Section 18. (5) Reflex Movements.
Reflex actions are also of greater significance than as a rule they
are supposed to be. According to
Lotze,[1] "reflex actions are not
limited to habitual and insignificant affairs of the daily life. Even
compounded series of actions which enclose the content even of a
crime may come to actuality in this way . . . in a single moment
in which the sufficient opposition of some other emotional condition,
the enduring intensity of emotion directed against an obstacle, or
the clearness of a moving series of ideas is lacking. The deed may
emerge from the image of itself without being caused or accompanied
by any resolve of the doer. Hearings of criminals are full of statements
which point to such a realization of their crimes, and these
are often considered self-exculpating inventions, inasmuch as people
fear from their truth a disturbance or upsetting of the notions
concerning adjudication and actionability. The mere recognition of
that psychological fact alters the conventional judgment but little;
the failure in these cases consists in not having prevented that
automatic transition of images into actions, a transition essentially
natural to our organism which ought, however, like so many other
things, to be subjected to power of the will." Reflex movements
require closer study.
[2] The
most numerous and generally known
are: dropping the eyelids, coughing, sneezing, swallowing, all
involuntary actions against approaching or falling bodies; then again
the patellar reflex and the kremaster reflex, etc. Other movements
of the same kind were once known and so often practiced that they
became involuntary.
[3] Hence, for
example, the foolish question how
a person believed to be disguised can be recognized as man or woman.
The well known answer is: let some small object fall on his lap;
the woman will spread her limbs apart because she is accustomed
to wear a dress in which she catches the object; the man will
bring his limbs together because he wears trousers and is able to catch
the object only in this way. There are so many such habitual
actions that it is difficult to say where actual reflexes end and habits
begin. They will be properly distinguished when the first are understood
as single detached movements and the last as a continuous,
perhaps even unconscious and long-enduring action. When I, for
example, while working, take a cigar, cut off the end, light it, smoke,
and later am absolutely unaware that I have done this, what has
occurred is certainly not a reflex but a habitual action. The latter
does not belong to this class in which are to be grouped only such
as practically bear a defensive character. As examples of how such
movements may have criminological significance only one's own
experience may be cited because it is so difficult to put oneself at
the point of view of another. I want to consider two such examples.
One evening I passed through an unfrequented street and came
upon an inn just at the moment that an intoxicated fellow was
thrown out, and directly upon me. At the very instant I hit the poor
fellow a hard blow on the ear. I regretted the deed immediately,
the more so as the assaulted man bemoaned his misfortune, "inside
they throw him out, outside they box his ears." Suppose that I
had at that time burst the man's ear-drum or otherwise damaged
him heavily. It would have been a criminal matter and I doubt
whether anybody would have believed that it was a "reflex action,"
though I was then, as to-day, convinced that the action was reflex.
I didn't in the least know what was going to happen to me and what I
should do. I simply noticed that something unfriendly was approaching
and I met it with a defensive action in the form of an uppercut
on the ear. What properly occurred I knew only when I heard
the blow and felt the concussion of my hand. Something similar
happened to me when I was a student. I had gone into the country
hunting before dawn, when some one hundred paces from the house,
right opposite me a great ball rolled down a narrow way. Without
knowing what it was or why I did it I hit at the ball heavily with an
alpenstock I carried in my hand, and the thing emerged as two
fighting tomcats with teeth fixed in each other. One of them was
my beloved possession, so that I keenly regretted the deed, but
even here I had not acted consciously; I had simply smashed away
because something unknown was approaching me. If I had then
done the greatest damage I could not have been held responsible—
if my explanation were allowed;
but
that it would have been allowed
I do not believe in this case, either.
A closer examination of reflex action requires consideration of
certain properties, which in themselves cannot easily have criminal
significance, but which tend to make that significance clearer. One
is the circumstance that there are reflexes which work while you
sleep. That we do not excrete during sleep depends on the fact that
the faeces pressing in the large intestine generates a reflexive action
of the constrictors of the rectum. They can be brought to relax only
through especially powerful pressure or through the voluntary
relaxation of one's own constrictors.
The second suggestive circumstance is the fact that even habitual
reflexes may under certain conditions, especially when a particularly
weighty different impression comes at the same
time, not
take place. It is a reflex, for example, to withdraw the hand when
it feels pain, in spite of the fact that one is so absorbed with another
matter as to be unaware of the whole process; but if interest in
this other matter is so sufficiently fixed as to make one forget, as
the saying goes, the whole outer world, the outer impression of pain
must have been very intense in order to awaken its proper reflex.
The attention may, however, not be disturbed at all and yet
the reflex may fail. If we suppose that a reflex action is one brought
about through the excitement of an afferent sensory nerve which
receives the stimulation and brings it to the center from which the
excitement is transferred to the motor series
(Landois
[4]), we exclude
the activity of the brain. But this exclusion deals only with conscious
activity and the direct transition through the reflex center
can happen successfully only because the brain has been consciously
at work innumerable times, so that it is coöperating in the later
cases also without our knowing it. When, however, the brain is
brought into play through some other particularly intense stimuli,
it is unable to contribute that unconscious coöperation and hence
the reflex action is not performed. On this point I have, I believe,
an instructive and evidential example. One of my maids opened
a match-box pasted with paper at the corner by tearing the paper
along the length of the box with her thumb-nail. Apparently the
box was over-filled or the action was too rapidly made, for the matches
flamed up explosively and the whole box was set on fire. What was
notable was the fact that the girl threw the box away neither consciously
nor instinctively; she shrieked with fright and kept the
box in her hand. At her cry my son rushed in
from
another room,
and only after he had shouted as loudly as possible, "Throw it
away, drop it," did she do so. She had kept the burning thing in
her hand long enough to permit my son to pass from one room into
another, and her wound was so serious that it needed medical treatment
for weeks. When asked why she kept the burning box in her
hand in spite of really very terrible pain she simply declared that
"she didn't think of it," though she added that when she was told
to throw the thing away it just occurred to her that that would be
the wisest of all things to do. What happened then was obviously
this: fear and pain so completely absorbed the activity of the brain
that it was not only impossible for it consciously to do the right
thing, it was even unable to assist in the unconscious execution of
the reflex.
This fact suggests that the sole activity of the spinal cord does
not suffice for reflexes, since if it did, those would occur even when
the brain is otherwise profoundly engaged. As they do not so
occur the brain also must be in play. Now this distinction is not
indifferent for us; for if we hold that the brain acts during reflexes
we have to grant the possibility of degrees in its action. Thus where
brain activity is in question, the problem of responsibility also arises,
and we must hold that wherever a reflex may be accepted as the
cause of a crime the subject of the degree of punishment must be
taken exceptionally into account. It is further to be noted that as
a matter of official consideration the problem of the presence of
reflexes ought to be studied, since it rarely occurs that a man says,
"It was purely a reflex action." He says, perhaps, "I don't know
how it happened," or, "I couldn't do otherwise," or he denies the
whole event because he really was not aware how it happened. That
the questions are here difficult, both with regard to the taking of
evidence, and with regard to the judgment of guilt, is obvious,—
and it is therefore indifferent whether we speak of deficiency in
inhibition-centers or of ill-will[5]
and malice.
[[ id="n18.1"]]
Lotze: Medizinische Psychologie. Leipzig 1852.
[[ id="n18.2"]]
Berzé in Gross's Archiv, I, 93.
[[ id="n18.3"]]
E. Schultze. Zeitschrift für Philosophie u. Pädagogie, VI, 1.
[[ id="n18.4"]]
L. Landois: Lehrbuch der Physiologie des Mensehen. Vienna 1892.
[[ id="n18.5"]]
Cf. H. Gross's Archiv, II, 140; III, 350; VII, 155; VIII, 198.