Crime & criminals : being the jurisprudence of crime, medical biological, and psycological / by Charles Mercier... with an introduction by Sir Bryan Donkin.

  • Mercier, Charles Arthur, 1852-1919.
Date:
1918
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Crime & criminals : being the jurisprudence of crime, medical biological, and psycological / by Charles Mercier... with an introduction by Sir Bryan Donkin. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    18/334 (page 12)
    ment of science. Research has in this country scarcely any meaning beyond the discovery of fact. A character¬ istic illustration of the contempt with which the dis¬ covery of general principles is regarded in this country is afforded by the Fellowship of the Royal Society. This distinction is freely awarded to men who are never heard of outside of their own narrow specialty, if in that specialty they have detected and described a new mathematical formula, or a new grouping of stars, a new disease, a new point in the anatomy of an insect, a new chemical com¬ pound, or a new instrument or process for the observa¬ tion of facts ; but the greatest discoverer of general principles of modern times, perhaps the greatest dis¬ coverer of general principles of all time, Herbert Spencer, was never a Fellow of the Royal Society. Late in life, indeed, when he was indifferent and could not enjoy it, when he was solitary and could not impart it, when he was known and did not want it, it was offered to him; but it was not offered to him until his fame had gone out into all lands, and the estimation of his genius in foreign countries was so universal and so high that his exclusion from the Royal Society cast a slur upon that body. Then the Fellowship was offered to him, and was declined. The Fellowship would have added lustre, not to the recipient, but to the Society. It is curious that the English should look so askance upon general principles and be so distrustful of the deductive method, for the two greatest discoveries of the human intellect, Gravitation and Evolution, were both made deductively, and both by Englishmen; and no other discoveries have so profoundly influenced human thought and human conduct. However, so it is, and I cannot anticipate for this attempt to investigate crime upon general principles, and to discover the laws, if any laws there be, to which