Index to Periodicals Government. "The Political Theories of the German Idealists, II." By Prof. W. A. Dun ning, Columbia University. Political Science Quarterly, v. 28, p. 480 (Sept.). Continued from Pol. Sci. Qu., v. 28, p. 193 (25 Green Bag 342). This is the concluding part of the paper. In the earlier instalment Kant and Fichte were dealt with; Wilhelm von Hum boldt and Hegel are here considered, and there is a valuable summing-up of the influence of the German idealists. "There was great diversity among those whom I have classed together in this essay. But there was also an essential likeness that justifies the classification — the conviction common to all that the vital truths of political science were to be reached rather through the processes of pure thought than through investigation of experience. ' These political idealists (1) developed to its utmost limits "the idea of will, as the ultimate element in politics and law"; (2) they began by formulating the social contract theory afresh, but Hegel "dropped it entirely in his explanation of the state"; (3) they "ascribed immeasured majesty and excellence to the state," preparing inevitably a tendency for the individual to wither and the attributes of authority to become the core of discussion; and (4) Fichte and Hegel both gave considerable stimulus to "the doctrine of nationality as a fundamental principle of political organization." The conceptions worked out with respect to the last "played a great role in the demand for German national unity that figured so largely in the stirring history of the mid-nineteenth century." See Constitutionality of Statutes, Legislative Policy, Separation of Powers. Insanity. "The New V'ork State Bar Asso ciation Questionnaire — Some Comments." By Smith Ely Jelliffe, M.D., Ph.D. 4 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 368 (Sept.). "To those who have followed the gradual development of psychiatry from the time of Bayle, who first started the splitting process which is segregating the psychotic conglomerate into fairly definite entities, to such a medical insanity has become an impossibility. "A still wider retrospect shows that even the Hippocratic psychiatrist recognized this; for although Hippocrates himself used the words 'paranoia,' 'mania,' 'melancholia,' in the widest of senses, yet he was careful to say that one could recognize an entirely different mental affection in phrenitis; and although paranoid kinds of thinking, i.e., mad, disordered, crazy thinking might be present in phrenitis, yet it was not to be confused with his mania, nor his melancholia — because it was not conditioned as they were by the passage of bile upward to the pituita, nor downward to the black gall of the liver. "It was the early Roman, with his great desire to systematize everything, who gave us the word 'insanity.' The Roman despised what he called Greek subtleties in those days — just as the law of today is stupid regarding medical
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concepts. It was the legal type of mind that produced this false medical generalization, which even the early Greeks had avoided. "In the long periods of submerged culture and civilization, Roman ideas prevailed, and with them the idea that there was one mental disease and that was 'insanity.' . . . "How much does a Beethoven symphony weigh? is the kind of a question that law and medicine are asking each other under the present order of things. "Law asks for a definition of a social status; not for a medical disease. It wishes to know as a protecting and regulating bit of machinery, how best to guide itself under certain circum stances, and desires as far as possible to put it in black and white and make it usable. Here again appears that Roman spirit that would reduce everything to form. This time the law is at fault in hanging on to old concepts long after they have outlived their usefulness. The law wishes to make one generalization upon a mental state as it relates to responsibility for an anti social act, of the validity of a contract, as to the capacity to confer with counsel, as to the ability to handle one's estate, etc.; they would envisage all of the situations under one term, and then their definition as given is supposed to cover it — true with later modifications known to lawyers themselves, but still all pigeon-holed in the one category 'insanity.' . . . "The term 'criminal insane' is a particularly unfortunate term. It is not an apt phrase. It is a very bad one. A sick man with a psy chosis, let it be a paresis, a delirium tremens, an acute excitement in an epileptic, typhoid or pneumonia patient, may commit an anti-social act among many others. This individual should never be treated in any other way than any other sick man. His place is in a hospital under medical treatment, not in a jail under the curse of the law, seeking, as the vengeful hand of the wounded social body, to extract from him the eye for an eye, the tooth for a tooth. . . . "What shall the law consider as a crime? This question is a large sociological one, and has little place in this questionnaire. It is too large to discuss. In general a society under certain forms of government called democratic does theoretically what it desires. How far this is from being true has been a theme for discussion for centuries. So far as the sick man is con cerned — whether he may have committed an anti-social act or not .— that is absolutely in different — he must always be regarded in the light of one needing medical and only medical treatment. Such medical treatment, if society so desires, may be under certain restrictive regulations, but the proper attitude of mind is that medical care and treatment is primary, legal restrictions secondary. The present system almost amounts to nothing but legal regulation and restriction. In New York State even the so-called 'Hospitals for the Criminal Insane' are bits of the political machinery of the 'Depart ment of Corrections.' In many other states there are even no decent hospitals. The sick man is locked up in jail. And this is an age that prides itself on enlightenment. . - "The only interest that society has in the so
