminals by the prudence of his 
 friends, who have placed him in the security of an asylum before he 
 came under the cognizance of the law, may often be an associate equally 
 objectionable as any of those who come under the denomination of ' Cri- 
 minal Lunatics.' " 
 
 In their Report for the present year, the views of the Commissioners 
 have approximated still more closely to those advocated in the pamphlet 
 above quoted. They state — 
 
 " The question of sanity or insanity, ought as we conceive, to be tried 
 
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 68 BUCKNILL ON CRIMINAL LUNACY. 
 
 and determined by a competent tribunal, at the earliest period after the 
 commission of the offence charged. 
 
 " With this view we would suggest that persons charged before justices 
 with indictable offences, and then found on due inquiry to have been 
 insane at the time of the offence, should, excepting perhaps in certain 
 atrocious cases, as of high treason or homicidal violence, not be committed 
 for trial, but should be dealt with either as lunatics not under proper 
 care and control, or otherwise, according to circumstances. 
 r*14.8n ""^^ respects the insane generally, it is important to observe, 
 L J *that a large number, if they had opportunity, would commit 
 murder or other heinous crimes ; and that in fact many of them, before 
 they are sent as insane patients to asylums, have committed acts for 
 which they might, but for the merciful consideration of those who dealt 
 with them, have been brought within the provisions of the Criminal 
 Lunatics' Acts. Their being treated not as criminals, hut as merely 
 insane, is in many cases matter of accident. No real distinction in such 
 cases exist between criminal lunatics and ordinary lunatics, inmates of 
 asylums, afflicted with homicidal mania, or other dangerous or criminal 
 propensities." 
 
 We must acknowledge that it is a subject of no little gratification to us 
 that the Commissioners in Lunacy have so entirely adopted our views 
 respecting the accidental nature of so called Criminal Lunacy, and the 
 necessity of special means for the care of homicidal and other lunatics of 
 criminal disposition, who have not "come under the cognizance of the 
 Law." 
 
 They also agree with us in vindicating the necessity of some radical 
 change in the forms of legal procedure where insanity is pleaded, and in 
 recommending that this change should be effected by extending the 
 powers of the Court, and not those of the jury. They state in their 
 Eeport, recently issued : 
 
 " If, upon the occasion of the trial of an indictment, the plea of In- 
 sanity be set up, we are disposed to think that the question should be 
 tried and determined by the Court after taking medical and other evi- 
 dence, and not by the common jury impanelled to try the facts." 
 
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