inging home to our legal brethren this important truth of absolute
psychic determinism, that a man is what he is and acts as he does
because of everything that has gone before him--because of ontogenetic
as well as phylogenetic instinctive motives--it will have fully
established its _raison d'etre_. For a realization of this truth would
at once annihilate from our minds that deceptive notion of the "freedom
of will" upon which our laws are based, and will be certain to bring
about a more enlightened solution of the problem of the criminal, all
attempts at which, we are constrained to state, have thus far[A]
undeniably been huge failures.

[A] Intimate contact with members of the legal profession, both
professionally and socially, for some years past has convinced me that
the average lawyer still looks upon the ideas concerning crime and the
criminal expressed by physicians of a forensic bent as totally
unpractical and visionary. It would take only a brief visit to a
criminal department of any modern, well-conducted hospital for the
insane to convince any fair-minded individual that the physician handles
the problem of the criminal not only in a more scientific and rational
manner than does one not possessed of this particular training, but also
in an eminently more practical manner, even so far as dollars and cents
are concerned. I have frequently had patients come under my observation
who for a great number of years had been oscillating between penal
institutions and hospitals for the insane, in whom each additional
sentence did not only fail to bring about the hoped-for reformation, but
served to render them more depraved and criminally inclined, and who
would have undoubtedly continued this checkered career throughout life,
had not their true, unreformable nature been discovered and thus caused
their permanent isolation from society, not by the jurist but by the
physician. Should reformation ever take place in any of these
individuals it is safe to assume that the one who was clear-visioned
enough to discover the cause of their antisocial existence would
likewise be competent enough to know when this cause has disappeared.

The psychic mechanism of lying is the same both in the occasional and in
the pathological liar--in both it is the expression of a wish--but the
difference in the personalities of the two is a very decided one. On the
one hand we have an individual who closely approaches normal man, while
on the o