oers as we extirpate vermin; but
I don't know that we have any more right to judge them than we have to
judge rats and mice, which are just as good as cats and weasels, though
we think it necessary to treat them as criminals.

The limitations of human responsibility have never been properly studied,
unless it be by the phrenologists. You know from my lectures that I
consider phrenology, as taught, a pseudo-science, and not a branch of
positive knowledge; but, for all that, we owe it an immense debt. It has
melted the world's conscience in its crucible, and cast it in a new
mould, with features less like those of Moloch and more like those of
humanity. If it has failed to demonstrate its system of special
correspondences, it has proved that there are fixed relations between
organization and mind and character. It has brought out that great
doctrine of moral insanity, which has done more to make men charitable
and soften legal and theological barbarism than any one doctrine that I
can think of since the message of peace and good-will to men.

Automatic action in the moral world; the reflex movement which seems to
be self-determination, and has been hanged and howled at as such
(metaphorically) for nobody knows how many centuries: until somebody
shall study this as Marshall Hall has studied reflex nervous action in
the bodily system, I would not give much for men's judgments of each
others' characters. Shut up the robber and the defaulter, we must. But
what if your oldest boy had been stolen from his cradle and bred in a
North-Street cellar? What if you are drinking a little too much wine and
smoking a little too much tobacco, and your son takes after you, and so
your poor grandson's brain being a little injured in physical texture, he
loses the fine moral sense on which you pride yourself, and doesn't see
the difference between signing another man's name to a draft and his own?

I suppose the study of automatic action in the moral world (you see what
I mean through the apparent contradiction of terms) may be a dangerous
one in the view of many people. It is liable to abuse, no doubt. People
are always glad to, get hold of anything which limits their
responsibility. But remember that our moral estimates come down to us
from ancestors who hanged children for stealing forty shillings' worth,
and sent their souls to perdition for the sin of being born,--who
punished the unfortunate families of suicides, and in their