1 1 ll^tl 1 1 
 
 ON THE WITNESS 
 
 STAxND 
 
 HUGO MUNSTERBEBG 
 
 1 1 1 f 1 1 1 
 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 
 
iifrom tijp Bltbrarg nf 
 
 aiuJjp aiMnarii OJ. OfraHtt}. 3pl}.iB. 1889 
 
 (Unrnell ICatu g-rljool 1890-91 
 
Cornell University Library 
 KF 9660.M94 
 
 On the witness stand; essays on psycholog 
 
 3 1924 020 165 936 
 
The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924020165936 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND. 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 
 ESSAYS ON PSYCHOLOGY AND CRIME 
 
 BY 
 HUGO MUNSTERBERG 
 
 PBOFEBSOB OF PSYCHOLOGY 
 HAEVABD UNIVERSITY 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE MCCLURB COMPANY 
 
 MCMVIII 
 
Copyright, 1908, hy The McClure Company 
 
 Published, March, 1908 
 
 'B77?5f 
 
 Copyright, 1907, 1908, by Th'e S. S. McClure Company 
 
 Copyright, 1908, by The International Magazine Company 
 
 Copyright, 1908, by The Bobbs-Merrill Company 
 
TO 
 
 MY COLLABORATORS IN THE 
 
 HARVARD PSYCHOLOGICAL LABORATORY 
 
 KDWIN BISSEL HOLT 
 
 AND 
 
 ROBERT MEARNS YERKES 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Introduction 3 
 
 Illusions , 13 
 
 The Memory of the Witness S7 
 
 The Detection of Crime 71 
 
 The Traces op Emotions 111 
 
 Untrue Confessions 135 
 
 'i 
 
 Suggestions in Court 173 
 
 Hypnotism and Crime 201 
 
 The Prevention of Crime 251 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Theee are about fifty psychological laboratories 
 in the United States alone. The average educated 
 man has hitherto not noticed this. If he chances 
 to hear of such places, he fancies that they serve 
 for mental healing, or telepathic mysteries, or 
 spiritistic performances. What else can a lab- 
 oratory have to do with the mind? Has not the 
 soul been for two thousand years the domain of 
 the philosopher? What has psychology to do with 
 electric batteries and intricate machines? Too 
 often have I read such questions in the faces of 
 visiting friends who came to the Harvard Psycho- 
 logical Laboratory in Emerson Hall and found, 
 with surprise, twenty-seven rooms overspun with 
 electric wires and filled with chronoscopes and 
 kymographs and tachistoscopes and ergographs, 
 and a mechanic busy at his work. 
 
 The development of this new science could re- 
 main unnoticed because it was such a rapid one, 
 surprising in its extent even to those who started 
 [3]- 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 it. When, as a young student, I went to the Uni- 
 versity of Leipzig in the eighties of the last cen- 
 tury, the little psychological laboratory there, 
 founded by Professor Wundt, was stiU the only 
 one in the world. No Western country college 
 would to-day be satisfied with those poor little 
 rooms in which the master of the craft made his 
 experiments with his few students. But since that 
 time the Leipzig workshop has been steadily grow- 
 ing, and every year has seen the foundation of 
 new institutes by the pupils of Wundt, and later 
 by their pupils. The first German laboratory out- 
 side of Leipzig was the one which I founded in 
 Freiburg just twenty years ago. At about the 
 same time Stanley Hall and Cattell brought the 
 work from Leipzig over the ocean. To-day there 
 exists hardly a university which has not opened a 
 workshop for this youngest of the natural sci- 
 ences. 
 
 But more brilliant than the external expansion 
 has been the inner growth. If the new science 
 started in poor quarters, it was stiU more modest 
 at the beginning in its outlook toward the work. 
 Experimental psychology did not even start with 
 [4J 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 experiments of its own; it rather took its prob- 
 lems at first from the neighbouring sciences. 
 There was the physiologist or the phj'sician 
 who made careful experiments on the functions of 
 the eye and the ear and the skin and the muscles, 
 and who got in this way somewhat as by-products 
 interesting experimental results on seeing and 
 hearing and touching and acting ; and yet all these 
 by-products evidently had psychological impor- 
 tance. Or there was the physicist who had to make 
 experiments to find out how far our human senses 
 can furnish us an exact knowledge of the outer 
 world; and again his results could not but be of 
 importance for the psychology of perception. Or 
 there was perhaps the astronomer who was bothered 
 with his " personal equation," as he was alarmed 
 to find that it took different astronomers different 
 times to register the passing of a star. The 
 astronomers had, therefore, in the interest of their 
 calculations, to make experiments to find out with 
 what rapidity an impression is noticed and re- 
 acted upon. But this again was an experimental 
 result which evidently concerned, first of all, the 
 student of mental life. 
 
 [5] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 Li this way all kinds of scientists who cared 
 little for psychology had gathered the most vari- 
 ous psychological results with experimental meth- 
 ods, and the psychologists saw that they could 
 not afford to ignore such results of natural sci- 
 ence. It would not do to go on claiming, for in- 
 stance, that thought is quick as lightning when 
 the experiments of the astronomers had proved 
 that even the simplest mental act is a slow process, 
 the time of which can be measured. Experimental 
 psychology, therefore, started with an effort to 
 repeat on its own account and from its own point 
 of view those researches which others had per- 
 formed. But it seemed evident that this kind of 
 work would never yield more than some little facts 
 in the periphery of mental life — borderland facts 
 between mind and body. No one dreamed of the 
 possibility of carrying such experimental method 
 to the higher problems of inner life which seemed 
 the exclusive region of the philosophising psychol- 
 ogist. But as soon as experimental psychology 
 began to work in its own workshops, it was most 
 natural to carry the new method persistently to 
 new and ever new groups of problems. The tools 
 [6] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 of experiment were now systematically used for 
 the study of memory and the connection of ideas, 
 then of attention and of imagination, of space 
 perception and time sense; slowly they became di- 
 rected to the problems of feeling and emotion, of 
 impulse and volition, of imitation and reasoning. 
 Groups of mental functions which yesterday 
 seemed beyond the reach of experiniental labora- 
 tory methods, to-day appear quite accessible. It 
 may be said that there is now hardly a corner 
 of mental life into which experimental psychology 
 has not thrown its searchlight. 
 
 It may seem strange that this whole wonderful 
 development should have gone on in complete de- 
 tachment from the problems of practical life. 
 Considering that perception and memory, feeling 
 and emotion, attention and volition, and so on, are 
 the chief factors, of our daily life, entering into 
 every one of our enjoyments and duties, experi- 
 ences and professions, it seems astonishing that 
 no path led from the seclusion of the psycho- 
 logical workshop to the market-place of the 
 world. 
 
 Of course this separation was no disadvantage 
 [7] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 to psychology. It is never a gain when a science 
 begins too early to look aside to practical needs. 
 The longer a discipline can develop itself under 
 the single influence, the search for pure truth, the 
 more solid wiU be its foundations. But now experi- 
 mental psychology has reached a stage at which 
 it seems natural and sound to give attention also 
 to its possible service for the practical needs of 
 life. 
 
 This must not be misunderstood. To make 
 psychology serviceable cannot mean simply to pick 
 up some bits of theoretical psychology and to 
 throw them down before the public. Just this has 
 sometimes been done by amateurish hands and 
 with disastrous results. Undigested psychological 
 knowledge has been in the past recklessly forced 
 on helpless schoolteachers, and in educational 
 meetings the blackboards were at one time filled 
 with drawings of ganglion cells and tables of 
 reaction-times. No warning against such " yellow 
 psychology " can be serious enough. 
 
 If experimental psychology is to enter into its 
 period of practical service, it cannot be a question 
 of simply using the ready-made results for ends 
 [8] 
 
I NTRODUCTION 
 which were not in view during the experiments. 
 What is needed is to adjust research to the prac- 
 tical problems themselves and thus, for instance, 
 when education is in question, to start psycholog- 
 ical experiments directly from educational prob- 
 lems. Applied Psychology will then become an in- 
 dependent experimental science which stands re- 
 lated to the ordinary experimental psychology as 
 engineering to physics. 
 
 The time for such Applied Psychology is surely 
 near, and work has been started from most various 
 sides. Those fields of practical life which come 
 first in question may be said to be education, med- 
 icine, art, economics, and law. The educator will 
 certainly not resist the suggestion that systematic 
 ' experiments on memory or attention, for instance, 
 can be useful for his pedagogical eff^orts. The 
 physician to-day doubts still less that he can be 
 aided in the understanding of nervous and mental 
 diseases, or in the understanding of pain and of 
 mental factors in treatment, by the psychological 
 studies of the laboratory. It is also not diflicult 
 to convince the artist that his instinctive creation 
 may well be supplemented by the psychologist's 
 [9] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 study of colour and form, of rhythm and har- 
 mony, of suggestion and aesthetic emotion. And 
 even the business world begins to understand that 
 the effectiveness of economic life depends in a 
 thousand forms on factors for which the student 
 of psychology is a real specialist. His experiments 
 can indicate best how the energies of mill-hands 
 can reach the best results, and how advertisements 
 ought to be shaped, and what belongs to ideal 
 salesmanship. And experience shows that the pol- 
 itician who wants to know and to master minds, 
 the naturalist who needs to use his mind in the 
 service of discovery, the officer who wants to keep 
 up discipline, and the minister who wants to 
 open minds to inspiration — all are ready to see 
 that certain chapters of Applied Psychology are 
 sources of help and strength for them. The law- 
 yer alone is obdurate. 
 
 The lawyer and the judge and the juryman are 
 sure that they do not need the experimental psy- 
 chologist. They do not wish to see that in this 
 field preeminently applied experimental psychol- 
 ogy has made strong strides, led by Binet, Stem, 
 Lipmann, Jung, Wertheimer, Gross, Sommer, 
 [10] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 AschafFenburg, and other scholars. They go on 
 thinking that their legal instinct and their com- 
 mon sense supplies them with all that is needed 
 and somewhat more; and if the time is ever to 
 come when even the jurist is to show some conces- 
 sion to the spirit of modern psychology, public 
 opinion will have to exert some pressure. Just in 
 the line of the law it therefore seems necessary not 
 to rely simply on the technical statements of 
 scholarly treatises, but to carry the discussion in 
 the most popular form possible before the wider 
 tribunal of the general reader. 
 
 With this aim in niind — ^while working at a 
 treatise on " Applied Psychology," which Is to 
 cover the whole ground with technical detail-^— I 
 have written the following popular sketches, which 
 select only a few problems in which psychology 
 and law come in contact. They deal essentially 
 with the mind of the witness on the witness stand ; 
 only the last, on the prevention of crime, takes 
 another direction. I have not touched so far the 
 psychology of the attorney, of the judge, or of 
 the jury — problems which lend themselves to very 
 interesting experimental treatment. Even the psy- 
 [11] 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 chology of the witness is treated in no way ex- 
 haustively; my only purpose is to turn the 
 attention of serious men to an absurdly neglected 
 field which demands the full attention of the 
 social community. 
 
 [12] 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 
 There had been an automobile accident. Before 
 the court one of the witnesses, who had sworn to 
 tell " the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," 
 declared that the entire road was dry and dusty ; 
 the other swore that it had rained and the road 
 was muddy. The one said that the automobile was 
 running very slowly ; the other, that he had never 
 seen an automobile rushing more rapidly. The first 
 swore that there were only two or three people on 
 the village road ; the other, that a large number of 
 men, women, and children were passing by. Both 
 witnesses were highly respectable gentlemen, 
 neither of whom had the slightest interest in 
 changing the facts as he remembered them. 
 
 I find among my notes another case, where every- 
 thing depended upon the time which had passed 
 between a whistle signal from the street and the 
 noise of an explosion. It was of the greatest im- 
 portance for the court to know whether the time 
 was long enough to walk a certain distance for 
 [15] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 which at least half a minute was needed. Of two 
 unbiassed witnesses, one swore that the time was 
 less than ten seconds; the other, that it was more 
 than one minute. Again, there was a case where 
 it was essential to find out whether at a certain 
 riot the number of guests in the hall was larger 
 than the forty who had been invited to attend. 
 There were witnesses who insisted that there could 
 not have been more than twenty persons present, 
 and others who were sure that they saw more than 
 one hundred. In a case of poisoning, some mem- 
 bers of the family testified that the beverage had a 
 disagreeable, sour taste, others, that it was taste- 
 less, and others, that it was sweet. In some Bowery 
 wrangle, one witness was quite certain that a 
 rowdy had taken a beer-mug and kept it in his 
 fist while he beat with it the skuU of his comrade ; 
 while others saw that the two were separated by 
 a long table, and that the assailant used the mug 
 as a missile, throwing it a distance of six or eight 
 feet. In another trial, one witness noticed at the 
 sea-shore in moonlight a woman with a child, while 
 another witness was not less sure that it was a man 
 with a dog. And only recently passengers in a 
 [16] 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 train which passed a courtyard were sure, and 
 swore, that they had taken in at a glance the dis- 
 tinct picture of a man whipping a child ; one swore 
 that he had a clean-shaven face, a hat, and was 
 standing, while another swore that he had a full 
 beard, no hat, and was sitting on a bench. The 
 other day two most reliable expert shorthand 
 writers felt sure that they had heard the utter- 
 ances which they wrote down, and yet the records 
 differed widely in important points. 
 
 There is no need of heaping up such illustra- 
 tions from actual cases, as everyone who remem- 
 bers the last half-dozen murder trials of his city 
 knows with what regularity these differences in 
 reports of witnesses occur. We may abstract from 
 all cases which demand technical knowledge; we 
 want to speak here only of direct observations 
 and of impressions which do not need any special 
 acquaintance with the matter. Wherever real 
 professional knowledge is needed, the door is, of 
 course, open to every variety of opinion, and one 
 famous expert may conscientiously contradict the 
 other. No, we speak here only of those impres- 
 sions for which every layman is prepared and 
 [17] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 where there can be no difference of opinion. We 
 further abstract entirely from all cases of inten- 
 tional deception; the witness who lies offers no 
 psychological interest for the student of illusions. 
 And we exclude aU questions of mental disease. 
 Thus there remain the unintentional mistakes of 
 the sound mind, — and the psychologist must ask 
 at once. Are they all of the same order? Is it 
 enough to label them simply as illusions of 
 memory. 
 
 To make memory responsible is indeed the rou- 
 tine way. It is generally taken for granted that 
 we all perceive our surroundings imiformly. In 
 case there were only twenty men in the hall, no 
 one could have seen one hundred. In case the road 
 was muddy, no one can have seen it dusty. In case 
 the man was shaved, no one can have seen the 
 beard. If there is still disagreement, it must have 
 crept in through the trickery of memory. The 
 perception must be correct; its later reproduc- 
 tion may be false. But do we reaUy aU perceive 
 the same thing, and does it have the same mean- 
 ing to us in our immediated absorption of the sur- 
 rounding world.'' Is the court suflSciently aware of 
 [18] 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 the great differences between men's perceptions, 
 and does the court take suflBcient trouble^ to ex- 
 amine the capacities and habits with which the wit- 
 ness moves through the world which he believes he 
 observes? Of course some kind of a " common- 
 sense" consideration has entered, consciously or 
 unconsciously, into hundreds of judicial decisions, 
 inasmuch as the contradictory evidence has to be 
 sifted. The judges have on such occasions more or 
 less boldly philosophised or psychologised on 
 their own account ; but to consult the psychological 
 authorities was out of the question. Legal theorists 
 have even proudly boasted of the fact that the 
 judges always found their way without psycho- 
 logical advice, and yet the records of such cases, 
 for instance, in railroad damages, quickly show 
 that the psychological inspirations of the bench 
 are often directly the opposite of demonstrable 
 facts. To be sure, the judge may bolster up the 
 case with preceding decisions, but even if the old 
 decision was justified, is such an amateur psy- 
 chologist prepared to decide whether the mental 
 situation is really the same in the new case? Such 
 judicial self-help was unavoidable as long as the 
 [19] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 psychology of earlier times was hazy and vague, 
 but all that has changed with the exact character 
 of the new psychology. 
 
 The study of these powers no longer lies -out- 
 side of the realm of science. The progress of ex- 
 perimental psychology makes it an absurd in- 
 congruity that the State should devote its fullest 
 energy to the clearing up of all the physical hap- 
 penings, but should never ask the psychological 
 expert to determine the value of that factor which 
 becomes most influential — ^the mind of the witness. 
 The demand that the memory of the witness should 
 be tested with the methods of modem psychology 
 has been raised sometimes, but it seems necessary 
 to add that the study of his perceptive judgment 
 will have to find its way into the court-room, too. 
 
 Last winter I made, quite by the way, a little 
 experiment with the students of my regular psy- 
 chology course in Harvard. Several himdred 
 young men, mostly between twenty and twenty- 
 three, took part. It was a test of a very trivia] 
 sort. I asked them simply, without any theoretical 
 introduction, at the beginning of an ordinary lec- 
 ture, to write down careful answers to a number 
 [20] 
 
ILLl^SIONS 
 of questions referring to that which they would 
 see or hear. I urged them to do it as conscien- 
 tiously and carefully as possible, and the hundreds 
 of answers which I received showed clearly that 
 every one had done his best. I shall confine my re- 
 port to the first hundred papers taken up at 
 random. At first I showed them a large sheet of 
 white cardboard on which fifty little black squares 
 were pasted in irregular order. I exposed it for 
 five seconds, and asked them how many black spots 
 were on the sheet. The answers varied between 
 twenty-five and two hundred. The answer, over 
 one hundred, was more frequent than that of below 
 fifty. Only three felt unable to give a definite re- 
 ply. Then I showed a cardboard which contained 
 only twenty such spots. This time the replies ran 
 up to seventy and down to ten. We had here 
 highly trained, careful observers, whose attention 
 was concentrated on the material, and who had 
 full time for quiet scrutiny. Yet in both cases 
 there were some who believed that they saw seven 
 or eight times more points than some others saw; 
 and yet we should be disinclined to believe in the 
 sincerity of two witnesses, of whom one felt sure 
 [21] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 that he saw two hundred persons in a hall in which 
 the other found only twenty-five. 
 
 My next question referred to the perception of 
 time. I asked the students to give the number of 
 seconds which passed between two loud clicks. I 
 separated the two clicks at first by ten seconds, 
 and in a further experiment by three seconds. 
 When the distance was ten, the answers varied 
 between half a second and sixty seconds, a good 
 number judging forty-five seconds as the right 
 time. The one who called it half a second was a 
 Chinese, while all those whose judgments ranged 
 from one second to sixty seconds were average 
 Americans. When the objective time was three 
 seconds, the answers varied between half a second 
 and fifteen seconds. I emphasise that these large 
 fluctuations showed themselves in spite of the fact 
 that the students knew beforehand that they were 
 to estimate the time interval. The variations would 
 probably have been still greater if the question 
 had been put to them after hearing the sound 
 without, previous information ; and yet a district 
 attorney hopes for a reliable reply when he in- 
 quires of a witness, perhaps of a cabman, how 
 [22] 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 much time passed by between a cry and the shoot- 
 ing in the cab. 
 
 In my third experiment I wanted to find out 
 how rapidity is estimated. I had on the platform 
 a large clock with a white dial over which one 
 black pointer moved once around in five seconds. 
 The end of the black pointer, which had the form 
 of an arrow, moved over the edge of the dial with 
 a velocity of ten centimeters in one second; that 
 is, in one second the arrow moved through a space 
 of about a finger's length. Now, I made this clock 
 go for a whole minute, and asked the observers to 
 watch carefully the rapidity of the arrow, and to 
 describe, either in figures or by comparisons with 
 moving objects, the speed with which that arrow 
 moved along. Most men preferred comparisons 
 with other objects. The list begins as follows: man 
 walking slowly ; - accommodation-train ; bicycle- 
 rider; funeral cortege in a city street; trotting 
 dog ; faster than trot of man ; electric car ; ex- 
 press train ; goldfish In water ; fastest automobile 
 speed ; very slowly, like a snail ; lively spider ; and 
 so on. Would It seem possible that university stu- 
 dents, trained in observation, could watch a move- 
 [23] 
 
ox THE WITNESS STAND 
 ment constantly through a whole minute, and yet 
 disagree whether it moved as slowly as a snail or 
 as rapidly as an express-train. And yet it is evi- 
 dent that the form of the experiment excluded 
 every possible mistake of memory and excluded 
 every suggestive influence. The observation was 
 made deliberately and without haste. 
 
 Those who judged in figures showed not less 
 variation. The list begins: one revolution in two 
 seconds ; one revolution in forty-five seconds ; three 
 inches a second ; twelve feet a second ; thirty sec- 
 onds to the hundred yards; seven miles an hour; 
 fifteen miles an hour ; forty miles an hour ; and so 
 on. In reality the arrow would have moved in an 
 hour about a third of a mile. Not a few of the 
 judgments, therefore, multiplied the speed by more 
 than one hundred. 
 
 In my next test I asked the class to describe 
 the sound they would hear and to say from what 
 source it came. The sound which I produced was 
 the tone of a large tuning-fork, which I struck 
 with a little hammer below the desk, invisibly to 
 the students. Among the hundred students whose 
 papers I examined for this record were exactly 
 [24] 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 two who recognised it as a tuning-fork tone. All 
 the other judgments took it for a bell, or an 
 organ-pipe, or a muffled gong, or a brazen instru- 
 ment, or a horn, or a 'cello string, or a violin, and 
 so on. Or they compared it with as different noises 
 as the growl of a lion, a steam whistle, a fog-horn, 
 a fly-wheel, a human song, and what not. The de- 
 scription, on the other hand, called it: soft, mel- 
 low, humming, deep, dull, solemn, resonant, pene- 
 trating, full, rumbling, clear, low ; but then again, 
 rough, sharp, whistling, and so on. Again I insist 
 that every one knew beforehand that he was to 
 observe the tone, which I announced by a signal. 
 How much more would the judgments have differed 
 if the tone had come in unexpectedly!' — a tone 
 which even now appeared so soft to some and so 
 rough to others — like a bell to one and like a 
 whistle to his neighbour. 
 
 I turn to a few experiments in which I showed 
 several sheets of white cardboard, of which each 
 contained a variety of dark and light ink-spots in 
 a somewhat fantastic arrangement. Each of these 
 cards was shown for two seconds, and it was sug- 
 gested that these rough ink-drawings represented 
 [25] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 something in the outer world. Immediately after 
 seeing one, the students were to write down what 
 the drawing represented. In some cases the sub- 
 jects remained sceptical and declared that those 
 spots did not represent anything, but were merely 
 blots of ink. In the larger number the suggestion 
 was effective, and a definite object was recognised. 
 The list of answers for one picture begins : soldiers 
 in a valley ; grapes ; a palace ; river-bank ; Jap- 
 anese landscape; foliage; rabbit; woodland scene; 
 town with towers; rising storm; shore of lake; 
 garden; flags; men in landscape; hair in curling- 
 papers ; china plate ; war picture ; country square ; 
 lake in a jimgle; trees with stone wall; clouds; 
 harvest scene; elephant; map; lake with castle in 
 background ; trees ; and so on. The list of votes 
 for the next picture, which had finer details, 
 started with : spider ; landscape ; turtle ; butterfly ; 
 woman's head ; bunch of war-flags ; ballet-dancers ; 
 crowd of people ; cactus plant ; skunk going down 
 a log; centipede; boat on pond; crow's nest; 
 beetle; flower; island; and so forth. There are 
 hardly any repetitions, with the exception that the 
 vague term " landscape " occurs often. Of course, 
 [26] 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 we know, since the days of Hamlet and Polonius, 
 that a cloud can look like a camel and like a whale. 
 And yet such an abundance of variations was 
 hardly to be foreseen. 
 
 My next question did not refer to immediate 
 perception, but to a memory image so vividly at 
 every one's disposal that I assumed a right to sub- 
 stitute it directly for a perception. I asked my 
 men to compare the apparent size of the full moon 
 to that of some object held in the hand at arm's 
 length. I explained the question carefully, and 
 said that they were to describe an object just large 
 enough, when seen at arm's length, to cover the 
 whole full moon. My list of answers begins as fol- 
 lows: quarter of a dollar; fair-sized canteloupe; 
 at the horizon, large dinner plate, overhead, des- 
 sert-plate ; my watch ; six inches in diameter ; silver 
 dollar ; hundred times as large as my watch ; man's 
 head; fifty-cent piece; nine inches in diameter; 
 grape-fruit; carriage-wheel; butter-plate; or- 
 ange ; ten feet ; two inches ; one-cent piece ; school- 
 room clock; a pea; soup-plate; fountain-pen; 
 lemon-pie ; palm of the hand ; three feet in diam- 
 eter: enough to show, again, the overwhelming 
 [27] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 manifoldness of the impressions received. To the 
 surprise of my readers, perhaps, it may be added 
 at once that the only man who was right was the 
 one who compared it to a pea. It is most probable 
 that the results would not have been different if I 
 had asked the question on a moonlight night with 
 the full moon overhead. The substitution of the 
 memory image for the immediate perception can 
 hardly have impaired the correctness of the judg- 
 ments. If in any court the size of a distant object 
 were to be given by witnesses, and one man de- 
 clared it appeared as large as a pea at arm's dis- 
 tance, and the second as large as a lemon-pie and 
 the third ten feet in diameter, it would hardly be 
 fair to form an objective judgment till the psy- 
 chologist had found out which mental factors 
 were entering into that estimate. 
 
 There were many more experiments in the list; 
 but as I want to avoid all technicality, I refer to 
 only two more, which are somewhat related. First, 
 I showed to the men some pairs of coloured paper 
 squares, and they had ample time to write down 
 which of the two appeared to them darker. At first 
 it was a red and a blue ; then a blue and a green ; 
 [28] 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 and finally a blue and a grey. My interest was en- 
 gaged entirely with the last pair. The grey was 
 objectively far lighter than the dark blue, and any 
 one with an unbiassed mind who looked at those 
 two squares of paper could have not the slightest 
 doubt that the blue was darker. Yet about one- 
 fifth of the men wrote that the grey was darker. 
 Now, let us keep this in mind in looking over 
 the last experiment, which I want to report. I 
 stood on the platform behind a low desk and 
 begged the men to watch and to describe every- 
 thing which I was going to do from one given 
 signal to another. As soon as the signal was given, 
 I lifted with my right hand a little revolving wheel 
 with a colour-disk and made it run and change its 
 color, and all the time, while I kept the little in- 
 strument at the height of my head, I turned my 
 eyes eagerly toward it. While this was going on, 
 up to the closing signal, I took with my left hand, 
 at first, a pencil from my vest-pocket and wrote 
 something at the desk ; then I took my watch out 
 and laid it on the table; then I took a silver cig- 
 arette-box from my pocket, opened it, took a 
 cigarette out of it, closed it with a loud click, and 
 [29] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 returned it to mj pocket ; and then came the end- 
 ing signal. The results showed that eighteen of 
 the hundred had not noticed anything of all that 
 I was doing with my left hand. Pencil and watch 
 and cigarettes had simply not existed for them. 
 The mere fact that I myself seemed to give all my 
 attention to the colour-wheel had evidently inhib- 
 ited in them the impressions of the dther side. Yet 
 I had made my movements of the left arm so osten- 
 tatiously, and I had beforehand so earnestly in- 
 sisted that they ought to watch every single move- 
 ment, that I hardly expected to make any one 
 overlook the larger part of my actions. It showed 
 that the medium, famous for her slate tricks, was 
 right when she asserted that as soon as she suc- 
 ceeded in turning the attention of her client to 
 the slate in her hand, he would not notice if an 
 elephant should pass behind her through the room. 
 But the chief iuterest belongs to the surprising 
 fact that of those eighteen men, fourteen were the 
 same who, in the foregoing experiment, judged 
 the light grey to be darker than the dark blue. 
 That coincidence was, of course, not chance. In 
 the case of the darkness experiment the mere idea 
 [30] 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 of greyness gave to their suggestible minds the 
 belief that the colourless grey must be darker than 
 any colour. They evidently did not judge at all 
 from the optical impression, but entirely from 
 their conception of grey as darkness. The coinci- 
 dence, therefore, proved clearly how very quickly 
 a little experiment such as this with a piece of blue 
 and grey paper, which can be performed in a few 
 seconds, can pick out for us those minds which 
 are probably unfit to report, whether an action 
 has been performed in their presence or not. 
 Whatever they expect to see they do see; and if 
 the attention is turned in one direction, they are 
 blind and deaf and idiotic in the other. 
 
 Enough of my class-room experiments. Might 
 they not indeed work as a warning against the 
 blind confidence in the observations of the average 
 normal man, and might they not reinforce the de- 
 mand for a more careful study of the individual 
 diff'erences between those on the witness stand? Of 
 course, such study would be one-sided if the psy- 
 chologist were only to emphasise the varieties of 
 men and the diff'erences by which one man's judg- 
 ment and observation may be counted on to throw 
 [31] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 out an opposite report from that of another man. 
 No, the psychologist in the court-room should cer- 
 tainly give not less attention to the analysis of 
 those illusions which are common to all men and 
 of which as yet common sense knows too little. The 
 jurymen and the judge do not discriminate, 
 whether the witness teUs that he saw in late twi- 
 light a woman in a red gown or one in a blue gown. 
 They are not expected to know that such a faint 
 light would still allow the blue colour sensation to 
 come in, while the red colour sensation would have 
 disappeared. 
 
 They are not obliged to know what directions 
 of sound are mixed up by all of us and what are 
 discriminated; they do not know, perhaps, that 
 we can never be in doubt whether we heard on the 
 country road a cry from the right or from the 
 left, but we may be utterly imable to say whether 
 we heard it from in front or from behind. They 
 have no reason to know that the victim of a crime 
 may have been utterly unable to perceive that he 
 was stabbed with a pointed dagger; he may have 
 felt it like a duU blow. We hear the witnesses talk- 
 ing about the taste of poisoned liquids, and there 
 [-32] 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 
 is probably no one in the jury-box who knows 
 enough of physiological psychology to be aware 
 that the same substance may taste quite differently 
 on different parts of the. tongue. We may hear 
 quarrelling parties in a civil suit testify as to the 
 size and length and form of a field as it appeared 
 to them, and yet there is no one to remind the 
 court that the same distance inust appear quite 
 differently under a hundred different conditions. 
 The judge listens, perhaps, to a description of 
 things which the witness has secretly seen through 
 the keyhole of the door; he does not understand 
 why all the judgments as to the size of objects 
 and their place are probably erroneous under such 
 circumstances. The witness may be sure of having 
 felt something wet, and yet he may have felt only 
 some smooth, cold metal. In short, every chapter 
 and sub-chapter of sense psychology may help to 
 clear up the chaos and the confusion which prevail 
 in the observation of witnesses. 
 
 But, as we have insisted, it is never a question 
 of pure sense perception. Associations, judg- 
 ments, suggestions, penetrate into every one of 
 our observations. We know from the drawings of 
 [33] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 children how they believe that they see all that they 
 know really exists ; and so do we ourselves believe 
 that we perceive at least all that we expect. I re- 
 member some experiments in my laboratory where 
 I showed printed words with an instantaneous il- 
 lumination. Whenever I spoke a sentence before- 
 hand, I was able to influence the seeing of the 
 word. The printed word was courage: I said 
 something about the university life, and the sub- 
 ject read the word as college. The printed word 
 was Philistines: I, apparently without intention, 
 had said something about colonial policy, and 
 my subject read Philippines. In this way, of 
 course, the fraudulent advertisement makes us 
 overlook some essential element which may change 
 the meaning of the offer entirely. Experimental 
 psychology has at last cleared the ground, and to 
 ignore this whole science and to be satisfied with 
 the primitive psychology of common sense seems 
 really out of order when crime and punishment 
 are in question and the analysis of the mind of the 
 witness might change the whole aspect of the case. 
 It is enough if we have to suffer from these 
 mental varieties in our daily life; at least the 
 [34] 
 
ILLUSIONS 
 court-room ought to come nearer to the truth, and 
 ought to show the way. The other organs of so- 
 ciety may then slowly follow. It may be that, ulti- 
 mately, even the newspapers may learn then from 
 the legal practice, and may take care that their 
 witnesses be examined, too, as to their capacity of 
 observation. Those experiments described from 
 my class-room recommend at least mildness of 
 judgment when we compare the newspaper reports 
 with each other. Since I saw that my own students 
 do not know whether a point moves with the slow- 
 ness of a snail or with the rapidity of an express- 
 train ; whether a time interval is half a second or a 
 whole minute ; whether there are twenty-five points 
 or two hundred; whether a tone comes from a 
 whistle, a gong, or a violin ; whether the moon Is 
 small as a pea or large as a man, — I am not sur- 
 prised any more when I read the reports of the 
 papers. 
 
 I had occasion recently to make an address on 
 peace in New York before a large gathering, to 
 which there was an unexpected and somewhat 
 spirited reply. The reporters sat immediately in 
 front of the platform. One man wrote that the 
 [S5] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 audience was so surprised by my speech that it 
 received it in complete silence ; another wrote that 
 I was constantly interrupted by loud applause, 
 and that at the end of my address the applause 
 continued for minutes. The one wrote that during 
 my opponent's speech I was constantly smiling; 
 the other noticed that my face remained grave and 
 without a smile. The one said that I grew purple- 
 red from excitement; and the other found that 
 I grew white like chalk. The one told us that my 
 critic, while speaking, walked up and down the 
 large stage; and the other, that he stood all the 
 while at my side and patted me in a fatherly way 
 on the shoulder. And Mr. Dooley finally heard 
 that before I made my speech on peace I was in- 
 troduced as the Professor from the Harvard War 
 School — ^but it may be that Mr. Dooley was not 
 himself present. 
 
 [36] 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 
 Last summer I had to face a jury as witness in a 
 trial. While I was with my family at the seashore 
 my city house had been burglarised and I was 
 called upon to give an account of my findings 
 against the culprit whom they had caught with a 
 part of the booty. I reported under oath that the 
 burglars had entered through a cellar window, 
 and then described what rooms they had visited. 
 To prove, in answer to a direct question, that they 
 had been there at night, I told that I had found 
 drops of candle wax on the second floor. To show 
 that they intended to return, I reported that they 
 had left a large mantel clock, packed in wrapping 
 paper, on the dining-room table. Finally, as to 
 the amount of clothes which they had taken, I 
 asserted that the burglars did not get more than 
 a specified list which I had given the police. 
 
 Only a few days later I found that every one 
 of these statements was wrong. They had not en- 
 tered through the window, but had broken the 
 [39] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 lock of the cellar door; the clock was not packed 
 by them in wrapping paper, but in a tablecloth; 
 the candle droppings were not on the second floor, 
 but in the attic; the list of lost garments was to 
 be increased by seven more pieces ; and while my 
 story under oath spoke always of two burglars, 
 I do not know that there was more than one. How 
 did all those mistakes occur? I have no right to 
 excuse myself on the plea of a bad memory. Dur- 
 ing the last eighteen years I have delivered about 
 three thousand university lectures. For those 
 three thousand coherent addresses I had not once 
 a single written or printed line or any notes what- 
 ever on the platform ; and yet there has never been 
 a moment when I have had to stop for a name or 
 for the connection of the thought. My memory 
 serves me therefore rather generously. I stood 
 there, also, without prejudice against the defend- 
 ant. Inasmuch as he expects to spend the next 
 twelve years at a place of residence where he wiU 
 have little chance to read my writings, I may con- 
 fess frankly that I liked the man. I was thus un- 
 der the most favourable conditions for speaking 
 the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and, as 
 [40] 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 there is probably no need for the assurance of my 
 best intentions, I felt myself somewhat alarmed in 
 seeing how many illusions had come in. 
 
 Of course, I had not made any careful examina- 
 tion of the house. I had rushed in from the sea- 
 shore as soon as the police notified me. In the fear 
 that valuable contents of the house might have 
 been destroyed or plundered. When I saw that 
 they had treated me mildly, inasmuch as they had 
 started in the wine cellar and had forgotten under 
 its genial influence, on the whole, what they had 
 come for, I had taken only a superficial survey. 
 That a clock was lying on the table, packed ready 
 to be taken away, had impressed itself clearly on 
 my memory; but that it was packed in a table- 
 cloth had made evidently too slight an impression 
 on my consciousness. My imagination gradually 
 substituted the more usual method of packing with 
 wrapping paper, and I was ready to take an oath 
 on it until I went back later, at the end of the 
 summer vacation. In the same way I got a vivid 
 image of the candle droppings on the floor, but as, 
 at the moment of the perception, no interest was 
 attached to the peculiar place where I saw them, 
 [41] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 I slowly substituted in my memory the second floo 
 for the attic, knowing surely from strewn paper 
 and other disorder that they had ransacked bot 
 places. As to the clothes, I had simply forgottei 
 that I had put several suits in a remote wardrobe 
 only later did I find it empty. My other tw 
 blunders clearly arose under the influence of sug 
 gestion. The police and every one about the hous 
 had always taken as a matter of course that th 
 entrance was made by a cellar window, as it woul 
 have been much more difficult to use the lockei 
 doors. I had thus never examined the other hy 
 pothesis, and yet it was found later that they dii 
 succeed in removing the lock of a door. Ani 
 finally, my whole story under oath referred to tw^ 
 burglars, without any doubt at the moment. Th 
 fact is, they had caught the gentleman in questioi 
 when he, a few days later, plundered anothe 
 house. He then shot a policeman, but was ar 
 rested, and in his room they found a jacket witl 
 my name written in it by the tailor. That alon 
 gave a hint that my house also had been entered 
 but from the first moment he insisted that ther 
 had been two in this burglary and that the othe 
 [42] 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 man had the remainder of the booty. The other 
 has not been found, and he probably still wears my 
 badges; but I never heard any doubt as to his 
 existence, and thus, in mere imitation, I never 
 doubted that there was a companion, in spite of 
 the fact that every part of the performance might 
 just as well have been carried out by one man 
 alone; and, after all, it is not impossible that he 
 should lie as well as shoot and steal. 
 
 In this way, in spite of my best intentions, in 
 spite of good memory and calm mood, a whole 
 series of confusions, of illusions, of forgetting, 
 of wrong conclusions, and of yielding to sug- 
 gestions were mingled with what I had to report 
 under oath, and my only consolation is the fact 
 that in a thousand courts at a thousand places all 
 over the world, witnesses every day affirm by oath 
 in exactly the same way much worse mixtures of 
 truth and untruth, combinations of memory and 
 of illusion, of knowledge and of suggestion, of 
 experience and wrong conclusions. Not one of my 
 mistakes was of the slightest consequence. But is 
 it probable that this is always so? Is it not more 
 natural to suppose that every day errors creep 
 [43] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 into the work of justice through wrong evidence 
 which has the outer marks of truth and trust- 
 worthiness? Of course, judge and jury and, later, 
 the newspaper reader try their best to weigh the 
 evidence. Not every sworn statement is accepted 
 as absolute reality. Contradictions between wit- 
 nesses are too faipiliar. But the instinctive doubt 
 refers primarily to veracity. The public in the 
 main suspects that the witness lies, while taking 
 for granted that if he is normal and conscious of 
 responsibility he may forget a thing, but it would 
 not believe that he could remember the wrong 
 thing. The confidence in the reliabiUty of memory 
 is so general that the suspicion of memory illu- 
 sions evidently plays a small role in the mind of 
 the juryman, and even the cross-examining lawyer 
 is mostly dominated by the idea that a false state- 
 ment is the product of intentional falsehood. 
 
 All this is a popular illusion against which mod- 
 em psychology must seriously protest. Justice 
 would less often miscarry if all who are to weigh 
 evidence were more conscious of the treachery of 
 human memory. Yes, it can be said that, while the 
 court makes the fullest use of all the modem sci- 
 [44 J 
 
THE MEMORY'OF THE WITNESS 
 entlfic methods when, for instance, a drop of dried 
 _ blood is to be examined in a murder case, the same 
 court is completely satisfied with the most unsci- 
 entific arid haphazard methods of common preju- 
 dice and ignorance when a mental product, espe- 
 cially the memory report of a witness, is to be ex- 
 amined. No juryman would be expected to follow 
 his general impressions in the question as to 
 whether the blood on the murderer's shirt is human 
 or animal. But he is expected to make up his mind 
 as to whether the memory ideas of a witness are 
 objective reproductions of earlier experience or are 
 mixed up with associations and suggestions. The 
 court proceeds as if the physiological chemistry 
 of blood examination had made wonderful prog- 
 ress, while experimental psychology, with its ef- 
 forts to analyse the mental faculties, still stood 
 where it stood two thousand years ago. 
 
 The fact is that experimental psychology has 
 not only in general experienced a wonderful 
 progress during the last decades, but has also 
 given in recent years an unusual amount of atten- 
 tion to just those problems which are involved on 
 the witness stand. It is perhaps no exaggeration 
 [45] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 to say that a new special science has even grown 
 up which deals exclusively with the reliability of 
 memory. It started in Germany and has had there 
 for some years even a magazine of its own. But 
 many investigations in France and the United 
 States tended from the start in the same direction, 
 and the work spread rapidly over the psycholog- 
 ical laboratories of the world. Rich material has 
 been gathered, and yet practical jurisprudence is, 
 on the whole, stiU unaware of it; and while the 
 alienist is always a welcome guest in the court 
 room, the psychologist is stiU a stranger there. 
 The Court would rather listen for whole days to 
 the " science " of the handwriting experts than 
 allow a witness to be examined with regard to his 
 memory and his power of perception, his attention 
 and his associations, his volition and his suggesti- 
 bility, with methods which are in accord with the 
 exact work of experimental psychology. It is so 
 much easier everywhere to be satisfied with sharp 
 demarcation lines and to listen only to a yes or no ; 
 the man is sane or insane, and if he is sane, he 
 speaks the truth or he lies. The psychologist 
 would upset this satisfaction completely. 
 [46] 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 The administration of an oath is partly respon- 
 sible for the wrong valuation of the evidence. Its 
 seriousness and solemnity suggest that the condi- 
 tions for complete truth are given if the witness is 
 ready not to lie. We are too easily inclined to con- 
 fuse the idea of truth in a subjective and in an 
 objective sense. A German proverb says, " Chil- 
 dren and fools speak the truth," and with it goes 
 the old " In vino Veritas." Of course, no one -can 
 suppose that children, fools, and tipsy men have 
 a deeper insight into true relations than the sober 
 and grown-up remainder of mankind. What is 
 meant is only that all the motives are lacking 
 which, in our social turmoil, may lead others to the 
 intentional hiding of the truth. Children do not 
 suppress the truth, because they are naive; the 
 fools do not suppress it, because they are reckless ; 
 and the mind under the influence of wine does not 
 suppress it, because the suppressing mechanism 
 of inhibition is temporarily paralysed by alcohol. 
 The subjective truth may thus be secured, and yet 
 the idle talk of the drunkard and the child and the 
 fool may be objectively untrue from beginning to 
 end. It is in this way only that the oath by its re- 
 [47] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 ligious background and by its connection with 
 threatened punishment can work for truth. It can 
 and will remove to a high degree the intention to 
 hide the truth, but it may be an open question to 
 what degree it can increase the objective truthful- 
 ness. 
 
 Of course, everyone knows that the oath helps 
 in at least one more direction in curbing misstate- 
 ments. It not only suppresses the intentional lie, 
 but it focusses the attention on the details of the 
 statement. It excludes the careless, hasty, chance 
 recollection, and stirs the deliberate attention of 
 the witness. He feels the duty of putting his best 
 will into the effort to reproduce the whole truth 
 and nothing but the truth. No psychologist will 
 deny this effect. He will ask only whether the in- 
 tention alone is sufficient for success and whether 
 the memory is really improved in every respect by 
 increased attention. We are not always sure that 
 our fimctions run best when we concentrate our 
 effort on them and turn the full light of attention 
 on the details. We may speak fluently, but the 
 moment we begin to give attention to the special 
 movements of our lips and of our tongue in speak- 
 [48] 
 
THE MEMORY OP THE WITNESS 
 ing and make a special effort to produce the move- 
 ments correctly, we are badly hampered. Is it so 
 sure that our memory works faultlessly simply 
 because we earnestly want it to behave well? We 
 may try hard to think of a name and it will not 
 appear in consciousness; and when we have 
 thought of somethng else for a long time, the de- 
 sired name suddenly slips into our mind. May it 
 not be in a similar way that the effort for correct 
 recollection under oath may prove powerless to a 
 degree which public opinion underestimates.'' And 
 no subjective feeling of certainty can be an ob- 
 jective criterion for the desired truth. 
 
 A few years ago a painful scene occurred in 
 Berlin, in the University Seminary of Professor 
 von Liszt, the famous criminologist. The Pro- 
 fessor had spoken about a book. One of the older 
 students suddenly shouts, " I wanted to throw 
 light on the matter from the standpoint of Chris- 
 tian morality ! " Another student throws in, " I 
 cannot stand that ! " The first starts up, ex- 
 claiming, " You have insulted me ! " The second 
 clenches his fist and cries, " If you say another 
 
 word " The first draws a revolver. The sec- 
 
 [49] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 ond rushes madly upon him. The Professor steps 
 between them and, as he grasps the man's arm, the 
 revolver goes off. General uproar. In that mo- 
 ment Professor Liszt secures order and asks a part 
 of the students to write an exact account of all 
 that has happened. The whole had been a comedy, 
 carefully planned and rehearsed by the three 
 actors for the purpose of studying the exactitude 
 of observation and recollection. Those who did 
 not write the report at once were, part of them, 
 asked to write it the next day or a week later ; and 
 others had to depose their oTsservations under 
 cross-examination. The whole objective perform- 
 ance was cut up into fourteen little parts which 
 referred partly to actions, partly to words. As 
 mistakes there were counted the omissions, the 
 wrong additions and the alterations. The smallest 
 number of mistakes gave twenty-six per cent, of 
 erroneous statements; the largest was eighty per 
 cent. The reports with reference to the second 
 half of the performance, which was more strongly 
 emotional, gave an average of fifteen per cent, 
 more mistakes than those of the first half. Words 
 were put into the mouths of men who had been 
 [50] 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 silent spectators during the whole short episode; 
 actions were attributed to the chief participants 
 of which not the slightest trace existed ; and essen- 
 tial parts of the tragi-comedy were completely 
 eliminated from the memory of a number of wit- 
 nesses. 
 
 This dramatic psychological experiment of six 
 years ago opened up a long series of similar tests 
 in a variety of places, with a steady eflFort to im- 
 prove the conditions. The most essential condition 
 remained, of course, always the complete naivete 
 of the witnesses, as the slightest suspicion on 
 their part would destroy the value of the experi- 
 ment. It seems desirable even that the writing of 
 the protocol should still be done in a state of be- 
 lief. There was, for instance, two years ago in 
 Gottingen a meeting of a scientific association, 
 made up of jurists, psychologists, and physicians, 
 all, therefore, men well trained in careful observa- 
 tion. Somewhere in the same street there was that 
 evening a public festivity of the carnival. Sud- 
 denly, in the midst of the scholarly meeting, the 
 doors open, a clown in highly coloured costume 
 rushes in in mad excitement, and a negro with a 
 [51] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 revolver in hand follows him. In the middle of the 
 hall first the one, then the other, shouts wild 
 phrases ; then the one falls to the ground, the other 
 jumps on him; then a shot, and suddenly both 
 are out of the room. The whole affair took less 
 than twenty seconds. All were completely taken 
 by surprise, and no one, with the exception of the 
 President, had the slighest idea that every word 
 and action had been rehearsed beforehand, or 
 that photographs had been taken of the scene. 
 It seemed most natural that the President should 
 beg the members to write down individually an 
 exact report, inasmuch as he felt sure that the 
 matter would come before the courts. Of the 
 forty reports handed in, there was only one whose 
 omissions were calculated as amounting to less 
 than twenty per cent, of the characteristic acts; 
 fourteen had twenty to forty per cent, of the 
 facts omitted; twelve omitted forty to fifty per 
 cent., and thirteen stUl more than fifty per cent. 
 But besides the omissions there were only six 
 among the forty which did not contain positively 
 wrong statements; in twenty-four papers up to 
 ten per cent, of the statements were free inven- 
 [52] 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 tions, and in ten answers — that is, in one-fourth 
 of the papers, — more than ten per cent, of 
 the statements were absolutely false, in spite of 
 the fact that they all came from scientifically 
 trained observers. Only four persons, for in- 
 stance, among forty noticed that the negro had 
 nothing on his head ; the others gave him a derby, 
 or a high hat, and so on. In addition to this, a 
 red suit, a brown one, a striped one, a coffee- 
 coloured jacket, shirt sleeves, and similar cos- 
 tumes were invented for him. He wore in reality 
 white trousers and a black jacket with a large red 
 necktie. The scientific commission which reported 
 the details of the inquiry came to the general 
 statement that the majority of the observers omit- 
 ted or falsified about half of the processes which 
 occurred completely in their field of vision. As was 
 to be expected, the judgment as to the time dura- 
 tion of the act varied between a few seconds and 
 several minutes. 
 
 It is not necessary to tell more of these dra- 
 matic experiments, which have recently become 
 the fashion and almost a sport, and which will still 
 have to be continued with a great variety of con- 
 [53 1 
 
ON T.HE WITNESS STAND 
 ditions if the psychological laws involved are 
 really to be cleared up. There are many points, 
 for instance, in which the results seem stiU contra- 
 dictory. In some cases it was shown that the mis- 
 takes made after a week were hardly more frequent 
 than those made after a day. Other experiments 
 seemed to indicate that the number of mistakes 
 steadily increases with the length of time which 
 has elapsed. Again, some experiments suggest 
 that the memory of the two sexes is not essentially 
 diiferent, while the majority of the tests seems to 
 speak for very considerable difference. Experi- 
 ments with school children, especially, seem to 
 show that the girls have a better memory than the 
 boys as far as omissions are concerned; they for- 
 get less. But they have a worse memory than the 
 boys as far as correctness is concerned ; they unin- 
 tentionally falsify more. 
 
 We may consider here still another point which 
 is more directly connected with our purpose, A 
 well-known psychologist showed three pictures, 
 rich in detail, but well adapted to the interest of 
 children, to a large number of boys and girls. 
 They looked at each picture for fifteen seconds 
 [54] 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 and then wrote a full report of everything they 
 could remember. After that they were asked to 
 underline those parts of their reports of which 
 they felt so absolutely certain that they would be 
 ready to take an oath before court on the under- 
 lined words. The young people put forth their 
 best efforts, and yet the results showed that there 
 were almost as many mistakes in the underlined 
 sentences as in the rest. This experiment has been 
 often repeated and the results make clear that 
 this happens in a smaller and yet still surprising 
 degree in the case of adults also. The grown-up 
 students of my laboratory commit this kind of 
 perjury all the time. 
 
 Subtler experiments which were carried on in 
 my laboratory for a long time showed that this 
 subjective feeling of certainty can not only ob- 
 tain in different degrees, but has, with different 
 individuals, quite different mental structure and 
 meaning. We found that there were, above all, 
 two distinct classes. For one of those types cer- 
 tainty in the recollection of an experience would 
 rest very largely upon the vividness of the image. 
 For the other type it would depend upon the 
 [55] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 congruity of an image with other previously ac- 
 cepted images ; that is, on the absence of conflicts, 
 when the experience judged about is imagined as 
 part of a wide setting of past experiences. But 
 the most surprising result of those studies was 
 perhaps that the feeling of certainty stands in no 
 definite relation to the attention with which the 
 objects are observed. If we turn our attention 
 with strongest effort to certain parts of a complex 
 impression, we may yet feel in our recollection 
 more certain about those parts of which we 
 hardly took notice than about those to which we 
 devoted our attention. The correlations between 
 attention, recollection, and feeling of certainty 
 become the more complex the more we carefully 
 study them. Not only the self-made psychology of 
 the average juryman, but also the scanty psy- 
 chological statements which judge and attorney 
 find in the large compendiums on Evidence fall to 
 pieces if a careful examination approaches the 
 mental facts. 
 
 The sources of error begin, of course, before 
 the recollection sets in. The observation itself 
 may be defective and illusory ; wrong associations 
 [561 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 may make it imperfect; judgments may misinter- 
 pret the experiehce ; and suggestive influences may 
 falsify the data of the senses. Everyone knows 
 the almost unlimited individual differences in the 
 power of correct observation and judgment. 
 Everyone knows that there are persons who, under 
 favourable conditions, see what they are expected 
 to see. The prestidigitateurs, the fakirs, the spirit- 
 ualists could not play their tricks if they could 
 not rely on associations and suggestions, and it 
 would not be so diflScult to read proofs if we did 
 not usually see the letters which we expect. But 
 we can abstract here from the distortions which 
 enter into the perception itself; we have discussed 
 them before. The mistakes of recollection alone 
 are now the object of our inquiry and we may 
 throw light on them from still another side. 
 
 Many of us remember minutes in which we 
 passed through an experience with a distinct 
 land almost uncanny feeling of having passed 
 through it once before. The words which we 
 hear, the actions which we see, we remember ex- 
 actly that we experienced them a long time ago. 
 The case is rare with men, but with women ex- 
 [57] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 tremely frequent, and there are few women who 
 do not know the state. An idea is there distinctly 
 coupled with the feeling of remembrance and 
 recognition, and yet it is only an associated sensa- 
 tion, resulting from fatigue or excitement, and 
 without the slightest objective basis in the past. 
 The psychologist feels no difficulty in explaining 
 it, but it ought to stand as a great warning signal 
 before the minds of those who believe that the 
 feeling of certainty in -recollection secures objec- 
 tive truth. There is no" new principle involved, of 
 course, when the ideas which stream into con- 
 sciousness spring from one's own imagination in- 
 stead of being produced by the outer impressions 
 of our, surroundings. Any Imaginative thought 
 may slip into our consciousness and may carry 
 with It In the same way that curious feeling that 
 It is merely the repetition of something we hav6 
 experienced before. 
 
 A striking Illustration Is well known to those 
 who have ever taken the trouble to approach 
 the depressing literature of modem mysticism. 
 There we find an abundance of cases reported 
 which seem to prove that either prophetic for- 
 158] 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 tune tellers or inspired dreams have anticipated 
 the real future of a man's life with the subtlest de- 
 tails and with the most uncanny foresight. But as 
 soon as we examine these wonderful stories, we find 
 that the coincidences are surprising only in those 
 cases in which the dreams and the prophecies have 
 been written down after the realisation. When- 
 ever the visions were given to the protocol before- 
 hand, the percentage of true reaUsations remains 
 completely within the narrow limits of chance coin- 
 cidents and natural probability. In other words, 
 there cannot be any doubt that the reports of such 
 prophecies which are communicated after having 
 been realised are falsified. That does not reflect in 
 the least on the subjective veracity; our satisfied 
 client of the clever fortune teller would feel ready 
 to take oath to his illusions of memory; but illu- 
 sions they remain. He also, in most cases, feels 
 sure that he told the dream to the whole family 
 the next morning exactly as it happened; only 
 when it is possible to call the members of the fam- 
 ily to a scientific witness stand, does it become 
 evident that the essentials of the dream varied in 
 all directions from the real later occurrence. The 
 [59] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 real present occurrence completely transforms the 
 reminiscences of the past prophecy and every hap- 
 pening is apperceived with the illusory overtone of 
 having been foreseen. 
 
 We must always keep in mind that a content of 
 consciousness is in itself independent of its rela- 
 tion to the past and has thus in itself no mark 
 which can indicate whether it was experienced once 
 before or not. The feeling of belonging to our 
 past life may associate itself thus just as well with 
 a perfectly new idea of our imagination as with a 
 real reproduction of an earlier state of mind. As 
 a matter of course, the opposite can thus happen, 
 too ; that is, an earlier experience may come to our 
 memory stripped of every reference to the past, 
 standing before our mind like a completely new 
 product of imagination. To point again to an 
 apparently mysterious experience: the crystal 
 gazer feels in his half hypnotic state a free play 
 of inspired imagination, and yet in reality he ex- 
 periences only a stirring up of the deeper layers 
 of memory pictures. They rush to his mind with- 
 out any reference to their past origin, picturing a 
 timeless truth which Is surprisingly correct only 
 [60] 
 
THE MEMORY'OF THE WITNESS 
 because it is the result of a sharpened memory. 
 Yes, we fill the blanks of our perceptions con- 
 stantly with bits of reproduced memory material 
 and take those reproductions for immediate im- 
 pressions. In short, we never know from the ma- 
 terial itself whether we remember, perceive, or 
 imagine, and in the borderland regions there 
 must result plenty of confusion which cannot al- 
 ways remain without dangerous consequences in 
 the court-room. 
 
 Still another phenomenon is fairly familiar to 
 everyone, and only the courts have not yet dis- 
 covered it. There are different types of memory, 
 which in a very crude and superficial classification 
 might be grouped as visual, acoustical, and mo- 
 tor types. There are persons who can repro- 
 duce a landscape or a painting in full vivid col- 
 ours and with sharp outlines throughout the field, 
 while they would be unable to hear internally a 
 melody or the sound of a voice. There are others 
 with whom every tune can easily resound in recol- 
 lection and who can hardly read a letter of a 
 friend without hearing his voice in every word, 
 while they are utterly unable to awake an optical 
 [61] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 image. There are others again whose sensorial 
 reproduction is poor in both respects; they feel 
 intentions of movement, as of speaking, of writ- 
 ing, of acting, whenever they reconstruct past ex- 
 perience. In reality the number of types is much 
 larger. Scores of memory variations can be dis- 
 criminated. Let your friends describe how they 
 have before their minds yesterday's dinner table 
 and the conversation around it, and there will not 
 be two whose memory shows the same scheme and 
 method. Now we should not ask a short-sighted 
 man for the slight visual details of a far distant 
 scene, yet it cannot be safer to ask a man of the 
 acoustical memory type for strictly optical recol- 
 lections. No one on the witness stand is to-day 
 examined to ascertain in what directions his mem- 
 ory is probably trustworthy and reliable; he may 
 be asked what he has seen, what he has heard, 
 what he as spoken, how he has acted, and yet 
 even a most superficial test might show that the 
 mechanism of his memory would be excellent for 
 one of these four groups of questions and utterly 
 useless for the others, however solemnly he might 
 keep his oath. 
 
 [62] 
 
THE MEMORY OP THE WITNESS 
 The courts will have to learn, sooner or later, 
 that the individual differences of men can be tested 
 to-day by the methods of experimental psychology 
 far beyond anything which common sense and 
 social experience suggest. Modern law welcomes, 
 for instance, for identification of criminals all the 
 discoveries of anatomists and physiologists as to 
 the individual differences; even the different play 
 of lines in the thumb is carefully registered in 
 wax. But no one asks for the striking differences 
 as to those mental details which the psychological 
 experiments on memory and attention, on feeling 
 and imagination, on perception and discrimina- 
 tion, on judgment and suggestion, on emotion and 
 volition, have brought out In the last decade. 
 Other sciences are less slow to learn. It has been 
 found, for instance, that the psychological speech 
 impulse has for every individual a special char- 
 acter as to intonation and melody. At once the 
 philologists came and made the most brillistnt use 
 of this psychological discovery. They have taken, 
 for instance, whole epic texts and examined those 
 lines as to which it was doubtful whether they be- 
 longed originally to the poem or were later in- 
 [63] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 terpolations. Wherever the speech intonation 
 agreed with that of the whole song, they acknowl- 
 edged the authentic origin, and where it did not 
 agree they recognised an interpolation of the 
 text. Yet the lawyers might learn endlessly more 
 from the psychologists about individual differ- 
 ences than the philologians have done. They must 
 only understand that the working of the mental 
 mechanism in a personality depends on the con- 
 stant cooperation of simple and elementary func- 
 tions which the modern laboratory experiment can 
 isolate and test. If those simplest elements are 
 imderstood, their complex combination becomes 
 necessary; just as the whole of a geometrical 
 curve becomes necessary as soon as its analytical 
 formula is understood for the smallest part. 
 
 But the psychological assistance ought not to 
 be confined to the discrimination of memory types 
 and other individual differences. The experimen- 
 talist cannot forget how abundant are the new 
 facts of memory variations which have come oUt 
 of experiments on attention and inhibition. We 
 know and can test with the subtlest means the 
 waves of fluctuating attention through which 
 [64] 
 
THE MEMORY OP THE WITNESS 
 ideas become reinforced and weakened. We know, 
 above all, the inhibitory influences which result 
 from excitements and emotions which ^may com- 
 pletely change the products of an otherwise faith- 
 ful memory. 
 
 A concrete illustration may indicate the method 
 of the experimenters. The judge has to make up 
 his mind as soon as there is any doubt on which 
 side the evidence on an issue of fact preponder- 
 ates. If it can be presupposed that both sides in- 
 tend to speak the truth he is ready to consider 
 that the one side had, perhaps, a more frequent 
 opportunity to watch the facts in question, the 
 other side, perhaps, saw them more recently ; the 
 one saw them, perhaps, under especially impress- 
 ive circumstances, the other, perhaps, with fur- 
 ther knowledge of the whole situation, and so on. 
 Of course, his buckram-bound volumes of old de- 
 cisions guide him, but those decisions report 
 again only that the one or the other judge, rely- 
 ing on his common-sense, thought recency more 
 weighty than frequency, or frequency more im- 
 portant than impressiveness, or perhaps the op- 
 posite. It is the same way in which common- 
 [65] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 sense tells a man what kind of diet is most nour- 
 ishing. Yet what responsible physician would 
 ignore the painstaking experiments of the phys- 
 iological laboratory, determining exactly the 
 quantitative results as to the nourishing value 
 of eggs or milk or meat or bread? The judges 
 ignore the fact that with the same accuracy 
 their common-sense can be transformed into care- 
 ful measurements the results of which may widely 
 differ from haphazard opinion. The psycholo- 
 gist, of course, has to reduce the complex facts 
 to simple principles and elements. An investiga- 
 tion, devoted to this problem of the relative ef- 
 fectiveness of recency, frequency, and vividness 
 was carried on in my psychological laboratory. 
 Here we used simple pairs of coloured papers and 
 printed figures, or colours and words, or words 
 and figures, or colours and forms, and so on. A 
 series of ten such pairs may be exposed success- 
 ively in a lighted field, each time one colour and 
 one figure of two digits. But one pair, perhaps 
 the third, is repeated as the seventh, and thus im- 
 presses itself by its frequency; another pair, per- 
 haps the fifth, comes with impressive vividness, 
 166] 
 
THE MEMORY OF THE WITNESS 
 from the fact that instead of two digits, sud- 
 denly three are used. The last pair has, of course, 
 the advantage in that it sticks to the mind from 
 its position at the end ; it remains the most recent, 
 which is not inhibited by any following pair. 
 After a pause the colours are shown again and 
 every one of the subjects has to write down the 
 figures together with which he believes himself to 
 have seen the particular colours. Is the vivid 
 pair, or the frequently repeated pair, or the re- 
 cent pair better remembered.'' Of course, the ex- 
 periment was made under most different conditions, 
 with different pauses, different material, different 
 length of the series, different influences, different 
 distribution, different subjects, but after some 
 years of work, facts showed themselves which 
 can stand as facts. The relative value of the 
 various conditions for exact recollection became 
 really measurable. They may and must be cor- 
 rected by further experiments, but they are raised 
 from the first above the level of the chance opinions 
 of the lawyer-psychologist. 
 
 All this remains entirely within the limits of the 
 normal healthy individuality. Nothing of aU that 
 [67] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 we have mentioned belongs to the domain of the 
 physician. Where the alienist has to speak, that 
 is, where pathological amnesia destroys the mem- 
 ory of the witness, or where hallucinations of 
 disease, or fixed ideas deprive the witness's remem- 
 brance of their value, there the psychologist is not 
 needed. It is in normal mental life and its border- 
 land regions that the progress of psychological 
 science cannot be further ignored. No railroad 
 or ship company would appoint to a responsible 
 post in its service men whose eyesight had not 
 been tested for colour blindness. There may be 
 only one among thirty or forty who cannot dis- 
 tinguish at a distance the red from the green 
 lantern. Yet if he slips into the service without 
 being tested, his slight defect, which does not dis- 
 turb him in practical life and which he may never 
 have noticed if he was not just picking red straw- 
 berries among green leaves, may be sufficient to 
 bring about the most disastrous wrecking of two 
 trains or the most horrible collision of steamers. 
 In the life of justice trains are wrecked and ships 
 are colliding too often, simply because the law 
 does not care to examine the mental colour blind- 
 [68] 
 
THE MEMORY OP THE WITNESS 
 ness of the witness's memory. And yet we have 
 not even touched one factor which, more than any- 
 thing else, devastates memory and plays havoc 
 with our best intended recollections: that is, the 
 power of suggestion. 
 
 [69] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 
 As old as the. history of crime is the history of 
 cruelties exercised, in the service of justice, for 
 the discovery of criminal facts. Man has the 
 power to hide his knowledge and his memories by 
 silence and by lies, and the infliction of physical 
 and mental pain has always seemed the quickest 
 way to untie the tongue and to force the confes- 
 sion of truth. Through thousands of years, in 
 every land on the globe, accomplices have been 
 named, crimes have been acknowledged, secrets 
 have been given up, under threats and tortures 
 which overwhelmed the will to resist. The imag- 
 ination of the Orient invented more dastardly tor- 
 tures than that of the Occident ; the mediaeval In- 
 quisition brought the system to perhaps fuller 
 perfection than later centuries; and to-day the 
 fortresses of Russia are said to witness tortures 
 which would be impossible in non-Slavic lands. 
 And, although the forms have changed, can there 
 be any doubt that even in the United States bru- 
 [73] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 tality is still a favourite method of undermining 
 the mental resistance of the accused? There are 
 no longer any thumb-screws, but the lower orders 
 of the police have still uncounted means to make 
 the prisoner's life uncomfortable and perhaps in- 
 tolerable, and to break down his energy. A rat 
 put secretly into a woman's cell may exhaust her 
 nervous system and her inner strength till she 
 is unable to stick to her story. The dazzling light 
 and the cold-water hose and the secret blow seem 
 still to serve, even if nine-tenths of the newspaper 
 stories of the " third degree " are exaggerated. 
 Worst of all are the brutal shocks given with 
 fiendish cruelty to the terrified imagination of the 
 suspect. 
 
 Decent public opinion stands firmly against 
 such barbarism ; and this opposition springs not 
 only from sentimental horror and from aesthetic 
 disgust: stronger, perhaps, than either of these 
 is the instinctive conviction that the method is 
 ineffective in bringing out the real truth. At all 
 times, innocent men have been accused by the tor- 
 tured ones, crimes which were never committed 
 have been confessed, infamous lies have been in- 
 [74] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 vented, to satisfy the demands of the torturers. 
 Under pain and fear a man may make any ad- 
 mission which will relieve his suffering, and, still 
 more misleading, his mind may lose the power to 
 discriminate between illusion and real memory. 
 Enlightened juries have begun to understand how 
 the ends of justice are frustrated by such methods. 
 Only recently an American jury, according to the 
 newspapers, acquitted a suspect who, after a pre- 
 vious denial, confessed with full detail to having 
 murdered a girl whose slain body had been found. 
 The detectives had taken the shabby young man 
 to the undertaking-rooms, led him to the side of 
 the coffin, suddenly whipped back the sheet, ex- 
 posing the white bruised face, and abruptly de- 
 manded, " When did you see her? " He sank on 
 his knees and put his hands over his face; but 
 they dragged him to his feet and ordered him to 
 place his right hand on the forehead of the body. 
 Shuddering, he obeyed, and the next moment 
 again collapsed. The detectives pulled him again 
 to his feet, and fired at him question after ques- 
 tion, forcing him to stroke the girl's hair and 
 cheeks; and, evidently without control of his 
 [75] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 mind, he affirmed all that his torturers asked, and, 
 in his half -demented state, even added details to 
 his untrue story. 
 
 The clean conscience of a modern nation re- 
 jects every such brutal scheme in the search of 
 truth, and yet is painfully aware that the ac- 
 credited means for unveiling the facts are too 
 often insufficient. The more complex the ma- 
 chinery of our social Ufe, the easier it seems to 
 cover the traces of crime and to hide the outrage 
 by lies and deception. Under these circumstances, 
 it is surprising and seems unjustifiable that law- 
 yers and laymen alike should not have given any 
 attention, so far, to the methods of measurement 
 of association which experimental psychology has 
 developed in recent years. Of course, the same 
 holds true of many other methods of the psycho- 
 logical laboratory — ^methods in the study of 
 memory and attention, feeling and will, percep- 
 tion and judgment, suggestion and emotion. In 
 every one of these fields the psychological experi- 
 ment could be made helpful to the purposes of 
 court and law. But it is the study and measure- 
 ment of associations which have particular value 
 [76] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 in those realms where the barbarisms of the third 
 degree were formerly in use. The chronoscope of 
 the modern psychologist has become, and will be- 
 come more and more, for the student of crime 
 what the microscope is for the student of disease. 
 It makes visible that which remains otherwise in- 
 visible, and shows minute facts which allow a clear 
 diagnosis. The physician needs his magnifier to 
 find out whether there are tubercles in the sputum : 
 the legal psychologist may in the future use his 
 mental microscope to make sure whether there are 
 lies in the mind of the suspect. 
 
 The study of the association of ideas has at- 
 tracted the students of the human mind since the 
 day of Aristotle ; but only in the last century have 
 we come to inquire systematically into the laws 
 and causes of these mental connections. Of course, 
 every one knows that our memory ideas link them- 
 selves with our impressions — that a face reminds 
 us of a name, or a name of a face ; that one word 
 calls another to mind ; that even smell or taste may 
 wake in us manifold associations. But out of such 
 commonplaces grew a whole systematic science, 
 and the school of associationists began to explain 
 [771 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 our entire mental life as essentially the interplay 
 of such associations. There are the outer associa- 
 tions of time and place, where one thing reminds 
 us of another together with which we experienced 
 it. There are inner associations, where one thing 
 awakens in our minds something else which has 
 similarity to it, or to which it is related as a part 
 to the whole or the whole to a part, and so on. 
 The word " dog " may call up in my mind, per- 
 haps, the memory-picture of a particular dog, or 
 the name of that dog, or the idea of a house in 
 which I saw it; or it may bring up the super- 
 ordinated idea, " animal," or the subordinated, 
 " terrier," or the coordinated, " cat," or the part, 
 " tail " ; or perhaps it may suggest to me the 
 German translation for dog, or a painting with 
 dogs in it: there are no end of possibilities. But 
 the psychologists were not satisfied with grouping 
 the various cases; their chief aim was to deter- 
 mine the conditions under which they arise, the 
 influence which the frequency or the recency or 
 the vividness or the combination of special experi- 
 ences has on the choice of the resulting idea. 
 In the last few decades, then, has arisen the new 
 [78] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 science, experimental psychology, which, like 
 physics and chemistry, has its own workshops, 
 wherein mental facts are brought under experi- 
 mental test in the same way as in the natural 
 sciences. With the application of experimental 
 methods, the study of association took at once a 
 new turn. In the laboratory we are not confined 
 to the chance material which daily life offers; we 
 can prepare and control the situation. For in- 
 stance, I may use a list of one hundred substan- 
 tives, and read one after the other to my subject, 
 and ask him to give me the first word which enters 
 his mind. I receive thus one hundred associations 
 which are independent of any intentional selection, 
 showing just the paths of least resistance in the 
 mind of my man. I may use them, for instance, to 
 make statistics as to their character: if the outer 
 associations prevail, I have a type of mind before 
 me other than in the case of a preponderance of 
 inner associations ; if the superordinations prevail, 
 I have an mteUect other than if the subordinations 
 were in the majority. Or I may study the influ- 
 ences of preceding impressions. Perhaps I read to 
 my man a story or showed him some pictures 
 [791 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 before I gave him the one hundred words for 
 association; the effect of that recent experience 
 will show itself at once. In this way the variations 
 are endless. 
 
 But one aspect dominates in importance: I can 
 measure the time of this connection of ideas. Sup- 
 pose that both my subject and I have little elec- 
 trical instruments between the lips, which, by the 
 least movement of speaking, make or break an 
 electric current passing through an electric clock- 
 work whose index moves around a dial ten times - 
 in every second. One revolution of the index thus 
 means the tenth part of a second, and, as the 
 whole dial is divided into one hundred parts, 
 every division indicates the thousandth part of a 
 second. My index stands quietly till I move my 
 lips to make, for instance, the word " dog." In 
 that moment the electric current causes the poin- 
 ter to revolve. My subject, as soon as he hears 
 the word, is to speak out as quickly as possible 
 the first association which comes to his mind. He 
 perhaps shouts " cat," and the movement of his 
 lips breaks the current, stops the pointer, and 
 thus allows me to read from the clockwork in 
 [80] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 thousandth parts of a second the time which 
 passed between my speaking the word and his 
 naming the association. Of course, this time in- 
 cludes not only the time for the process of asso- 
 ciation, but also the time for the hearing of the 
 word, for the understanding, for the impulse of 
 speaking, and so on. But all these smaller periods 
 I can easily determine. I may find out how long 
 it takes if my subject does not associate anything, 
 but simply repeats the word I give him. If the 
 mere repetition of the word " dog " takes him 
 825 thousandths of a second, while the bringing 
 up of the word " cat " took 975 thousandths, I 
 conclude that the difference of 650 thousandths 
 was necessary for the process of associating 
 " cat " and " dog." 
 
 In this way, during the last twenty years, there 
 has developed an exact and subtle study of mental 
 associations, and through such very careful ob- 
 servation of the time-differences between associa- 
 tions a deep insight has been won into the whole 
 mental mechanism. The slightest changes of our 
 psychical connections can be discovered and 
 traced by these slight variations of time, which 
 [81] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 are, of course, entirely unnoticeable so long as no 
 exact measurements are introduced. The last few 
 years have finally brought the latest step : the the- 
 oretical studies have been made useful to practical 
 life. Like many other branches of experimental 
 psychology, the doctrine of association has be- 
 come adjusted to the practical problems of educa- 
 tion, of medicine, of art, of commerce, and of law. 
 It is the last which chiefly concerns us here — a 
 kind of investigation which began in Germany and 
 has since been developed here and abroad. 
 
 For instance, our purpose may be to find out 
 whether a suspected person has really participated 
 in a certain crime. He declares that he is innocent, 
 that he was not present when the outrage oc- 
 curred, and that he is not even familiar with the 
 locality. An innocent man will not object to our 
 proposing a series of one hundred associations to 
 demonstrate his innocence. A guilty man, of 
 course, will not object, either, as a declination 
 would indicate a fear of betraying himself; he 
 cannot refuse, and yet affirm his innocence. 
 Moreover, he will feel sure that no questions can 
 bring out any facts which he wants to keep hidden 
 [82 J 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 in his soul; he will be on the lookout. As long as 
 nothing more is demanded than that he speak the 
 first word which comes to his mind, when another 
 word is spoken to him, there is indeed no legal 
 and no practical reason for declining, as long as 
 innocence is professed. Such an experiment will 
 at once become interesting in three different direc- 
 tions as soon as we mix into our list of one hun- 
 dred words a number, perhaps thirty, which stand 
 in more or less close connection to the crime in 
 question — ^words which refer to the details of the 
 locality, or to the persons present at the crime, or 
 to the probable motive, or to the professed alibi, 
 and so on. The first direction of our Interest is 
 toward the choice of the associations. Of course, 
 every one believes that he would be sure to admit 
 only harmless words to his lips ; but the conditions 
 of the experiment quickly destroy that feeling of 
 safety. As soon as a dangerous association rushes 
 to the consciousness, it tries to push its way out. 
 It may, indeed, need some skill to discover the 
 psychical influence, as the suspected person may 
 have self-control enough not to give away the 
 dangerous idea directly; but the suppressed idea 
 [83] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 remains in consciousness, and taints the next asso- 
 ciation, or perhaps the next but one, without his 
 knowledge. 
 
 He has, perhaps, slain a woman in her room, 
 and yet protests that he has never been in her 
 house. By the side of her body was a cage with a 
 canary-bird. I therefore mix into my list of words 
 also " bird." His mind is full of the gruesome 
 memory of his heinous deed. The word " bird," 
 therefore, at once awakens the association 
 " canary-bird " in his consciousness ; yet he is 
 immediately aware that this would be suspicious, 
 and he succeeds, before the dangerous word comes 
 to his lips, in substituting the harmless word 
 " sparrow." Yet my next word, or perhaps my 
 second or third next, is " colour," and his prompt 
 association is " yellow " : the canary-bird is still 
 in his mind, and shows its betraying influence. 
 The preparaton of the list of words to be called 
 thus needs psychological judgment and insight if 
 a man with quick self-control is to be trapped. In 
 most cases, however, there is hardly any need of 
 relying on the next and following words, as the 
 primary associations for the critical words un- 
 [84] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 veil themselves for important evidence directly 
 enough- 
 Yet not only the first associations are interest- 
 ing. There is interest in another direction in the 
 associations which result from a second and a 
 third repetition of the series. Perhaps after half 
 an hour, I go once more through the whole list. 
 The subject gives once more his hundred replies. 
 An analysis of the results will show that most of 
 the words which he now gives are the same which 
 he gave the first time ; pronouncing the words has 
 merely accentuated his tendency to associate them 
 in. the same connection as before. If it was 
 " house " — " window " first, then it wDl probably 
 be " house " — " window " again. But a number of 
 associations have been changed, and a careful 
 analysis will show that these are first of all the 
 suspicious ones. Those words which by their con- 
 nection with the crime stir up deep emotional com- 
 plexes of Ideas will throw ever new associations 
 into consciousness, while the indifferent ones will 
 link themselves in a superficial way without 
 change. To a certain degree, this variation of the 
 dangerous associations is reinforced by the inten- 
 [85] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 tional effort of the suspected. He does not feel 
 satisfied with his first words, and hopes that other 
 words may better hide his real thoughts, not know- 
 ing that just this change is to betray him. 
 
 But most important is the third direction of 
 inquiry: more characteristic than the choice and 
 the constancy of the associations is their involun- 
 tary retardation by emotional Influence. A word 
 which stirs emotional memories will show an asso- 
 ciation-time twice or three times as long as a 
 commonplace Idea. It may be said at once that It 
 Is not ordinarily necessary, even for legal pur- 
 poses, that the described measurement be In thou- 
 sandths of a second ; the differences of time which 
 betray a bad conscience or a guilty knowledge of 
 certain facts are large enough to be easily meas- 
 ured In hundredths or even in tenths of a second ; 
 though measurements for the theoretical purposes 
 of psychology require, indeed, a division of the 
 second Into a thousand parts. In the following 
 legal division I shall, therefore, refer to differ- 
 ences In tenths of a second only. 
 
 The absolute time of associations is, of course, 
 quite different for different persons; to link 
 [86] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 familiar ideas like " chair "— " table " or " black " 
 — " white " may take for the slow type more than 
 a full second, while the alert mind may not need 
 more than half a second. Thus we begin by finding 
 the average for each individual, and all our inter- 
 est goes into the deviations from this average. 
 That a certain association should take one and a 
 half seconds would be a very suspicious retarda- 
 tion for the quick mind which normally associates 
 in three quarters, while it would be quite normal 
 for the slow thinker. And here, again, it may be 
 mentioned that the retardation is not always con- 
 fined to the dangerous association alone, but often 
 comes in a still more pregnant way in the follow- 
 ing or the next following association, which on 
 the surface looks entirely harmless. The emotional 
 shock has perturbed the working of the mechan- 
 ism, and the path for all associations is blocked. 
 The analysis of these secondary time-retardations 
 is the factor which demands the greatest psycho- 
 logical skill. A few illustrations from practical 
 life may make the whole method clearer. 
 
 An educated young man of eighteen lived in the 
 house of an uncle. The old gentleman went to con- 
 [87] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 suit a nerve specialist in regard to some slight 
 nervous trouble of the younger friend. On that 
 occasion he confided his recent suspicion that the 
 young man might be a thief. Money had repeat- 
 edly been taken from a drawer and from a trunk ; 
 until lately he had had suspicions only of the 
 servants ; he had notified the police, and detectives 
 had watched them. He was most anxious to find 
 out whether his new suspicion was true, as he 
 wanted, in that case, to keep the matter out of 
 court, in the interest of the family. The physi- 
 cian, Dr. Jung, in Zurich, arranged that the young 
 man come for an examination of his nerves. He 
 then proposed to him a list of a hundred associa- 
 tions as part of the medical inspection. The 
 physician said " head," the patient associated 
 "nose"; then " green "—" blue," "water"— 
 « air," " long " — " short," « five " — " six," 
 " wool " — " cloth," and so on, the average time 
 of these commonplace connections being 1.6 sec- 
 onds. But there were thirty-seven dangerous 
 words scattered among the hundred — words that 
 had to do with the things in the room from which 
 the money was abstracted, or with the theft and 
 [88] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 its punishment, or with some possible motives. 
 There appeared, for instance, the word " thief." 
 The association " burglar " seemed quite natural, 
 but it took the boy suddenly 4.6 seconds to reach 
 it. In the same way " police " — " theft " took 3.6 
 seconds, " jail " — " penitentiary " 4.2 seconds. In 
 other cases the dangerous word itself came with 
 normal automatic quickness, but the emotional dis- 
 turbance became evident in the retardation of the 
 next word. For instance, " key " — " false key " 
 took only 1.6 seconds, but the following trivial 
 association " stupid " — " clever " grew to 3.0 sec- 
 onds. " Crime " — " theft " came again promptly 
 in 1.8, but the inner shock was so strong that the 
 commonplace word " cook " was entirely inhibited 
 and did not produce an association at all in 20 
 seconds. In the same way " bread '" — ^" water " 
 rushed forward in 1.6 seconds, but this charac- 
 teristic choice, the supposed diet of the jail, 
 stopped the associative mechanism again for the 
 following trivial word. It would lead too far to go 
 further into the analysis of the case, but it may 
 be added that a repetition of the same series 
 showed the characteristic variations in the region 
 [89] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 of the suspicious words. While " crime " had 
 brought " theft " the first time, it was the second 
 time replaced by " murder " ; " discover " brought 
 the first time " wrong," the second time " grasp." 
 In the harmless words there was hardly any 
 change at all. But, finally, a subtle analysis of the 
 selection of words and of the retardations pointed 
 to sufficient details to make a clear diagnosis. The 
 physician told the young man that he had stolen; 
 the boy protested vehemently. Then the physi- 
 cian gave him the subtle points unveiled by the 
 associations — ^how he had bought a watch with 
 the money and had given presents to his sister; 
 and the boy confessed everything, and was saved 
 from jail by the early discovery. The brutalities 
 of the third degree would hardly have yielded 
 such a complete result, nor the technicalities of 
 legal evidence, either. 
 
 Of course, this case is that of a highly sensitive 
 mind with the strong feelings of a bad conscience. 
 A professional tough criminal would not show 
 such intense emotions, and hence not such iong 
 retardations, if he were as unsuspicious and un- 
 aware of the purposes of the experiment as that 
 [90] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 boy was. But what would be the situation of such 
 a trained criminal who had no conscience and who 
 knew beforehand that the experiment was to 
 determine whether or not he lied or spoke the 
 truth? 
 
 In that case, another group of facts is to be 
 considered. We might expect from such a subject 
 very little lengthening of the simple association- 
 time by emotion, but instead of it a considerable 
 lengthening by conscious effort to avoid suspicious 
 and dangerous associations, provided that he were 
 anxious to hide the damaging truth. As soon as a 
 critical word were offered, he would be on the look- 
 out not to betray the first word which came over 
 the threshold of consciousness, but to make sure 
 first that it was harmless, and to replace it if it 
 were dangerous. Experiment shows that such 
 watching and conscious sanctioning takes time, 
 and the replacing of the unfit word by a fitting 
 word brings still larger loss of time; nobody is 
 able to look out for the harmlessness of his asso- 
 ciations and yet to associate them with the average 
 quickness with which the commonplace ideas are 
 brought forth. If the dangerous words show 
 [91J 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 association-times of unusual shortness, it is neces- 
 sary to suppose that the subject of the experiment 
 makes no effort to suppress the truth; the short 
 time proves that he lets the ideas go as they will, 
 without his sifting, sanctioning, and retouching. 
 Even the best bluffer will thus be trapped in his 
 effort to conceal anything, by time-differences 
 which he himself cannot notice. 
 
 As an illustration of a case of such a type, I 
 may speak of experiments that I carried on re- 
 cently for several days in a Western penitentiary 
 with a self-confessed multi-murderer. He played 
 the star witness in a trial against a man whom his 
 confession accused as an accomplice. It made 
 hardly a difference whether the view of the prose- 
 cution or the view of the defence was taken: seen 
 from any side, the witness offered a psychological 
 problem of unusual interest. And its importance 
 did not decrease when it was found out, through 
 the verdict of the jury, that the defendant was 
 innocent and had no connection with the crimes 
 of the witness. No side doubted at any time that 
 ,this was one of the most persistent murderers of 
 modem time, and no side could deny that he was, 
 [92] 
 
THE DETECTION OP CRIME 
 during the trial, an imperturbable witness with 
 the mildest manners, with quiet serenity, and with 
 the appearance of a man who has found his peace 
 in God. 
 
 The first problem for the psychologist was 
 whether the confession of the witness was a chain 
 of conscious lies or whether he himself reaUy be- 
 lieved what he told the court. No outer evidence 
 was fit to settle this question of his mental attitude, 
 and It seemed thus interesting to study whether It 
 might be possible to decide It by the association 
 method. 
 
 I had the good chance to see the murderer at 
 once on the witness stand. As my seat was at the 
 small table of the attorneys for the prosecution, I 
 had him only a few feet from me for careful ob- 
 servation. I cannot deny that my Impression on 
 that first morning was very unfavourable. His 
 profile, especially the jaw, appeared to me most 
 brutal and vulgar ; I also saw at once the deforma- 
 tion of the ear, the Irregularity in the movements 
 of the eyes, and the abnormal lower lip. That this 
 was the profile of a murderer seemed to me not 
 Improbable, but that this man had become a sin- 
 [93] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 cere religious convert seemed to me quite incredi- 
 ble. Yet, I did not consult my antipathies ; I had 
 to rely on my experiments, which I started the 
 following day. This is, of course, not the place 
 to set down a scientific report of the nearly one 
 hundred groups of tests and experiments which 
 were completed ; they belong in scholarly archives. 
 Most of them referred to the memory, the atten- 
 tion, the feelings, the will, the judgment, and the 
 suggestibility. Our interest here belongs only to 
 the association experiments and to some related 
 tests. Thus the report here covers only a small 
 section of the case, and ignores entirely every- 
 thing which does not refer to the subjective 
 veracity. 
 
 I told the witness directly that I had come to 
 examine his mind and find out what was really at 
 the bottom of his heart. He at once declared him- 
 self perfectly ready to undergo any test. If he 
 thought that he, the experienced poker-player, 
 could easily hide' his inmost mind and could deceive 
 me with cant and lies, I turned the tables on him 
 quickly. I began with some simple psychological 
 tricks with which every student of psychology is 
 [94] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 familiar, but which were naturally unknown and 
 somewhat uncanny to the witness. For instance, I 
 covered one of his eyes and asked him to fixate 
 with the other eye a little cross on the table, and 
 to watch at the same time a cent piece which I 
 moved at the side of the cross. Suddenly I told 
 him that he would not see the cent any more — 
 indeed, it had disappeared; and as he did not 
 know that we all have a blind spot at the entrance- 
 place of the optical nerve in the retina, he was 
 much struck by my foreknowledge of such a defect 
 in his eye. Or, I showed him the drawing of a stair 
 which he saw as such; observing his eye move- 
 ments, I told him that he now did not see the stair 
 any more, but an overhanging wall, and again he 
 was astonished at my knowing everything in his 
 soul. In a similar way, I used some tactual illu- 
 sions, and soon he was entirely imder the spell 
 of the belief that I had some special scientific 
 powers. 
 
 Then I began with a real experiment. I told him 
 
 that I should call at first fifty words, and each 
 
 time, when he heard a word, he was to name to 
 
 me as quickly as possible the first thing which 
 
 [95] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 came to his mind on the hearing of the word. I 
 asked him not to choose the words intentionally, 
 but to let them go without any reflection ; I added 
 that I should learn all from the ideas which he 
 would bring up. My first word was " river," he 
 associated " water " ; then " ox," he said " yoke " ; 
 " mountain," he said " hill " ; " tobacco," he said 
 " pipe." All the interest thus seemed to belong to 
 the choice of the words, and he saw that I wrote 
 his answers down. But the fact is that I did some- 
 thing else also; I measured in fractions of a sec- 
 ond the time between my calling the word and his 
 giving a reply. Between his hearing of the word 
 " river " and his speaking the word " water," 
 eight-tenths of a second passed ; between " ox " — 
 " yoke," six-tenths ; between " tobacco " — " pipe," 
 eight-tenths. On the whole, seven to eight-tenths 
 of a second was the very short standard time for 
 those associations which represented familiar 
 ideas. 
 
 Now, there were mixed in among the fifty words 
 
 many which had direct relation to his criminal 
 
 career and to his professed religious conversion — 
 
 for instance, the words confession, revolver, re- 
 
 196] 
 
THE DETECTION OP CRIME 
 ligion, heaven, jury, death, Bible, pardon, rail- 
 road, blood, jail, prayer, and some names of his 
 victims and of his alleged accomplices. Let us not 
 forget that he was fully under the belief that I 
 had a special power to discover from his spoken 
 words the real tendencies of his miad. If he had 
 had anything to hide, he would have been con- 
 stantly on the lookout that no treacherous word 
 should slip in. If a word like " confession " or 
 something similar were called among harmless 
 ones, he would never shout at once the first word 
 which came to his mind, but would have watched 
 that no dangerous secret, perhaps " confession " 
 — "humbug," came out and betrayed him. He 
 would have quickly suppressed the word before it 
 was spoken — and yet, however quickly he might 
 have done it, it would have taken at least one or 
 two seconds more; and he would have used the 
 longer time the more freely, as he had no reason 
 to suspect that time played any part in the experi- 
 ment. 
 
 But the results show the very remarkable fact 
 that the dangerous words brought, on the whole, 
 no retardation of the associative process. After 
 [97] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 " tobacco " — " pipe " came with the same prompt- 
 ness " confession " — " truth," again in eight- 
 tenths of a second, a time entirely insufficient for 
 any inner deliberation or sanction or choice or 
 correction: it is a time which just allows the 
 speaking of the first idea which arises in the mind. 
 " Heaven " — " God " took, again, less than a sec- 
 ond, and so " religion "—« truth," "blood"— 
 " knife," " governor " — " executive," " witness " 
 —"stand," "minister" — "pulpit," "mine- 
 owner " — •" mine " ; only " pardon " — ■" peace," 
 " death " — " end," and similar more abstract 
 words took about one and a half seconds, a time 
 which is stiU too short for real inhibition and 
 second thought. Even the names of his accom- 
 plices and of his victims awoke associations in 
 less than nine-tenths of a second. The fact that 
 these associations were produced by the witness in 
 the minimum time, which made deliberation im- 
 possible, while he was convinced that the words 
 would unveil his real mind, is strong evidence 
 indeed that this man did not want consciously to 
 hide anything, and that he himself really believed 
 his confession. 
 
 [98] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 If these experiments had been made with him 
 before his confession, he would have stumbled over 
 every third word, and many of his associations 
 would have taken three seconds or more. He would 
 have been unable, in spite of best efforts, to over- 
 come the fear of betraying himself, and this fear 
 would have retarded the associations in a way 
 which would have trapped him unmistakably. But 
 not only the short time, the choice of the associa- 
 tions also indicated clearly that, in an almost in- 
 credible manner, a mild, indifferent serenity had 
 taken hold of his mind, and that his criminal life 
 was of no concern to him any more. I gave him, 
 for instance, the name of a city in which, accord- 
 ing to his confession, he had been last to poison 
 a victim and to dynamite his house ; but in his mind 
 the place did not connect itself any more with 
 murder; in less than a second his mind joined it 
 with " ocean." 
 
 It is evident from the association-times that no 
 real emotion accompanied any of his memories of 
 crime. He did not have and did not simulate a bad 
 conscience. The emotional retardation of suspi- 
 cious associations, characteristic of the average 
 199] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 criminal, was, as expected, entirely lacking in this 
 wholesale murderer. That does not mean that he 
 lacks feeling ; my experiments showed the opposite. 
 To be sure, his sensitiveness for pain was, as with 
 most criminals, much below the average. A deep 
 pin-prick did not produce any reaction, and his 
 whole touch sense was obtuse, while his eyes and 
 ears were very sharp. But, in spite of this lack of 
 organic pain, — ^he has never been ill, — ^he is sensi- 
 tive to the immediate perception of suffering in 
 others. Simulation is excluded: I measured the in- 
 voluntary reactions. He really shivers at the 
 thought of hurting others. I have no reason for 
 doubting that he had this mental sensitiveness 
 always; and that is no contradiction to the fact 
 that he was spreading pain all around. Nearly all 
 his crimes were performed in an impersonal way; 
 he did not see the victims. He manufactured in- 
 fernal machines, laid dynamite in the mines and 
 bombs under gates, and thought of the suffering 
 of the victims as little as the manufacturer of 
 children's toys may think of the happiness of the 
 little ones. He assured me that in those fifteen 
 years of heinous deeds he never struck any one 
 [100] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 personally with his fist; that would have gone 
 against his nerves. He exhibited tender feeling in 
 all directions; he selected, for instance, very deli- 
 cate colour combinations as those which he liked 
 best among many which I showed him. His fa- 
 vourite colour seemed to be dark blue; any showy 
 or loud dressing is disagreeable to him. He asserts, 
 even, that he rarely drank any strong drinks : one 
 glass of beer made him sleepy. 
 
 Yet his emotional Ufe is simply dead — ^the small 
 figures of his association-times would otherwise be 
 quite impossible. And it may be added that even if 
 his religious conversion is genuine, his so-called 
 reUgion lacks also every sound and deep feeling; 
 it is thoroughly utilitarian ; he serves God because 
 he win reward him after death. 
 
 The association experiments thus completely 
 fxilfilled their purpose: they gave a definite reply 
 to a definite question which could hardly be an- 
 swered by other methods of evidence. The asso- 
 ciation experiments proved that the murderer did 
 not try to hide anything. Of course, this was only 
 the first problem to be solved in the case. From 
 this state of subjective truthfulness which inter- 
 [101 ] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 ests the psychologist to the proof of objective 
 truth which interests the court is still a very long 
 way. It would have been possible, for instance, 
 that all this was pseudo-religious auto-suggestion, 
 or that it was a systematic illusion brought forth 
 by the suggestions of detectives and lawyers, or 
 that the witness was hypnotised, or that his mind 
 was diseased. The experimental inquiry had to 
 study all those and other possibilities ; they formed 
 the chief part of my experiments, but they do not 
 belong here, as they have no relation to the method 
 of association-measurement, which was the only 
 concern of this discussion. 
 
 Of course, the theoretical importance of the 
 method is independent of the practical importance 
 of the cases in which it is applied. Multi-murderers 
 are rare ; but the simplest case of wrong-doing 
 may demonstrate the success of the method just 
 as well. No sharper contrast could be "possible 
 than that between the brutal criminal with his 
 dynamite bombs and the lovely little girl with her 
 chocolate bonbons whom I had seen a short time 
 before. She was anemic and neurasthenic, and 
 could not concentrate her attention on her work 
 [102] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 for her college examinations. She came to me for 
 psychological advice. I asked her many questions 
 as to her habits of life. Among other things, she 
 assured me that she took wholesome and plentiful 
 meals and was not allowed to buy sweets. Then 
 I began some psychological experiments, and, 
 among other tests, I started, at first rather aim- 
 lessly, with trivial associations. Her average asso- 
 ciation-time was slow, nearly 2 seconds. Very soon 
 the word " money " brought the answer " candy," 
 and it came with the quickness of 1.4 seconds. 
 There was nothing remarkable in this. But the 
 next word, " apron," harmless in itself, was 6 
 seconds in finding its association, and, further- 
 more, the association which resulted was " apron " 
 — " chocolate." Both the retardation and the in- 
 appropriateness of this indicated that the fore- 
 going pair had left an emotional shock, and the 
 choice of the word " chocolate " showed that the 
 disturbance resulted from the intrusion of the 
 word " candy." The word " apron " had evidently 
 no power at all compared with those associations 
 which were produced by the candy-emotion. 
 
 I took this as a clue, and after twenty indiffer- 
 [103] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 ent words which slowly restored her cabnness of 
 mind, I returned to the problem of sweets. Of 
 course, she was now warned, and was evidently on 
 the lookout. The result was that when I threw in 
 the word " candy " again, she needed 4.6 seconds, 
 and the outcome was the naive association 
 " never." This " never " was the first association 
 that was neither substantive nor adjective. All 
 the words before had evidently meant for her sim- 
 ply objects; but "candy" seemed to appeal to 
 her as a hint, a question, a reproach, which she 
 wanted to repudiate. She was clearly not aware 
 that this mental change from a descriptive to a 
 replying attitude was very suspicious; she must 
 even have felt quite satisfied with her reply, for 
 the next associations were short and to the point. 
 After a while I began on the same line again. The 
 unsuspicious word " box " brought quickly the 
 equally unsuspicious " white " ; and yet I knew at 
 once that it was a candy-box, for the next word, 
 " pound," brought the association " two," and the 
 following, " book," after several seconds the unfit 
 association " sweet." She was again not aware 
 that she had betrayed the path of her imagination. 
 [ 104] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 In the course of three hundred associations I 
 varied the subject repeatedly, and she remained 
 to the end unconscious that she had given me all 
 the information needed. Her surprise seemed still 
 greater than her feeling of shame when I told her 
 that she skipped her luncheons daily and had 
 hardly any regular meals, but consumed every day 
 several pounds of candy. With tears she made 
 finally a full " confession." She had kept her inju- 
 dicious diet a secret, as she had promised her 
 parents not to spend any money for chocolate. 
 The right diagnosis led me to make the right sug- 
 gestions, and after a few weeks her health and 
 strength were restored. 
 
 This trivial case with its foolish offence shows 
 how psychological detective work may also be use- 
 ful outside of the sphere of law. It not seldom 
 becomes the serious interest of the educator and 
 the physician to disentangle hidden thoughts, and 
 the " third degree " of the school and of the con- 
 sultation-room might easily be replaced^ by asso- 
 ciation experiments. On such a basis the nerve 
 specialist would frequently be able to make the 
 right and helpful diagnosis without the aid of any 
 [105 J 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 " confession " and without awakening in the pa- 
 tient the slighest suspicion that his physician had 
 discovered the real source of the trouble. Experi- 
 ments have convinced me that the method may 
 ' bring to light facts of which even the patient him- 
 self is ignorant. Ideas which are connected in his 
 deepest soul, but which he cannot bring up vol- 
 untarily by mere effort of memory, are sometimes 
 brought to expression by the mechanical devices 
 of this association method. It seems that as soon 
 as a number of associations have been produced 
 under pressure of the desire to associate as 
 quickly as possible, the mind enters into a state of 
 decreased inhibition, in which suppressed and for- 
 gotten ideas rush forward. 
 
 This fact must become the more important, the 
 more we learn, under the guidance of the Vienna 
 School, that one of the most troublesome nervous 
 diseases — ^namely, hysteria — results principally 
 from suppressed affective ideas, and can be cured 
 by awaking anew the restrained thought. Hysteria 
 is " strangulated emotion," and disappears when 
 the forgotten emotional ideas are brought to con- 
 scious expression. One hysteric woman always be- 
 [106] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 came mute after sunset; another could not take 
 any food but liquids ; another was constantly tor- 
 tured by the hallucination of the tobacco odour. 
 Every physician knows a hundred such hysteric 
 symptoms. No one of these patients knew the rea- 
 son or origin of her trouble. Slowly the physician 
 discovered the suppressed ideas, which had had no 
 chance to express themselves and had worked dis- 
 aster in their inhibited form. The woman who 
 could not speak at night had sat once at sunset 
 years before, at the bedside of her sick father ; she 
 had vehemently suppressed every sound in order 
 not to disturb him. As soon as this first scene was 
 brought back to her mind, she regained her voice. 
 The woman who could not take solid food had 
 been obliged, years before, to suppress her dis- 
 gust when eating at the same table with a man 
 who suffered from an ugly disease. As soon as 
 this starting-point was consciously associated 
 again, she was ready to dine like others. The wo- 
 man who smelled tobacco had long before heard by 
 chance, in a room full of smoke, that the man she 
 loved was in love with another, and she had had 
 to suppress her emotion on account of the pres- 
 [107] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 ence of others. As soon as she connected the smell 
 again in consciousness with that first strangulated 
 emotion, the hallucination disappeared. Hysteric 
 contractions and anaesthesias, pathological im- 
 pulses and inhibitions, can all be removed if the 
 long-forgotten emotional ideas with which the dis- 
 turbance started can be brought to light. Just 
 here the association method seems sometimes 
 helpful. The psychologist who seeks to discover 
 the secret connections of ideas may thus, by his as- 
 sociation method, not only protect the innocent 
 and unmask the guilty, but bring health and 
 strength to the nervous wreck. 
 
 Yet our chief interest belongs to the legal as- 
 pect of this method. Carried out with the skill 
 which only long laboratory training can give, it 
 has become, indeed, a magnifying-glass for the 
 most subtle mental mechanism, and by it the 
 secrets of the criminal mind may be unveiled. All 
 this has, of course, no legal standing to-day, and 
 there is probably no one who desires to increase 
 the number of " experts " in our criminal courts. 
 But justice demands that truth and lies be dis- 
 entangled. The time will come when the methods 
 [108] 
 
THE DETECTION OF CRIME 
 of experimental psychology cannot longer be ex- 
 cluded from the court of law. It is well known 
 that the use of stenographers in trials once met 
 with vehement opposition, while now the shorthand 
 record of the court procedure seems a matter of 
 course. The help of the psychologist will become 
 not less indispensable. The vulgar ordeals of the 
 " third degree " in every form belong to the Mid- 
 dle Ages, and much of the wrangling of attorneys 
 about technicalities in admitting the " evidence " 
 appears to not a few somewhat out of date, too: 
 the methods of experimental psychology are work- 
 ing in the spirit of the twentieth century. The 
 " third degree " may brutalise the mind and force 
 either correct or falsified secrets to light; the 
 time-measurement of associations is swifter and 
 cleaner, more scientific, more humane, and more 
 reliable in bringing out the truth which justice 
 demands. Of course, we are only at the beginning 
 of its development ; the new method is stiU in many 
 ways imperfect, and if clumsily applied it may be 
 misleading; moreover, there exists no hard and 
 fast rule which fits every case mechanically. But 
 all this indicates only that, just as the bodily facts 
 [109] 
 
ON THE "WITNESS STAND 
 have to be examined by the chemist or the physi- 
 ologist, the mental facts must be examined also, 
 not by the layman, but by the scientific psychol- 
 ogist, with the training of a psychological 
 laboratory. 
 
 [110] 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 
 - V V 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 
 If a girl blushes when a boy's name is mentioned 
 in the family sitting-room, we feel sure, even if she 
 protests, that he is not quite indiflferent to her 
 young heart. If she opens a letter and grows pale 
 while reading it, she may assure us that the event 
 is unimportant ; we know better. If she talks with 
 you and every word makes you believe that her 
 entire interest belongs to you and your remarks, 
 it is enough for you to see that her fingers are 
 playing nervously with her fan, and that her 
 breathing has become deep and vehement and her 
 eyes restless since a certain guest has entered the 
 room ; you know she is hardly listening to you and 
 waits only for him to approach her. And if he 
 does not come, — she may be masterful in simula- 
 tion and the artificial smile may never leave the 
 lips, yet you will hear her disappointment in the 
 timbre of her voice, you may see it even in the 
 width of the pupil of her eye. 
 
 Yes, the hidden feeling betrays itself often 
 [113] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 against the will of the best comedian in life. It 
 may be easy to suppress intentionally the conspicu- 
 ous movements by which we usually accentuate the 
 emotions. It is not necessary to become wild with 
 anger and to collapse in sorrow, we may even 
 inhibit laughter and tears, and a New Englander 
 will never behave like a Southern Italian, But the 
 lips and hands and arms and legs, which are under 
 our control, are never the only witnesses to the 
 drama which goes on inside — if they keep silent, 
 others wiU speak. The poets know it well. 
 Through the dramatic literature of aU ages is 
 repeated the motive of the unintentional expres- 
 sion of emotions. The ghastly memory of a grue- 
 some past seems locked up in the hero's mind ; and 
 yet when he is brought back to the place of his 
 deed, it comes to light in his paleness and trem- 
 bling, in the empty glaring of his eyes and the 
 breaking of his voice. There is hardly a tragedy 
 of Shakespeare in which the involuntary signs of 
 secret excitement do not play their role. And the 
 comedies of all time vary the same motive with 
 regard to the lighter sins of love and social en- 
 tanglement. The helpless stammering of the ex- 
 [114] 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 cited lover betrays everything which his deliberate 
 words are to deny. 
 
 But the signs which made Hamlet sure that his 
 mother had committed murder have not been over- 
 looked by those who are on the track of the 
 criminal in our practical life. The suspected man 
 who pales before the victim while he pretends not 
 to know him, or who weeps at hearing the story of 
 the crimes which he disavows, is half condemned in 
 the eyes of the prosecutor. When the conspiracy 
 against Dreyfus sought to manufacture evidence 
 against him, they made much of the fact that he 
 trembled and was thus hardly able to write when 
 they dictated to him a letter in which phrases of 
 the discovered treasonable manuscript occurred. 
 Much of that which the police and the delinquents 
 call the third degree consists of these bodily signs 
 of a guilty conscience ; to make the accused break 
 down from his own inner emotion is the triumph 
 of such maladministration of law. 
 
 It seems that even some of the superstitions of 
 
 barbaric times which claimed to discover the guilty 
 
 by all kinds of miracles sometimes contained a 
 
 certain truth of this kind. They depended on ap- 
 
 [115] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 parently mysterious signs which in reality some- 
 times belonged to the bodily effects of emotion. 
 Evidently primitive life sharpens the observation 
 of such symptoms. One of the most adventurous 
 " gunmen " of the West told me that when he was 
 attacked by mobs he behaved as if he were con- 
 stantly spitting; he went through such motions 
 because it always discourages the crowd when they 
 see that their adversary does not fear them, and 
 they would know that a man who is afraid cannot 
 spit — the emotion of fear dries up the mouth and 
 throat. 
 
 Of course, everyone knows how uncertain and 
 unsafe such crude police methods must be. There 
 cannot be justice if we base our judgment on the 
 detective's claim that a man blushed or trembled 
 or was breathing heavily. It would hardly be bet- 
 ter than those superstitious decisions of early 
 times. There are too many who believe that they 
 see what they expect to see, and very different 
 emotions may express themselves with very simi- 
 lar symptoms. The door is open for every arbi- 
 trariness if such superficial observations were 
 to count seriously for acquittal or for conviction. 
 [116] 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 But that provokes the natural question: cannot 
 science help us out? Cannot science deter- 
 mine with exacitude and safety that which 
 is vague in the mere chance judgment of 
 police oflScers? More than that: cannot science 
 make visible that which is too faint and weak to 
 be noticed by the ordinary observer? The by- 
 stander watches the expressions of the strong 
 overwhelming emotions — ^but can science, can ex- 
 perimental psychology, not bring to light the 
 traces of the whole interplay of feelings, the light 
 and passing ones as well as the strong, and the 
 most hidden suggestions of consciousness as well 
 as heavy emotional storms? 
 
 The question is indeed pressing, as the idea of 
 the psychological expert in court cannot be with- 
 drawn from public discussion. The mental life, — 
 perception and memory, attention and thought, 
 feeling and will — splays too important a role in 
 court procedure to reject the advice of those who 
 devote their work to the study of these fimctions. 
 And especially the progress of modern psychol- 
 ogy has been too rapid in recent years to ignore 
 it stni with that condescension which was in order 
 [117] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 at the time when psychologists indulged in specu- 
 lation and psychological laboratories were un- 
 known. To-day the psychologist operates with 
 the methods of exact science, and the method 
 which is here demanded seems entirely in har- 
 mony with his endeavours. The problem is 
 whether he can record objectively the passing 
 symptoms and whether he can get hold of expres- 
 sions too faint to be perceptible to our senses. 
 But just that the laboratory psychologist is aim- 
 ing at constantly and successfully. Whether he 
 measures the time of mental acts or analyses the 
 complex ideas, whether he studies the senses or the 
 volitions, he is always engaged in connecting the 
 vague inner impression with an outer measurable 
 fact which can be recorded, and in throwing full 
 light on that which escapes notice in ordinary 
 life. 
 
 In the region of feelings and emotions the ex- 
 perimental methods of psychology have been cer- 
 tainly not less successful than in other fields of 
 inner life. To confine ourselves to that special 
 problem which interested us from the point of 
 view of law: the psychologist can indeed register 
 [118] 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 the symptoms of inner excitement and, more than 
 that, can show the effects of feelings and emotions 
 of which the mere practical observation does not 
 give us any trace. Yet even the subtlest detective 
 work of the psychological instruments refers only 
 to the same bodily functions which make us visibly 
 blush in shame, pale and tremble in fear, shiver 
 in horror, weep in grief, perspire in anxiety, 
 dance in joy, grow hot and clench the fist in 
 anger. Everywhere the blood vessels contract or 
 dilate, the heart beat changes, the glands increase 
 or decrease their activity, the muscles work ir- 
 regularly: but the instruments allow us to be- 
 come aware of almost microscopic changes. We 
 may, perhaps, point to a variety of lines along 
 which such inquiry may move. 
 
 To begin with a very simple group of processes, 
 we may start with our ordinary movements of the 
 arm: does feeling influence them? I can give my 
 reply from a little diary of mine. I kept it years 
 ago. It was not the regulation diary — ^there was 
 no sentimentality in it, but mostly figures. Its 
 purpose was to record the results of about twenty 
 experiments which took about half an hour's time. 
 [119] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 I had the material for these little experiments al- 
 ways in my pocket and repeated them three or 
 four times a day throughout several months. I 
 fell to experimenting whenever daily life brought 
 me into a characteristic mental state, such as emo- 
 tion or interest or fatigue or anything important 
 to the psychologist. One of these twenty experi- 
 ments was the following : I attached to the bottom 
 of my waistcoat a small instrument which allowed 
 me to slide along an edge between thumb and fore- 
 finger of the right hand, both outwards and in- 
 wards. Now I had trained myself to measure off 
 in this way from memory distances of four and 
 eight inches. Under normal conditions my hand 
 passed through these distances with exactitude 
 while the eyes were closed; the apparatus regis- 
 tered carefully whether I made the distance too 
 long or too short. The results of many hundreds 
 of these measurements went into my diary together 
 with a description of the mood in which I was. 
 
 When I came to figure up the results after half 
 
 a year's records I found a definite relation between 
 
 my feelings and my arm movements. My diary 
 
 indicated essentially three fundamental pairs of 
 
 [120] 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 feeling in the course of time. There was pleasure 
 and displeasure, there was excitement and depres- 
 sion, and there was gravity and hilarity. The fig- 
 ures showed that in the state of excitement both 
 the outward and inward movements became too 
 long, and in the state of depression both became 
 too short; in the state of pleasure the outward 
 movements became too long, the inward movements 
 too short; in the state of displeasure the opposite 
 — the outward movements too short and the in- 
 ward movements too long. In the case of gravity 
 or hilarity no constant change in the length of the 
 movement resulted, but the rhythm and rapidity 
 of the action was influenced by them. 
 
 Here were, for the first time, three distinct sets 
 of feelings separated and recognised through 
 three distinct ways of bodily behaviour. After the 
 publication of my figures, others came from other 
 starting points to such division of our feelings 
 into three groups, while some believe that there 
 are only two sets. Still others hold, and I should 
 not disagree, that pleasure and displeasure alone 
 are the fundamental feelings; that a colour or a 
 sound is agreeable seems primary, that it is ex- 
 [121 J 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 citing or soothing is secondary. On the other 
 hand the number of those secondary feelings seems 
 to me to-day still larger than it did at that time; 
 I am inclined to accept many more simple feelings 
 and find for everyone characteristic expressions of 
 movement. All this becomes important as soon as 
 the psychologist begins to explain the feelings and 
 asks how far the sensations themselves enter as 
 parts into the feelings. 
 
 But what concerns us here is the fact that the 
 pleasurable and the unpleasurable mood betray 
 themselves in opposite movement — impulses of 
 which we are unaware. I had meant in those hun- 
 dreds of cases to make exactly the same out- 
 ward and inward movements and yet the experi- 
 ments disclosed the illusion. Of course, we all 
 know how in joy the outward movements are re- 
 inforced; the boy swings his cap and the whole 
 body stretches itself, while in anger the opposite 
 impulses prevail — ^the contraction of the fist be- 
 comes typical. The experiments show that these 
 various impulses are at work when we do not 
 know and do not show it: we must bring the man 
 before a registering apparatus to find out from 
 [122] 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 his motions without his knowledge whether sun- 
 shine or general cloudiness prevails in his mind. 
 
 But the unintentional movements may become 
 symptoms of feelings in still a different way. The 
 thing which awakes our feeling starts our actions 
 towards the interesting object. All muscle read- 
 ing or thought reading works by means of such a 
 principle. The ouija-board of the spiritualists is a 
 familiar instrument for the indication of such im- 
 pulses, and if we want a careful registering of the 
 unnoticeable movement, we may use an automato- 
 graph — ^a plate which lies on metal balls and thus 
 follows every impulse of the hand which lies flat 
 on it; the plate has an attachment by which the 
 slighest movements are registered on a slowly mov- 
 ing surface. If the arm is held in a loop which 
 hangs from the ceiling, the hand will still more 
 easily follow the weakest impulse without our 
 knowledge. Ask your subject to think attentively 
 of a special letter in the alphabet and then spread 
 twenty-five cards with the letters in a half-circle 
 about him; his arm on the automatograph wiU 
 quickly show the faint impulse towards the letter 
 of which he thought, although he remains entirely 
 [123] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 unaware of it. And if a witness or a criminal in 
 front of a row of a dozen men claims that he does 
 not know any one of them, he will point on the 
 automatograph, nevertheless, towards the man 
 whom he really knows and whose face brings him 
 thus into emotional excitement. Still easier may 
 be the graphic record, if it is not necessary to 
 show a definite direction but simply a sudden re- 
 action. The hand may lie on a rubber bulb or on 
 a capsule covered with very elastic rubber and the 
 slightest movement of the fingers will press the air 
 in the capsule which, through a rubber tube, is 
 conducted to a little bulb that pushes a lever and 
 the lever registers its up and down motions. The 
 accused may believe himself to be motionless, and 
 yet when he hears the dangerous name of the place 
 of his crime or of an accomplice, his unintentional 
 muscle contraction will be registered. It is only a 
 question of technique thus to take exact record of 
 the faintest trembling when a little cap is attached 
 to the finger. 
 
 The emotional interest may betray itself in an 
 interesting way even through movements which are 
 ordinarily not consciously guided like those of our 
 [ 124] 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 hands and fingers ; I am thinking of the eye move- 
 ments. I found that our eyes may go their own 
 way without our knowledge. My subject, for in- 
 stance, looks straight forward ; I show him a card 
 with a printed word which is indifferent to him. 
 We have agreed beforehand that after seeing and 
 reading the card he is to close his eyes, to turn 
 his head somewhat sidewards, and then to open his 
 eyes again. The experiment shows that if he does 
 perform these acts, his eyes, after the sideward 
 movement o^ his head, look in the same direction 
 in which his head points. I repeat this several 
 times ; always with the same result. Now I take a 
 card with a word which, I know, is emotionally im- 
 portant to mv subject from an earlier experience. 
 The result is suddenly changed: he reads it, closes 
 his eyes, turns his head, opens his eyes again, and, 
 without his knowledge, his eyes have not followed 
 his head but are still turned towards the exciting 
 word — ^the feeling interest has been betrayed by 
 the unintentional backward rotation of the eye- 
 balls. I may show in this way to the suspected man 
 one indifferent thing after another; his eyes will 
 follow his head. Then I show an object which was 
 [125] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 instrumental in the crime or which was present at 
 the place of the deed or which belonged to the 
 victim and, if he recognises it, his eyes will stick 
 to It while his head is moving and after. Yes, the 
 police know from old experience that not only 
 do the eyes want to be back at the exciting scene, 
 but the whole man is magnetically drawn to the 
 spot where the crime was committed. Dostojewski 
 shows us how the murderer, almost against his own 
 will, returns to the place of his emotion and thus 
 runs upon his doom. 
 
 We are still speaking, of course, of movements 
 and yet of an entirely different process if we con- 
 sider the breathing. Our inspirations and expira- 
 tions can be registered In finest detail and a variety 
 of elegant methods are available. Perhaps the 
 simplest " pneumograph " consists of a tube made 
 of spiral wire and covered with rubber, to be at- 
 tached by ribbons to the chest. Every respiratory 
 movement lengthens and shortens the tube, and this 
 presses a part of the air contained into a little 
 capsule, the cover of which follows the changing 
 pressure of the air and moves a registering lever, 
 usually a large straw which enlarges the move- 
 [126] 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 ments of the cover. The end of the straw but 
 touches the smoked surface of a slowly revolving 
 drum; it thus writes in the thin layer of smoke a 
 wave line which shows the, subtlest features of the 
 breathing. It is a simple task to measure every ele- 
 ment of such a curve, every change in the length, 
 in the height, in the angle, in the regularity of the 
 wave; and that means every change in the rapid- 
 ity, rhythm, distribution, pauses and strength of 
 the breathing. As soon as such delicate methods of 
 registration are applied, the intimate relation be- 
 tween feeling and breath becomes evident. Pleas- 
 ure, for instance, makes the respiration weaker 
 and quicker ; displeasure, stronger and slower ; ex- 
 citement makes it stronger and quicker; acquies- 
 cence, weaker and slower. But such generalisa- 
 tions cannot do any justice to the manifoldness of 
 changes that may occur: every ripple on the in- 
 terests of the mind reflects itself in the changes of 
 the pneumographic wave — ^it may be an agreeable 
 or disagreeable smell or taste, it may be exciting 
 or depressing news from without or a fancy from 
 within. 
 
 The same holds true for the heart beat, meas- 
 [127] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 ured by the blood wave in the arteries; such a 
 pulse writer is called a sphygmograph. It may be 
 attached, for instance, to the wrist; a delicate 
 lever presses against the wall of the blood vessel 
 just where the finger of the physician would feel 
 the pulse. The lever is attached again to the thin 
 rubber which covers an air chamber, and the 
 changing pressure of air is again transmitted to 
 a long straw which writes an enlarged record of 
 the movement on the revolving drum, rotating 
 regularly by means of clockwork. Here again the 
 height and length and form of every pulse beat 
 may have its own physiognomy. When we write 
 pulse and breathing together on the same drum, 
 we see at once that even every ordinary inspiration 
 changes the pulse ; while we inhale we have a pulse 
 different from the pulse while we exhale. Far more 
 influential are the feelings. Again it is only an in- 
 sufficient abstraction if we generalise and say: 
 pleasure heightens and retards the puke, dis- 
 pleasure weakens and accelerates it, or excitement 
 makes the pulse stronger and quicker, acquies- 
 cence weaker and slower. But there is still another 
 way open to observe the changes in our blood 
 [128] 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 vessels. We may examine the quantity of blood, 
 for instance, which streams to a limb, by means of 
 the so-called plethysmograph. The arm is held by 
 a large tube filled with water ; a rubber ring closes 
 the tube. The change of blood supply which 
 makes the arm swell changes the pressure which 
 the water exerts against the air, which is again 
 conducted through a rubber tube to a recording 
 lever; every emotional excitement speaks in the 
 blood supply of every limb. All these instruments 
 of registration have belonged for decades to the 
 household equipment of every physiological lab- 
 oratory ; it was therefore a sad spectacle when re- 
 cently scores of American papers told their read- 
 ers that I had invented the sphygmograph and 
 automatograph and plethysmograph this summer 
 — ^they might just as well have added that I in- 
 vented the telegraph last spring. To recent years 
 belongs only the application of these instruments 
 for the study, of feelings and emotions. 
 
 But we may go still further and point to ex- 
 pressions of emotions which are entirely beyond 
 human senses. If we put our hands on two copper 
 plates and make the weak galvanic current of a 
 [129] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 battery run through the plates and our body, we 
 can, with the help of a delicate galvanometer, 
 measure the slightest variations of the resistance 
 to the current. Experiment shows that such 
 changes occur, indeed, if our brain is excited ; any 
 emotional disturbance influences the resistance: it 
 seems that the activity of the sweat-glands in the 
 skin is under the nervous influence of our feelings, 
 and the functioning of these glands alters the 
 electrical conditions. A word we hear may excite 
 us and at once the needle of the galvanometer be- 
 comes restless : there is no more uncanny betrayal 
 of our inmost mind. Or we may point to the curi- 
 ous facts of the knee jerk, A little hammer falls 
 always from the same height on the tendon of the 
 knee, and every time the leg makes a jerking re- 
 flex movement, the angle of which can be regis- 
 tered. Experiment shows again that this angle 
 changes with the emotional excitement of the 
 mind; evidently the brain sends impulses down to 
 the lower part of the spinal cord where the knee 
 reflex is produced, and the emotion inhibits those 
 messages and changes the whole function. Even 
 the temperature of the body seems to be influenced 
 [180] 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 by excitement; the experienced physician knows 
 how the emotion of the patient can change his 
 feverish state, and experiment seems to indicate 
 similar changes for the normal state. 
 
 There is thus really no doubt that experimental 
 psychology can furnish amply everything which 
 the court demands: it can register objectively the 
 symptoms of the emotions and make the observa- 
 tion thus independent of chance judgment, and, 
 moreover, it can trace emotions through involun- 
 tary movements, breathing, pulse, and so on, where 
 ordinary observation fails entirely. And yet, it 
 seems to me that a great reluctance and even a cer- 
 tain scepticism as to the practical application of 
 these methods is still in order. Firstly, the studies 
 in this field of the bodily registration of emotion 
 are still in their beginnings and so far many dif- 
 ficulties are not overcome; there are still contra- 
 dictions in the results of various scholars. Es- 
 pecially we know too little yet about the evident 
 individual diflFerences to make, fer instance, a 
 breathing and pulse curve to-day a basis for a 
 legal condemnation or acquittal. The facts them- 
 selves are so complicated that much further work 
 [131] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 must be done before we can disentangle the practi- 
 cal situations. 
 
 Secondly, experiment gives us so far not suffi- 
 cient hold for the discrimination of the guilty 
 conscience and the emotional excitement of the 
 innocent. The innocent man, especially the nervous 
 man, may grow as much excited on the wit- 
 ness stand as the criminal when the victim and 
 the means of the crime are mentioned; his fear 
 that he may be condemned unjustly may influence 
 his muscles, glands and blood vessels as strongly 
 as if he were guilty. Experimental psychology 
 cannot wish to imitate with its subtle methods the 
 injustice of barbarous police methods. The real 
 use of the experimental emotion-method is there- 
 fore so far probably confined to those cases in 
 which it is to be found out whether a suspected 
 person knows anything about a certain place or 
 man or thing. Thus if a new name, for instance, 
 is brought in, the method is reliable ; the' innocent, 
 who never heard the name before, will not be 
 more excited if he hears that one among a dozen 
 others; the criminal, who knows the name as that 
 of a witness of the crime, will show the emotional 
 [ 132 1 
 
THE TRACES OF EMOTIONS 
 symptoms. And yet, it may be rash to propose 
 narrow limits for the practical use, as the rapid 
 progress of experimental crimino-psychology 
 may solve to-morrow those difficulties which seem 
 still to stand in the way to-day. 
 
 [1381 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 
 It is a sad story which I am going to report, a 
 weird tragedy of yesterday. I am most seriously 
 convinced that it is a tragedy not only of crime 
 but also of human error and miscarried justice, 
 and my scientific conscience as a psychologist com- 
 pels me to speak of it because the tragedy of yes- 
 terday may come up again, in some other form, 
 to-morrow. 
 
 I am the last one to desire for the modern psy- 
 chologist a special privilege to meddle with the 
 daily afi'airs of practical life. Far too often the 
 " new " psychology has been made a kind of Jack- 
 of-all-trades. Psychology has had to furnish the 
 patent medicine for all the defects of our schools, 
 psychology has become the word to conjure with 
 in literature and religion, in social troubles and 
 economic emergencies, and the public can hardly 
 imagine how a psychologist's mail is burdened with 
 inquiries from superstitious and unbalanced minds 
 and with reports of uncanny and mysterious hap- 
 [137] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 penings. Wherever experience seems unexplain- 
 able, the psychologist is expected at least to 
 pigeon-hole and to label the occurrence and to 
 give his oflScial sanction that such strange things 
 may sometimes happen. Yet, the psychologist can 
 hardly glance over such letters without wishing 
 that the public at least might know how much 
 wiser it would be to consult a detective. No mental 
 explanation is in order till the facts themselves 
 are cleared up by methods for which the scholar 
 is not prepared at aU. His steady contact with 
 seekers for truth makes him least suspicious of the 
 thousand sources of delusion and deception which 
 an attorney may find out, but not a scholar. 
 
 But if the psychologist has thus not seldom the 
 wish that the detective were consulted in his place, 
 that does not prevent his regretting sometimes 
 that the world relies on the detective instead of 
 calling in the psychologist. The more the scientific 
 analysis and explanation of mental life makes 
 progress through the experimental and physio- 
 logical, comparative and clinical methods, the more 
 we learn how subtle the internal connections are 
 and how insufficient the popular psychology must 
 [138] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 be with which the facts of life are usually inter- 
 preted by detectives and attorneys, by juries and 
 judges. To be sure, they all respect the physician 
 who examines whether the criminal was insane or 
 mentally disordered. But between the common- 
 sense of the average juryman and the medical 
 science of the alienist the world of criminal facts 
 cannot be divided fairly. The detective may bring 
 out much evidence which lies outside of the realm 
 of physicians, which yet may be a closed book 
 to the naive view of psychical life. In such case 
 the psychologist feels it his duty fearlessly to 
 oppose the popular prejudice. 
 
 Just this was the situation when I ventured last 
 year to write a letter to a well-known nerve 
 specialist in Chicago who had privately asked my 
 opinion as a psychologist in the case of a man 
 condemned to death for murder. The man had 
 confessed the crime. Yet I felt sure that he was 
 innocent. My letter somehow reached the papers 
 and I became the target for editorial sharp- 
 shooters everywhere. I have before me still a col- 
 lection of such specimens. " Harvard's Contempt 
 of Court " is the big heading here, " Science Gone 
 [139] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 Crazy " the heading there, and so It went on in 
 the papers, while every mail brought an epistolary 
 chorus. The efforts of the attorneys to change the 
 condemned man's fate by a motion for a super- 
 sedeas before the Supreme Court were unsuccess- 
 ful. One week later the accused was hanged; yet, 
 if scientific conviction has the right to stand 
 frankly for the truth, I have to say again that 
 he was hanged for a crime of which he was no more 
 guilty than you or I, and the only difference 
 which the last few months have brought about is 
 the fact that, as I have been informed on good 
 authority, the most sober-minded people of Chi- 
 cago to-day share this sad opinion. 
 
 I felt sure from the first that no one was to be 
 blamed. Court and jury had evidently done their 
 best to find the facts and to weigh the evidence; 
 they are not to be expected to be experts in the 
 analysis of unusual mental states. The proof of 
 the alibi seemed sufficient to some, but insufficient 
 to others; most various facts allowed of different 
 interpretation, but all hesitation had to be over- 
 come by the one fundamental argument which 
 excluded every doubt: there was a complete con- 
 [140] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 fession. And if the sensational press did not 
 manifest a judicial temper, that seemed this time 
 very excusable. The whole population had been at 
 the highest nervous tension from the frequency of 
 brutal murders in the streets of Chicago. Too 
 often the human beast escaped justice: this time 
 at last they had found the villain who confessed — 
 he at least was not to escape the gallows. For 
 many years no murder case had so deeply excited 
 the whole city. Truly, as long as a demand for 
 further psychological inquiry appeared to the 
 masses simply as " another way of possibly cheat- 
 ing justice " and as a method tending " towards 
 emasculating court procedure and discouraging 
 and disgusting every faithful ofBcer of the law," 
 the newspapers were almost in duty bound to rush 
 on in the tracks of popular prejudice. 
 
 I took it thus gladly as a noble outburst of 
 Chicago feeling against my " long-distance impu- 
 dence " that a leading paper resumed the situation 
 in this way : " Illinois has quite enough of people 
 with an itching mania for attending to other 
 people's business without importing impertinence 
 from Massachusetts. This crime itself, no matter 
 [141 J 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 who may be the criminal, was one of the frightful 
 fruits of a sickly paltering with the stem admin- 
 istration of law. We do not want any directions 
 from Harvard University irresponsibles for pal- 
 tering still further." This seems to me to hit the 
 nail on the head exactly, and my only disagree- 
 ment is with the clause " no matter who may be 
 the criminal." I think it does matter who may be 
 the criminal — whether the one whom they hanged 
 or somebody else who is still to-day in freedom. 
 
 But if I examine these endless reports for a 
 real argument why the accused youth was guilty 
 of the heinous crime, everything comes back after 
 all to the statement constantly repeated that it 
 would be "inconceivable that any man who was 
 innocent of it should claim the infamy of guilt." 
 Months have passed since the neck of the yoimg 
 man was broken and " thousands of persons 
 crowded Michigan Street, jamming that thor- 
 oughfare from Clark Street to Dearborn Avenue, 
 waiting for the undertaker's wagon to leave the 
 jail yard." The discussion is thus long since re- 
 moved to the sphere of theoretical argiunent ; and 
 so the hour may be more favourable now for asking 
 [ 1-12 J 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 once more whether it is really " inconceivable " 
 that an innocent man can confess to a crime of 
 which he is wholly ignorant. Yet the theoretical 
 question may perhaps demand no later than to- 
 morrow a practical answer, when perhaps again a 
 weak mind shall work itself into an untrue con- 
 fession and the community again rely thereon 
 satisfied, hypnotised by the spell of the dangerous 
 belief that " murder will out." The history of 
 crime in Chicago has shown sufficiently that mur- 
 der will not " out." It is important that the court, 
 instead of bringing out the guilty thought, shall 
 not bring it " in " into an innocent consciousness. 
 Of course in a criminal procedure there cannot 
 be any better evidence than a confession, provided 
 that it is reliable and well proved. If the accused 
 acknowledges in express words the guilt in a 
 criminal charge, the purpose of the procedure 
 seems to have been reached; and yet at all times 
 and in all nations experience has suggested a cer- 
 tain distrust of confessions. The earnestness 
 with which caution is urged is decidedly different 
 at different periods ; the danger of accepting con^ 
 fessions seems to have been felt more strongly at 
 [ 14,3 ] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 some times than at others. Has this perhaps de- 
 pended on the nervous disposition of the crowd at 
 various epochs? No doubt, the abnormal, hysteri- 
 cal, neurotic tendency fluctuated greatly in pre- 
 vious centuries in which the world was scientifically 
 still unaware of its own nervousness and its own 
 hysteria, and yet protected its social life instinct- 
 ively against its dangers. The essential argument, 
 however, against the trustworthiness of confes- 
 sions had a purely social origin: it referred to 
 possible promises or threats by other members 
 of the community. No doubt, the chances for such 
 influences were difi'erent, too, at various times and 
 in different social conditions. The self-sacrificing 
 desire to exculpate others has played its role occa- 
 sionally also. In short, there is no lack of social 
 motives to make it conceivable from the start that 
 an accused makes of his own accord a confession 
 against himself which is not true. Especially in 
 the realm of the minor offences, promise and 
 threat are still to-day constant sources of untrue 
 self -accusation. 
 
 Perhaps we can add still another motive which 
 might induce a man in full possession of his under- 
 [ 144] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 standing to declare himself guilty against his 
 better knowledge. No statistics can tell the story, 
 but we can suppose that persons suspected wrongly 
 of a crime may, in the face of an mifortunate 
 combination of damaging evidence, prefer to 
 make a false confession in the hope of a recom- 
 mendation to mercy. Every lawyer knows the 
 famous Boom case in Vermont, where the brothers 
 confessed to having killed their brother-in-law and 
 described the deed in fuU detail and how they 
 destroyed the body; while long afterwards the 
 " murdered " man returned aUve to the village. 
 The evidence against the suspected appeared so 
 overwhelming that they saw only one hope to save 
 their lives — ^by turning the verdict, through their 
 untrue confession, from murder to manslaughter. 
 To this group we might count not a few of the 
 historic confessions in the Salem witchcraft trag- 
 edy. The nearest relatives urged the unfortunate 
 accused women to such confessions, seeing no 
 other way of escape for them. 
 
 But just those dark chapters of New England 
 history can show us an abundance of other forms 
 of confession which lead us step for step from 
 [145] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 well-balanced calculation to complete alienation, 
 through all the borderland regions of mental con- 
 fusion and disintegration. Even the advice of the 
 nearest relatives of those accused as witches was 
 often not at all based on confidence. The prepos- 
 terous accusations were for them too sufficient 
 proof of guilt, and not to confess appeared to 
 them as obstinacy. Thus they urged the poor 
 women prisoners, starting from the conviction that 
 the unwillingness to confess showed that their 
 minds were wholly given over to Satan. " In many 
 cases where they yielded, it was not from unworthy 
 fear or for self-preservation, but because their 
 judgment was overthrown and their minds in com- 
 plete subjection and prostration." There can, in- 
 deed, hardly be a doubt that in some instances the 
 confessing persons really believed themselves 
 " guilty." The reports agree further that the ac- 
 cused persons, when they made up their minds to 
 confess, " fabricated their stories with much in- 
 genuity and tact, making them tally with the state- 
 ments of the accusers, adding points and items 
 that gave an air of truthfulness." 
 
 Ann Foster at Salem Village confessed in 1692 
 [U6] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 that the devil appeared to her in the shape of a 
 bird at several times. She further stated that it 
 was Goody Carrier that made her a witch. " She 
 told her that if she would not be a witch, the devil 
 would tear her to pieces and carry her away — at 
 which time she promised to serve the devil; that 
 she was at the meeting of the witches at Salem 
 Village: they got upon sticks and went said jour- 
 ney," and so forth. Yet Ann Foster was not 
 insane; the horrors of the accusation had over- 
 powered the distressed mind. We should say to-day 
 that a dissociation of her little mind had set in ; 
 the emotional shock brought it about that the 
 normal personality went to pieces and that a split- 
 off second personality began to form itself with 
 its own connected life story built up from the 
 absurd superstitions which had been suggested to 
 her through the hypnotising examinations. 
 
 The untrue confessions from hope or fear, 
 through promises and threats, from cunning calcu- 
 lations and passive yielding thus shade off into 
 others which are given with real conviction under 
 the pressure of emotional excitement or under the 
 spell of overpowering influences. Even the mere 
 [147] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 fatigue often brought to the Salem witches the 
 loosening of the mental firmness and the intrusion 
 of the suggestion of guilt. In tedious examinations 
 the prisoners were urged to confess through many 
 hours " till the accused were wearied out by being 
 forced to stand so long or by want of sleep " and 
 then gave assent to the accusation of having 
 signed the devil's book. 
 
 It seems like the other pole of the social 
 world if we turn from these cruel court 
 procedures to the helpful humanity of our 
 hospitals for the insane. But the sounds of reckless 
 untrue self-accusation are familiar there too to 
 everyone who knows the scenes of misery in the 
 ward of the melancholic patients. There is no 
 judge and no jury, only the physician and the 
 nurse, yet no torture of punishment can be harder 
 than the suffering of the melancholic who feels 
 remorse for sins which he never committed, for 
 crimes of which he never thought before. Years 
 ago his friend died ; now arises the illusion that he 
 has poisoned him. The last fire in the town was laid 
 by him ; he is guilty of the unpardonable sin. The 
 slightest fault in his real past takes, in this illu- 
 [148] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 sory affective state, new and gigantic dimensions; 
 long-forgotten mistakes awake with unproportion- 
 ate feelings of anguish. The patient accuses him- 
 self of meanness and deceit, of diabolical plans, 
 and with growing accuracy he elaborates the 
 minute details of his imaginary crimes. 
 
 As a matter of course, when the physician 
 speaks in the modem court-room the grave word 
 Melancholia, the self -accusation cannot have any 
 further consequences of a judicial character. The 
 doors of the hospital are closed behind the patient. 
 He may still be witness against others; but the 
 confessions of crime which he claims to have com- 
 mitted himself cannot be considered as evidence 
 imder any circumstances. And as the symptoms of 
 melancholia and other depressive states with self- 
 accusatory ideas are easily recognised, there 
 remains hardly any reason for fearing lest such 
 irresponsible fabrications of a diseased brain be 
 taken as real confessions of an actual criminal. 
 But does this give security for a proper rating of 
 those illusory confessions which, like the absurdi- 
 ties of the Salem witches, result from the tem- 
 porary abnormal states of a not-diseased brain? 
 [149] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 Hysterical and autohypnotic states may there 
 combine with otherwise perfectly normal behaviour, 
 and pseudo-confessions may thus arise in men who 
 are distinctly not ill. A slight dissociation of mind 
 may set in which does not suggest calling for the 
 physician at all, and which may yet affect pro- 
 foundly the admissions made by the accused per- 
 son. Has the court sufficient means at hand to 
 convince the jury that it must weigh all the evi- 
 dence with a fair consideration of these not 
 pathological, yet very influential, mental varia- 
 tions ? 
 
 Whether the crime was done in a state of mental 
 responsibility is certainly a question never neg- 
 lected. The mental status of the witnesses finds 
 usually much less subtle analysis: the cross- 
 examining lawyers turn their attention mostly 
 backwards to the time of the crime and overlook 
 too often the mental state at the time of the trial. 
 But above all, the psychical state of the defendant 
 himself during the trial is usually measured by 
 the crudest standards of easy-going psychology 
 which considers a mental life as typical and unal- 
 tered as long as the man is neither insane nor 
 [150] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 intoxicated. And yet it would be perhaps less 
 exaggerated if we claimed that no psychical 
 mechanism remains entirely unchanged when a wit- 
 ness speaks under his oath or when a defendant 
 faces the jury. The variations remain, of course, 
 mostly within the limits of normal life, as we have 
 to call normal every setting which harmonises with 
 the life purposes of the individual. But variations 
 they are, nevertheless, and only the psychologist 
 may be clearly aware of their tendencies. Practical 
 life would be satisfied with the broad statement 
 that the witness was excited, or anxious and timid, 
 or felt himself important, or was eager to prove 
 his view. How far really his mental possibilities 
 were influenced, how far his perceptions, memory, 
 ideas, imaginative acts, feelings, emotions, voli- 
 tions, attention, judgment and ideas of self were 
 altered through the situation Is not considered and 
 would be certainly unimportant in ninety-nine 
 cases out of a hundred. 
 
 Yet we must not forget that there is nowhere 
 
 a sharp line to be drawn between the symptoms of 
 
 real mental disease and the variations in normal 
 
 personalities. There is no mental trait which be- 
 
 [151 J 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 longs to mental diseases only; whatever we find 
 in the asylums is made up of the same material 
 that enters into the normal interplay of human 
 minds. The order and harmony alone are dis- 
 turbed ; a single feature is grossly exaggerated or 
 unduly inhibited, and by this abnormal increase or 
 decrease of a regular trait the balance is lost and 
 danger is ahead. Mental diseases are like carica- 
 tures of a person ; in the caricature too every part 
 of the face is the same as in the ordinary physiog- 
 nomy, but the proportion is lost, as one special 
 part, perhaps the nose or the teeth are grotesquely 
 enlarged. All mental aberrations are such exag- 
 gerated caricatures of the normal feelings, or 
 emotions, or impulses, or memories, or imagina- 
 tions, or attentions. And because the disease does 
 not develop perfectly new features, but simply 
 reinforces quite ordinary tendencies, it is easy to 
 see that there is nowhere a sharp hne between the 
 normal trait and its pathological over-functioning. 
 The motionless brooding of the melancholic 
 patient is easily recognised, and yet the pessimis- 
 tic temperament of many a normal man or woman 
 generates all the features which are so sadly de- 
 [152] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 veloped in the melancholic attacks. Even the self- 
 accusations and the self -destructive despair of the 
 melancholic find their counterpart in the realm of 
 normal life; the pessimist is too often inclined to 
 torture himself by opprobriums, to feel discour- 
 aged with himself, and to feel guilty without real 
 guilt. From these slight traces of temperamental 
 type to the complete alienation of the hopeless 
 patient there is a sliding scale of depressions. It 
 leads through all the affective states of the neuras- 
 thenic and other neurotic varieties. To recognise 
 where the temperament ends and the irresponsible 
 disturbance begins is made extremely difficult by 
 the great breadth of the borderland region. Pub- 
 lic opinion, and court and jury as its organs, are 
 always inclined to claim that whole borderland 
 field still for the normal life and to acknowledge 
 the mental disturbance only when the disease 
 region is entered. But modem psychology recog- 
 nises daily more strongly that the subtlest analysis 
 of the occurrences in the borderland field is abso- 
 lutely necessary if the higher ends of social justice 
 are to be reached. The courts show in all other 
 fields that the progress of science breaks new paths 
 [153] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 for them. It is, for instance, interesting to see how 
 the neurasthenic states are slowly recognised by 
 the courts in civil suits as real bodily disturbance, 
 while a short time ago they were still considered as 
 mere imaginations and illusory complaints. The 
 time has come to take notice of the progress in 
 psychology too. 
 
 There is no less a transitional region for all the 
 other mental activities. Everyone knows in daily 
 life the type of the superficial, silly person whose 
 attention is always shifting, and yet it is only an 
 absurd exaggeration of such behaviour that char- 
 acterises the alienation of the maniac. We know 
 the sanguine type with its quick, sudden impulses, 
 or the slow mind whose will appears always inhib- 
 ited, as if every volition is checked by an inner 
 resistance. We know the stubborn mind which can- 
 not be persuaded by any logical argument and 
 which sticks to its fixed ideas, and we know the 
 suggestible mind which follows the last hint and 
 believes everything, or at least everything which 
 is printed. Every one of these features of a mental 
 physiognomy may grow till its caricature stands 
 before us as disease, and everywhere there are 
 [ 154 J 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 many steps between the extremes of pleasant origi- 
 nality of character and the saddest mental abey- 
 ance. The ti-ait becomes psychologically alarming 
 as soon as the balance is sufficiently destroyed to 
 make the purposes of life impossible. Persons who 
 perhaps doubt in the reality of the outer world 
 may be found in the asylums and on the philo- 
 sophic platform; whether the doubting mind is a 
 patient or a philosopher shows itself quickly in 
 the consequences: the philosopher includes that 
 doubt within an harmonious life plan, the patient's ! 
 life is destroyed by his insane doubt. 
 
 This steady correspondence between the normal, 
 slight variations and the hopeless disturbances, and 
 the small steps of transition between the extremes 
 are shown perhaps nowhere more clearly than in 
 the field of memory. We differ from one another 
 not only by good and bad retention of our experi- 
 ences or by good memory for different spheres, the 
 one for names, the other for faces, the one for 
 figures, the other for sounds, but the disturbances 
 and illusions of memory too are most irregular, 
 and just as no two persons have exactly the same 
 face, certainly no two have the same kind of 
 [155] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 memory. Even unusual varieties may remain still 
 fully within the limit of soundness. I myself, for 
 instance, have absolutely no memory for the 
 mental processes during sleep; in other words, I 
 have never in my life had a dream. When I talk of 
 dreams in my university courses of psychology, I 
 speak of them just as a blind man might speak of 
 colours. Yet, mental processes go on in my sleep- 
 ing brain as in other men, because my friends have 
 often found that when they wake me up from deep 
 sleep with a question, I invariably give at first an 
 absurd reply full of reminiscences of the foregoing 
 days ; but as soon as I am really awake, not the 
 slightest trace of these comes back to my memory. 
 Yet, this rare variety of memory is not an abnor- 
 mal state, since it cannot interfere with the pur- 
 poses of my life; and the remainder of mankind 
 is, indeed, rather to be pitied for its dreams, which 
 may bring a confusion of themselves with the ipeal 
 past. If most people were without dreams, the 
 dreamers would have good reason to consult the 
 nerve physicians and their mental state would 
 be pigeonholed in the borderland region between 
 normality and hallucination. Dreams are hallu- 
 [156] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 clnations which become harmless only because the 
 impulses to action become ineffective during sleep. 
 I say that no field shows such a variety in normal 
 limits as the memory, and this refers to its positive 
 features as much as to its negative ones, as much 
 to the remembering as to the forgetting. That we 
 forget, is in itself certainly no defect and no 
 pathological symptom. On the contrary, we could 
 not fulfil the purposes of our life if we did not 
 disburden our memory constantly of superfluous 
 matter. We were lost if we had to keep in memory 
 every face we have seen in the street and every 
 advertisement we have seen in the papers. Our 
 mind has to sift and sift. And we demand from 
 our normal memory even that it follows somewhat 
 our own imagination. We do not care to remember 
 exactly as we experienced the impressions; our 
 perception is fuU of little blanks which our im- 
 aginative memory fills aU the time with fitting asso- 
 ciations, and when we remember a landscape, we 
 want to have the picture rovmded out and do not 
 care whether the wave of the ocean had exactly 
 this curve and whether the tree had just this 
 number of branches. We remember well when we 
 [1571 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 select the material, eliminate some parts worthy of 
 being forgotten, and add from our own imagina- 
 tion other parts well adapted to reproduce the 
 original experience. 
 
 But it is evident that this suppressing and sup- 
 plementing of memory ideas makes us unfit for life 
 when it assumes large proportions. If we cannot 
 remember our previous experience, and if, in addi-. 
 tion to it, our own imagination deceives us by the 
 delusion of pseudo-memories, we are of course 
 completely lost in the social world, and the care of 
 the asylum alone can protect us against utter 
 destruction. Yet, who will decide when the limit 
 is reached where we forget and supplement too 
 much: nowhere is the borderland region broader 
 and nowhere more important for the psychology 
 of the court-room. We may move for a long while 
 still in the realm of the normal. It may be pure 
 fatigue which may decrease our resistance against 
 the creeping of deceptive illusions into our 
 memory. Or it may be a simple emotional excite- 
 ment; no doubt, the mere fact of being on the 
 witness stand awakens in many minds, by its im- 
 portance and solemnity, an excitement which is 
 [158] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 especially favourable for opening the memory to 
 suggestions and to confused ideas which group 
 themselves around some ideas with strong feeling 
 tone. Many a memory succumbs even to an im- 
 pressive or a suggestive question. And more im- 
 portant still is the suggestiveness of the whole 
 situation and especially of its social elements. All 
 that is stiU normal ; there is no education and no 
 art, no politics and no rehgion without suggestion, 
 and yet suggestion is certainly to a high degree a 
 suppression of objective memory. But slowly aU 
 this leads over into the borderland region. Instead 
 of a sound fatigue, there may be an over-fatigue ; 
 instead of light emotional excitement, the deep 
 affectional influence of alcohol or drugs; instead 
 of the mild suggestive influence of the teacher and 
 minister, the deep intrusion of the hypnotising 
 physician or of autohypnotisation. All that is not 
 pathological ; yet the abnormahties of the memory 
 may have taken in the meantime dimensions which 
 alter entirely the value of the reported recollec- 
 tions. 
 
 The untrustworthiness of memory under all 
 such conditions has nothing whatever to do with 
 [159] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 the intentions and the veracity of the witness. The 
 average man knows anyhow very little of the work- 
 ing of his own mind and his particular variations 
 escape his attention. It is well known how many 
 persons do not know even that they are colour- 
 blind, or that they lack elements of imagination 
 which are natural to others. A colleague once 
 wanted me to hypnotise him because he had just, 
 in his fortieth year, discovered that he had no 
 power of optical remembering; he hoped to get 
 it through hypnosis, and yet he had never missed 
 it until he read of it in a psychological book. And 
 only the other day I was consulted by a young 
 woman who, up to her college days, had not dis- 
 covered that other persons do not hear voices when 
 they are alone ; she had heard them since childhood 
 days and had felt sure that it was everybody's 
 experience. The average person is unfamiliar with 
 his psychical peculiarities and with the varieties 
 and trickeries of his memory. They do not con- 
 cern the physician either. But the psychological 
 examiaation furnishes indeed to-day a kind of 
 mental Roentgen rays which illumine the internal 
 happenings. 
 
 [160] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 We must not forget, moreover, that our knowl- 
 edge of our own personality and its doing is also 
 only a function of memory. We know of our- 
 selves, in a psychological sense, through the 
 connected memory of our actions and of our ex- 
 periences, and this reproducing self-consciousness 
 is open to all the chances and defects which be- 
 long to our remembering in other fields. Our own 
 doings, of which we know, perhaps, through our 
 muscle sensations, are in themselves no better 
 material for our reproduction in memory than 
 the scenes which we have seen and the words which 
 we have heard. As soon as the memory for 
 our own past is completely lost, the pathological 
 character is, of course, evident; and if the ideas 
 which form our selves become dissociated and 
 groups become split ofiF as a second or third 
 personality in us, no one doubts that such 
 curious formations belong to the physician's 
 domain. Yet here again we can reach the 
 most hopeless forms through small steps from 
 the experiences of our daily life. Every one of us 
 is a difi'erent personality under different circum- 
 stances. 
 
 [ 161 ] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 The man in the office is not the man in 
 family life; on his vacation trip, not the same as 
 at work; in the political meeting, not the same as 
 in the theatre. New leading impulses, new groups 
 of memory associations, new groups of feelings 
 enter each time into play and change the whole 
 aspect of our life. To be sure, the core of our 
 personahty is not touched by such daily occur- 
 rences, and we can easily bridge over in our mind 
 from the one state to the other. Just for this rea- 
 son it does not interfere with the purposes of 
 healthy action. But this growing up of a new 
 personality, with its own impulses and separated 
 by its own memories from our regular life, may 
 again increase just like those other variations of 
 memory. An emotional shock or a captivating 
 impression may stir up long-forgotten memory 
 ideas or push imaginative thoughts into the cen- 
 tre and build around them split-off pieces of a 
 dissociated mind into a new personality which can 
 be, perhaps, hardly discriminated from the pre- 
 vious self, but in which important emotions and 
 memories may be distorted. And this alteration 
 may affect more and more the deeper layers of 
 [162] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 emotional thought and the whole man may be for 
 a long time a new man before the outside becomes 
 aware of it, or before he himself can explain the 
 sudden changes, in his attitudes and in his actions, 
 in his judgments and his self -consciousness. The 
 borderland region between the normal .variations 
 of personality and the complete pathological de- 
 struction of the self demand thus the most earnest 
 consideration in the court-room. 
 
 And now I return to the distressing case of 
 Chicago. Dr. Christison has set forth the entire 
 murder case in a brilliaiit pamphlet which few 
 will sjudy without becoming convinced that an 
 innocent man has suffered death by the rope on 
 account of untrue confessions. It may be sufficient 
 here to cite from it the following facts : On Janu- 
 ary 12, 1906, a young married woman was bru- 
 tally outraged and murdered in Chicago. Her 
 body was found, by the unfortunate defendant, 
 lying face downwards on a manure pile in a barn- 
 yard. The barn was about half a block distant 
 from his home. He had to go there to attend to his 
 father's horse. When he observed the body, he at 
 once reported the matter to his father at the house, 
 [163] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 and the father notified the police. The officers who 
 inspiected the premises found the woman's hat at 
 her feet, but could discover no evidence whatsoever 
 of a scuffle having taken place. Purse, shopping- 
 bag and muff were gone. Around her neck was a 
 hard-drawn copper wire, the ends being twisted 
 together. 
 
 The young man looked as if he had not slept 
 during the night and the officers suspected him. 
 The testimonies show that the young man was 
 everywhere regarded as a thoughtful, obliging 
 fellow of exceptionally good disposition, but often 
 exhibiting marked stupidity. He never sought the 
 company of women. All of his friends thought 
 him decidedly trusting and credulous and absent- 
 minded. He alternated between gay and morose 
 moods. His most pronounced defect seemed to 
 them his lack of initiative. His regular work was 
 with his father at the trade of carpenter. When 
 he came to the police station, he was- told at once 
 that he was the guilty man ; but the accused denied 
 everything. 
 
 Now the pohce began to press him and to sug- 
 gest more and more impressively to him his guilt. 
 [164] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 Suddenly he began to confess, and he was quite 
 willing to repeat his confession again and again. 
 Every time it became richer in detail. "At about 
 6.30 I took her in the alley. I wrestled with her 
 and lost my senses. She wanted to run," — and so 
 on and so on. On this basis he was condemned to 
 death. So the matter stood when my opinion was 
 asked for, as above reported. I could not help be- 
 coming convinced that all the external signs spoke 
 against the interpretation of the jury. The young 
 man's alibi proof, brought forward by his friends, 
 seemed to me convincing. Everything seemed to 
 point to the fact that the woman was murdered by 
 an unknown person at another place, and that her 
 body was dragged during the night by the copper 
 wire coiled around her neck from another street 
 to the barnyard. The so-called " confessions " 
 themselves seemed absurd and contradictory and 
 exactly like the involuntary elaboration of a sug- 
 gestion put into the man's mind. His whole life 
 history and the expression of his face were in full- 
 est accordance with the suspicion that his mind 
 was in a state of dissociation when he began his 
 confessions. It seemed to me a typical case of that 
 [165] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 large borderland region in which a neurotic mind 
 develops an illusory memorj as to its own doings 
 in the past. After most careful scrutiny as far as 
 the written and printed material allowed, I wrote 
 thus in June in my much-abused letter that the 
 confessions must be untrue and that the con- 
 demned man had really nothing to do with the 
 crime. I added at once, " It is an interesting case 
 of dissociation and auto-suggestion ; it would need 
 probably careful treatment to build up his disso- 
 ciated mind again and thus to awake in him a clear 
 memory of his real experiences." 
 
 But when I expressed thus my firm conviction, 
 I had, nevertheless, the uncanny feeling that there 
 was something obscure in the case. I was unable 
 to understand how the sudden change from denial 
 to confession was brought about. To be sure, there 
 were the sharp inquisitory questions of the police 
 officers, and yet from a rather extended experience 
 I cotdd not imagine that without a sudden external 
 shock or some overwhelming fascination such a 
 conversion and such a disintegration could set in. 
 Only a short time before a lady had come to me 
 who showed quite similar blanks of memory for 
 [166] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 several days, filling the gap with imaginative ideas, 
 and she too did not understand why her personality 
 had been changed so suddenly. But when I hypno- 
 tised Her, I understood what had happened. She 
 had been in a nervous and over-fatigued state 
 when her own physician bent over her, and the 
 sharp sunlight reflected from his eye-glasses struck 
 her eyes. At that moment she felt it like a shock, 
 his eye-glasses seemed to become large and un- 
 canny, and from that moment on her consciousness 
 was split and her remaining half-personality de- 
 veloped a pseudo-memory of its own. 
 
 I had before my mind also the case of a certain 
 religious conversion which Dr. Prince has recently 
 analysed and described. It was the case of a young 
 woman who, from a most distressed, restless and 
 suffering state, was suddenly completely changed 
 to a state of joyful excitement and happy ecstasy. 
 She felt it as a spiritual " conversion " to health, 
 and the complete change of her mental personality 
 was indeed most surprising. She could not remem- 
 ber that anything had happened which might have 
 influenced her ; but when the physician hypnotised 
 her in the interest of her ailments, everything 
 [167] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 became clear. She had gone to church in a condi- 
 tion of hopeless despair. The church was empty 
 and, as she communed with herself, her hopeless- 
 ness deepened. Then her ejes became fixed upon 
 one of the shining brass lamps in the church, and 
 of a sudden all was changed. She went into a 
 trance-like state in which many disconnected memo- 
 ries of her early life and of happy times rushed 
 to her consciousness, each accompanied by emo- 
 tion, and these long-forgotten emotions of happi- 
 ness persisted. 
 
 If there had been anything of such optical cap- 
 tivation of attention, like the reflex of the eye- 
 glass or the shining of the brass lamp, in the 
 Chicago case, everything would have been com- 
 pletely clear to me; without such fascinating 
 stimulus, I could not account sufficiently for the 
 suddenness of the change in the defendant's per- 
 sonality. When I wrote my letter, I felt certain 
 that if I had had a chance to hypnotise the con- 
 demned man, I should have found out that some 
 unexpected stimulus must have come in, must have 
 snapped off the normal connections. I expressed 
 this as my wish at that time, repeatedly. I could 
 [168] 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 not foresee that all the explanation I was looking 
 for would be furnished only a few days later by 
 Nature herself. The unfortunate youth awoke 
 suddenly from the awful spell. The period of dis- 
 integration was suddenly again eliminated from 
 the memory and the normal connections entered 
 again into play. The same paper, which had in- 
 sisted that the defendant must be the murderer 
 because no innocent man would ever confess such 
 a brutal crime, brought out a few days later a 
 long report which began as follows: 
 
 " With death on the gallows only six days away, 
 he asserts his innocence of the atrocious murder. 
 He declares he has absolutely no memory of having 
 made to the police a confession . . . He as- 
 serts that his only recollection of the coroner's 
 inquest is that of seeing a revolver pointed at him. 
 He said, ' I saw the flash of steel in front of me. 
 Then two men got before me. I can remember no 
 more than that about it. Someone told me after- 
 ward who the man was ; but I had not seen him at 
 all and I don't recall seeing any other men even 
 until after I had seen the revolver. I suppose I must 
 have made those statements, since they all say I 
 [169] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 did. But I have no knowledge of havmg made 
 them, and I am innocent of that crime. From the 
 time that I was arrested I do not believe that I 
 was myself for a moment, until after I was over 
 here in the jail. Everything about that time is 
 a blur, a blank, to me. I can see through this blur 
 the time in the station, when the police would bring 
 me up every little while and tell me that I had done 
 it. I know that the very first thing that the In- 
 spector said to me when I was brought to him was, 
 *You did this.' I did not do it, and I knew that 
 I did not; but I do not know what I said or did 
 during that time in the station. I wondered why a 
 revolver should be pointed at me,' " and so forth. 
 It would be absurd to fancy that this last turn 
 of his mind was a made-up story to escape pimish- 
 ment. Through all those weeks of his half -dazed 
 condition, he had never made the least effort to 
 weaken his so-called confessions or to protect him- 
 self in any way. Moreover, this stupid boy would 
 be the last to be able to invent suddenly a long 
 story which fits so exactly in every detail the 
 clinical experiences of the nervous physician and 
 the mental experiences of the psychologist. " I 
 [170 J 
 
UNTRUE CONFESSIONS 
 saw the flash of steel in front of me." And from 
 that moment everything became a blur and a blank. 
 It was the one missiilg link in the chain of evidence 
 of his innocence. He cannot even have understood 
 that this flash of steel worked like the shining brass 
 lamp in Dr. Prince's case or the reflecting eye- 
 glass in that other case. He naively reported the 
 whole truth, and with all the ear-marks of truth. 
 He would have been absolutely unable to fabricate 
 by his own efforts such scientifically exact observa- 
 tions. What resulted when he begun to fabricate 
 out of his own faculties was sufficiently shown in 
 his " confessions," a contradictory mixture of im- 
 probable and psychologically impossible occur- 
 rences. Six days later the punishment of death was 
 executed. 
 
 [171] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 
 It was in a large city which I was visiting for the 
 first time. I went to see the hypnotic experiments 
 of a friend, a physician for nervous diseases. He 
 invited me to witness the treatment of a lady who 
 had been deeply hypnotised by him for a local 
 nervous disturbance. Her mind seemed normal in 
 every respect. She was a woman of wealth and 
 social position. When she was in hypnotic sleep, 
 he suggested to her to return in the afternoon 
 when she would find us both, and, as soon as he 
 took out his watch, to declare her willingness to 
 make a last will in which I should become the only 
 heir to all her property. She had never seen me be- 
 fore and I was introduced to her under a fictitious, 
 indifferent name. When she left the office after 
 awakening from her hypnotic sleep, she did not 
 take any notice of me at all. At the appointed 
 hour she returned, apparently not knowing herself 
 why she came. She found in the parlour, besides 
 her physician and me, three or four others who 
 [175] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 wanted to watch the develppment of the experi- 
 ment. She was not embarrassed. She said that she 
 had passed the house by chance and that she 
 thought it would be nice to show her doctor how 
 much better she felt and to ask whether there was 
 any objection to her going to the theatre. I then 
 began a conversation with her about the opera. 
 We talked for perhaps ten minutes on music and 
 the drama, exactly as if we had met at any dinner 
 party, and there was nothing in the least strange 
 in her ideas or in her expression of them. 
 
 Suddenly my friend asked how late it was and, 
 as arranged, took his watch out of his pocket. 
 There was a moment of hesitation. The lady spoke 
 the next few words in a stammering way; but 
 then she rushed on and told us that she had not ex- 
 pected to find such a company, but that her real 
 purpose in coming was to report to me that she 
 had selected me as her heir and that now she 
 wanted accordingly to make her last will. Up to 
 this moment her action has been a mechanical 
 carrying out of the post-hj^notic suggestion, but 
 the really interesting part was now to begin. I 
 told her that there must be a mistake, as she could 
 [176] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 not have seen me before, and I mentioned a ficti- 
 tious city in which I claimed to live. At once she 
 replied that she had just spent the last winter in 
 that city, and that she had met me there daily on 
 the street, and that from the first she had planned 
 to leave me all that she owned. I insisted that at 
 least she had never spoken to me. Yes, in that 
 same city she had met me repeatedly in society. 
 I represented to her the unnaturalness of leaving 
 her Wealth to a stranger instead of to her children. 
 At once she rephed that she had thought it out 
 for years, that it would be a blessing for the chil- 
 dren not to be burdened with riches, while she 
 knew that I would use them in a philanthropic 
 way. The others took part in the conversation, 
 scores of arguments were brought up to dis- 
 courage her from this fantastic plan. For each 
 one she had a long-considered excellent rejoinder. 
 Finally, I told her directly that, as she knew, 
 she had been hypnotised that morning and that 
 this whole idea of the last will had been planted in 
 her head by the witnessed suggestion of her physi- 
 cian. With a charming smile she replied that she 
 knew all that perfectly well, but that she did not 
 [177] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 contradict and resist this proposition of the doc- 
 tor simply because it by chance coincided entirely 
 with her own cherished plans, which had been per- 
 fectly firm in her mind for a year. She would have 
 written to me some day soon if I had not come 
 to town. She went on that she was unwilling to 
 hear any further doubts of her sincerity and that 
 she was ready to take an oath that she had made 
 up her mind in favour of such a testament long be- 
 fore she was hypnotised. To put an end to all this, 
 she insisted that paper be brought to her, and then 
 she wrote a codicil which left all her property to 
 the fictitious man from the fictitious town. The 
 doctors present had to sign as witnesses. I put the 
 paper into my pocket, switched the conversation 
 over to the theatre again, and, after a few minutes, 
 she had evidently forgotten the whole episode. 
 She treated me again as a complete stranger ; and 
 when I asked whether she happened to know the 
 city before mentioned, I was told that she had once 
 passed through it on the train. When she left the 
 house, she had clearly not the slightest remem- 
 brance of that document in my pocket, which we 
 others then burned together. 
 [178] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 If I had been present as an uninformed stranger 
 during that afternoon visit, I should have been so 
 completely misled that I could not have thought 
 of any additional inquiry or any further argu- 
 ment to test the validity of the testimony. Every- 
 thing seemed to harmonise with the one plan which 
 had been put into her mind. All her memories be- 
 came falsified, all her tastes and emotions were 
 turned upside down, all her life experiences were 
 mingled with and supplemented by untrammelled 
 imagination, coupled with the strongest feeling of 
 certainty and sincerity, and yet everything was 
 moulded by her own mind, with the exception of 
 that one decision which had been urged upon her 
 from the outside. 
 
 If a suggestion planted in a consciousness 
 would remain there isolated, it would be easy 
 to detect it. It would be in such manifold con- 
 tradiction with all the normal reminiscences 
 and habitual arguments that every court, for 
 instance, would quickly recognise the strange 
 thought as an intruder. But just this is the un- 
 canny power of suggestion, that it at once infects 
 all the neighbouring ideas and emotions and 
 [179] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 forces the whole mental life of the personality 
 under the unnatural influence. 
 
 Of course, life does not o'ften make such effec- 
 tive experiments, and the danger seems small that 
 judges or jurymen should ever be deceived by such 
 an elaborate performance of a witness. Few per- 
 sons only can be hypnotised to the degree that a 
 post-hypnotic suggestion becomes so powerful. 
 But it cannot be emphasised too strongly that the 
 extreme abnormal changes in mental life go over 
 by the smallest steps into the perfectly normal and 
 habitual behaviour. The grotesque destructiveness 
 of such a hypnotic revolution shows only an exag- 
 gerated form of the dangerous working of sug- 
 gestion which leads in a sliding scale down to the 
 little bits of strange influences with their unrea- 
 sonable reasoning, as when we read in the cars the 
 unhypnotic suggestions of " cook with gas " or 
 " read the StMi " or " wear rubber heels." 
 
 The psychologist does not need, indeed, the hyp- 
 notic state to demonstrate experimentally how 
 every suggestion contaminates the most sincere 
 memory. A picture of a farmer's room was shown 
 to about forty persons, children and adults. Each 
 [180] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 one examined- it individually and was then asked 
 to give a report from the fresh memory image in 
 reply to detailed questions. The picture had 
 plenty of detail which could easily be grasped. 
 The questions were partly indiflFerent and objec- 
 tive. How many persons are in the room? Does 
 the room have windows? What is the man doing? 
 There were persons and windows and the man was 
 eating his soup. But other questions, referring to 
 objects not present in the picture, could pass 
 through different stages of suggestiveness. Is 
 there a stove in the room? is not so intense a sug- 
 gestion as the express question, did you see the 
 stove in the room? There was no stove in the pic- 
 ture. Are there houses to be seen through the win- 
 dows of the room? Does a lamp hang from the 
 ceiling? The result showed that the replies to 
 these suggestive questions were correct only in 
 fifty-nine per cent, of all cases. Hundreds of times 
 objects were invented in accordance with the sug- 
 gestion of the question and this immediately after 
 the direct observation of the picture, and without 
 any personal interest in the falsified result. 
 The experiments show that the resistance for 
 [181] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 the young people is much weaker than for the 
 grown-ups, for the girls weaker than for the boys, 
 but they all were under perfect conditions of emo- 
 tional calmness. Such conditions are not to be 
 found on the witness stand under the excitement 
 of the solemn court procedure ; there the resistance 
 of the adult persons may sink to the low level of 
 that of the boys and girls. Above all, the experi- 
 ments show that at all ages the positive effect of 
 the suggestion works itself out in minute and con- 
 crete detail. As soon as the subject has answered 
 that there is a stove in the room, he is at once 
 ready to reply by a positive statement to the 
 further question, where i& the stove standing? 
 The one says on the left, the other on the right; 
 one in the corner, and one against the middle of 
 the wall, each simply following the path of least 
 resistance in his own imagination. The experi- 
 ments allowed a complete gradation of the sug- 
 gestive power of the various questions. The gown 
 of the farmer's wife was red. It was sufficient to 
 ask whether the gown was blue or green to elim- 
 inate for many the red entirely from memory. 
 And with the suggestiveness of the question the 
 [182] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 readiness to elaborate their own inventions stead- 
 ily increased. Experiments of this kind have been 
 carried on with almost identical results in different 
 nations with persons of different ages and profes- 
 sions with most varied material, and every time the 
 power of a suggestive question to break down the 
 true memory appears alarming. But whoever has 
 studied these protocols of the psychological lab- 
 oratories cannot help feeling that many cross-ex- 
 aminations in court are only continuations of the 
 interesting tests carried on to demonstrate that 
 there is nothing more suggestive for some persons 
 than a skiKul question. Their influence may set 
 in long before the lawyer of the other side rejects 
 a too clumsy suggestion as an imallowed " lead- 
 ing question." 
 
 Of course, the illusory effect of a suggestion 
 need not wait till the labour of the memory sets in. 
 Our perceptions themselves may be distorted 
 through suggestive influences. Experimental psy- 
 chology can demonstrate it and at the same time 
 test it in a thousand forms. Of course, such little 
 psychological laboratory experiments seem petty 
 and far removed from the reality of life experi- 
 [183] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 ence, as they can offer nothing but a dry sche- 
 matic pattern. Yet this is a complete misunder- 
 standing. Not the weakness of the experiments 
 but their strength lies in their schematic char- 
 acter. All the experimental sciences teach us to 
 understand the world by bringing its manifoldness 
 to the simplest formula. The physicist too does 
 not wait till the lightning breaks through the 
 clouds; he does not need the thunder storm. The 
 small electrical machine on his laboratory table 
 can teach him in a much more instructive way 
 what factors determine the electric discharge. 
 The artificial schematisation shows the connections 
 between cause and effect alone. Thus we do not 
 need in the laboratory the erratic play of emotions 
 and prejudices which suggestions and persuasions 
 may stjir up in the chaos of practical life. We 
 recognise the essential features just as well in the 
 slight changes of perceptive judgment with the 
 tiny material of our workshop. 
 
 If I have, for instance, on the one side of my 
 table thirty little squares of grey paper and on 
 the other side the same number of the same ma- 
 terial, and I ask the subject to decide without 
 [184] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 counting on which of the two sides there are more 
 of the grey squares, I can easily arrange that he 
 sees more on whichever side I want him to. I find, 
 perhaps, that his judgment depends upon the 
 grouping, that those thirty pieces suggest dif- 
 ferent numbers according as they lie in regular 
 lines or in irregular disorder; according as they 
 are shut off in small groups or grouped in one 
 circle ; surrounded by a frame, or accentuated by 
 a few ink spots, or brightened by a light back- 
 ground, — ^in short, that very various side factors 
 suggest an erroneous judgment as to the number 
 of the perceived things. And yet such harmless 
 experimental tests unveil all the factors with 
 which, for instance, political parties before elec- 
 tion awake misleading suggestions as to the rel- 
 ative strength of the party vote. A little bit of 
 bright colour on my laboratory table gives me all 
 the moral effect on my subjects which the most 
 wonderful torchlight processions and brass bands 
 can have on the suggestive voter. 
 
 Or take a still more striking experiment. We 
 have a series of cardboard boxes of different sizes, 
 from a width of a few inches to several feet, and 
 [185] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 we make them all. exactly equal in weight, filling 
 the smallest, perhaps, with iron and the largest 
 with straw. All are to have the same handle, and 
 if one after the other is lifted with closed eyes, aU 
 of course appear of equal heaviness. But now the 
 subject is to lift them, one after the other, with 
 open eyes, and the impression of weight will at 
 once be controlled by the suggestion given by the 
 size. The small box appears now several times 
 heavier than the large one, and no effort to over- 
 come the suggestion can rule out the illusion. It 
 may be a long way from the overestimation of the 
 weight of a little cardboard box to the falsifying 
 overestimation of a piece of evidence by the jury 
 of a murder case, but it is a straight way without 
 demarcation lines. If the twelve jurymen were 
 grouped according to their suggestibility, from 
 the most stubborn to the' most easily influenced, 
 they would stand probably In the same order as if 
 they were tested for errors in the judgment of 
 our boxes of cardboard. Yes, we might simplify 
 our test still more. Sometimes I found it sufficient 
 to show to my subjects various pairs of circles 
 drawn on paper ; they had to decide which of the 
 [186] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 pairs was the larger. The pairs were always of the 
 same size, but in their centres various figures were 
 printed ; the suggestible person is easily inclined to 
 call the circle with the figure 79 larger than the 
 circle which contains merely the figure 32, just as 
 there may be men who think the prettier girl to be 
 the cleverer, or the richer feUow the more bril- 
 liant. 
 
 What does the psychologist really understand 
 by a suggestion? Let us be sure from the first that 
 it certainly means nothing abnormal or patholog- 
 ical. The illustrations have indicated sufficiently 
 that abnormal disturbance and ordinary normal 
 life can meet here. My lady with the over-gen- 
 erous last will had certainly left the realm of 
 normality ; the voter who is imposed on by the big 
 parade, or the customer who is carried away by 
 the bargain prices of the great removal sale, is 
 also under the influence of suggestion and may 
 yet be otherwise quite a normal person. Sugges- 
 tion is, moreover, no symptom of weakness, and it 
 would be absurd to believe that life might be 
 wholesomer and better if it could move on without 
 the aid of influences of suggestion. On the con- 
 [187] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 trary, life would be dreary and commonplace, 
 without enthusiasm and without convictions, if all 
 suggestions evaporated. Education and art, pol- 
 itics and religion, rely on the power of suggestion, 
 for a suggestion is after all any idea which takes 
 hold of dur consciousness in such a way that it in- 
 hibits and excludes the opposite ideas. 
 
 But in what sense is there any meaning in 
 speaking of opposite ideas? Our consciousness 
 has room for any combination of thoughts, and 
 each idea seems to go peacefully together with 
 any other idea. We can think black and white and 
 summer and winter and man and woman quietly 
 together. When the psychologist speaks of op- 
 posite ideas, he means something very different. 
 He calls opposite such ideas as involve mutually 
 exclusive attitudes. I can think of man and of 
 woman, but I cannot take the attitude towards 
 a person of taking him for a man and at the same 
 time the attitude of taking him for a woman. I 
 can think of summer and winter, but I must be- 
 lieve that the season is either winter or summer, 
 not both, and must act accordingly. The whole 
 antagonism thus lies in our own activities, and, 
 [188] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 if we say that one idea excludes the opposite, we 
 really mean that the idea which demands one atti- 
 tude excludes another idea which demands an op- 
 posite attitude. In ordinary life, in states free 
 from suggestion, no idea has any prerogative. 
 Each has fair play. When a new idea comes to our 
 mind, perhaps from hearing it from a friend, per- 
 haps from reading it, perhaps from our own 
 imagination, it may fall into a conflict of atti- 
 tudes with some other idea present and, above all, 
 with some associations and memories which awake; 
 then begins a fair fight in which either the new- 
 comer or the old idea may win ; both together can- 
 not last, as we cannot live through opposite ac- 
 tions at the same time: we cannot turn to the 
 right and to the left, we cannot close the hand 
 and open It, we cannot speak and be silent. 
 
 Wrong ideas and inappropriate propositions 
 enter our consciousness through many doors all 
 the time, but they are at once eliminated through 
 the influence of the opposite ideas which a faith- 
 ful memory and a sound reasoning provide. That 
 which is connected most firmly with the remainder 
 of our experience will survive. Each of the rival- 
 [189 J 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 ling ideas is thus backed by ii;s own connections 
 and stands on its own merits. Whenever this is 
 changed, and an idea, it may be the new intruder 
 or the old incumbent, gets an unfair chance so 
 that all its opposing ideas are weakened and per- 
 haps even suppressed from the start, then we call 
 it a suggestion. All our prejudices and all our 
 convictions work as such suggestions. They do 
 not give to the idea of opposite attitude the op- 
 portunity for a test. That may work for the good 
 or for the bad. The moral idea and the vicious 
 desire may be equally strengthened through such 
 suggestive energy which eliminates the opposite 
 from the start. We call the readiness to receive 
 such suggestions from other persons suggestibil- 
 ity. The degree of suggestibility changes from 
 man to man and changes in every individual from 
 mood to mood, from hour to hour. Hypnotism, 
 finally, is an artificially increased state of sug- 
 gestibility. Yet there are nowhere sharp demarca- 
 tion lines. Even the most stubborn mind is open 
 to certain suggestions and even the most deeply 
 hypnotised mind has still the power to resist cer- 
 tain ideas which would be opposed by the deepest 
 [190] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 maxims of his life. Emotion certainly increases 
 suggestibility with everybody ; so does fatigue and 
 nervous exhaustion. 
 
 There is nothing mysterious in all this, and the 
 psychologist is not unable to understand it all as 
 product of the brain mechanism. He knows to-day 
 that each idea is composed of sensations which ac- 
 company nervous excitement in many sensorial 
 brain cells and these are stimulated by the sense 
 organs. But he knows further that this excite- 
 ment does not stop in those sensory cells. The 
 process which starts from the sense organs does 
 not find in those sensory brain centres an end sta- 
 tion, but runs on into motor paths which lead, 
 finally, to the muscular system. Those central 
 brain stations thus serve for the transmission of 
 the incoming sensory stimuli into outgoing motor 
 impulses. All this is endlessly complex. Millions 
 of paths lead to the brain and millions of paths 
 lead out again, and the cortex of the brain is the 
 great automatic switch-board for aU those tracks. 
 Yet all this alone would be no explanation. It 
 would make us only understand that any sensory 
 idea, a word which we hear, a thing which we see, 
 [ 191 ] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 would necessarily lead over into an action. But 
 plenty of facts speak now in favour of the fol- 
 lowing view. 
 
 Firstly, those motor paths in the brain are so 
 related to each other that whenever excitement 
 goes on in the one, the track which would lead to 
 the opposite action becomes blocked. When the 
 impulse runs into those nerves which, for instance, 
 open the hand, the brain closes those channels of 
 motor discharge which would lead us to clench the 
 fist. Secondly, the ideas which accompany the sen- 
 sory brain processes become vivid only when the 
 channels of discharge are open; they remain un- 
 vivid, that is, they become inhibited and sup- 
 pressed when those channels of discharge are 
 closed. A suggestion would thus be an idea whose 
 sensory brain accompaniment keeps the channels 
 of motor discharge wide open, so that the paths 
 which would lead to the opposite action are, on 
 the whole, closed ; and because the channels of dis- 
 charge are closed, all the ideas which might lead 
 to such opposite action are eliminated from the 
 first. If the words, " This is a garden," spoken 
 to me here in my library, came as a suggestion, 
 [192] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 > they would not exclude any activity of mine. I 
 might carry on a conversation on politics, might 
 read a book, and might remember correctly all 
 that happened to me before, but everything must 
 remain in harmony with my attitude towards this 
 room as a garden. The wish to take a book from 
 the shelf on the wall would be indeed inhibited and 
 the books themselves would become correspond- 
 ingly invisible, while I should believe I saw the 
 flowers in the garden, which I should feel ready to 
 pick. Of course, to take my library shelves for 
 flower bushes because someone tells me this is a 
 garden demands an extreme degree of suggestibil- 
 ity, and, where it is reached, we should certainly 
 speak of an hypnotic state. To take in an anxious 
 mood at twilight the trunk of a willow tree for a 
 burglar requires much less suggestibility; and to 
 believe the latest news of the yellow journal only 
 because it is shouted in big headlines, in spite of 
 the fact that a hundred earlier experiences ought 
 to suppress belief, a stiU smaller degree of sug- 
 gestibility is sufficient. 
 
 If, therefore, no mystery and no disease is in- 
 volved, if suggestion rests on an opening and 
 [193] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 closing of motor channels which goes on auto- 
 matically and to a high degree independent of 
 conscious will, if everyone is open to suggestions 
 and yet suggestions are able to turn white into 
 black and black into white, it seems indeed aston- 
 ishing that the work of justice is carried out in the 
 courts without ever consulting the psychologist 
 and asking him for all the aid which the modem 
 study of suggestion can offer. There is no one 
 participant in the drama of the court who might 
 not change the plot by the operation of sugges- 
 tions in his mind: the defendant may have worked 
 under suggestion at the time of his criminal deed, 
 the witnesses may be influenced during their ob- 
 servation of the deed or may labour -under sugges- 
 tion on the witness stand and, even if their observa- 
 tion and recollection is correct, their narration may 
 still be tainted by the strange spell ; but is the law- 
 yer or the judge, above all, is the juryman less open 
 to a disturbance of the normal ideational rivalry? 
 To be sure, popular imagination runs often 
 enough into the suspicion that a crime was per- 
 formed under hypnotic influence; but just this is 
 on the whole more a motive for dime novels than 
 [194] 
 
SUGGESTIOXS IN COURT 
 for legal consideration. AH the probabilities are 
 against it. For the purpose of justice it is far 
 more important to keep in mind that hypnotism is 
 only the strongest degree of suggestibility and 
 that the weaker states of openness for suggestion 
 are the real hotbeds of criminal impulses. We 
 know to-day, for instance, that alcohol poisoning | 
 can produce with many persons a state of sug- ; 
 gestibOity in which complete imitations of post- 
 hypnotic suggestions become possible. The order 
 to do a certain foolish act at an appointed hour in 
 the sober state wUl be carried out when the order 
 has been given in an impressive way while the wine 
 was still paralysing the inhibitory centres. In the 
 same way emotion changes the man; during a 
 panic the suggestibility is reinforced to a degree 
 where aU resistances seem to be broken down, and 
 to be a member of a crowd is always sufficient to 
 weaken the counter action. But there are many 
 persons whose unusual suggestibility makes them 
 constantly liable to chance influences, even in 
 normal social life. They are enthusiastic for the 
 last arguments they hear, and the next speaker who 
 says the opposite convinces them just as fuUy. 
 [195] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 The psychological experiment can measure the de- 
 gree of this constitutional weakness with exacti- 
 tude, and to leave this nervous disposition alto- 
 gether out of account in judging the criminal act 
 is in principle not diflFerent from punishing the in- 
 sane like a normal man. 
 
 Still more important than the influence of sug- 
 gestion on the crime is that on the report of the 
 witness. The distortion may begin with the mere 
 perception of the circumstances. Whenever the 
 court becomes doubtful as to whether the witness 
 really observed the facts correctly, we hear some 
 speculative generality as to the probability of a 
 reliable judgment. Here again the first thing 
 ought to be to find the personal equation and to 
 determine by the means of science to what degree 
 the perceptive consciousness of the observer re- 
 mains independent of intruding suggestions. The 
 suggestible witness may have heard distinct words 
 where the objective witness heard only a noise. 
 Much may depend upon that for the trial. Words 
 distinguished by the unsuggestible mind would 
 count for much; those distinguished by the sug- 
 gestible one for almost nothing. But to say which 
 [196] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 is which, it ought not to be sufficient to rely on 
 hearsay and anecdotes, with all the means of the 
 laboratory experts at disposal to determine the 
 exact degree of suggestibility, just as experts 
 would decide whether a bullet can have taken the 
 one way or the other through the body. 
 
 Where the perception was fairly correct, the 
 recollection may be entirely distorted by sugges- 
 tive side influences. We have spoken of the ex- 
 periments which prove the powerful influence of 
 suggestive questions. No doubt the whole situa- 
 tion of the court-room reinforces the suggestibil- 
 ity of every witness. In much-discussed cases cur- 
 rent rumours, and especially the newspapers, have 
 their full share in distorting the real recollections. 
 Everything becomes unintentionally shaped and 
 moulded. The imaginative idea which fits a prej- 
 udice, a theory, a suspicion, meets at first the 
 opposition of memory, but slowly it wins in power, 
 and as soon as the suggestibility is increased, the 
 play of ideas imder equal conditions ends, and the 
 opposing idea is annihilated. Easy tests could 
 quickly unveil this changed frame of mind and, if 
 such a half hypnotic state of suggestibility has 
 [197] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 set in, it is no wiser to keep the witness on the 
 stand than if he had emptied a bottle of whiskey 
 in the meantime. And even if the memory itself 
 is correct, the narration may be dictated by sug- 
 gestive influences and the reported story itself 
 may work backwards 'with auto-suggestive in- 
 fluence on the memory. There are not a few who 
 finally believe their hunting stories after they 
 have told them repeatedly. 
 
 Is it necessary to say that the most suggestible 
 man in the court and the one whose suggestibility 
 is most dangerous may be neither the criminal nor 
 the witness, but the juryman? His task demands 
 freedom from suggestion more than ahnost any 
 other quality. He has to weigh the value of con- 
 flicting evidence. Here again psychological ex- 
 periment can show how easy it is to interfere with 
 the unhampered play of rival ideas when the mind 
 is suggestible. The lawyer who knows his average 
 juryman instinctively makes the richest use of all 
 the psychological factors which bring the argu- 
 ments of the one side fully into the focus of in- 
 terest and suppress and inhibit the effectiveness of 
 the opposite idea. But here again there may be a 
 [198] 
 
SUGGESTIONS IN COURT 
 degree of suggestibility which simply interferes 
 with the purpose of justice and only psychological 
 experiment can bring such deficiency to light. The 
 judgment of a jury becomes a caricature, if not 
 the evidence, but insignificant and accidental cir- 
 cumstances determine the attitude of the sugges- 
 tible juror. 
 
 Of course public opinion with its crowd of in- 
 stincts is for the most part just such a suggesti- 
 ble arbiter. I heard at the centre of politics that 
 after the Spanish War, when the nation was de- 
 lighted with the navy and all kinds of scandals 
 seemed to bring evidence against the army, Con- 
 gress would never have voted so much to the army 
 had not WestvPoint in that year won the football 
 match over Annapolis, and thus swung round the 
 suggestible public opinion from navy to army. 
 But, to be sure, when the Court of public opinion 
 begins to weigh the evidence, it is no longer law, 
 but politics, and it might not be wise to ask how 
 far there is suggestion in politics too, inasmuch 
 as we might be checked too soon by the counter 
 question: Is there anything in politics which is 
 not suggestion? 
 
 [199] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 
 Those stubborn people who simply did not believe 
 that such a thing as hypnotism existed have prob- 
 ably now slowly died out ; they might just as well 
 have refused to believe that there are mental 
 diseases. And those of the other extreme, those 
 who saw in the hypnotic state a mystical revela- 
 tion in which superhuman powers manifested them- 
 selves, have slowly lost their ground now; they 
 might just as well call sleep or hysteria or epilepsy 
 a supernatural mystery. No, science understands 
 to-day that the facts of hypnotism are in no way 
 more mysterious than aU the other functions in the 
 natural life of the mind. They are narrowly related 
 to the experiences of absorbing attention, vivid 
 imagination and obedient wiQ and, on the other 
 side, to sleep and dreams and mental aberration. 
 
 Of course, there nevertheless still remains much 
 under heated discussion. There is no real agree- 
 ment yet as to where the limits of hypnotism lie 
 and where it shades off into suggestion. There are 
 [203] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 various possible interpretations of the hypnotic 
 brain process, various views also as to the special 
 disposition for it, and even its symptoms still need 
 careful inquiry. But everyone may agree at least 
 in this : that hypnotism is not without serious con- 
 sequences and is therefore certainly not a play- 
 thing. And secondly : that hypnotism is for many 
 nervous and mental disorders a highly eiFective 
 remedy when applied by the experienced physi- 
 cian. It has brought and will bring health and 
 through it, happiness to uncounted sufferers, and 
 therefore it has come to stay. 
 
 But if hypnotism is to be with us it seems nat- 
 ural that the question should be asked — often not 
 without anxiety : — ^What is its relation to law and 
 court, to crime and criminal procedure.? The un- 
 canny power which man has therein over men, wiU 
 over wiU, suggests the thought that dangerous 
 social entanglements may threaten or that new 
 energies in the interest of the law may be made 
 thereby available. The imagination has here a free 
 field ; the dime novel and, alas ! the dollar-and-a-half 
 novel have made full use of this convenient instru- 
 ment of criminal wonders, and the newspaper pub- 
 [204 J 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 lie reads, often without any feeling for the dif- 
 ference, stories of hypnotic crime which might 
 easily have taken place by the side of others which 
 are absolutely impossible. There is nowhere a 
 standard, and it may therefore be worth while to 
 take a bird's-eye-view of the whole field in which 
 hypnotism and crime come really or supposedly in 
 contact with each other. 
 
 The popular imagination turns first with pref- 
 erence to the query whether the court may not ap- 
 ply hypnotism for the purpose of unveiling the 
 hidden truth. Unsolicited letters concerning hyp- 
 notism turn up copiously in a psychologist's mail ; 
 statistics show that it is just this proposition 
 which disturbs the largest percentage of these 
 amateur criminologists. They take a passionate 
 interest in every murder case and too often reach 
 the torturing stage of not knowing who is really 
 guilty, even when all evidence and the verdict of 
 the jury is in. Their scruple, they feel, could be 
 removed only by their absolutely knowing that 
 this or that man speaks the truth. Hypnotism 
 has the well-known power of breaking down the 
 resistance of the will; if the hypnotised witness 
 [205 ] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 were ordered to speak the full truth, he would no 
 longer have any choice. It looks so simple and 
 promising. 
 
 From a purely psychological standpoint such a 
 method might be successful. It is not different in 
 principle from the hypnotic confessions which a 
 patient may make against his will. The other day 
 a student whom I was curing of the cocaine habit 
 assured me most vehemently that he had no cocaine 
 in his room any more, and a few minutes later, when 
 I had hypnotised him, he described correctly the 
 place where he had hidden it. But the difficulty 
 would begin with the fact, too often misunder- 
 stood, that one cannot be hypnotised by a newper- 
 son for tlie"Brittmie against _his wiU, Acrimiaal 
 who does not confess in his full senses wiU not 
 yield to any hypnotising efforts, as no outsider 
 can bring about the new state of mind. Hypnotis- 
 ation cannot work on an unyielding brain as a 
 sponge with chloroform which is held by force to 
 the mouth might work. If the imagination of the 
 subject does not help in reaching the somnam- 
 bulic state, no one can inject a mesmeric fluid into 
 his veins. And finally, even if such hypnotising by 
 [206] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 force were possible, it is self evident, from moral 
 and legal reasons, that no civilised court ought to 
 listen to such extorted evidence. 
 
 Of course, it might be different if a wrongly 
 accused defendant or a suspected witness wished 
 in his own interest to be hypnotised. A woman 
 once asked my advice in such a case. She 
 was under a cloud of ugly suspicion ; even her own 
 husband did not believe her protestations of in- 
 nocence, and, I suppose, her lawyer still less. She 
 wanted to be brought to the deepest state of hyp- 
 notism in open court till it would be evident that 
 she had no wiU-power left for deceit. If she de- 
 clared herself innocent on the question of the 
 hypnotiser, the court would have to accept it. I 
 advised her strongly not even to suggest such a 
 theatrical performance. Technically, it is not at 
 aU possible to hypnotise everyone to such a strong 
 degree, further it would be difficult to prove to 
 the court that she did not simulate hypnotic sleep 
 and that no secret agreement existed between the 
 subject and her hypnotiser. But the decisive point 
 for me was the conviction that the court ought to 
 accept such somnambulic utterances as little as the 
 [207] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 insane speeches of a paranoiac. She would be no 
 longer in full possession of her mental energies, as 
 it is the essence of the hypnotic state that large 
 parts of the inner functions are inhibited: all is 
 suppressed which counteracts the suggestions of 
 the hypnotiser. She thus would cease to be really 
 herself, and the person on the witness stand would 
 therefore not remain legally the witness who took 
 the oath before the hypnotisation. 
 
 Quite different is the case when the hypnotisa- 
 tion is required to awake in the mind the memory 
 of facts which occurred in an earlier hypnotic sit- 
 ting. It is well known, indeed, that a person awak- 
 ing from hypnosis may be without any memory of 
 the words spoken, but may remember everything, 
 even months after, as soon as a new hypnotic 
 state is produced. Such a sharpened dream mem- 
 ory may become important, and here the break of 
 personal unity is no hindrance, as the purpose is 
 objective information; for such an end even an 
 insane man may give acceptable evidence, perhaps 
 as to the place where stolen booty is hidden. 
 
 But that the court should hypnotise would in 
 any case be a most exceptional event; what is de- 
 [208] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 serving of much more attention is the case when 
 the criminal hypnotises. Here again popular mis- 
 understandings prevail. Here belongs, first of 
 all, the absurd fear of the man with paralysing 
 powers. He enters the room and when he looks on 
 you, you are powerless; you give him your jewels 
 and the key to your safe and he plunders you 
 gently while you have to smile and cannot raise a 
 hand. The Enghsh newspapers insisted that such 
 a " burglar with the hypnotic eye " is " the latest 
 product of America." Pwnch, the London Chari- 
 vari, poked fun at him with a long poem on John 
 P. Beck of Fortieth Street — ^Was as smart a 
 burglar as one could meet. " On one thing only 
 would he rely — The power of his black hypnotic 
 eye." At first John P. burglarises the halls of the 
 miUionaires. Finally he comes before the jury, but 
 every witness begins to talk nonsense as soon as 
 John P. looks at him. "And each who came 
 through the witness door — Seemed still more mad 
 than the man before." And at last he looks on the 
 judge, and the judge, too, begins to get confused 
 and absurd and closes finally : " I know the crim- 
 inal. Yes, you see^The wretch before you. I am 
 [209] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 he ! — The man who should be in the dock is me ! — 
 Arrest me, warders ! Step down, John P." 
 
 Now all this is, of course, extremely funny, but 
 Punch wanted to be still funnier, and therefore in- 
 troduced, with a serious face, the burlesque poetry 
 with a prose remark. It closes with the statement: 
 " Professor Miinsterberg of Harvard and other 
 learned men have set themselves to show that hyp- 
 notic power may become a most dangerous asset 
 of the criminal." That is amusing, indeed — ^be- 
 cause hardly anyone who is interested in the psy- 
 chology of hypnotic states has sought and used so 
 constantly the chance to ridicule the belief in a 
 special " hypnotic power." I know well that not a 
 few disagree with me in this, but I must. insist 
 and have always insisted that anyone can hyp- 
 notise anyone. 
 
 Of course, whoever wants to hypnotise — ^in fact, 
 no one but a physician ought to do it — ^must learn 
 the technique and apply it patiently and skilfully. 
 And certainly there are Individual differences. Not 
 everyone can be deeply hypnotised ; with not a few 
 the inhibition does not go further than the in- 
 ability to open the eyes, while only one of 
 [210] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 four enters into strong hypnotic hallucinations. 
 Further, not everyone is weU prepared to awake 
 that confidence which is essential and that feeling 
 of repose which guides one over to the dreamy 
 state ; the look, the voice, the gestures, the phrases, 
 the behaviour of certain persons make them poor 
 hypnotisers, however well they may understand the 
 tricks. But in principle everyone can hypnotise 
 and can be hypnotised, just as in principle every- 
 one can love and can be loved and no especial mys- 
 terious power is needed to fall in love or to awake 
 love. 
 
 Yet, while thus everyone can exert hypnotic in- 
 fluence, no one can do it by a mere glance. AH the 
 stories of a secret influence by which one man's 
 will gets hold of another man's mind are re- 
 mainders of the mesmeric theories of the past. We 
 know to-day that everything depends upon the at- 
 tention and imagination of the hypnotised and 
 that no mysterious fluid can flow over. This mys- 
 tical view of unscientific superstition reached its 
 climax in the prevalent belief that a man can exert 
 such a secret influence from a far distance, with- 
 out the victim's knowledge of the source of the 
 [211] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 uncanny distortion of his mind. Thus every 
 heinous crime can be committed under that cover. 
 The distant hypnotiser can inflict pain and suf- 
 fering on his enemy and can misuse the innocent 
 as instrument of his criminal schemes. . 
 
 Such a reappearance of the old witchcraft 
 superstitions is especially characteristic for the 
 borderland cases between normal and abnormal 
 minds. An unsound intellect easily interprets the 
 stray impulses of the mind as the intrusion of a 
 distant adversary. In Germany, for instance, a 
 talented writer bombarded the legislatures with 
 his pamphlets demanding new laws for the pim- 
 ishment of those who produced criminal perver- 
 sions through telepathic influence. The asylums 
 are full of such ideas. The paranoiacs are always 
 inclined to explain their inner disturbances by the 
 newest startling agencies. Their mind is disturbed 
 by Roentgen rays or wireless telegraphy or hyp- 
 notic influence from a distance. In this country 
 such accusations have become familiar to the stu- 
 dents of Christian Science. In " Science and 
 Health " Mrs. Eddy wrote, " In coming years the 
 person or mind that hates his neighbour will have 
 [212] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 no need to traverse his fields, to destroy his flocks 
 and herds . . . for the evil mind will do this 
 through mesmerism; and not in propria persona 
 be seen committing the deed." And again, " Mes- 
 merism is practised both with and without manipu- 
 lation; but the evil deed without a sign is also 
 done by the manipulator and mental mal-practi- 
 tioner. The secret mental assassin stalks abroad 
 and needs to be branded to be known in what he is 
 doing." Or, " That malicious animal-power seeks 
 to kin his fellow mortals, morally and physi- 
 cally, and then to charge the innocent with his 
 crimes." 
 
 There ought to be no compromise : that morally 
 ruinous doctrine of " Malicious Animal Magnet- 
 ism " is a complete distortion of the facts. Noth- 
 ing of that kind is ever possible. Some agree that 
 if the surprising facts of hypnotism are possible, 
 such telepathic mesmerism might be possible too, 
 as the influence looks similar. We might just as 
 well propose : if the surprising fact is true that a 
 lien can be hatched from a hen's egg, it may also 
 be true that a hen can come from a white candy 
 egg, as they look alike. It is exactly the essentials 
 [213] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 of hypnotism and telepathy which are dissimilar 
 and not to be compared : the latter would be a mys- 
 tery, the former is no harder to explain than any 
 act of sense impression and attention. 
 
 Of course, there is no reason to deny that a 
 person may fall into hypnotic state while the hyp- 
 notiser is at another place. The only condition is, 
 that he must have been hypnotised by him before 
 and that his own imagination has been captured 
 by the thought of the absent hypnotiser. I my- 
 self have repeatedly hypnotised by telephone or 
 even by mail. I treated, for instance, a morphin- 
 ist who at first came daily to my laboratory to be 
 hypnotised ; later it was sufficient to tell him over 
 the telephone: Take your watch out, in two min- 
 utes you will fall asleep; or to write to him: As 
 soon as you have read this note, you will be in 
 the hypnotic state. I thus had the " malicious '* 
 influence over a distance, but it was not by will 
 power, it was the power of his own imagination; 
 at the time when he read my note in his , suburb 
 and fell asleep, I was not thinking of him at all. 
 As a matter of course, such influences by cor- 
 respondence would have been impossible had not 
 [214] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 repeated hypnotisation in personal contact pre- 
 ceded. Even that may not be necessary if not com- 
 plete hypnotisation but only suggestive influence 
 is in question. A few days ago I got a letter from 
 a Southern lady whose son suffers from morphin- 
 ism. I have never seen either of them. She writes : 
 " My son has been impressed with the belief that 
 your treatment is all he needs to be cured. In a 
 dream, he said, you stood before him with the 
 finger-tips of your hands trembling and said: i 
 have the power to influence your will. He woke 
 repeating: You have the power to control my 
 will. That morning he seenjed to forget to take 
 the morphine at the regular time and soon went 
 down to the beach without his morphine outfit in 
 his pocket — an unusual thing," and so forth. 
 He himself was convinced that my will power was 
 working on him while I did not even know him. 
 
 The chief factor is confidence. Anyone who saw 
 the hypnotic effects, when the greatest master of 
 hypnotism. Professor Bernheim of Nancy, in 
 France, went from bed to bed in the clinics sim- 
 ply saying: Sleep, sleep, felt that indeed no one 
 else could have attained that influence. But not 
 [215] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAl^D 
 because he had a special power: the chief point 
 was that the whole population about Nancy went 
 to him with an exaggerated tension of expectancy 
 and confidence. I remember the case of a suffering 
 woman whom I tried at first in vain to hypnotise ; 
 I felt that her mind was full of antagonism. I 
 slowly found out what troubled her. She had seen 
 so many physicians who had sent her high bills 
 that she was afraid doctors humbug nervous pa- 
 tients for money. I told her that I, as a psychol- 
 ogist, do such work only in the interest of science, 
 and that I, therefore, as a matter of course, have 
 never accepted a cent from any patient anywhere. 
 Two minutes later she was in deep hypnotic sleep. 
 The attention and emotion of the subject is 
 thus much more important than the power of the 
 hypnotiser. Yet, this does not exclude the possi- 
 bility that attention and emotion may be stirred 
 up intentionally, perhaps even maliciously, with- 
 out conscious knowledge of the victim. There is 
 no especial power which produces love, and yet the 
 coquettish smile of a wilful girl may perturb the 
 peace of any man. In this way a hypn,otiser may 
 not wait till the subject lies down with the con- 
 [216] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 scious expectation of being hypnotised, but may 
 work slowly and systematically by means of a 
 hundred little tricks on the imagination of a sus- 
 ceptible person. While both the hypnotic eye 
 which fascinjites at the first glance and the ma- 
 licious magnetism from a distance are absurd in- 
 ventions, such slow and persistent gaining of 
 power over an unresisting mind is certainly possi- 
 ble. A full hypnotic state cannot be reached in 
 such a way ; it shades oflF into the states of sub- 
 mission which belong to our normal social life; 
 there is increased suggestibility in love and fear, 
 in the pupil's feeling towards the teacher and the 
 patient's feeling towards the physician— nowhere 
 a sharp demarcation line between these most valu- 
 able influences of social authority and the ab- 
 normal suggestions which have their climax in 
 the complete hypnotic state. Such semi-hypnotic 
 state can work, of course, also for good, but the 
 dangers of its misuse are evident. 
 
 I remember the tragic case of a young Western 
 
 woman who seems to have lived for years such a 
 
 depersonalised social life. She had gone through 
 
 college and graduate university work and every 
 
 [217] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 one of her instructors and comrades was charmed 
 with the lovely girl; but her finest gifts showed 
 themselves in her delightful family life. Her aged 
 mother and her sisters were her only thoughts. 
 The family made the acquaintance of an Italian 
 who posed as a rich Italian count. He was without 
 means, without education, disreputable and man- 
 nerless, from the lowest level. The girl was dis- 
 gusted with him, but he managed to see her often. 
 She felt with aversion how his influence grew on 
 her; she felt a shiver when he looked at her, and 
 yet an uncanny sensation crept over her, a 
 strange fascination which she could not overcome ; 
 she had to do what he asked and finally what he 
 ordered her to do. She despised him, and yet one 
 day they secretly left the house and were married. 
 At once he took possession of the young woman's 
 considerable property. But It was not only that 
 she gave him all ; under his control she began ab- 
 surd lawsuits to deprive the family of all they 
 owned; she swore on the witness stand in court to 
 the most cruel accusations and attacks against her 
 mother, who had never wavered in her devoted love 
 for her daughter, and everyone who knew her be- 
 [218] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 fore felt from her expression and her voice that 
 she was not herself any more, but that she was the 
 passive instrument of an unscrupulous schemer. 
 Her own mother said: " Sometimes, for a few 
 minutes, I seemed to get near her — ^then she would 
 seem gone, miles and miles away. There are no 
 words to describe the horror of it." And the sister 
 wrote : " I should go crazy if I saw her often." 
 And such a weird spectacle of an elusive mind, 
 which is the old personality and yet not the old 
 self, is not quite rare in our court rooms. It is 
 a hypnotic state which is pregnant with social 
 dangers, but certainly, as said before, there is no 
 fear that it can be brought about suddenly or 
 from a distance; it needs persistent influence, 
 works probably only on neurotic persons with a 
 special disposition for mental inhibitions, and 
 never reaches complete hypnotism. 
 
 How far now does the full hypnotic state itself 
 fall within the realm of criminal action? One 
 aspect offers itself at once : the hypnotised person 
 may become the powerless instrument of the crim- 
 inal will of the hypnotiser. He may press the trig- 
 ger of the gun, may mix the poison into the food, 
 [219] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 may steal and forge, and yet the real responsible 
 actor is not the one who commits the crime but 
 the other one who is protected and who directed 
 the deed by hypnotic suggestion. All that has 
 been demonstrated by experiments a hundred 
 times. I perhaps tell the hypnotised man that he is 
 to give poison to the visitor whom I shall call from 
 the next room. I have a sugar powder prepared 
 and assure my man that the powder is arsenic. I 
 throw it into a glass of water before his eyes and 
 then I caU the friend from the next room. The 
 hypnotised subject takes the glass and offers it to 
 the newcomer; you see how he hesitates and per- 
 haps trembles, but finally he overcomes his re- 
 sistance and offers the sugar water which he must 
 take for poison. The possibilities of such secret 
 crimes seem to grow, moreover, in an almost un- 
 limited way through the so-called posthypnotic 
 suggestions. The opportunity to perform unwill- 
 ingly a crime in the hypnotic sleep itself is in 
 practical life, of course, small and exceptional. 
 But the hypnotiser can give the order to carry out 
 the act at a later time, a few hours or a few days 
 after awaking. 
 
 [220] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 Every experimenter knows that he can make the 
 subject go through a foolish performance long 
 after the hypnosis ended. Go this afternoon at 
 four to your friend, stand before him on one leg 
 and repeat the alphabet. Such a silly order will 
 be carried out to the letter, and only the theoretical 
 question is open, whether the act is done in spite 
 of full consciousness, or whether the subject falls 
 again under the influence of his own imagination 
 at the suggested time into a half hypnotic state. 
 Certainly he does not know before four o'clock 
 that he is expected to do the act, and when the 
 clock strikes four he feels an instinctive desire to 
 run to the house of his friend and to behave as 
 demanded. He will even do it with the feeling of 
 freedom and will associate in his own mind illogical 
 motives to explain to his own satisfaction his per- 
 verse desires. He wants to recite the alphabet to 
 his friend because his friend once made a mistake 
 in spelling. Might he not just as well run to his 
 friend's house and shoot him down if a criminal 
 hypnotiser afflicted him with such a murderous 
 suggestion? He would again believe himself to act 
 in freedom and would invent a motive. The situa- 
 [ 221 J 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 tion becomes the more gruesome, as the criminal 
 would have only half done his work in omitting to 
 add the further suggestion that no one else would 
 ever be able to hypnotise him again and that he 
 would entirely forget that he was ever hypnotised. 
 Experiment proves that all this is entirely possible, 
 and that posthypnotic suggestion thus plays in 
 literature a convenient role of secret agency for 
 atrocious murder as well as for Trilby's wonder- 
 ful singing. 
 
 In contradiction to all this I have to confess : I 
 have my doubts as to the purity of Trilby's hyp- 
 notic singing, and I have more than doubts — ^yes, 
 I feel practically sure that no real murder has 
 ever been committed by an innocent man under the 
 influence of posthypnotic suggestion. It is true, I 
 have seen men killing with paper daggers and 
 poisoning with white flour and shooting with 
 empty revolvers in the libraries of nerve specialists 
 or in laboratory rooms with doctors sitting by and 
 watching the performance. But I have never be- 
 come convinced that there did not remain a back- 
 ground idea of artificiality in the mind of the hyp- 
 notised, and that this idea overcame the resistance 
 [222] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 which would be prohibitive in actual life. To bring 
 an absolute proof of this conviction is hardly pos- 
 sible, as we cannot really kill for experiment's 
 sake. 
 
 There remains, of course, also the possible 
 claim that the courts have condemned men for 
 murder for which they were passive instruments. 
 Yet, it is a fact that so far no murder case is 
 known in which the not unusual theory of the 
 hypnotic influence seemed probable after all evi- 
 dence was in. I have repeatedly received inquiries 
 from lawyers asking whether there would be any 
 basis to stand on if the defence were to claim that 
 the crime was done in a hypnotic or posthypnotic 
 state. I have replied every time that, in spite of 
 the many experiments which seem to prove the 
 contrary, it can be said that hypnotic suggestion 
 is unable to break down the inner resistance. 
 There is therefore no danger to be feared from 
 this side. The frequent claim of defendants that 
 they must have been hypnotised is, nevertheless, 
 mostly no conscious invention. It is rather the 
 outcome of the fact that the criminal . impulse 
 comes to the unbalanced diseased mind often like 
 [223] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 a foreign intruder; it takes hold of the person- 
 ality without free choice of motives, and the un- 
 fortunate sufferer thus interprets quite sincerely 
 his unaccountable perversions as the result of 
 strange outside influences. 
 
 But there is another side, and it would be reck- 
 less to overlook the dliference. You cannot make 
 an honest man steal and kill, but you can make him 
 perform many other actions which are not immoral 
 as far as the action is concerned and which yet 
 have criminal character. The scoundrel perhaps 
 gives the posthypnotic suggestion that his sub- 
 ject, a man of independent means and without 
 immediate relatives, call at a lawyer's and deposit 
 with him a last will leaving all his property to the 
 hypnotiser. Here no resistance from moral prin- 
 ciple is involved ; the man who throws away all he 
 owns acts in accordance with the order because 
 the impulse is not checked by the habits of a 
 trained conscience. We can add one more step 
 which is entirely possible: the hypnotiser may see 
 a further opportunity to give the posthypnotic 
 suggestion of suicide. The next day the victim is 
 found dead in his room ; everything indicates that 
 [224] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 he took his own life; there is not the least sus- 
 picion: and the hypnotiser is his heir in conse- 
 quence of the spurious last will. Similar cases are 
 reported, and they are not improbable. The easi- 
 ness with which any hypnotiser can cover the 
 traces of his crime by special suggestions makes 
 the situation the more dangerous. 
 
 In this group belong also the posthypnotic per- 
 juries. Of course, if the man on the witness stand 
 knew that he swore falsely, his moral convictions 
 would rebel as in the case of the theft and murder. 
 But he believes what he swears ; on his side there is 
 no crime, but merely confusion of ideas and falsi- 
 fied memory ; the crime belongs entirely to the one 
 who fabricated the artificial delusion. 
 
 In many of these cases the hypnotised subject is 
 the sufferer while he himself is acting; they are 
 not seldom supplemented by crimes in which the 
 subject is a passive sufferer. The French litera- 
 ture of hypnotism is full of cases in which hyp- 
 notised women have been the victims of sexual 
 crime. No warning can be loud enough, indeed, 
 against hypnotising by anyone but reliable doc- 
 tors of medicine. Other cases refer to simple 
 [225] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 fraud. The posthypnotic suggestion may force 
 one man to pay the price of real pearls for glass 
 pearls and may induce another man to buy a 
 house which is useless for him. The physician who 
 is a trained psychologist will have no difficulty in 
 assisting the court in all such situations and in 
 making the right diagnosis; on the other hand, 
 without thorough experience in scientific psychol- 
 ogy, no one will be able to disentangle such cases, 
 be he physician or not. The hypnotiser may have 
 suggested complete forgetfulness and may have 
 prohibited any new hypnotisation, but there al- 
 ways remains somewhere a little opening where the 
 psychologist can insert a wedge and finally break 
 open the whole mental structure. It may be added 
 at once that the psychologist has also no difficulty 
 in recognising any simulation of hypnotic states. 
 There remains still one important relation be- 
 tween hypnotism and crime: hypnotisation may 
 prevent crime. The moral interest we take in the 
 suppression of criminal impulses makes us inclined 
 to see a sharp demarcation line between these 
 socially destructive tendencies and other impulses 
 which are morally indiflPerent. Psychologically we 
 [226] 
 
HYPNOTISM AND CRIME 
 cannot acknowledge such a distinct line between 
 them. The craving for an immoral and illegal end 
 may take possession of a weak nervous system in 
 the same way in which any neurasthenic impulse 
 becomes rooted, and it seems therefore not unjusti- 
 fied to hope for such a criminal disposition the 
 same relief by hypnotic treatment as for the neu- 
 rasthenic disturbance. 
 
 Last year I was approached within the same 
 week by two young people who complained in al- 
 most identical terms that they could not master 
 their ideas and desires. The one suffered from the 
 idea that he wanted to kill certain persons ; when- 
 ever he saw them he felt the impulse to knock them 
 down. The other suffered from the idea that she 
 wanted to look altematingly from one eye to the 
 other of any person with whom she talked. The 
 impulse to kiU was possibly of the greatest conse- 
 quence, the impulse to look from eye to eye was 
 evidently the most indifferent affair. And yet the 
 second person was the greater sufferer. She had 
 once by chance observed in a man's face a strik- 
 ing difference in colour between his two eyes, and 
 that led her to look altematingly to the one and 
 [227] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 the other eye. It became a habit which grew 
 stronger than her will and, when she came to me, 
 it had reached a point where she thought of suicide 
 because life had become intolerable from this in- 
 cessant impulse to swing from eye to eye. I treated 
 the dangerous killing impulse and the harmless 
 swinging impulse exactly alike, by inhibitory sug- 
 gestions, and they disappeared under the hypnotic 
 treatment in exactly the same time. 
 
 But it is evident that the criminal impulses can- 
 not be simply treated as an appendix to the neu- 
 rasthenic states. Most complex and partly moral 
 questions are involved therein. Have we a right to 
 reinforce righteousness by hypnotic instead of by 
 an appeal to spiritual energies? If we cure the 
 depraved boy of his stealing habit by hypnotism, 
 would it not be the simple logical consequence 
 that his whole education and training ought to 
 be left to such a safe and forceful influence? 
 And that opens the widest perspective of social 
 problems. It leads us to a new and separate ques- 
 tion: What can the modem psychologist con- 
 tribute to the prevention and suppression of 
 crime? 
 
 [228] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 
THE, PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 
 A FEW weeks ago there stumbled into my labora- 
 tory a most pitiable human wreck; I saw at the 
 first glance how morphine had devastated the 
 frame of a man in his best years, and trembling 
 and with rolling eyes he confessed that he was 
 using thirty grains of the destructive poison every 
 day. He could neither eat nor sleep, he had not 
 worked for years, he had left wife and child, — 
 it was a gruesome story of heartrending misery. 
 They had sent him to asylums in vain ; he remained 
 the slave of his passion, and "everyone treated him 
 with contempt and disgust. Slowly I drew out his 
 whole tragedy from the beginning. He had been 
 successful in life and hard at work; then he had 
 had an accident and had been brought into a 
 Southern hospital. There the surgeons gave him 
 morphine every evening to secure a restful night, 
 just a little " shot " of an eighth of a grain. When 
 he left the hospital his hip was healed, but the 
 poor fellow could not sleep without the drug, and 
 [231] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 from day to day the dose had to be increased — ^he 
 was a morphinist, an outcast, without energy and 
 without hope. 
 
 For weeks I have been fighting his passion with 
 persistent suggestive treatment, and the dose he 
 needs has now been reduced to the hundredth 
 part, and his old strength and enjoyment of life 
 have slowly come back; he wiU be cured soon. 
 But every day when I put my full energy to the 
 task, I have to think of the cruelty with which so- 
 ciety has treated him. He was not born a " dope 
 fiend " ; he did not choose the poison. Organised so- 
 ciety injected it into his system — a small dose only, 
 but enough to make the craving for it irresistible, 
 and when it had grown to ruinous proportions so- 
 ciety was ready to despise and to condemn him. 
 Even in the best case it could only make heroic ef- 
 forts to overcome the gigantic passion which it had 
 recklessly raised. To me this diseased passion is a 
 symbol of all the crime that fills the countries of 
 the globe. No man is born a criminal. But society 
 gives him without his will the ruinous injection — 
 of course, a small dose only, a shot of an eighth 
 of a grain, and despises him if the injected in- 
 [232] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 stinct grows and grows, and when it has destroyed 
 the whole man, then society goes heroically to 
 work with police and court and punishment. It 
 is nearly always too late — to prevent that first 
 reckless injection would have been better than all 
 the labour of the penitentiaries. 
 
 At last this conviction is making its way every- 
 where : prevention of crime is more important than 
 treatment of crime. It is claimed that this country 
 spends annually five hundred million dollars more 
 on fighting the existing crime than on all its works 
 of charity, education and religion; the feeling is 
 at last growing that a fraction of that expense 
 and energy would be ample for providing that 
 such a quantity of habitual crime should not come 
 to existence at all. For such a result, however, it 
 is essential that all social factors cooperate in 
 harmony and that no science which may contribute 
 to this tremendous problem hold back. It is evi- 
 dent that it is the duty of modern experimental 
 psychology to give its serious attention to such 
 thoughts, and a psychologist may therefore ask 
 for a hearing. He has perhaps little to con- 
 tribute, as only in very recent days has the psy- 
 L233] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 chological laboratory come into connection with 
 the world of crime, but that little is the more 
 needed to awake interest for this too much neg- 
 lected aspect of the case. 
 
 Public opinion, to be sure, to-day leans toward 
 calling the psychologist as witness for a very dif- 
 ferent purpose. The psychologist is to disburden 
 society of its responsibility for the growth of 
 crime, inasmuch as he is called to testify that the 
 criminal is born as such. Reminiscences of Lom- 
 broso's interesting theories and of his whole school 
 fill the air. It seems a dogma that the true scientist 
 must accept the type of the born criminal along 
 with other human abnormalities which are beyond 
 our social making and unmaking, like the epileptic, 
 or, on the sunny side of society, the musical genius. 
 But in such a form the doctrine is certainly mis- 
 leading and distorted, and the psychologist must 
 refuse to furnish evidence. No one will deny the 
 importance of those Italian inquiries which were 
 quickly amplified by the researchers of all coun- 
 tries. It was of the highest value to study the 
 bodily and mental characteristics of the inmates 
 of our prisons, to gather anthropological and 
 [ 234 ] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 sociological data of their misshapen ears or pal- 
 ates, of their tattooing and their slang, and 
 finally to make psychological experiments as to 
 their sensitiveness and their emotions. But no re- 
 sult justifies the claim that criminals are born as 
 such. The accusation against society stands after 
 Lombroso firmer than before ; society has not done 
 its duty. 
 
 From the outset we must not forget that from 
 a psychological point of view it is utterly vague 
 to speak of a criminal disposition as if such a term 
 stood for a unified mental state. In the old days 
 of reckless phrenology it seemed so simple to talk 
 of the sense for architecture or the sense for 
 morality, and in the same way of the absence of 
 such sense, as if really one, elementary function 
 only were involved. All that was necessary for 
 the old phrenologist, because it was his belief 
 that he was able to recognise the development of 
 mental functions like love of music or criminality 
 from the development of certain bumps on the 
 skull; and for that purpose it was again neces- 
 sary to presuppose that such mental traits were 
 located in one single corner of the brain. 
 [235] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 To-day we know that such faculties are the out- 
 come of hundreds of thousands of processes which 
 are going on in perhaps milhons of brain parts. 
 We may seek the localised seat for simple tone 
 sensations or simple colour sensations, but not for 
 a whole perception of a thing, and infinitely less 
 for such complex states, built up from ideas, emo- 
 tions, and volitions. 
 
 How does the average man succeed in living an 
 honest life? Impressions and thoughts carry to 
 his mind numberless ideas which awake feelings of 
 pleasure and displeasure. The pleasurable idea 
 stirs up the desire and the impulse to realise it in 
 action, and the disagreeable idea awakes the im- 
 pulse to get rid of the displeasing source. There 
 is no further will act necessary; the idea of the 
 end itself presses the brain button and makes us 
 act. We approach the attractive and escape the 
 painful by the mere power of the ideas ; the whole 
 development of life from the first sucking for 
 sweet milk is possible only through this mechanism. 
 But from the beginning life complicates this pro- 
 cess. The tempting idea of the end to be reached 
 awakes, before the action sets in, some counter 
 [236] 
 
THE PREVENTION OP CRIME 
 idea, perhaps the thought of dangerous results ; 
 we desire the fruit, but we know it is poisonous, and 
 the idea of poisoning works in the opposite direc- 
 tion. The attractive impression gives the impulse 
 to extend the arm, and the thought of danger 
 gives the counter impulse to withdraw the arm. 
 The one tends to inhibit the other ; the more vivid 
 idea overpowers the weaker one ; we do not grasp 
 for the poisonous fruit, because the danger holds 
 us back. 
 
 Such counter idea, which associates itself with 
 the idea of the end, may be of social character; 
 the expectation of punishment or of contempt 
 may work as such a check, and yet the mechan- 
 ism of the process is just the same. It is again 
 a balancing of opposing forces. And finally, in- 
 stead of such social ideas, there may stand on 
 the other side a religious habit or an ethical ideal 
 which may become effective where no social fear 
 is involved, but the principle remains always the 
 same: the struggle of ideas controls the resulting 
 action. There is no good or bad, wise or foolish 
 actor behind those ideas to pick out the favoured 
 one, but the ideas in their varieties of vividness 
 [2S7] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 and feeling-tone with their attached impulses are 
 themselves the working of the personality, and 
 their striving determines the result. A life may be 
 honest, or at least decent, if the tempting ideas of 
 socially forbidden ends are inhibited and over- 
 powered by opposing considerations, ideas of pun- 
 ishment and harm, or of religious fear. On a 
 higher level we may demand that it shall be the 
 idea of moral dignity which checks the forbidden 
 impulse. But the essential point remains that the 
 non-criminal, the correct life, is always the result 
 of a complex interplay between ideas and counter 
 ideas with the result that the thought of some un- 
 pleasant consequence inhibits the desire. The 
 mechanism of the process is therefore not differ- 
 ent from the case where the idea of bodily harm 
 prevents us from doing a reckless or dangerous 
 thing. And in this way the psychologist cannot 
 acknowledge a special function of non-criminal 
 behaviour; it overlaps and practically coincides 
 with the reasonable, cautious way of living in 
 every other respect. By the smallest possible 
 steps every man's adjustment to his environment 
 leads from the avoidance of bodily risks to the 
 • [238 J 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 avoidance of social risks, and thus to non-crimi- 
 nal habits. There Is nowhere a sharp demarcation 
 line. The one who is instinctively overmuch afraid 
 of being found out in wrong-doing will live a 
 faultless life from the standpoint of law; just as 
 truly as his neighbour who obeys the laws from 
 a moral conviction. It is impossible to bring crim- 
 inality, from a psychological viewpoint, down to 
 one formula. 
 
 The normal decent life thus demands that an 
 idea which by its feeling tone stimulates to a for- 
 bidden action shall awake, at the same time, the 
 counter ideas which stimulate to the inhibition of 
 the action, and that these opposing ideas shall re- 
 main victorious. It is evident that crime may thus 
 result from most different reasons. Those social 
 counter ideas may not have been learned, or they 
 may not come quickly enough to consciousness, or 
 they may be too faint, or, on the other hand, the 
 original ideas with their desires may be too intense, 
 or their emotions may be too vehement, or the 
 mechanism of inhibition may not be working 
 normally — in short, a defect or an abnormality in 
 any part of the complex process may lead to a con- 
 [2391 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 flict with the law. And yet how different the mind 
 in which the impulses are too strong from that in 
 which the opposing ideas are too faint and that in 
 which the inhibition does not work precisely. And 
 where is to be the point at which the defect be- 
 comes abnormal? The temperament with strong 
 impulses may remain still quite well behaved if the 
 checking ideas are unusually strong too, and the 
 faint checks may be harmless if the desires are 
 still weaker. 
 
 Moreover, it is clear that none of these defects 
 works in the direction of crime alone. The brain 
 in which such counter ideas are too slowly asso- 
 ciated has no special trouble in the line of legal 
 consequence alone; it is a general deficiency; all 
 the ideas come slowly, the mental vision is nar- 
 row ; the man is stupid and mentally lazy. On the 
 other hand, the brain in which the opposing ideas 
 are unable to produce inhibition must do the reck- 
 less thing everywhere: he runs risks and does not 
 care. And the brain in which the impulses are 
 overstrong will again show its emotional lack of 
 balance in every field. In short, there are minds 
 which are born slow or stupid or brutal or 
 [240] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 excitable or lazy or quaint or reckless or 
 duU — ^and in every one of such minds a certain 
 chance for crime is given^ But to be born with a 
 mind .which by its special stupidity or carelessness 
 or vehemence gives to crime an easier foothold 
 than the average mind certainly does not mean to 
 be a born criminal. The world is full of badly 
 balanced or badly associating persons ; we cannot 
 deny that nature provided them poorly in the 
 struggle for social existence; they are less fit 
 than others, but their ending within prison walls 
 is only one of the many dangers which hfe has in 
 store for them ; the same unfit apparatus may make 
 them unable to gain a position or to have friends 
 or to protect themselves against disease. In short, 
 it is not criminals that are " bom," but men with 
 poorly working minds. And yet who will say where 
 a mind is just of the right kind? No brain works 
 perfectly — ^what intelligence and what tempera- 
 ment would be ideal? " All the world is peculiar." 
 It is thus only a question of relative amount. 
 
 Just this, indeed, is the situation which the psy- 
 chologist finds. Of course, if we turn to the pro- 
 fessional criminal who has become a specialist at 
 [241 ] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 safe-blowing or at sneak-thieving or at check- 
 forging or burglary, and who has been shaped by 
 long years in the penitentiaries, we find specimens 
 of mind which are very diiFerent from the normal 
 average ; but those are the differences of training. 
 They have become indeed almost unable to avoid 
 crimes ; they have to go on in their career, but it 
 was not their inborn disposition that forced them 
 to burglary. If we abstract from the effect of 
 such life training in the social underworld, and 
 from the traces of poor education, of bad ex- 
 ample, of disease and neglect, we find among the 
 criminals the same types of mind as in other 
 spheres, only with a great percentage of all kinds 
 of mental inferiority — stupid and narrow minds, 
 vehement and passionate minds, minds with weak 
 power of comprehension and minds with ineffective 
 power of inhibition, minds without normal emo- 
 tions and minds without energy for work. 
 
 When a school for criirflnal boys was carefully 
 
 ft 
 
 examined, it was found that of the two hundred 
 boys one hundred and twenty-seven were deficient 
 in their general make-up, either in the direction 
 of feeble-mindedness or in the direction of hys- 
 [242] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME \ 
 
 teric emotion or in the direction of epileptic dis- 
 turbance. And fuller light is thrown on these 
 figures as soon as others are added; in eighty- 
 five cases the father or the mother, or both, were 
 drunkards ; in twenty-four cases, the parents were 
 insane ; in twenty-six cases, epileptics ; and in 
 twenty-six further cases, suffering from other 
 nervous diseases. Not the criminal tendency was 
 born with the poor children, but the insufficient 
 capacity and resistance of the central nervous 
 system; and this was their inheritance from ab- 
 normal and degenerate parents. 
 
 If we wish to express it in terms of experimental" 
 psychology, we may consult the careful tests which 
 have been made with female criminals in Southern 
 penitentiaries, on the one side, and female students 
 of a large university on the other. Certainly, 
 point for point the criminals show a different re- 
 sult. For instance, in memory tests the average 
 student remembered a series of seven letters or a 
 series of eight numerals, whUe under the same ex- 
 perimental conditions the average criminal re- 
 membered only five letters or six numerals. Or 
 the test for the attention to tactual impressions 
 [243] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 showed that the students discriminated two com- 
 pass points as two on the right fore-arm at a dis- 
 tance of sixteen millimetres, while the criminals 
 did not discriminate them with less than twenty- 
 four millimetres. If students pulled at a hook as 
 fast as they could, their energy would be decreased 
 in half a minute by 1.6 pounds, while that of the 
 criminals decreased by 2.4 pounds. Or if a word 
 was given as starting point for any associations 
 which might arise in consciousness, the average 
 number of associations in one minute was for the 
 students ten, for the criminals five. In short, in 
 every respect the average of the criminals shows 
 a poorer mental equipment than the average of 
 the picked student minds. But here again no one 
 feature points to a special demand for crime. 
 Criminals are recruited especially from the men- 
 tally inferior ; that is the only true core of the 
 doctrine of the born criminal. But the mental 
 inferiority — intellectual or emotional or voli- 
 tional — forces no one to steal and burglarise. 
 He cannot and will never equal the clever, well- 
 balanced, energetic fellow, but society may find 
 a modest place, humble but safe, even for the 
 [244] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 most stupid and most indifferent and most un- 
 energetic : no one is predestined by his brain to the 
 penitentiary. 
 
 It may be replied, of course, that there are 
 plenty of cases in which crime is committed from 
 an irresistible impulse or from a total lack of 
 inhibition or from other defects which exclude 
 free self-determination. But in such cases we have 
 clearly no longer any right to speak of crime; it 
 is insanity. The man who starts incendiary fires 
 because he has hallucinations in which he hears 
 God's voice ordering him to burn the town, is not 
 a criminal. Moreover, the pathological impulses 
 of the diseased mind are again not confined to the 
 criminal sphere ; again crime is only the chance ef- 
 fect; the disturbance is general. The irresistible 
 impulse may be just as well directed against the 
 man's own personality, and may lead to self -muti- 
 lation or to suicide. And that holds true also for 
 the milder degrees. Only to-day I studied the case 
 of a lad of eleven who was brought to xiie because 
 he was found stealing from time to time. He was 
 a dear little boy, surrounded with comfort and the 
 best and most loving influences. He fights 
 [245 ] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 and fights against his impulse and speaks of it 
 frankly. Sometimes it comes like an attack; he 
 longs for some money perhaps to buy fire-crackers 
 with, and he simply cannot resist till it is done, 
 he told me with tears, and then he hardly knows 
 why he did it. But it was evident at the first glance 
 that the boy was not normally built, and that the 
 attacks which led to such pseudo-crimes were 
 pathological, quite similar to epileptic or hysteric 
 fits. To prevent such explosions of the diseased 
 brain is not prevention of crime; but, on the one 
 side, treatment of disease, on the other side, pro- 
 tection of society against the outbreaks of dan- 
 gerous patients. In real crime we have to presup- 
 pose that the checking of the impulse by the 
 counter idea would have been possible if the avail- 
 able energy had been brought into play. Crime 
 is thus not a disease, and there is no need to excuse 
 the existence of our jails by considering them as 
 asylums. Every action is, of course, the necessary 
 result of foregoing causes, but such effect of the 
 causes remains a free, and therefore a responsible 
 action, as long as the causes work on a mechanism 
 which is able to secure an unhampered interplay 
 [246] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 of Influences. The insane or the hypnotised mind 
 has no freedom and therefore cannot commit crime, 
 but the merely stupid or reckless or brutal or in- 
 different minds are still free, while it is clear that 
 the probability of a disastrous result is for them 
 alarmingly high. 
 
 If we thus exclude the pathological mind from 
 further discussion, we can say that no one is born 
 a criminal: what, then, has society to do that no 
 one shall become a criminal? The latest of all sci- 
 ences, eugenics, might look backwards and demand 
 that society take care that such mentally weak 
 and inferior persons are not born at all. Vital sta- 
 tistics show indeed on some of their darkest pages 
 that the overwhelming majority of those degen- 
 erate personalities have drunkards and epileptics 
 as parents. But our immediate lack Is a different 
 one : we presuppose that the minds of the millions 
 in aU their variations of strong and weak, of in- 
 telligence and emotionality and power are bom 
 and sent into the streets of the cities ; what can 
 the psychologist advise that their way may not 
 lead them from the street to the cell of the prison? 
 
 But now the problem has become simplified. We 
 [247] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 know the mechanism which keeps men straight ; we 
 can foresee, therefore, what influences must be 
 detrimental. If the counter idea is to balance and 
 to overcome the first desire, we can foresee that 
 the chances for crime must grow if the impulses 
 are strengthened or if the counter ideas are weak- 
 ened or ehminated, or if the inhibitory apparatus 
 is damaged, or if in any other way the sound bal- 
 ance is tampered with. Here is indeed the place 
 for the experiment of the psychologist. He can 
 isolate the special factors and study their influence 
 under the exact conditions of the laboratory. We 
 may take illustrations at random. 
 
 We said that crime involves an impulse to action 
 which is normally to be checked. The checking 
 will be the more difficult the stronger the impulse. 
 The psychologist therefore asks: What influences 
 have the power to reinforce the impulse? Has, for 
 instance, imitation such an influence.'' Mere specu- 
 lation cannot answer such a question, and even so- 
 called practical experience may lead to very mis- 
 taken conclusions. But the laboratory experiment 
 can tell the story in distinct figures. I ask my sub- 
 jects, for instance, to make rhythmical finger 
 [248 J 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 movements by which a weight is lifted, and the ap- 
 paratus in which the arm rests records exactly the 
 amount of every contraction. After a while the 
 energy seems exhausted ; my idea has no longer 
 the power to lift the weight more than a few milli- 
 metres; the recorded curve sinks nearly to zero. 
 I try with encouraging words or with harsh com- 
 mand; the motor energies of these word-stimuli 
 are not ineffective; the curve shows a slight up- 
 ward movement, but again it sinks rapidly. And 
 then I make the same rhythmical movement myself 
 before the eyes of my subject; he sees it and at 
 once the curve ascends with unexpected strength. 
 The movements have now simply to imitate the 
 watched ones, and this consciousness of imitation 
 has reinforced the energy of the impulse beyond 
 any point which his own will could have reached. 
 It is as if the imitation of the suggestive sight 
 suddenly brings to work all the stored-up powers. 
 The psychologist can vary the experiment in a 
 hundred forms ; always the same result, that the 
 impressive demonstration of an action gives to 
 the impulse of the imitating mind the maximum 
 of force — it must then be the one condition under 
 [249] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 which it is most difficult to inhibit the impulse. 
 How many helpful suggestions for the good, for 
 education and training and self -development can 
 be drawn from such facts ; but, much more, how 
 many warnings against the reckless fostering of 
 criminality ! In millions of copies the vulgar news- 
 paper pictures of crime reach the homes of the 
 suggestible masses and every impulse towards the 
 forbidden is dangerously reinforced. Every bru- 
 tality spreads outward and accentuates the lawless 
 impulses in the surrounding ; the abolition of prize 
 fights and whipping posts is not enough. 
 
 To point in another direction: everything must 
 be fatal for weak honesty which reduces the power 
 of restraint. The psychological experiment can 
 here analyse the influences, for instance, of our 
 usual stimulants — coffee and tea, tobacco and alco- 
 hol, drugs and nervina. Laboratory experiment 
 indicates perhaps only slight variations in the 
 rapidity of movements in the memory tests or 
 in the discriminations of stimuli, but every one of 
 those changes must be endlessly magnified if it is 
 projected into the dimensions of a world-city in 
 ■ which the millions indulge in artificial excitement 
 [250] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 and stimulation. Take the well-studied case of al- 
 cohol. We ask, let us say, a number of normal men 
 to go through a series of experiments in their 
 ordinary state. 
 
 We may begin with a reaction time ex- 
 periment. That means we study how long it 
 takes to make the quickest possible hand-move- 
 ment in response to a flash-light or to a click; we 
 measure the time between the light or sound stim- 
 ulus and the reaction in thousandths of a second. 
 Then we vary it by a test where various movements 
 are to be made in response to different lights, so 
 that a choice and discrimination is involved. We 
 then turn, perhaps, to memory experiments — ^with 
 the learning of letters or figures or words. Next 
 may be an experiment in intellectual activity; we 
 measure the time of simple arithmetical opera- 
 tions. Then we study the mental associations ; for 
 instance, we give a list of two hundred words and 
 our subject has to speak for each one the first 
 word which flashes on his mind. We may then 
 study the character of these closely-bound ideas 
 and may group them statistically. Then we meas- 
 ure with a dynamometer the strength of the great- 
 [251] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 est possible effort for action. Next in order per- 
 haps we study the judgment of our subject in his 
 estimation of space and time distances, then the 
 accuracy with which he Imitates a given rhythm, 
 then the rapidity with which he counts the letters 
 of a page, then the sharpness of attention with 
 which he discriminates a set of short impressions, 
 and so on through other tests for other mental 
 functions. For every test we get his average fig- 
 ures. And then we begin the examination of the ef- 
 fect of the stimulants. How are all these exactly 
 measurable functions changed twenty minutes or 
 an hour or two hours after taking a dose of one 
 ounce or two ounces or three ounces of pure alco- 
 hol, whiskey, beer or champagne? 
 
 Only such a variety of tests gives the possibility 
 of disengaging the effect and of understanding 
 where the real disturbance sets in. Certain func- 
 tions seem certainly Improved. For instance, we 
 soon find that the reaction time test gives smaller 
 figures under alcohol, at least in a first stage ; the 
 subject who needs normally, say 150 thousandths 
 of a second to press a telegraph key after hear- 
 ing a click, may need only 125 thousandths of a 
 [252] 
 
THE PREVENTION OP CRIME 
 second half an hour after his alcohol dose. But is 
 that really an improvement? The same records 
 show that while the time of the reaction decreases 
 there appear at the same time wrong reactions 
 which did not occur in his normal state ; again and 
 again, the key is pressed before the signal is really 
 heard, the impulse explodes when any chance 
 touches it off instead of remaining under the con- 
 trol of consciousness which waits for the cHck. 
 
 In the same way, it seems in the first short 
 period from the dynamometric tests that the alco- 
 hol brings an improvement of motor energy, but 
 half an hour later the tables are turned, the mus- 
 cular effectiveness is decreased. In the field of as- 
 sociations the time of bringing a new idea to 
 consciousness becomes longer, the process is re- 
 tarded, but, more important, the associative pro- 
 cess becomes more mechanical. If we call those 
 associations external in which an idea awakes an- 
 other with which it is connected in space or time, 
 and internal those which involve a thorough rela- 
 tion, a connection by meaning and purpose, we 
 can say that the external associations strongly 
 increase with alcohol and the internal ones be- 
 [253] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 come eliminated. Still greater are the changes 
 in mechanical memorising, which is at first 
 greatly facilitated and in calculation, which suf- 
 fers from the first. The strongest improvement 
 is shown in reading, the greatest difficulty in the 
 intellectual connection. And if the various threads 
 are connected by careful study, we get a unified 
 result: all motor reactions have become easier, all 
 acts of apperception worse, the whole ideational 
 interplay has suffered, the inhibitions are reduced, 
 the merely mechanical superficial connections con- 
 trol the mind, and the intellectual processes are 
 slow. Is it necessary to demonstrate that every 
 one of these changes favours crime.'' The counter 
 ideas awake too slowly, hasty action results from 
 the first impulse before it can be checked, the in- 
 hibition of the forbidden deed becomes ineffective, 
 the desire for rash vehement movements becomes 
 overwhelming. In such a way experimental psy- 
 chology can carry the vague impressions of the 
 bystander into a field of exact studies where mere 
 prejudices are not allowed to interfere, but where 
 real objections can be substantiated. Moreover, 
 the general statements can be particularised by 
 [254 J 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 subtler examinations still: how does alcohol work 
 in different climates, at different seasons, at dif- 
 ferent hours of the day, in work and in fatigue, 
 in different states of health, with food and with- 
 out, for different ages, different sexes, different 
 races, and how is the effect of pure alcohol related 
 to that of the various beverages, to whiskey and 
 beer and wine? Only if we can differentiate the 
 mental influences through such experimental tests 
 can we secure a rational protection against one of 
 the most persistent sources of social evils. 
 
 With the same methods we might study tobacco 
 and coffee and tea, bromides and morphine, but 
 also the effects of physical or mental overstrain, of 
 bad air and bad light, of irrational nourishment 
 and insufficient sleep, of exhaustive sports and 
 emotional exertions, and a hundred other factors 
 which enter into the daily life of the masses. On 
 such an experimental basis only can we hope for 
 regulation and improvement; a sweeping pro- 
 scription, of course, might be reached without 
 laboratory studies : simply to forbid everything is 
 easy, but such radicalism is practically impossible 
 as far as the evidence of fatigue or poverty is con- 
 [255] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 cerned, and perhaps possible but unwise as far 
 as the stimulants are in question. The psycholog- 
 ical experiment must show the middle way which 
 shall close the fountains of evil and yet keep open 
 the sources of good. 
 
 Mere abstinence from stimulants, indeed, is no 
 real solution of the problem ; it is just the psychol- 
 ogist who knows too well the evil effects of monot- 
 ony and emptiness ; who understands that the crav- 
 ing for stimulants and artificial excitement be- 
 longs to the deepest conditions of our physical 
 existence, and that the complete suppression of it 
 leads to mental explosions which bring man again 
 to disastrous impulses and crime. The laboratory 
 experiment can demonstrate in turn how the psy- 
 chological conditions are changed when such a 
 dreary state of waiting and monotony lays hold 
 on the mind; how certain mental functions are 
 starving and others dangerously overwrought. A 
 state of dulness and expectant attention is created 
 in which the longing for contrast may intensify 
 the desires to a point where the reaction is more 
 vehement than under any stimulant. That is the 
 state which, projected into the masses, may lead 
 [256] 
 
THE PREVENTION OP CRIME 
 to gambling and perversity, and on to irrational 
 crimes, which through thef mere excitement' of the 
 imagination overcome the emptiness of an unstim- 
 ulated life. ' 
 
 Or the experiment may undertake to ex- 
 amine the subtler mechanism of mental inhibition: 
 how far does the suppression and inhibition of the 
 motor impulse depend on the intensity of the 
 counter stimulus and how far on habit — that is, on 
 unbroken repetition? How is it altered by inter- 
 ruption of training or by the feeling-tone of the 
 ideas'? Simple measurement of reaction times may 
 be again the method, varied by the Introduction of 
 warning signals which are to counterbalance the 
 stimulus. Yet the short schematic experiments of 
 the psychologist's workshop illustrate clearly how 
 and why a public state of lawless corruption and 
 general disrespect of law must undermine the In- 
 hibitory effects of the law and thus bring crime to 
 a rich harvest. That is just the wonderful power 
 of the psychological experiment, that it can ana- 
 lyse the largest social movements In the smallest 
 and most schematic miniature copies of the mental 
 forces Involved, and from the subtle analysis is 
 [ 257 ] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 only one step to the elimination of dangers. What 
 the commercialism of our time or the vices of the 
 street, the recklessness of the masses and the vul- 
 garity of the newspapers, the frivolity of the 
 stage and the excitement of the gambling hells 
 may mean for the weak individual cannot be better 
 understood than through the microscopical model 
 of it in the experimental test which allows subtle 
 variations. 
 
 The psychologist wiU thus certainly not believe 
 that all or most is done for the prevention of 
 crime by mere threatening with punishment. The 
 question, in this connection, is not whether the pun- 
 ishment satisfies our demand for retaliation or 
 whether the punishment helps indirectly towards 
 prevention by educating and reforming the man 
 behind whom the doors of the penitentiary are 
 closed. The question is now only whether the fear 
 of a future judicial punishment will be a sufficient 
 counter idea to check the criminal impulse. The 
 psychologist cannot forget that too many condi- 
 tions must frustrate such expectations. The hope 
 of escaping justice in the concrete case will easily 
 have a stronger feeling tone than the opposing 
 [258] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 fear of the abstract general law. The strength of 
 the forbidden desire will narrow the circle of asso- 
 ciations and eliminate the idea of the probable 
 consequences. The stupid mind will not link the 
 correct expectations, the slow mind will bring the 
 check too late when the deed is done, the vehement 
 mind will overrule the energies of inhibition, the 
 emotional mind will be more moved by the antici- 
 pated immediate pleasure than by the thought of a 
 later suffering. And all this will be reinforced if 
 overstrain has destroyed the nervous balance or if 
 stimulants have smoothed the path of motor dis- 
 charge. If the severity of cruel punishments has 
 brutalised the mind, the threat will be as ineffective 
 as if the mildness of the punishment had reduced 
 its pain. And, worst of all, this fear will be ruled 
 out if the mind develops in an atmosphere of crime 
 where the child hears of the criminal as hero and 
 looks at jail as an ordinary affair, troublesome 
 only as most factors in his slum life are trouble- 
 some; or if the anarchy of corruption or class 
 justice, of reckless legislation or public indiffer- 
 ence to law defeats the inhibiting counter idea of 
 punishment and deprives it of its emotional 
 [259] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 strength. The system of punishment will be the 
 more disappointing the more mechanical it is in 
 its application. The plan of probation thus means 
 a real progress. 
 
 More important than the motives of fear are 
 the influences which can shape the minds of the 
 tempted, the influences which reduce the emotional 
 and motor powers of forbidden desires, awake 
 regularly and strongly the social counter ideas, 
 strengtheil their inhibiting influence, and weaken 
 thus the primary impulse. It must be said again: 
 criminals are not born, but made — ^not even self- 
 made, but fellow-made. Society must work nega- 
 tively to remove those influences which work in the 
 opposite direction. The atmosphere of criminality, 
 the vulgarity and brutality, the meanness and friv- 
 olity of the surroundings must be removed from 
 the mind in its development. And if the social 
 contrasts are necessary for much of the good, at 
 least the vulgar esteem of mere riches and the 
 pitiless contempt for misery can be eliminated. 
 Above all, a well-behaved mind grows only in a 
 well-treated body; true, far-seeing hygiene can 
 prevent more crime than any law. But it is not 
 [ 260 ] 
 
THE PREVENTION OP CRIME 
 only a question of the favourite work of our 
 hygienists, the infectious and germ diseases, to- 
 gether with the sanitary conditions of factories 
 and tenements. Hygiene has to take no less care 
 of the overworked or wrongly treated senses and 
 nerve systems from the schoolroom to the stock 
 exchange ; there is no gain if we avoid typhoid 
 epidemics but fall into epidemics of insanity. The 
 whole rhythm of life breaks down the instruments 
 of nervous resistance, and the most immediate 
 symptom Is necessarily the growth of crime. It 
 is not the impulse itself, but the inability to resist 
 the impulse that Is the real criminal feature. The 
 banker who speculates with the funds of his bank 
 is not a criminal because such an idea arises in 
 his consciousness, but because his idea is not in- 
 hibited by the counter ideas, and yet the whole 
 community has pushed to break down the bar- 
 riers which his mind could have put ;into the 
 motor path of the ruinous impulse. 
 
 Of course, the negative precautions must be 
 
 supplemented by the positive ones. Hygiene has 
 
 not only to destroy the unclean, but to build up 
 
 the clean. And for mental hygiene this holds 
 
 [261 ] 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 still more strongly. To create a public life which 
 is an example and an inspiration to the humblest, 
 which fills with civic pride the lowest, — ^means 
 to abolish the penitentiaries. The public welfare 
 must give to everybody through work, through 
 politics, through education, through art, through 
 religion, a kind of life interest and life content 
 in which envy is meaningless. It is from this realm 
 that the counter ideas must be reinforced that 
 automatically check the impulse to the immoral 
 deed. But no public scheme can make superfluous 
 those clearest sources of pure life, the motives of 
 private personal interest between human being and 
 human being. Everything which strengthens fam- 
 ily life and works against its dissolution, every- 
 thing which gives the touch of personal sympathy 
 to the forlorn, helps towards the prevention of 
 crime. How often can a criminal life be funda- 
 mentally changed as soon as the absurd prejudice 
 is given up that every criminal is a different kind 
 of man from those outside of jail, and straight- 
 forward sympathy instead of mere charitable pity 
 is offered. To make them feel that they are recog- 
 nised as equals means to win them over to decency. 
 [262] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 And those who analyse them psychologically know 
 Well that there is really no condescension necessary 
 for such acknowledgment. They are the equals 
 of the unpunished; they are stupid or lazy or 
 vehement or reckless or uneducated or unemotional 
 or egotistic, but all that we find on this side of the 
 legal demarcation line as well. We are accustomed 
 to bow to the stupid and lazy and reckless and 
 egotistic, in case that life has brought them 
 under conditions where a sufficient balance was 
 secured; they are not different in their inmost 
 selves, even if surroundings, bad example, over- 
 whelming temptation, the saloon, the cruelty of 
 misfortune has once in a hasty hour destroyed that 
 balance. 
 
 There lies finally the deep importance of a full 
 confession. The man who confesses puts himself 
 again on an equal ground with the honest major- 
 ity; he belongs again to those who want both 
 health and justice; he gives up his identity with 
 the criminal and eliminates the crime like a foreign 
 body from his life. A true confession wins the 
 bedrock of life again and is the safest prevention 
 of further crime. The psychologist — I say it with 
 L263J 
 
ON THE WITNESS STAND 
 hesitation, as my observations on that point may 
 not yet be complete enough, and the subject Is an 
 entirely new one — ^may even be able to find out by 
 his experiments whether a true confession is prob- 
 able or not. After all, the actions of every man 
 strive for satisfaction, and there cannot be satis- 
 faction without unity. He who lives in the present 
 only gains such satisfaction from the immediate 
 experience; the pleasure and enjoyment of the 
 present hour is the end of his consciousness and 
 absorbs him so fully that complete unity of mind 
 is reached. Another type rushes forward, the mind 
 directed toward the future; the suffering of the 
 hour is overborne by the hope of the coming 
 success, and present and future complete for him 
 the unity of life. Both those who turn to the 
 present and to the future cannot have a desire for 
 true liberating confession. But It Is different with 
 those who have a vivid memory and whose mind is 
 thus ever turning back to the past. There is the 
 unending conflict between their memories which 
 belong to the life of purity, to childhood and 
 parents' love, to religion and friendship, and the 
 present sorrow and anxiety ; the craving for unity 
 [ 264 ] 
 
THE PREVENTION OF CRIME 
 must end this struggle ; a confession connects the 
 present with the past again and throws out the 
 interfering intrusion of shame. If the experiment 
 of the psychologist demonstrates the possession 
 of a vivid living memory, the chances are strong 
 that a confession is to be trusted. The criminal 
 deed is thus almost a split-off consciousness, a 
 part of a dissociated personality, and through 
 the confession it is cut off absolutely. On the other 
 hand, if it is too late, if the split-off part has 
 grown to be the stronger and has finally become 
 the real self, then it is nearly always too late 
 for prevention by social hygiene; the criminal 
 who has become a professional is nearly always 
 lost, and society has only to ^consider how to pro- 
 tect itself against the damage he is effecting. He 
 must be separated from the commonwealth just as 
 the insane must be removed from the market places 
 of life. Short punishment for the professional 
 criminal is useless and harmful in every respect. 
 But his career is a terrible warning against delay- 
 ing the prevention of crime till society — rashly 
 ignoring psychology — ^has itself manufactured 
 the hopeless criminal. 
 
 [2^5] 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abstinence, 256 
 Advertisement, 34 
 Alcohol, 251 
 Alienist, 46, 139 
 Amnesia, 68 
 Anaesthesia, 108 
 Applied psychology, 9 
 Association, 76, 83, 103, 
 
 251, 253 
 Attention, 7, 30, 48, 56, 64, 
 
 88, 243. 
 
 Born criminal, 234, 241 
 Business, 10 
 
 Certainty, 49, 55, 179 
 Colour discrimination, 32 
 Confession, 73, 98, 105, 137, 
 
 143, 165, 206, 263 
 Court, 45, 108, 194, 207 
 Cross-examination, 50, 183 
 Cruelty, 73 
 
 Depersonalization, 217 
 Detection of crime, 73 
 Direction of sound, 32 
 Disposition, 235 
 Dissociation, 147, 165 
 Dream, 59, 156 
 Dynamometer, 251 
 
 Education, 8, 105 
 Emotion, 86,99,106,113,191 
 Eugenics, 247 
 Evidence, 19, 44, 65, 85, 
 
 109, 140, 145, 186 
 Excitement, 124, 127, 130, 
 
 158 
 Experimental psychology, 4, 
 
 6, 45, 65, 79, 109, 118. 
 
 184, 233, 243, 248 
 Expert, 20, 46, 108, 117, 197 
 Expression, 118 
 Eye movements, 125 
 
 Decisions, 19 
 Deformation, 93 
 
 Feeble mindedness, 242 
 FeeUng, 7, 113, 121 
 Frequency, 65 
 [ 267 ] 
 
INDEX 
 
 Hygiene, 261 Multimurderer, 92 
 
 Hypnotism, 167, 175, 190, Mysticism, 58 
 
 203, 221 
 Hysteria, 106, 150 Neura^theiuc, 153, 227 
 
 Number, 15, 21 
 Identification, 63 
 
 Illusions, 15, 122, 148 
 • Imagination, 60 Oath, 39, 43, 47, 55 
 
 Imitation, 248 Observation. 23, 50 
 
 Impressiveness, 65 Omissions, 52 
 
 Individual differences, 63, 
 
 210 Perception, 18, 196 
 
 Inhibition, 30, 64, 106, 192, Perjury, 225 
 
 219, 237, 245. 257 Personal equation, 5, 196 
 
 Innocence, 74, 82, 132, 139 Personality, 161, 219, 238 
 Insanity, 245 Phrenology, 235 
 
 Physician, 9 
 Jury, 11, 45, 75, 186, 194, Physiology, 5 
 
 198 Pleasure, 121, 127 
 
 Plethysmograph, 129 
 Lie, 18, 77 Pneumograph, 126 
 
 Prevention, 226, 231 
 Magnetism', 213 Professional criminal, 241, 
 
 Medium, 30 265 
 
 Melancholia, 149 Psychological laboratories. 
 
 Memory, 7, 18, 39, 44, 54, 3, 46, 76, 79, 183, 248 
 
 61, 155, 180, 208, 243 Punishment, 238, 258 
 
 Mental diseases, 152 
 
 Morphinism, 231 Reaction time, 252 
 
 Movements, 120 Recency, 65 
 
 [ 268 ] 
 
IND 
 
 Recollection, 48, 67, 197 
 Reliability, 46 
 Remembrance, 58 
 Respiration, 127 
 Retardation, 86, 97 
 
 Second personality, 147, 161 
 Selfaccusation, 148 
 Selfconsciousness, 161 
 Sex, 54 
 
 Simulation, 113 
 Size estimation, 37 
 Speed estimation, 23 
 Sphygmograph, 128 
 SuggestibiUty, 190, 193, 197 
 Suggestion, 26, 31, 42, 57, 
 147, 165. 175, 187, 222 
 
 EX 
 
 Suppressed ideas, 83, 97, 
 
 106 
 Suspected, 82, 115, 145 
 
 Taste, 33 
 
 Telepathy, 3, 212 
 
 Third degree, 74, 105, 115 
 
 Threats, 73 
 
 Time estimation, 15, 22, S3 
 
 Time measurement, 80, 251 
 
 Types of memory, 61 
 
 Veracity, 44, 94 
 Vividness, 55 
 
 Witchcraft, 145 
 
 THE END 
 
 [ 269 ]