litileness about the excuses and reasons given by the individual, when discovered in the attempt, which shows that he fails to appreciate the true cause of the sad symptom. "I couldn't help it”—the old excuse which has been since the beginning, and will be to the end. The laying of vice upon the shoulder of fate, who shall bear the blame also, but carrying all the merit of doing virtuously ourselves. But that reason, "could not help it," is the best excuse of suicidal insanity, properly so called, and it is for the medical jurists to discover whether it is true or not. Two lovers died in each other's arms, and asserted in a letter to the world that they were too happy to live. Sir S. Romilly died in order that he might be reunited with his wife, the grief for whose death weighed him down. A gentleman is said to have killed himself in order that he might be saved the trouble of tying his garters of a morning. And the desire of notoriety is not an uncommon inducement to the commission of suicide, and irritation is, as we have pointed out, the cause of many suicides. All these motives might have influence over weak minds in which we could not discover any morbid element, but they will be found to have a greater influence over [161] those minds which are weakened by disease.

240. Relation between Suicidal Mania and Homicidal Mania. We find that in many cases the same mind which would be liable to be influenced powerfully by inducements to suicide would also be open to the impulsive temptations to homicide. The two acts are somewhat closely connected in thought, and the frequency with which death has been sought by the sane to avoid the consequences of murder must, to minds weakened by disease, connect those acts and propensities still more closely. And the fact proves that they really are very frequently manifested by the same individual, and much difficulty does arise in practice owing to this circumstance. We come then to

PART VI.-HOMICIDAL INSANITY.

241. As to the Existence of Homicidal Insanity.— Much ingenuity is wasted in this world, or, at least, only serves an indirect purpose, not that which it was intended

to subserve. So it is with much of the reasoning about homicidal mania. How many attempts have been made tc prove that an impulse to kill does really exist? How many efforts are made to prove all the Judges in England whe won't believe in the existence of such impulses a parcel of very stupid old gentlemen? How many cases, in which ic seemed no reasonable man could doubt that an uncontrollable desire to take the life of another did really exist, have been collected and carried from one reservoir of facts inte another? How many indignant appeals have been made to the country at large not to sanction the horrible injustice of impressing its principle of the certainty of punishment upon the public, by means of cruelty to the persons of poor lunatics, who were as innocent of the crime as a horse, which carries a man to the place where he means to commit a theft, is of the robbery? And when another comes to speak of the same subject, he must be guided by the tracks of his predecessors. One's wheels run in the ruts. And all that a new comer can hope to do is to avoid one or two of the inaccuracies of which those who have gone before him have been guilty.

2242. Homicidal Impulse Explained by Propensity.Some writers, in attempting to find out what homicidal impulse really means, have sought assistance from the dead words of the phrenologists. They have found out what they call a propensity to destroy or a faculty of destructiveness. This, upon the face of it, looks a great discovery. A propensity to destroy in sane men, an exaltation of the tendency in insane men, gives you inordinate propensity to destroyto destroy what? Why, life; i. e., a homicidal impulse. But when they attempt to show that there is some such propensity [162) in mankind they are not so successful. They reason that an all-wise Providence would probably give man such a propensity to destroy because there are many things in man's environment the destruction of which benefits humanity. How easily men reason as to what God ought to have done. But is this propensity theory not infinitely clumsy? And does it not violate all the laws of economy? You give man

a propensity to destroy. The propensity does not tell him what it would be well to destroy. Thought and experience do that. Now, on this hypothesis you require your propensity and your reason, while it is quite evident that reason could do it quite well enough without any such assistance. By thought a man becomes convinced that the removal and destruction of a certain animal or object would conduce to his happiness, and by thought he thinks how that can most effectually be done, and he comes to the conclusion that it can be best effected by destruction or death, and he destroys or kills it. Where is the necessity for your propensity? Away with it, then, if it is of no use. Does a man require a propensity, when he is hungry, to induce him to kill to satisfy his hunger? Does he require a propensity before he can bait a trap for rats? Has the housewife a savage pleasure in the mere fact of death when she sees the patent fly-paper strewn with dead insects? Does the fact that some savage tribes kill more animals than they can use for food prove anything as to the existence of a propensity to kill? Or does it only prove that they take an intense pleasure in the exercise and exhibition of skill, that they do not care anything about the life or death of other animals, which is much too remote a fact from the current of their lives to affect their somewhat limited sentiments, and that they are utterly careless as to the future, thinking that the morrow has a personal interest in looking after its own affairs. That a blow is given for a blow is no proof of a propensity to destroy, as some have argued,' but is a proof of the existence, under injury, of a sentiment we have denominated "anger," a characteristic feature of which sentiment is a desire to injure the cause of the mental irritation. Neither can the reality of this socalled "destructiveness" be augured from the wrath which children vent upon inanimate objects when injured by them. Anger, like all real strong passion, tends to the externalization of mind in acts. And those acts have a certain conplexion, a certain bent: they are 16intended to injure the object that injured us. It is reason alone convinces us after

1 See Journal of Mental Science, July, 1863, p. 197.

much experience that we do not injure the cause of that injury by a blow, unless the object of our anger is endowed with life. Even the strongest anger is guided by thought.

2243. Rational Explanation of Impulse. So far, then, we have seen no reason to believe in a propensity to destroy or kill. There is a tendency in human minds to view and consider the possibilities of change or of no change. And an habitual mode of thought will make a man prefer one of those courses, even somewhat irrationally, if the mind is not very powerful, and this preference is strengthened by a necessity for consistency and the like. So men are conservatives or radicals, and in so far one may have an acquired propensity to destroy, or at least to change, but in no other way that we can see. Then let us examine again the possible motives of men, as the sails which the winds of passion fill. A man kills another in anger, or he kills another because they both love the same woman, or he kills another because he has a piece of property that the murderer desires to possess. Such are some of the motives which induce to the destruction of life. Now, the law has defined murder as "the killing of any person under the King's peace with malice aforethought express or implied." Ard in each of the three cases above supposed there seems reason to think that the indictment which runs to the effect that the prisoner did on the day named "feloniously and wilfully, and of his malice aforethought, kill and murder" the deceased,' would lie.

244. Anger and Punishment.-Now, the type of all punishment is to be found in the sentiment of anger which we have referred to above., When a disease came upon the earth in times past, the peoples thought the gods were angry, and the smoke of bulls and rams went up to appease them. In human anger the injury is the most prominent idea, and almost inevitably suggests the punishment, and therefore we find blow given for blow. And we find that some codes of laws have so far proved slavish to the type, and have decreed an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and, indeed, in our

Bla. Com., p. 195; 3 Inst. 47; 24 and 25 Vic., c. 100, § 6. *24 and 25 Vic., c. 100, § 6.

country in the reign of Edward I. incendiaries were put to death by fire, as was also the practice in some Gothic constitutions. But although anger is the real type of all punishment, and the object of anger and the object of punishment are the same-in the one case to repel injury which might be again [164] offered to the individual, in the other to repel injury which might again be offered to authority--punishment, as put in force in a highly cizilized country, has lost much of the essentially human property which it had in earlier times.

245. Punishment and the Objects of Punishment.— As individuals learned by experience that there was no real advantage to be gained by venting anger upon the inanimate, as they discovered that it was only the animate that could experience, that could be taught, and therefore could be deterred by hostile demonstrations, so the State learned that it was expedient to punish only those who were animate in the full sense of that word, those who were not bound hand and foot by circumstances, such as duress or absolutely diseased organism, as they were to all intents and purposes unable to experience, incapable of learning, and therefore could not be deterred by any such punishment. The State might have argued that, although no individual who is ever placed in these circumstances will ever learn that it is well to refrain from certain acts, persons in other circumstances will: just exactly as the child might have reasoned, "If my hitting the gate does not teach the gate not to hurt me again, it will show the boys who are looking on that I am not to be trampled on even by a gate." But the fact is, that neither of the supposed persons did reason thus, and so it comes about that law exempts from punishment all such as can be proved to have been, as it were, inanimate, and therefore, in the true sense, "not guilty" of the crime with which they are charged. Well, when that crime is murder, the law does, under certain circumstances, exempt an individual from punishment. If a man kills a neighbor in a fit of mania, he is not held responsible: if he kills his neighbor under the influence of an adequate delusion, concerning facts which, if true, would justify his killing the individual, he is not held responsible, and the same rule holds good of a person believing in an illusion.