Illusions of direction of sound are very common. It is said that even animals are subject to them; and everybody knows how few human beings can distinguish the source and direction of street music, a rolling wagon, or a ringing bell. Even when long practice enables one to determine direction with correctness, an accidental event, perhaps the weather, especial sounds, a different grouping of individuals on the street, may result in serious mistakes. I tried to learn to judge from my office-desk whether the ring of the horse- car came from above or below. I succeeded so well that I could not understand how it was difficult not to learn the difference, and yet I failed many a time altogether in judgment. The reason for it I do not know.

All these enumerated circumstances must show how very uncertain all acoustic perceptions are, and how little they may be trusted if they are not carefully tested under similar conditions, and if—what is most important—they are not isolated. We are here led back

[1] Max Meyer: Zur Theorie der Geruschempfindungen. Leipzig 1902.

to the old principle that every observation is not proof but means of proof, and that it may be trusted only when it is confirmed by many parallel actions which are really consistent. That even after that mistakes are possible, is true, but "after that'' is when we have done all that lies within human power.

Section 101. (4) Illusions of Touch.

The high standing of the sense of touch which make it in certain directions even the organ of control of the sense of sight, is well known, and Condillac's historic attempt to derive all the senses from this one is still plausible. If what is seen is to be seen accurately there is automatic resort to the confirmatory aid of the sense of touch, which apprehends what the eye has missed. Hence we find many people touching things, whose vision is not altogether reliable— i. e., people of considerable age, children unpracticed in seeing, an uneducated people who have never learned to see quickly and comprehensively. Moreover, certain things can be determined only by touching, i. e., the fineness of papers, cloth, etc., the sharpness or pointedness of instruments, or the rawness of objects. Even when we pat a dog kindly we do so partly because we want to see whether his skin is as smooth and fine as the eye sees it; moreover, we want to test the visual impression by that of touch.

But important and reliable as the sense of touch is, it is nevertheless not to be trusted when it is the sole instrument of perception. We must never depend on the testimony of a witness based entirely on perceptions by touch, and the statements of a wounded person concerning the time, manner, etc., of his wound are unreliable unless he has also seen what he has felt. We know that most knife and bullet wounds, i. e., the most dangerous ones, are felt, in the first instance, as not very powerful blows. Blows on the extremities are not felt as such, but rather as pain, and blows on the head are regularly estimated in terms of pain, and falsely with regard to their strength. If they were powerful enough to cause unconsciousness they are said to have been very massive, but if they have not had that effect, they will be described by the most honest of witnesses as much more powerful than they actually were. Concerning the location of a wound in the back, in the side, even in the upper arm, the wounded person can give only general indications, and if he correctly indicates the seat of the wound, he has learned it later but did not know it when it occurred. According to Helmholtz, practically all abdominal sensations are attributed to the anterior abdominal wall. Now such matters become of importance when an individual has suffered several wounds in a brawl or an assault and wants to say certainly that he got wound A when X appeared, wound B when Y struck at him, etc. These assertions are almost all false because the victim is likely to identify the pain of the moment of receiving the wound with its later painfulness. If, for example, an individual has received a rather long but shallow knife wound and a deep stab in the back, the first will cause him very considerable burning sensation, the latter only the feeling of a heavy blow. Later on, at the examination, the cut has healed and is no longer painful; the dangerous stab which may have reached the lung, causes pain and great difficulty in breathing, so that the wounded man assigns the incidence of the stab to the painful sensation of the cut, and conversely.

Various perceptions of victims on receiving a wound are remarkable, and I have persuaded a police surgeon of considerable learning and originality to collect and interpret his great mass of material. It is best done by means of tabulation, accurate description of wounds according to their place, size, form, and significance, the statement of the victim concerning his feeling at the moment of receiving the wound, the consequences of healing, and at the end explanatory observations concerning the reasons for true or incorrect sensations of the victim. As this work is to have only psychological value it is indifferent whether the victim is veracious or not. What we want to know is what people say about their perception. The true and the false will distinguish themselves automatically, the material being so rich, and the object will be to compare true subjective feelings with true subjective deeds. Perhaps it may even be possible to draw generalizations and to abstract certain rules.

There are many examples of the fact that uncontrolled touch leads to false perceptions. Modern psychophysics has pointed to a large group of false perceptions due to illusions of pressure, stabs, or other contact with the skin. The best known, and criminalistically most important experiments, are those with open compasses. Pressed on the less sensitive parts of the body, the back, the thigh, etc., they are always felt as one, although they are quite far apart. The experiments of Flournoy, again, show how difficult it is to judge weights which are not helped by the eye's appreciation of their form and appearance. Ten objects of various forms were judged by fifty people for their weight; only one discovered that they all had the same weight.

Similarly, mere touch can not give us proper control over the organs of the body. Sully says that in bed we may voluntarily imagine that a leg has a position quite different from that it really has. Let me cite some similar examples from my "Manual for Investigating Judges.'' If we take a pea between the thumb and the index finger, we feel the pea simply, although its tactile image comes to us through two fingers, i. e., double. If now we cross the third finger over the fourth and hold the pea between the ends of these two fingers, we feel it to be double because the fingers are not in their customary positions and hence give double results. From one point of view this double feeling is correct, but when we touch the pea naturally, experience helps us to feel only one pea. Another example consists in crossing the hands and turning them inward and upward, so that the left fingers turn to the left and the right fingers to the right. Here the localization of the fingers is totally lost, and if a second person points to one of the fingers without touching it, asking you to lift it, you regularly lift the analogous finger of the other hand. This shows that the tactile sense is not in a very high stage of development, since it needs, when unhelped by long experience, the assistance of the sense of sight. Perceptions through touch alone, therefore, are of small importance; inferences are made on the basis of few and more coarse characteristic impressions.

This is shown by a youthful game we used to play. It consisted of stretching certain harmless things under the table—a soft piece of dough, a peeled, damp potato stuck on a bit of wood, a wet glove filled with sand, the spirally cut rind of a beet, etc. Whoever got one of these objects without seeing it thought he was holding some disgusting thing and threw it away. His sense of touch could present only the dampness, the coldness, and the motion, i. e., the coarsest traits of reptilian life, and the imagination built these up into a reptile and caused the consequent action. Foolish as this game seems, it is criminalistically instructive. It indicates what unbelievable illusions the sense of touch is capable of causing. To this inadequacy of the tactile imagination may be added a sort of transferability of certain touch sensations. For example, if ants are busy near my seat I immediately feel that ants are running about under my clothes, and if I see a wound or hear it described, I often feel pain in the analogous place on my own body. That this may lead to considerable illusion in excitable witnesses is obvious.

Finally, this dependence of the sense of touch may be supplemented by the fact that it is counted only relatively, and its value varies with the individual. We find the cellar warm in winter and cold in summer, because we only feel the difference with the outer air, and when we put one hand in hot, and the other in cold water, and then put both in tepid water one finds the tepid water cold, the other warm. The record of tactile sensations is frequent in our protocols and requires constant consideration of the sense's unreliability.

Diseased conditions are of course to be referred to the physician. I need only mention that slight poisonings by means of chloroform, morphine, atropine, daturine, decrease, and that strychnine increases the sensitivity of the touch organ.

Section 102. (5) Illusions of the Sense of Taste.

Illusions of taste are of importance for us only in cases of poisoning in which we want the assistance of the victim, or desire to taste the poison in question in order to determine its nature. That taste and odor are particularly difficult to get any unanimity about is an old story, and it follows that it is still more difficult clearly to understand possible illusions of these senses. That disease can cause mistaken gustatory impressions is well known. But precedent poisoning may also create illusions. Thus, observation shows that poisoning by rose-santonin (that well-known worm remedy to which children are so abnormally sensitive) causes a long-enduring, bitter taste; sub-cutaneous morphine poisoning causes illusory bitter and sour tastes. Intermittent fevers tend to cause, when there is no attack and the patient feels comparatively well, a large number of metallic, particularly coppery tastes. If this is true it may lead to unjustified suspicions of poisoning, inasmuch as the phenomena of intermittent fever are so various that they can not all be identified.

Imagination makes considerable difference here. Taine tells somewhere of a novelist, who so graphically described the poisoning of his heroine that he felt the taste of arsenic and got indigestion. This may be possible, for perhaps everybody has already learned the great influence of the false idea of the nature of a food. If some salt meat is taken to be a sweet pastry, the taste becomes disgusting because the imaginary and the actual tastes seem to be mixed. The eye has especial influence, and the story cited and denied a hundred times, that in the dark, red wine and white wine, chicken and goose, can not be distinguished, that the going out of a cigar is not noted, etc., is true. With your eyes closed it may be possible to eat an onion instead of an apple.

Prior tastes may cause significant gustatory illusions. Hence, when assertions are made about tastes, it is always necessary to inquire at the outset what had been eaten or drunk before. Experienced housewives take this fact into consideration in setting their tables and arranging their wines. The values of the wines are considerably raised by complete illusions of taste. All in all, it must not be forgotten that the reliability of the sense of taste can not be estimated too low. The illusions are greatest especially when a thing has been tasted with a preconceived notion of its taste.

Section 103. (6) The Illusions of the Olfactory Sense.

Olfactory illusions are very rare in healthy people and are hence of small importance. They are frequent among the mentally diseased, are connected in most cases with sexual conditions and then are so vivid that the judge can hardly doubt the need of calling in the physician. Certain poisons tend to debauch the olfactory sense. Strychnine, e. g., tends to make it finer, morphine duller. People with weak lungs try, in most cases, to set their difficulty of breathing outside themselves and believe that they are inhaling poisoned air, coal-gas, etc. If one considers in this connection the suspiciousness which many people suffering from lung trouble often exhibit, we may explain many groundless accusations of attempted murder by stifling with poisonous or unbreathable gas. If this typical illusion is unknown to the judge he may find no reason for calling in the physician and then—injustice.

The largest number of olfactory illusions are due to imagination. Carpenter's frequently cited case of the officials who smelled a corpse while a coffin was being dug up, until finally the coffin was found to be empty, has many fellows. I once was making an examination of a case of arson, and on approaching the village noted a characteristic odor which is spread by burned animals or men. When we learned: that the consumed farm lay still an hour's ride from the village, the odor immediately disappeared. Again, on returning home, I thought I heard the voice of a visitor and immediately smelled her characteristic perfume, but she had not been there that day.

Such illusions are to be explained by the fact that many odors are in the air, that they are not very powerfully differentiated and may hence be turned by means of the imagination into that one which is likely to be most obvious.

The stories told of hyper-sensitives who think they are able to smell the pole of a magnet or the chemicals melted into a glass, belong to this class. That they do so in good faith may be assumed, but to smell through melted glass is impossible. Hence it must be believed that such people have really smelled something somewhere and have given this odor this or that particular location. Something like this occurs when an odor, otherwise found pleasant, suddenly becomes disgusting and unbearable when its source is unknown. However gladly a man may eat sardines in oil he is likely to turn aside when his eyes are closed and an open can of sardines is held under his nose. Many delicate forms of cheese emit disgusting odors so long as it is not known that cheese is the source. The odor that issues from the hands after crabs have been eaten is unbearable; if, however, one bears in mind that the odor is the odor of crabs, it becomes not at all so unpleasant.

Association has much influence. For a long time I disliked to go to a market where flowers, bouquets, wreaths, etc., were kept because I smelled dead human bodies. Finally, I discovered that the odor was due to the fact that I knew most of these flowers to be such as are laid on coffins—are smelled during interment. Again, many people find perfumes good or bad as they like or dislike the person who makes use of them, and the judgment concerning the pleasantness or unpleasantness of an odor is mainly dependent upon the pleasantness or unpleasantness of associative memories. When my son, who is naturally a vegetarian and who could never be moved to eat meat, became a doctor, I thought that he could never be brought to endure the odor of the dissecting room. It did not disturb him in the least, however, and he explained it by saying: "I do not eat what smells like that, and I can not conceive how you can eat anything from the butcher shops where the odor is exactly like that of the dissecting room.'' What odor is called good or bad, ecstatic or disgusting, is purely a subjective matter and never to be the basis of a universal judgment. Statements by witnesses concerning perceptions of odor are valueless unless otherwise confirmed.

Section 104. (b) Hallucinations and Illusions.

The limits between illusions of sense and hallucinations and illusions proper can in no sense be definitely determined inasmuch as any phenomena of the one may be applied to the other, and vice versa.[1] Most safely it may be held that the cause of illusions of sense lies in the nature of sense-organs, while the hallucinations and illusions are due to the activity of the brain. The latter are much more likely to fall within the scope of the physician than sense- illusions, but at the same time many of them have to be determined upon by the lawyer, inasmuch as they really occur to normal people or to such whose disease is just beginning so that the physician can not yet reach it. Nevertheless, whenever the lawyer finds himself face to face with a supposed illusion or hallucination he must absolutely call in the physician. For, as rarely as an ordinary illusion of sense is explicable by the rules of logic or psychology, or even by means of other knowledge or experience at the command of any educated man, so, frequently, do processes occur in cases of hallucination and illusion which require, at the very least, the physiological knowledge of the physician. Our activity must hence be limited to the perception of the presence of hallucination or illusion; the rest is matter for the psychiatrist. Small as our concern is, it is important and difficult, for on the one hand we must not appeal to the physician about every stupid fancy or every lie a prisoner utters, and on the other hand we assume a heavy responsibility if we interpret a real hallucination or illusion as a true and real observation. To acquire knowledge of the nature of these things, therefore, can not be rigorously enough recommended.

Hallucination and illusion have been distinguished by the fact that hallucination implies no external object whatever, while in illusion objects are mistaken and misinterpreted. When one thing is taken for another, e. g., an oven for a man, the rustle of the wind for a human song, we have illusion. When no objective existence is perceived, e. g., when a man is seen to enter, a voice is heard, a touch is felt, although nothing whatever has happened, we have hallucination. Illusion is partial, hallucination complete, supplementation of an external object. There is not a correct and definite difference between illusion and hallucination inasmuch as what is present may be so remotely connected with what is perceived that it is no more than a stimulus, and thus illusion may be turned into real hallucination. One authority calls illusion the conception of an actually present external event which is perceived by the peripheral organs in the form of an idea that does not coincide with the

[1] C. Wernicke ber Halluzinationen, Ratlosigkeit, Desorientierung etc. Monatschrift f. Psychiatrie u. Neurologie, IX, 1 (1901).

event. The mistake does not lie in the defective activity of the senses so much as in the fact that an apperceptive idea is substituted for the perceptive view. In hallucination every external event is absent, and hence, what is seen is due to a stimulation of the periphery. Some authorities believe hallucination to be caused by cramp of the sensory nerve. Others find illusions to be an externally stimulated sense-perception not corresponding to the stimulus, and still others believe it to be essentially normal. Most human beings are from time to time subject to illusions; indeed, nobody is always sober and intelligent in all his perceptions and convictions. The luminous center of our intelligent perceptions is wrapped in a cloudy half-shadow of illusion.

Sully[1] aims to distinguish the essential nature of illusion from that characterized by ordinary language. Illusion, according to him, is often used to denote mistakes which do not imply untrue perceptions. We say a man has an illusion who thinks too much of himself, or when he tells stories otherwise than as they happen because of a weakness of memory. Illusion is every form of mistake which substitutes any direct self-evident or intuitive knowledge, whether as sense-perception or as any other form.

Nowadays the cause of hallucination and illusion is sought in the over-excitement of the cerebro-spinal system. As this stimulation may be very various in its intensity and significance, from the momentary rush of blood to complete lunacy, so hallucinations and illusions may be insignificant or signs of very serious mental disturbances. When we seek the form of these phenomena, we find that all those psychical events belong to it which have not been *purposely performed or lied about. When Brutus sees Csar's ghost; Macbeth, Banquo's ghost; Nicholas, his son; these are distinctly hallucinations or illusions of the same kind as those "really and truly'' seen by our nurses. The stories of such people have no significance for the criminalist, but if a person has seen an entering thief, an escaping murderer, a bloody corpse, or some similar object of criminal law, and these are hallucinations like classical ghosts, then are we likely to be much deceived. Hoppe[2] enumerates hallucinations of apparently sound (?) people. 1. A priest tired by mental exertion, saw, while he was writing, a boy's head look over his shoulder. If he turned toward it it disappeared, if he resumed writing it reappeared. 2. "A thoroughly intelligent''

[1] James Sully. Illusions.

[2] J, J. Hoppe. Erklrungen des Sinnestauschungen.

man always was seeing a skeleton. 3. Pascal, after a heavy blow, saw a fiery abyss into which he was afraid he would fall. 4. A man who had seen an enormous fire, for a long time afterward saw flames continually. 5. Numerous cases in which criminals, especially murderers, always had their victims before their eyes. 6. Justus Mser saw well-known flowers and geometrical figures very distinctly. 7. Bonnet knows a "healthy'' man who saw people, birds, etc., with open eyes. 8. A man got a wound in his left ear and for weeks afterward saw a cat. 9. A woman eighty-eight years old often saw everything covered with flowers,—otherwise she was quite "well.''

A part of these stories seems considerably fictitious, a part applies to indubitable pathological cases, and certain of them are confirmed elsewhere. That murderers, particularly women-murderers of children, often see their victims is well known to us criminalists. And for this reason the habit of confining prisoners in a dark cell for twenty-four hours on the anniversary of a crime must be pointed to as refined and thoroughly medival cruelty. I have repeatedly heard from people so tortured of the terror of their visions on such days of martyrdom. Cases are told of in which prisoners who were constipated had all kinds of visual and auditory hallucinations and appeared, e. g., to hear in the rustling of their straw, all sorts of words. That isolation predisposes people to such things is as well known as the fact that constipation causes a rush of blood to the head, and hence, nervous excitement. The well-known stories of robbers which are often told us by prisoners are not always the fruit of malicious invention. Probably a not insignificant portion are the result of hallucination.

Hoppe tells of a great group of hallucinations in conditions of waking and half-waking, and asserts that everybody has them and can note them if he gives his attention thereto. This may be an exaggeration, but it is true that a healthy person in any way excited or afraid may hear all kinds of things in the crackling of a fire, etc., and may see all kinds of things, in smoke, in clouds, etc. The movement of portraits and statues is particularly characteristic, especially in dim light, and under unstable emotional conditions. I own a relief by Ghiberti called the "Rise of the Flesh,'' in which seven femurs dance around a corpse and sing. If, at night, I put out the lamp in my study and the moon falls on the work, the seven femurs dance as lively as may be during the time it takes my eyes to adapt themselves from the lamplight to the moonlight. Something similar I see on an old carved dresser. The carving is so delicate that in dim light it shows tiny heads and flames after the fashion of the Catholic church pictures of "poor souls,'' in purgatory. Under certain conditions of illumination the flames flicker, the heads move, and out of the fire the arms raise themselves to the clouds floating above. Now this requires no unusual excitement, simply the weary sensing of evening, when the eyes turn from prolonged uniform reading or writing to something else.[1] It has happened to me from my earliest childhood. High bodily temperature may easily cause hallucinations. Thus, marching soldiers are led to shoot at non- existing animals and apparently-approaching enemies. Uniform and fatiguing mental activity is also a source of hallucination. Fechner says that one day having performed a long experiment with the help of a stop-watch, he heard its beats through the whole evening after. So again when he was studying long series of figures he used to see them at night in the dark so distinctly that he could read them off.

Then there are illusions of touch which may be criminalistically important. A movement of air may be taken for an approaching man. A tight collar or cravat may excite the image of being stifled! Old people frequently have a sandy taste while eating,—when this is told the thought occurs that it may be due to coarsely powdered arsenic, yet it may be merely illusion.

The slightest abnormality makes hallucinations and illusions very easy. Persons who are in great danger have all kinds of hallucinations, particularly of people. In the court of law, when witnesses who have been assaulted testify to having seen people, hallucination may often be the basis of their evidence. Hunger again, or loss of blood, gives rise to the most various hallucinations. Menstruation and hmorrhoids may be the occasions of definite periodic visions, and great pain may be accompanied by hallucinations which begin with the pain, become more distinct as it increases, and disappear when it ceases.

It might seem that in this matter, also, the results are destructive and that the statements of witnesses are untrue and unreliable. I do not assert that our valuation of these statements shall be checked from all possible directions, but I do say that much of what we have considered as true depends only on illusions in the broad sense of the word and that it is our duty before all things rigorously to test everything that underlies our researches.

[1] Cf. A. Mosso: Die Ermdung. Leipzig 1892.

Section 105. (C) Imaginative Ideas.

Illusions of sense, hallucinations, and illusions proper taken as a group, differ from imaginative representations because the individual who has them is more or less passive and subject to the thing from which they arise, while with the latter the individual is more active and creates new images by the *combination of existing or only imagined conditions. It does not matter whether these consist of the idea only, or whether they are the product of word, manuscript, picture, sculpture, music, etc. We have to deal only with their occurrence and their results. Of course there is no sharp boundary between imaginative ideas and sense-perception, etc. Many phenomena are difficult to classify and even language is uncertain in its usage. The notion "illusion'' has indicated many a false ideal, many a product of incoherent fancy.

The activity of the imagination, taken in the ordinary sense, requires analysis first of all. According to Meinong[1] there are two kinds of imaginative images—a generative, and a constructive kind. The first exhibits elements, the second unites them. Thus: I imagine some familiar house, then I reproduce the idea of fire (generative), now I unite these two elements, and imagine the house in question in flames (constructive). This involves several conditions.

The conditions of generation offer no difficulties. The difficulty lies in the constructive aspect of the activity, for we can imagine astonishingly little. We can not imagine ourselves in the fourth dimension, and although we have always had to make use of such quantities, we all have the idea that the quantity A represents, e. g,, a line, A, a square, A, a cube, but as soon as we have to say what image A, A, etc., represents, our mathematical language is at an end. Even twelve men or a green flame seen through red glass or two people speaking different things can barely be imagined with any clearness. We have the elements but we can not construct their compounds. This difficulty occurs also in the consideration of certain objects. Suppose we are looking at an artistically complete angel; we are always bothered by the idea that his wings are much too small to enable him to fly. If an angel constructed like a man is to be borne by his wings, they must be so gigantic as to be unreproducible by an artist. Indeed a person slightly more grubby,

[1] Phantasie u. Phantasienvorstellung. Zeitsehrift f. Philosophie u. philosophische Kritik. Vol. 95.

and interested in anatomy, will bother, at the sight of the most beautiful statue of an angel, concerning the construction of the limbs, the wings, and their relation to the skeleton. In certain directions, therefore, the imagination is too weak to conceive an ethereal being in human form floating in the air. Further, one authority points out that we think more frequently of centaurs than of human beings with serpentine bodies, not because centaurs are more sthetic but because horses are more massive than serpents. I do not believe this to be the true explanation, for otherwise we should have had to imagine people with canine bodies, inasmuch as we see as many dogs as horses, if not more. But the fact is correct and the explanation may be that we imagine a centaur because of the appropriate size, the implied power, and because it is not a wide leap from a horseman to a centaur. In short, here also we see that the imagination prefers to work where difficulties are fewer. Thus, with the ease of imagining an object there goes its definite possibility. I know an old gentleman in A and another one in B who have never seen each other, but I can easily imagine them together, speaking, playing cards, etc., and only with difficulty can I think of them as quarreling or betting. In the *possibility there is always a certain ease, and this is appropriated by the imagination.

It is significant that when others help us and we happen to find pleasure therein, we answer to very difficult demands upon the imagination. In the opera the deviation from reality is so powerful that it seems silly to one unaccustomed to it. But we do not need the unaccustomed person. We need only to imagine the most ordinary scene in an opera, i. e., a declaration of love, sung; an aria declining it; an aria before committing suicide; a singing choir with a moral about this misfortune. Has anything even remotely like it ever been seen in real life? But we accept it quietly and find it beautiful and affecting simply because others perform it without difficulty before our eyes and we are willing to believe it possible.

The rule to be derived from all the foregoing is this. Whenever we believe a statement to be based on imagination, or to have been learned from some imaginative source, we must always connect it with its most proximate neighbors, and step by step seek out its elements and then compound them in the simplest possible form. We may, in this fashion, get perhaps at the proper content of the matter. Of course it need not yield another imaginary image. And its failure to do so would be an objection if the compound were the end of the work and were to be used in itself. But that is not the case. All that is required is to derive a certain starting-point from the hodge-podge of uncertainties and unintelligibility. When the construction is made it must be compared with all the material at hand and tested by that material. If the two agree, and only when they agree, may it be assumed that the starting-point has been properly chosen. But not to make this construction means to feel around aimlessly, and to give up the job before it has been really begun.

Let us take the simplest possible instance of such a situation. In a bowling alley, two youths, A and B, had a lively quarrel, in which A held the ball in his hand and threatened to throw it at B's head. B, frightened, ran away, A pursued him, after a few steps threw the ball into the grass, caught B, and then gave him an easy blow with the fiat of his hand on the back of his head. B began to wabble, sank to the ground, became unconscious, and showed all the signs of a broken head (unconsciousness, vomiting, distention of the pupils, etc.). All the particular details of the event are unanimously testified to by many witnesses, non-partisan friends of A and B, and among them the parish priest. Simulation is completely excluded inasmuch as B, a simple peasant lad, certainly did not know the symptoms of brain-fever, and could not hope for any damages from the absolutely poor A. Let us now consider what the nearest facts are. The elements of the case are: B sees a heavy ball in A's hand; A threatens B with it and pursues him; B feels a blow on the head. The compounding of these elements results in the invincible assumption on B's part that A had struck him on the head with the ball. The consequence of this imaginative feeling was the development of all the phenomena that would naturally have followed if B had actually been struck on the head.

It would be wrong to say that these cases are so rare as to be useless in practice. We simply do not observe them for the reason that we take much to be real because it is confirmed reliably. More accurate examination would show that many things are merely imaginative. A large portion of the contradictions we meet in our cases is explicable by the fact that one man is the victim of his fancies and the other is not. The great number of such fancies is evinced by the circumstance that there can nowhere be found a chasm or boundary between the simplest fancies of the normal individual and the impossible imaginings of the lunatic. Every man imagines frequently the appearance of an absent friend, of a landscape he has once seen. The painter draws even the features of an absent model; the practiced chess-master plays games without having the board before him; persons half asleep see the arrival of absentees; persons lost in the wood at night see spirits and ghosts; very nervous people see them at home, and the lunatic sees the most extraordinary and disgusting things—all these are imaginations beginning with the events of the daily life, ending with the visions of diseased humanity. Where is the boundary, where a lacuna?

Here, as in all events of the daily life, the natural development of the extremely abnormal from the ordinary is the incontrovertible evidence for the frequency of these events.

Of course one must not judge by one's self. Whoever does not believe in the devil, and never as a child had an idea of him in mind, will never see him as an illusion. And whoever from the beginning possesses a restricted, inaccessible imagination, can never understand the other fellow who is accompanied by the creatures of his imagination. We observe this hundreds of times. We know that everybody sees a different thing in clouds, smoke, mountain tops, ink blots, coffee stains, etc.; that everybody sees it according to the character and intensity of his imagination, and that whatever seems to be confused and unintelligible is to be explained as determined by the nature of the person who expresses or possesses it.

So in the study of any work of art. Each is the portrayal of some generality in concrete form. The concrete is understood by anybody who knows enough to recognize it. The generality can be discovered only by him who has a similar imagination, and hence each one draws a different generalization from the same work of art. This variety holds also in scientific questions. I remember how three scholars were trying to decipher hieroglyphs, when that branch of archology was still very young. One read the inscription as a declaration of war by a nomadic tribe, another as the acquisition of a royal bride from a foreign king; and the third as an account of the onions consumed by Jews contributing forced labor. "Scientific'' views could hardly of themselves have made such extraordinary differences; only imagination could have driven scholars in such diverse directions.

And how little we can apprehend the imaginations of others or judge them! This is shown by the fact that we can no longer tell whether children who vivify everything in their imagination see their fancies as really alive. It is indubitable that the savage who takes his fetish to be alive, the child that endows its doll with life, would wonder if fetish and doll of themselves showed signs of vitality—but whether they really take them to be alive is unknown to the adult. And if we can not sympathetically apprehend the views and imaginings of our own youth, how much less possible is it so to apprehend those of other people. We have to add to this fact, moreover, the characteristic circumstance that less powerful effects must be taken into consideration. The power of imagination is much more stimulated by mild, peaceful impressions than by vigorous ones. The latter stun and disquiet the soul, while the former lead it to self-possession. The play of ideas is much more excited by mild tobacco smoke, than by the fiery column of smoking Vesuvius; the murmur of the brook is much more stimulating than the roar of the stormy sea. If the converse were true it would be far easier to observe the effects in others. We see that a great impression is at work, our attention is called to its presence, and we are then easily in the position of observing its effect in others. But the small, insignificant phenomena we observe the less, the less obvious their influence upon the imagination of others appears to be. Such small impressions pass hundreds of times without effect. For once, however, they find a congenial soul, their proper soil, and they begin to ferment. But how and when are we to observe this in others?

We rarely can tell whether a man's imagination is at work or not. Nevertheless, there are innumerable stories of what famous men did when their imagination was at work. Napoleon had to cut things to pieces. Lenau used to scrape holes in the ground. Mozart used to knot and tear table-cloth and napkins. Others used to run around; still others used to smoke, drink, whistle, etc. But not all people have these characteristics, and then we who are to judge the influence of the imagination on a witness or a criminal are certainly not present when the imagination is at work. To get some notion of the matter through witnesses is altogether too unsafe a task. Bain once justly proposed keeping the extremities quiet as a means of conquering anger. Thus it may be definitely discovered whether a man was quite angry at a given instant by finding out whether his hands and feet were quiet at the time, but such indices are not given for the activity of imagination.

Moreover, most people in whom the imagination is quite vigorously at work know nothing about it. Du Bois-Reymond says somewhere, "I've had a few good ideas in my life, and have observed myself when I had them. They came altogether involuntarily, without my ever having thought of them.'' This I do not believe. His imagination, which was so creative, worked so easily and without effort that he was not aware of its activity, and moreover, his fundamental ideas were so clear that everything fell into lines spontaneously without his being conscious of it later. This "working'' of the imagination is so effortless to fortunate natures that it becomes an ordinary movement. Thus Goethe tells of an imaginary flower which broke into its elements, united again, broke again, and united in another form, etc. His story reveals one of the reasons for the false descriptions of perception. The perception is correct when made, then the imagination causes movements of ideas and the question follows which of the two was more vigorous, the perceptive or the imaginal activity? If the one was intenser, memory was correct; if the other, the recollection was erroneous. It is hence important, from the point of view of the lawyer, to study the nature and intensity of witnesses' imagination.[1] We need only to observe the influence of imaginal movements on powerful minds in order to see clearly what influence even their weak reflection may have on ordinary people. Schopenhauer finds the chief pleasure of every work of art in imagination; and Goethe finds that no man experiences or enjoys anything without becoming productive.

Most instructive is the compilation of imaginative ideas given by Hfler[2] and put together from the experiences of scholars, investigators, artists, and other important persons. For our purposes it would be better to have a number of reliable statements from other people which would show how normal individuals were led astray by their imaginations. We might then learn approximately what imaginative notions might do, and how far their limits extend. Sully calls attention to the fact that Dickens's characters were real to him and that when the novel was completed, its dramatic person became personal memories. Perhaps all imaginative people are likely to take their imaginings as actual remembered events and persons. If this happens to a witness, what trouble he may cause us!

A physician, Dr. Hadekamp, said that he used to see the flow of blood before he cut the vein open. Another physician, Dr. Schmeisser, confirms this experience. Such cases are controlled physically, the flow of blood can not be seen before the knife is removed. Yet how often, at least chronologically, do similar mistakes occur when no such control is present? There is the story of a woman who could describe so accurately symptoms which resulted from a swallowed needle, that the physicians were deceived and undertook

[1] Cf. Witasek: Zeitschrift f. Psychologie. Vol. XII. "ber Willkrliche Vorstellungsverbindung.''

[2] Psychologie. Wien u. Prag. 1897.

operations which only served to show that the woman had merely imagined it all. A similar case is that of a man who believed himself to have swallowed his false teeth. He even had serious feelings of choking which immediately disappeared on the discovery of the teeth under his night-table. A prominent oculist told me that he had once treated for some time a famous scholar because the latter so accurately described a weakening of the retina that the physician, in spite of his objective discoveries, was deceived and learned his mistake only when it appeared that the great scholar fortunately had been made game of by his own imagination. Maudsley tells how Baron von Swieten once saw burst a rotten corpse of a dog, and, for years after, saw the same thing whenever he came to the same place. Many people, Goethe, Newton, Shelley, William Black, and others, were able completely to visualize past images. Fechner tells of a man who claimed voluntarily to excite anywhere on his skin the feeling of pressure, heat, and cold, but not of cut, prick or bruise, because such imaginations tended to endure a long time. There is the story of another man who had a three days' pain in his finger because he had seen his child crush an analogous finger.

Abercrombie tells of an otherwise very excitable person who believed in the reality of the luck that a fortune-teller had predicted for him, and some authorities hold that practically everybody who eagerly awaits a friend hears his step in every sound. Hoppe's observation that pruritus vulv excites in imaginative women the illusion of being raped is of considerable importance, and we criminalists must watch for it in certain cases. Lieber tells of a colored preacher who so vividly painted the tortures in hell that he himself could merely cry and grunt for minutes at a time. Mller cites a lady who was permitted to smell from an empty bottle and who regularly lost consciousness when she was told that the bottle contained laughing gas. Women often assert that when about to change their homes they often see the new residence in dreams just as it really appears later on. Then there is a story of a man blind for fourteen years who nevertheless saw the faces of acquaintances and was so troubled thereby that the famous Graefe severed his optic nerve and so released him from his imagination.

Taine describes the splendid scene in which Balzac once told Mad. de Girardin that he intended to give Sandeau a horse. He did not do so, but talked so much about it that he used to ask Sandeau how the horse was. Taine comments that it is clear that the starting point of such an illusion is a voluntary fiction. The person in question knows it as such in the beginning but forgets it at the end. Such false memories are numerous among barbarous peoples and among raw, untrained, and childish minds. They see a simple fact; the more they think of it the more they see in it; they magnify and decorate it with environing circumstances, and finally, unite all the details into a whole in memory. Then they are unable to distinguish what is true from what is not. Most legends develop in this way. A peasant assured Taine that he saw his sister's soul on the day she died,—though it was really the light of a brandy bottle in the sunset.

In conclusion, I want to cite a case I have already mentioned, which seems to me significant. As student I visited during vacation a village, one of whose young peasant inhabitants had gone to town for the first time in his life. He was my vacation play-mate from earliest childhood, and known to me as absolutely devoted to the truth. When he returned from his visit, he told me of the wonders of the city, the climax of which was the menagerie he had visited. He described what he saw very well, but also said that he had seen a battle between an anaconda and a lion. The serpent swallowed the lion and then many Moors came and killed the serpent. As was immediately to be inferred and as I verified on my return, this battle was to be seen only on the advertising posters which are hung in front of every menagerie. The lad's imagination had been so excited by what he had seen that day that the real and the imagined were thoroughly interfused. How often may this happen to our witnesses!

If the notion of imagination is to be limited to the activity of representation, we must class under it the premonitions and forewarnings which are of influence not only among the uneducated. Inasmuch as reliable observations, not put together a posteriori, are lacking, nothing exact can be said about them. That innumerable assertions and a semi-scientific literature about the matter exists, is generally familiar. And it is undeniable that predictions, premonitions, etc., may be very vivid, and have considerable somatic influence. Thus, prophecy of approaching death, certain threats or knowledge of the fact that an individual's death is being prayed for, etc., may have deadly effect on excited people. The latter superstition especially, has considerable influence. Praying for death, etc., is aboriginal. It has been traced historically into the twelfth century and is made use of today. Twelve years ago I was told of a case in which an old lady was killed because an enemy of hers had the death-mass read for her. The old lady simply died of fright. In some degree we must pay attention to even such apparently remote questions.

(d) Misunderstandings.

Section 106. (I) Verbal Misunderstandings.[1]

Here too it is not possible to draw an absolutely definite boundary between acoustic illusions and misunderstandings. Verbally we may say that the former occur when the mistake, at least in its main characteristic, is due to the aural mechanism. The latter is intended when there is a mistake in the comprehension of a word or of a sentence. In this case the ear has acted efficiently, but the mind did not know how to handle what had been heard and so supplements it by something else in connection with matter more or less senseless. Hence, misunderstandings are so frequent with foreign words. Compare the singing of immigrant school children, "My can't three teas of tea'' for "My country 'tis of thee,'' or "Pas de lieu Rhone que nous'' with "Paddle your own canoe.''[2]

The question of misunderstandings, their development and solution, is of great importance legally, since not only witnesses but clerks and secretaries are subject to them. If they are undiscovered they lead to dangerous mistakes, and their discovery causes great trouble in getting at the correct solution.[3] The determination of texts requires not only effort but also psychological knowledge and the capacity of putting one's self in the place of him who has committed the error. To question him may often be impossible because of the distance, and may be useless because he no longer knows what he said or wanted to say. When we consider what a tremendous amount of work classical philologists, etc., have to put into the determination of the proper form of some misspelled word, we can guess how needful it is to have the textual form of a protocol absolutely correct. The innocence or guilt of a human being may depend upon a misspelled syllable. Now, to determine the proper and correct character of the text is as a rule difficult, and in most cases impossible. Whether a witness or the secretary has misunderstood, makes no difference in the nature of the work. Its importance remains unaffected, but in the latter case the examining justice, in so far as he correctly

[1] Many omissions have been necessitated by the feet that no English equivalents for the German examples could be found. [Translator.]

[2] Cf. S. Freud: Psychopathologie des Alltagsleben

[3] Cited by James, Psychology, Buefer Course.

remembers what he has heard, may avoid error. The mistakes of the secretaries may in any event be reduced to a minimum if all protocols are read immediately, and not by the secretary but by the examining judge himself. If the writer reads them he makes the same mistakes, and only a very intelligent witness will perceive them and call attention to them. Unless it so happens the mistake remains.

I cite a few of the errors that I have observed. From a protocol with the suspect: "On the twelfth of the month I left Marie Tomizil'' (instead of, "my domicile''). Instead of "irrelevant,''—"her elephant.'' Very often words are written in, which the dictator only says by the way; e. g., "come in,'' "go on,'' "hurry up,'' "look out,'' etc. If such words get into the text at all it is difficult to puzzle out how they got in. How easily and frequently people misunderstand is shown by the oath they take. Hardly a day passes on which at least one witness does not say some absolute nonsense while repeating it.

The discovery of such errors and the substitution of what is correct brings us back to the old rule that the mere study of our own cases can not teach us anything, since the field of view is too narrow, the material too uniform, and the stimulation too light. Other disciplines must be studied and examples from the daily life must be sought. Goethe, in particular, can teach us here. In his little monograph, "Hr-, Schreib- and Druckfehler,'' he first tells that he had discovered the most curious mistakes in hearing when he reread dictated letters, mistakes which would have caused great difficulty if not immediately looked after. The only means for the solution of these errors is, he says, "to read the matter aloud, get thoroughly into its meaning and repeat the unintelligible word so long that the right one occurs in the flow of speech. Nobody hears all that he knows, nobody is conscious of all that he senses, is able to imagine, or to think. Persons who have never been to school tend to turn into German all Latin and Greek expressions. The same thing happens just as much with words from foreign languages whose pronunciation is unknown to the writer . . . and in dictation it occurs that a hearer sets his inner inclination, passion, and need in the place of the word he has heard, and substitutes for it the name of some loved person, or some much desired good morsel.'' A better device for the detection of errors than that suggested by Goethe cannot be found, but the protocol or whatever else it may be must be *read; otherwise nothing helps. Many mistakes are due, as Mnsterberg points out, to the fact that the word is seen for just an instant, and it is easy to misread a word so seen if some similar word had been heard or seen just before. The most senseless corruptions of text occur often, and it seems extraordinary how they may be overlooked. Andresen points out that the reason for all popular explanations is the consciousness of language which struggles against allowing any name to be an empty sound, and still more, strives to give each term a separate meaning and an indubitable intelligibility. The human mind acts here instinctively and navely without any reflection, and is determined by feeling or accident. Then it makes all kinds of transformations of foreign words.

This fits with the analogous observation that a group of Catholic patron saints depend for their character on their names. Santa Clara makes clear vision, St. Lucy sounds like lucida, and is the saint of the blind; St. Mamertus is analogous to mamma, the feminine breast, and is the patron saint of nurses and nursing women. Instructive substitutions are Jack Spear, for Shakespeare, Apolda for Apollo; Great victory at le Mans, for Great victory at Lehmanns; "plaster depot,'' for "place de Repos.''

Andresen warns us against going too far in analysis. Exaggerations are easy, particularly when we want to get at the source of a misunderstanding because of the illegibility of the style. Our task consists, first of all, in getting at the correctness of what has been said or written, otherwise we have nothing whatever to go by. Only when that is quite impossible may we assume misunderstandings and seek them out. The procedure then must be necessarily linguistic and psychological and requires the consultation of experts in both fields. Certain instructive misunderstandings of the most obvious sort occur when the half-educated drop their dialect, or thoroughly educated people alter the dialectical expressions and try to translate them into high German.

It is frequently important to understand the curious transposition in meaning which foreign words get, e. g., commode, fidel, and famos. A commode gentleman means in German, a pliable person; and a fidel lad is not a loyal soul, but a merry, pleasure- seeking one; famos—originally "famous,''—means expensive or pleasant.

It may be not unimportant to understand how names are altered. Thus, I know a man who curiously enough was called Kammerdiener, whose father was an immigrant Italian called Comadina, and I know two old men, brothers, who lived in different parts of the country, one of whom was called Joseph Waldhauser, the other Leopold Balthasar. In the course of the generation the name had so completely changed that it is impossible to say which is correct. Again, a family bearing the name Theobald is of French origin and used really to be called Du Val. In Steiermark, which had been over-run with Turks two hundred years ago, there are many family names of Turkish origin. Thus Hasenhrl may come from Hassan ri; Salata from Saladin; Mullenbock, from Mullei Beg; Sullman from Soliman.

Section 107. (2) Other Misunderstandings.

The quantitative method of modern psychophysics may lead to an exact experimental determination of such false conceptions and misunderstandings as those indicated above, but it is still too young to have any practical value. It is vitiated by the fact that it requires artificial conditions and that the results have reference to artificial conditions. Wundt has tried to simplify apparatus, and to bring experiment into connection with real life. But there is still a far cry from the psychological laboratory to the business of life. With regard to misunderstandings the case is certainly so. Most occur when we do not hear distinctly what another person is saying and supplement it with our own notions. Here the misunderstanding is in no sense linguistic, for words do not receive a false meaning. The misunderstanding lies in the failure to comprehend the sense of what we have heard, and the substitution of incorrect interpretations. Sometimes we may quite understand an orator without having heard every word by simply adding these interpretations, but the correctness of the additions is always questionable, and not only nature and training, but momentary conditions and personal attitude, make a considerable difference. The worst thing about the matter is the fact that nobody is likely to be aware that he has made any interpretations. Yet we do so not only in listening, but in looking. I see on a roof in the distance four white balls about the nature of which I am uncertain. While looking, I observe that one of the balls stretches out head and tail, flaps its wings, etc., and I immediately think, "Oh, those are four pigeons.'' Now it may be true that they are four pigeons, but what justification had I for such an interpretation and generalization from the action of one pigeon? In this instance, no doubt, it would have been difficult for me to make a mistake, but there are many cases which are not so obvious and where the interpretation is nevertheless made, and then the misunderstanding is ready to hand. Once my wife and I saw from our seats in the car a chimney-sweep who stood in a railroad station. As he bent over, looking for a lost coin, my very myopic wife cried out, "Look at the beautiful Newfoundland dog.'' Now this is a conceivable illusion for a short-sighted individual, but on what basis could my good lady interpret what she saw into the judgment that it was a Newfoundland dog, and a beautiful one at that? Taine illustrates a similar process with the story of a child who asked why his mother had put on a white dress. He was told that his mother was going to a party and had to put on her holiday clothes for that purpose. After that, whenever the child saw anybody in holiday attire, green or red or any other color, it cried out,—"Oh, you have a white dress on!'' We adults do exactly the same thing. As Meinong says so well, we confuse identity with agreement. This proposition would save us from a great many mistakes and misunderstandings if kept in mind.

How frequently and hastily we build things out is shown by a simple but psychologically important game. Ask anybody at hand how the four and the six look on his watch, and let him draw it. Everybody calmly draws, IV and VI, but if you look at your watch you will find that the four looks so, IIII, and that there is no six. This raises the involuntary question, "Now what do we see when we look at the watch if we do not see the figures?'' and the further question, "Do we make such beautiful mistakes with all things?''

I assert that only that has been reliably seen which has been drawn. My father asked my drawing teacher to teach me not to draw but to observe. And my teacher, instead of giving me copies, followed the instruction by giving me first one domino, then two, then three, one upon the other, then a match box, a book, a candlestick, etc. And even today, I know accurately only those objects in the household which I had drawn. Yet frequently we demand of our witnesses minutely accurate descriptions of things they had seen only once, and hastily at that.

And even if the thing has been seen frequently, local and temporal problems may make great difficulties. With regard to the first class of problems, Exner[1] cites the example of his journey from Gmunden to Vienna in which, because of a sharp curve in the road, he saw everything at Lambach reversed, although the whole stretch of road was familiar to him. The railroad trains, the public buildings, the rivers, all the notable places seemed to lie on the wrong side. This

[1] S. Exner: Entwurf, etc.

is particularly characteristic if a city is entered, especially at night, through a railroad terminal, and the locomotive is attached to the rear of the train. In the daily life the alteration of objects by locations is familiar. How different a landscape seems at night or in winter, although it has been observed hundreds of times during the day or in summer. It is good to look around frequently on the road, particularly at cross-roads, if the way back is to be kept in mind. Even the starting point may have a disturbing effect on the sense of place. For example, if you have traveled numerous times on the train from A to B, and for once you start your journey from C, which is beyond A, the familiar stretch from A to B looks quite different and may even become unrecognizable. The estimation of time may exercise considerable influence on such and similar local effects. Under most circumstances we tend, as is known, to reduce subjectively great time-spans, and hence, when more time than customary is required by an event, this becomes subjectively smaller, not only for the whole event but also for each of its parts. In this way what formerly seemed to extend through an apparently long period seems now to be compressed into a shorter one. Then everything appears too soon and adds to the foreign aspect of the matter.

The case is similar for time-differences. Uphues[1] cites an example: "If a person has not heard a bell or anything else for some time and then hears it again, the question whether the object existed in the interval does not arise. It is recognized again and that is enough.'' Certainly it is enough for us, but whether the thing is true, whether really the same phenomena or only similar ones have been noted, is another question rarely asked. If the man or the bell is the same that we now perceive anew, the inference is involuntarily drawn that they must have persisted, but we eliminate altogether the lapse of time and suppose unconsciously that the entity in question must have been on the spot through the whole period. One needs only to observe how quickly witnesses tend to identify objects presented for identification: e. g. knives, letters, purses, etc. To receive for identification and to say yes, is often the work of an instant. The witness argues, quite unconsciously, in this fashion: "I have given the judge only one clew (perhaps different from the one in question), now here again is a clew, hence, it must be the one I gave him.'' That the matter may have changed, that there has been some confusion, that perhaps

[1] Die Wahrnehmung und Empfinding. Leipzig 1888.

other witnesses have given similar things, is not at all considered. Here again we have to beware of confusing of identities with agreements.

Finally, we must consider fatigue and other conditions of excitation. Everybody knows how things read late at night seem absolute nonsense, and become simple and obvious the next morning. In the same way, we may take a thing to be thus and so while tired in the evening, and in the morning see our notion to be a coarse misunderstanding. Hoppe tells of a hospital interne who became so excited and tired through frequent calls that he heard the tick- tack of his watch as "Oh-doc-tor.'' A witness who has been subjected to a prolonged and fatiguing examination falls into a similar condition and knows at the end much less than at the beginning. Finally, he altogether misunderstands the questions put to him. The situation becomes still worse when the defendant has been so subjected to examination, and becomes involved, because of fatigue, etc., in the famous "contradictions.'' If "convincing contradictions'' occur at the end of a long examination of a witness or a defendant, it is well to find out how long the examination took. If it took much time the contradictions mean little.

The same phenomena of fatigue may even lead to suspicion of negligence. Doctors, trained nurses, nursery maids, young mothers, etc., who became guilty of "negligence'' of invalids and children have, in many instances, merely "misunderstood'' because of great fatigue. It is for this reason that the numerous sad cases occur in which machine-tenders, switch-tenders, etc., are punished for negligence. If a man of this class, year after year, serves twenty-three hours, then rests seven hours, then serves twenty-three hours again, etc., he is inevitably overtaken by fatigue and nervous relaxation in which signals, warnings, calls, etc., are simply misunderstood. Statistics tend to show that the largest number of accidents occur at the end of a period of service, i. e., at the time of greatest fatigue. But even if this were not the case some reference must be made to chronic fatigue. If a man gets only seven hours' rest after intense labor, part of the fatigue-elements must have remained. They accumulate in time, finally they summate, and exercise their influence even at the beginning of the service. Socialists complain justly about this matter. The most responsible positions are occupied by chronically fatigued individuals, and when nature extorts her rights we punish the helpless men.

The case is the same with people who have much to do with money—tax, post, bank, and treasury officials, who are obliged to attend rigorously to monotonous work—the reception and distribution of money, easily grow tired. Men of experience in this profession have assured me that they often, when fatigued, take money, count it, sign a receipt and then—return the money to the person who brought it. Fortunately they recognize their mistake in the astonishment of the receiver. If, however, they do not recognize it, or the receiver is sly enough calmly to walk off with the money, if the sum is great and restitution not easily possible, and if, moreover, the official happens to be in the bad graces of his superiors, he does not have much chance in the prosecution for embezzlement, which is more likely than not to be begun against him.[1] Any affection, any stimulus, any fatigue may tend to make people passive, and hence, less able to defend themselves.

A well known Berlin psychiatrist tells the following story: "When I was still an apprentice in an asylum, I always carried the keys of the cells with me. One day I went to the opera, and had a seat in the parquette. Between the acts I went into the corridor. On returning I made a mistake, and saw before me a door which had the same kind of lock as the cell-doors in the asylum, stuck my hand into my pocket, took out my key—which fitted, and found myself suddenly in a loge. Now would it not be possible in this way, purely by reflex action, to turn into a burglar?'' Of course we should hardly believe a known burglar if he were to tell us such a story.

(e) The Lie. Section 108. (I) I. General Considerations.

In a certain sense a large part of the criminalist's work is nothing more than a battle against lies. He has to discover the truth and must fight the opposite. He meets this opposite at every step. The accused, often one who has confessed completely, many of the witnesses, try to get advantage of him, and frequently he has to struggle with himself when he perceives that he is working in a direction which he can not completely justify. Utterly to vanquish the lie, particularly in our work, is of course, impossible, and to describe its nature exhaustively is to write a natural history of mankind. We must limit ourselves to the consideration of a definite number of means, great and small, which will make our work easier,

[1] Cf. Lohsing in H. Gross's Archiv VII, 331.

will warn us of the presence of deception, and will prevent its playing a part. I have attempted to compile forms of it according to intent, and will here add a few words.[1]

That by the lie is meant the intentional deliverance of a conscious untruth for the purpose of deception is as familiar as the variety of opinion concerning the permissibility of so-called necessary lies, of the pious, of the pedagogic, and the conventional. We have to assume here the standpoint of absolute rigorism, and to say with Kant,[2] "The lie in its mere form is man's crime against his own nature, and is a vice which must make a man disreputable in his own eyes.'' We can not actually think of a single case in which we find any ground for lying. For we lawyers need have no pedagogical duties, nor are we compelled to teach people manners, and a situation in which we may save ourselves by lying is unthinkable. Of course, we will not speak all we know; indeed, a proper silence is a sign of a good criminalist, but we need never lie. The beginner must especially learn that the "good intention'' to serve the case and the so-called excusing "eagerness to do one's duty,'' by which little lies are sometimes justified, have absolutely no worth. An incidental word as if the accomplice had confessed; an expression intending to convey that you know more than you do; a perversion of some earlier statement of the witness, and similar "permissible tricks,'' can not be cheaper than the cheapest things. Their use results only in one's own shame, and if they fail, the defense has the advantage. The lost ground can never be regained.[3]

Nor is it permissible to lie by gestures and actions any more than by words. These, indeed, are dangerous, because a movement of the hand, a reaching for the bell, a sudden rising, may be very effective under circumstances. They easily indicate that the judge knows more about the matter than he really does, or suggest that his information is greater, etc. They make the witness or defendant think that the judge is already certain about the nature of the case; that he has resolved upon important measures, and other such things. Now movements of this kind are not recorded, and in case the denial of blame is not serious, a young criminalist allows himself easily to be misled by his desire for efficiency. Even accident may help. When I was examining justice I had to hear the testimony of a rather weak-minded lad, who was suspected of having stolen and hidden a large sum of money. The lad firmly and cleverly denied

[1] Cf. my Manual, "When the witness is unwilling to tell the truth.''

[2] Kant : "ber ein vermeintliches Recht, aus Menschenliebe zu lgen.''

[3] A sentence is here omitted. [Translator.]

his guilt. During the examination a comrade entered who had something official to tell me, and inasmuch as I was in the midst of dictation he wanted to wait until the end of the sentence. Happening to see two swords that had just been brought from a student duel, he took one in his hand and examined the hilt, the point and the blade. The defendant hardly saw this action before he got frightened, raised his hands, ran to the sword-examiner, crying "I confess, I confess! I took the money and hid it in the hollow hickory tree.''

This event was rather funny. Another, however, led, I will not say to self-reproach, but to considerable disquiet on my part. A man was suspected of having killed his two small children. As the bodies were not found I undertook a careful search of his home, of the oven, of the cellar, the drains, etc. In the latter we found a great deal of animal entrails, apparently rabbits. As at the time of this discovery I had no notion of where they belonged, I took them, and in the meantime had them preserved in alcohol. The great glass receptacle which contained them stood on my writing table when I had the accused brought in to answer certain questions about one or two suspicious matters we had discovered. He looked anxiously at the glass, and said suddenly, "Since you have got it all, I must confess.'' Almost reflexly I asked, "Where are the corpses?'' and he immediately answered that he had hidden them in the environs of the city, where they were found. Clearly, the glass containing the intestines had led him to the notion that the bodies were found and in part preserved here, and when I asked him where they were he did not observe how illogical the question would be if the bodies had really been found. The whole thing was a matter of accident, but I still have the feeling that the confession was not properly obtained; that I should have thought of the effect of the glass and should have provided against it before the accused was brought before me.

In the daily life such an open procedure is, of course, impossible, and if the circumstances were to be taken for what they seem we should frequently make mistakes. Everybody knows, e. g., how very few happy marriages there are. But how do we know it? Only because the fortune of close observation always indicates that the relation is in no way so happy as one would like it to be. And externally? Has anybody ever seen in even half-educated circles a street quarrel between husband and wife? How well-mannered they are in society, and how little they show their disinclination for each other. And all this is a lie in word and deed, and when we have to deal with it in a criminal case we judge according to the purely external things that we and others have observed. Social reasons, deference for public opinion which must often be deceived, the feeling of duty toward children, not infrequently compel deception of the world. The number of fortunate marriages is mainly overestimated.[1]

We see the same thing with regard to property, the attitude of parents and children, the relation between superiors and inferiors, even in the condition of health,—conduct in all these cases does not reveal the true state of affairs. One after another, people are fooled, until finally the world believes what it is told and the court hears the belief sworn to as absolute truth. It is, perhaps, not too much to say that we are far more deceived by appearances than by words. Public opinion should least of all impose on us. And yet it is through public opinion that we learn the external relations of the people who come before us. It is called vox populi and is really rot. The phrases, "they say,'' "everybody knows,'' "nobody doubts,'' "as most neighbors agree,'' and however else these seeds of dishonesty and slander may be designated—all these phrases must disappear from our papers and procedure. They indicate only appearances—only what people *wanted to have seen. They do not reveal the real and the hidden. Law too frequently makes normative use of the maxim that the bad world says it and the good one believes it. It even constructs its judgments thereby.

Not infrequently the uttered lies must be supported by actions. It is well-known that we seem merry, angry, or friendly only when we excite these feelings by certain gestures, imitations and physical attitudes. Anger is not easily simulated with an unclenched fist, immovable feet, and uncontracted brow. These gestures are required for the appearance of real anger. And how very real it becomes, and how very real all other emotions become because of the appropriate gestures and actions, is familiar. We learn, hence, that the earnest assertor of his innocence finally begins to believe in it a little, or altogether. And lying witnesses still more frequently begin to hold their assertions to be true. As these people do not show the common marks of the lie their treatment is extraordinarily difficult.

It is, perhaps, right to accuse our age of especial inclination for that far-reaching lie which makes its perpetrator believe in his own

[1] A. Moll: Die kontrre Sexualempfindung. Berlin 1893.

creation. Kiefer[1] cites examples of such "self-deceiving liars.'' What drives one to despair is the fact that these people are such clever liars that they make a game of the business. It is a piece of luck that these lies, like every lie, betray themselves by the characteristic intensity with which they seek to assume the appearance of truth. This important mark of the lie can not be too clearly indicated. The number and vigor of lies must show that we more frequently fail to think of their possibility than if they did not exist at all. A long time ago I read an apparently simple story which has helped me frequently in my criminalistic work. Karl was dining with his parents and two cousins, and after dinner said at school, "There were fourteen of us at table to-day.'' "How is it possible?'' "Karl has lied again.'' How frequently does an event seem inexplicable, mysterious, puzzling. But if you think that here perhaps, "Karl has lied again,'' you may be led to more accurate observation and hence, to the discovery of some hiatus by means of which the whole affair may be cleared up.

But frequently contradictions are still more simply explained by the fact that they are not contradictions, and by the fact that we see them as such through inadequate comprehension of what has been said, and ignorance of the conditions. We often pay too much attention to lies and contradictions. There is the prejudice that the accused is really the criminal, and that moves us to give unjustified reasons for little accidental facts, which lead afterwards to apparent contradictions. This habit is very old.

If we inquire when the lie has least influence on mankind we find it to be under emotional stress, especially during anger, joy, fear, and on the death-bed.[2] We all know of various cases in which a man, angry at the betrayal of an accomplice, happy over approaching release, or terrified by the likelihood of arrest, etc., suddenly declares, "Now I am going to tell the truth.'' And this is a typical form which introduces the subsequent confession. As a rule the resolution to tell the truth does not last long. If the emotion passes, the confession is regretted, and much thought is given to the withdrawal of a part of the confession. If the protocols concerning the matter are very long this regret is easily observable toward the end.

That it is not easy to lie during intoxication is well known.[3] What

[1] E. Kiefer: Die Lge u. der Irrtum vor Gericht. Beiblatt der "Magdeburgischen Zeitung,'' Nos. 17, 18, 19. 1895

[2] Cf. "Manual,'' "Die Aussage Sterbender.''

[3] Cf. Ncke: Zeugenaussage in Akohol. Gross's Archiv. XIII, 177 and H. Gross, I 337.

is said on the death-bed may always, especially if the confessor is positively religious, be taken to be true. It is known that under such circumstances the consciousness of even mentally disturbed people and idiots becomes remarkably clear, and very often astonishing illuminations result. If the mind of the dying be already clouded it is never difficult to determine the fact, inasmuch as particularly such confessions are distinguished by the great simplicity and clearness of the very few words used.

Section 109.(2) The Pathoformic lie.

As in many other forms of human expression, there is a stage in the telling of lies where the normal condition has passed and the diseased one has not yet begun. The extreme limit on the one side is the harmless story-teller, the hunter, the tourist, the student, the lieutenant,—all of whom boast a little; on the other side there is the completely insane paralytic who tells about his millions and his monstrous achievements. The characteristic pseudologia phantastica, the lie of advanced hysteria, in which people write anonymous letters and send messages to themselves, to their servants, to high officials and to clergy, in order to cast suspicion on them, are all diseased. The characteristic lie of the epileptics, and perhaps also, the lies of people who are close to the idiocy of old age, mixes up what has been experienced, read and told, and represents it as the experience of the speaker.[1]

Still there is a class of people who can not be shown to be in any sense diseased, and who still lie in such a fashion that they can not be well. The development of such lies may probably be best assigned to progressive habituation. People who commit these falsehoods may be people of talent, and, as Goethe says of himself, may have "desire to fabulate.'' Most of them are people, I will not say who are desirous of honor, but who are still so endowed that they would be glad to play some grand part and are eager to push their own personality into the foreground. If they do not succeed in the daily life, they try to convince themselves and others by progressively broader stories that they really hold a prominent position. I had and still have opportunity to study accurately several well-developed types of these people. They not only have in common the fact that they lie, they also have common themes. They tell how important

[1] Delbrck: De pathologische Lge, etc. Stuttgart 1891. "Manual,'' "Das pathoforme Lgen.

personages asked their advice, sought their company and honored them. They suggest their great influence, are eager to grant their patronage and protection, suggest their great intimacy with persons of high position, exaggerate when they speak of their property, their achievements, and their work, and broadly deny all events in which they are set at a disadvantage. The thing by which they are to be distinguished from ordinary "story-tellers,'' and which defines what is essentially pathoformic in them, is the fact that they lie without considering that the untrue is discovered immediately, or very soon. Thus they will tell somebody that he has to thank their patronage for this or that, although the person in question knows the case to be absolutely different. Or again, they tell somebody of an achievement of theirs and the man happens to have been closely concerned with that particular work and is able to estimate properly their relation to it. Again they promise things which the auditor knows they can not perform, and they boast of their wealth although at least one auditor knows its amount accurately. If their stories are objected to they have some extraordinarily unskilful explanation, which again indicates the pathoformic character of their minds. Their lies most resemble those of pregnant women, or women lying-in, also that particular form of lie which prostitutes seem typically addicted to, and which are cited by Carlier, Lombroso, Ferrero, as representative of them, and as a professional mark of identification. I also suspect that the essentially pathoformic lie has some relation to sex, perhaps to perversity or impotence, or exaggerated sexual impulse. And I believe that it occurs more frequently than is supposed, although it is easily known in even its slightly developed stages. I once believed that the pathoformic lie was not of great importance in our work, because on the one hand, it is most complete and distinct when it deals with the person of the speaker, and on the other it is so characteristic that it must be recognized without fail by anybody who has had the slightest experience with it. But since, I have noticed that the pathoformic lie plays an enormous part in the work of the criminalist and deserves full consideration.

TOPIC IV. ISOLATED SPECIAL CONDITIONS.

Section 110. (a) Sleep and Dream.

If a phenomenon occurs frequently, its frequency must have a certain relation to its importance to the criminalist. Hence, sleep and dream must in any event be of great influence upon our task. As we rarely hear them mentioned, we have underestimated their significance. The literature dealing with them is comparatively rich.[1]

The physician is to be called in not only when we are dealing with conditions of sleep and dream which are in the least diseased, i. e., abnormally intense sleepiness, sleep-walking, hallucinatory dreams, etc., but also when the physiological side of sleep and dream are in question, e. g., the need of sleep, the effect of insomnia, of normal sleepiness, etc. The criminalist must study also these things in order to know the kind of situation he is facing and when he is to call in the physician for assistance. Ignorance of the matter means spoiling a case by unskilful interrogation and neglect of the most important things. At the very least, it makes the work essentially more difficult.

But in many cases the criminalist must act alone since in those cases there is neither disease nor a physiological condition by way of explanation but merely a simple fact of the daily life which any educated layman must deal with for himself. Suppose, e. g., we are studying the influence of a dream upon our emotions. It has been shown that frequently one may spend a whole day under the influence of a dream, that one's attitude is happy and merry as if something pleasant had been learned, or one is cross, afraid, excited, as if something unhappy had happened. The reason and source of these attitudes is frequently a pleasant or unpleasant dream, and sometimes this may be at work subconsciously and unremembered. We have already shown that so-called errors of memory are to a large extent attributable to dreams.[2]

This effect of the dream may be of significance in women, excitable men, and especially in children. There are children who consider their dreams as real experiences, and women who are unable to distinguish between dreams and real experience, while the senile and aged can not distinguish dreams and memories because their memories and the power to distinguish have become weakened.[3]

I know of an eight-year-old child who after dinner had gone looking for chestnuts with a man. In the evening it came home happy but woke up in tears and confessed that the man in question had

[1] Cf. S. Freud: Traumdeutung. Leipzig 1900 (for the complete bibliography). B. Sidis: An Experimental Study of Sleep: Journal of Abnormal Psychology.

[2] Maudsley. Physiology and Pathology of the Mind.

[3] Cf. Altmann in H. Gross's Archiv. I, 261.

raped it. Another case concerns a great burglary which had caused its victims considerable excitement. The second day after the event the ten or twelve-year-old daughter of the victim asserted with certainty that she had recognized the son of a neighbor among the thieves. In both cases there were serious legal steps taken against the suspects, and in both cases the children finally admitted, after much thinking, that they had possibly dreamed the whole matter of their complaints.

The character-mark of such cases is the fact that the children do not make their assertions immediately, but after one or two nights have passed. Hence, whenever this occurs one must entertain at least the suspicion that reality and dreams have been confused.

Similarly, Taine narrates that Baillarger once dreamed that he had been made director of a certain journal, and believed it so definitely that he told it to a number of people. Then there is the familiar dream of Julius Scaliger. Leibnitz writes that Scaliger had praised in verse the famous men of Verona. In dream he saw a certain Brugnolus who complained that he had been forgotten. Later Scaliger's son Joseph discovered that there really had been a Brugnolus who had distinguished himself as grammarian and critic. Obviously Scaliger senior had once known, and had completely forgotten about him. In this case the dream had been just a refreshing of the memory. Such a dream may be of importance, but is unreliable and must be dealt with carefully.

To get at a point of departure concerning the nature of the sleep and the dreams of any given person, we may classify them with reference to the following propositions:[1] 1. The vividness of dreams increases with their frequency. 2. The lighter the sleep the more frequent the dreams. 3. Women sleep less profoundly than men and hence dream more. 4. With increasing age dreams become rarer and sleep less profound. b. Who sleeps lightly needs less sleep. 6. The feminine need of sleep is greater. I might add with regard to the last point that the fact that women are better able to endure nursing children or invalids constitutes only an apparent contradiction of this point. The need of sleep is not decreased, but the goodwill and the joy of sacrifice is greater in woman than in man.