I remarked before that almost every one of Lombroso’s books might have as its title, “The Cause of, and Prevention of ——.” One exception must, however, be made to this generalization, or perhaps two. The first of these relates to his book upon “The Man of Genius,”^[49] and the second to his work “Pensiero e meteore,”^[50] in which were collected his researches into the cosmic and telluric influences that determine human actions.

To speak first of the last-named work, we learn from it, as also from earlier and later minor writings, that in Lombroso’s opinion it is not the internal, inborn factors only that exercise an important influence upon the actions and the social behaviour of human beings. Indeed, to Lombroso as a determinist we owe a service which distinguishes him from the great majority of modern determinists. He was bold enough to revive and to restore to psychology the cosmic determinism of the Pythagoreans. It was not within the organism alone that he sought the determining influences of physiological and psychological activity. He looked for these also outside the organism—in the environment; and his conception of this environment was the very widest possible (see p. 132). At first, when still quite a young man, he laid stress, with Buckle, upon the influence of civilization—that is to say, of the cultural environment—upon individual phenomena. He saw, indeed, in these phenomena, when they are of an abnormal character—taking, for example, the form of insanity, crime, or prostitution—diseases of the social organism, which become individualized in predisposed or malformed persons (the theory of degeneration). Subsequently he came to note, and perhaps to overestimate, the influence of meteorological and cosmic processes—the influence, that is to say, of the physical environment. Later still, when he had grasped the entire plan of the edifice of his life-work, the most important part of that edifice was always the doctrine of causes and of the environment—understanding always by the term “environment” all that comes into relation from outside with the individual and with society, everything competent to determine his tendencies, his gifts, his capacities, and his actions.

Lombroso ultimately came to regard environment as profoundly important in determining the production of criminality, as may be seen most clearly in a passage from the fourth chapter of his work on “The Cause and Prevention of Crime,” of which I here give a portion. After a detailed explanation of the distinction between the older civilization, typified by force, and contemporary civilization, typified by cunning, and having shown that both these types are manifested in the criminal career, he goes on to say: “We experience here de facto the parallel activity of two forms of criminality: atavistic criminality, characterized by the relapse of abnormally predisposed individuals to the employment of forcible means in the struggle for existence—means which our own civilization has normally ceased to use—manslaughter, robbery with violence, or rape; and evolutionary criminality, which is just as maleficent in intention, but far more civilized in its means, for in place of force and violence it employs cunning and artifice.”

The first form of criminality is exhibited only by a comparatively small number of unfortunately predisposed individuals; the second form, by those who are not sufficiently strong to withstand the unfavourable influences of their environment.

Thus, following in the tracks of Quetelet, and contemporaneously with Adolf Wagner—the former being the founder of “social physics,” and the latter the man who demonstrated “the reign of law in the apparently voluntary actions of human beings”—Lombroso regarded the activity of the individual as devoid of all true spontaneity. He viewed it in its dependence upon numerous external and internal factors, in part belonging to the organization of the individual and in part to his environment. In accordance with this view, he assigned to the intellect, to “reason,” a minimal share in the control of actions, in the conduct of the ego. And even in emotion he saw, for the most part, a simple operation of unconscious processes, subsidiary reactions of the organism in response to natural forces.

Thus, in his view, the personality of the doer tended to disappear; individual differences faded away. In his determinism, the idea of the “type,” of the “group,” of the “class,” preponderates. The average man, whose type is deformed by the inexorable law of pathological inheritance (which plays so large a part in all Lombroso’s works), acts under the mechanical compulsion of his internal disposition and organization; and, further, as if this alone were insufficient, he is driven by the external conditions of life, whether those of the physical environment or those of the social organization. Thus he reduces individual differences, for the most part, to a few types, in which the degenerative predispositions almost always manifest themselves in the form of automatic “epileptic” discharges. This does not mean that he altogether denied individual classification, but in his teaching all individuals were contemplated in the light of one and the same fundamental determinism. From the lowest step of this classification occupied by the savage atavistic criminal, the series proceeds to the altitude on which is enthroned the figure of the genius.

This determinism, although not expressly stated, underlies also his account of genius.

Almost throughout his whole life he was interested in the problem of genius. We see this from his first important work, published in the year 1855, upon the “Insanity of Cardanus.” It runs through the six Italian and eight foreign editions of his work on “The Man of Genius.” We see it also in the last important work published before he died, on “Genius and Degeneration.”

It is well known that he regarded the analogy between the epileptic automatic discharge and the inspiration of genius as a proof of the identity of these two phenomena. Here the indefiniteness of the concepts “genius” and “epilepsy” is compensated by the importance and abundance of the facts adduced by him to show that in the essence of genius an “anomaly” is almost invariably to be recognized—and this not merely in the peculiarities commonly observed in men of genius in spheres altogether independent of the direct manifestations of their genius. But inspiration, the discharge itself, is also cosmically determined. Thus we understand why it is that, in the last edition of “The Man of Genius,” the section upon the characteristics of the genius occupies no more space than does the account of the environing causes of genius, and occupies barely half the amount of space given to the section upon genius as manifested in the insane.

However much or however little of these ideas may be found to possess permanent value, one point of unquestionable importance is Lombroso’s demand that among the conditions of the work of genius we must study the personality of the genius himself with all his individual peculiarities. A glance at the almost interminable series of “pathographies” of highly-talented persons proves to us how strong an influence Lombroso’s ideas exercised upon the intellectual world of Germany, and to what an extent they gave rise to an anthropological method of study of the nature of the man of genius.

We Germans must see, unless we are blind, the enormous importance in relation to the work produced by the two most distinguished figures of our recent intellectual history—Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche—of the severe suffering with which both were afflicted. Even if it be not true that pathology is the root of genius, at any rate, pathos, not ethos, will persist as the sphere in which mortal man attains the highest perfection, and the one in which he performs the greatest deeds. And Lombroso’s own path through life, overburdened as he was with sorrows, struggles, pains, and deprivations, shows us that, in default of the forcible over-stimulation which severe suffering induces in rich and deep natures, the energy of the highest spiritualization is unable to radiate from the hidden depths of our nature; and yet these same sorrows and struggles are likely, in those in whom the divine fire of Prometheus has not glowed from the first, to lead to crime or to insanity.

In the light of this idea, the life-work of the master, who displayed the close relationship between these three great manifestations of suffering humanity, genius, insanity, and crime, will no longer appear so strange as his isolated and detached ideas appeared to his contemporaries. And we shall continue to return again and again to his works, as to an arsenal of means to help us to the understanding of the highest and of the deepest endowments of mankind.

If we wish to do justice to the life-work of Lombroso, we must not omit the study of his own personality, to which, therefore, a final glance may be directed. By his birth and by his own peculiar temperament he belonged to that Jewish aristocracy to which, as Bismarck pointed out, Disraeli also belonged. The former well-to-do position and the high standing of his family were changed greatly for the worse in consequence of the Austrian domination in Italy. Lombroso was compelled to be not merely his own teacher, but also his own bread-winner; and when at length he had attained a good position as a consulting physician and University Professor, owing to his espousal of the cause of the Italian peasantry he lost the material advantages of a position which would otherwise have led him to acquire considerable wealth in the industrially powerful Northern Italy.

These losses freed him completely from the desire to strive for outward success, and restored to him the leisure without which he could never have collected his enormous materials, or carried on his incessant polemic for clearer ideas, and effected the systematic arrangement of his material. Thus his life attained a harmonious character such as rarely belongs to the learned life of a successful physician; and whilst he remained outwardly unpretending and modest, always ready to help others both in word and deed, he continued to be the intellectual father of new and ever new sensational hypotheses. He, “the slave of facts,” never boasted of his diligence; and although in innumerable controversies he unweariedly defended his ideas, his zeal was always on behalf of the ideas themselves, never to gain material advantages. Lombroso never sought for personal gain from the conceptions of whose value and importance he was so firmly convinced, and which came to him, as it were, intuitively. Indeed, his principal strength lay in intuition, in his ready grasp of the essential. His theories of intuitive genius lay stress upon certain analogies between intuition and epileptoid states; and the great reverence paid by him to truth may possibly have led him at times to underestimate the powerful, although not always fully conscious, intellectual activity which paves the way to every happy discovery.

We cannot here attempt to show the extent and importance of Lombroso’s contributions to Italian culture outside the domain of anthropological researches. From his house in Turin, and from the circle of thinkers, officials and artists who assembled there, there was diffused a powerful influence, and at times the very consciousness of Italy seemed to be centred here at work. And, unceasingly, a manifold receptivity and activity found the unity and the energy requisite for their concentrated effects in the fiery soul in whose ardour the most heterogeneous elements were fused, and whose spirit lives on in his successors and disciples—