the trial of some
desperate criminal, is not infrequently associated with
abnormally low intelligence, the sodden stolidity of the traditional
criminal type. Where it appears, as it sometimes does, in
criminals of high intelligence, it is regarded by psychiatrists
as a specific abnormality, comparable to color-blindness or a
physical deformity.

There are, on the other hand, individuals whose apparent
low suggestibility is of the highest social value. There are
striking instances, throughout the long struggle toward human
liberty, of persons who could withstand the public opinion
of their own day in the light of some ideal which they cherished,
of men who needed no other approval than their consciences,
their better selves, or their god. Socrates drinking
the fatal hemlock, Christ upon the cross, the Christian saints,
Joan of Arc, the extreme dissenters of every generation, are
instances of men and women seemingly unmoved by the
praise and blame of their contemporaries. Sustained by their
deep inner conviction of the justice and significance of their
mission, they have been content to suffer scorn, ridicule, and
martyrdom at the hands of their own generation in a persistent
devotion to what in their eyes constituted the highest good of
mankind.

SOCIAL ESTIMATES AND STANDARDS OF CONDUCT. Individuals
are early habituated to the customs of the society in which
they live, and come to approve, as might be expected from
the power of men's habits and from their instinctive gregariousness,
those things which they or their companions have
always done. That "people don't do such things," or that
"everybody does them," is a frequently assigned reason for
the approval or condemnation of an act. Social approvals
thus become affixed to acts which are regularly done by the
majority, and divergences are subjected to varying degrees
of censure. In civilized societies variations from customs
that are not legally enforced are punished mainly by social
ostracism. There is no law against walking down a crowded
city street in Elizabethan costume, yet few would indulge
their taste for beautiful but archaic dress in the face of all the
ridicule they would incur. The whole system of etiquette,
of the standard of living of respectable society, is maintained
in large part because of the approvals and outward marks of
admiration that go to some types of life and the contempt in
which others are held. Much of the economic activity of the
l