In law every crime consists of two things:  an act and an intent.  Both are necessary to constitute legal guilt, and on the prevalent theory of moral guilt and punishment both are necessary to make up criminal conduct.  There can be no legal or moral guilt unless one intends wickedness; unless he deliberately does the act because he wishes to do wrong and knows he does wrong.  The question then of moral guilt, which is necessary to the commission of a criminal act, touches all the questions suggested and many more.  Even if freedom of action is to some degree assumed, the question still remains as to the degree of guilt in fixing punishment and responsibility.  The question involves the make-up of the man, his full heredity, so far as it can be known.

Most of every man’s heredity is hidden in the mist and darkness of the past.  He inherits more or less directly through an infinite number of ancestors, reaching back to primitive man and even to the animals from which he came.  The remote ancestry is, of course, usually not so important as that immediately behind him.  Still, plainly, his form and structure and the details of his whole machine, including the marvelously delicate mechanism of the brain and nervous system, are heritages of the very ancient past.  Neither are the processes of inheritance well understood nor subject to much control.  Often in the making of the man Nature resorts to some “throw-back” which reproduces the ancient heritage.  This can be seen only in general resemblances and behavior, for the genealogical tree of any family is very short and very imperfectly known, and the poor have no past.  In three or four generations at the most the backward trail is lost and his family merged with the species of which he forms but a humble part.

Enough, however, is known of ancestry and the infinite marks of inheritance on every structure as well as enough of the reaction of the human machine to the varied environment that surrounds it, to make it clear that if one were all-seeing and all-wise he could account in advance for every action of every man.  More than this, he could see in the original, fertilized cell, all its powers, defects and potentialities and could, in the same manner, look down through the short years during which the human organism, grown from the cell, shall have life and movement, and could see its varied environment.  If one could see this with infinite wisdom, he could infallibly tell in advance each step that the machine would take and infallibly predict the time and method of its dissolution.  To be all-knowing is to be all-understanding, and this is infinitely better than to be all-forgiving.