Section 35.
Our conclusions depend upon perceptions made by ourselves and
others. And if the perceptions are good our judgments may be good,
if they are bad our judgments must be bad. Hence,
to study the
forms of sense-perception is to study the fundamental conditions
of the administration of law, and the greater the attention thereto,
the more certain is the administration.
It is not our intention to develop a theory of perception. We have
only to extract those conditions which concern important circumstances,
criminologically considered, and from which we may see
how we and those we examine, perceive matters. A thorough and
comprehensive study of this question can not be too much recommended.
Recent science has made much progress in this direction,
and has discovered much of great importance for us. To ignore
this is to confine oneself merely to the superficial and external, and
hence to the inconceivable and incomprehensible, to ignoring valuable
material for superficial reasons, and what is worse, to identifying
material as important which properly understood has no value
whatever.
