Your question about inherited predispositions, as limiting the sphere of the will, and, consequently, of moral accountability, opens a very wide range of speculation.  I can give you only a brief abstract of my own opinions on this delicate and difficult subject.  Crime and sin, being the preserves of two great organized interests, have been guarded against all reforming poachers with as great jealousy as the Royal Forests.  It is so easy to hang a troublesome fellow!  It is so much simpler to consign a soul to perdition, or say masses, for money, to save it, than to take the blame on ourselves for letting it grow up in neglect and run to ruin for want of humanizing influences!  They hung poor, crazy Bellingham for shooting Mr. Perceval.  The ordinary of Newgate preached to women who were to swing at Tyburn for a petty theft as if they were worse than other people,—­just as though he would not have been a pickpocket or shoplifter, himself, if he had been born in a den of thieves and bred up to steal or starve!  The English law never began to get hold of the idea that a crime was not necessarily a sin, till Hadfield, who thought he was the Saviour of mankind, was tried for shooting at George the Third;—­lucky for him that he did not hit his Majesty!

It is very singular that we recognize all the bodily defects that unfit a man for military service, and all the intellectual ones that limit his range of thought, but always talk at him as if all his moral powers were perfect.  I suppose we must punish evil-doers as we extirpate vermin; but I don’t know that we have any more right to judge them than we have to judge rats and mice, which are just as good as cats and weasels, though we think it necessary to treat them as criminals.

The limitations of human responsibility have never been properly studied, unless it be by the phrenologists.  You know from my lectures that I consider phrenology, as taught, a pseudo-science, and not a branch of positive knowledge; but, for all that, we owe it an immense debt.  It has melted the world’s conscience in its crucible, and cast it in a new mould, with features less like those of Moloch and more like those of humanity.  If it has failed to demonstrate its system of special correspondences, it has proved that there are fixed relations between organization and mind and character.  It has brought out that great doctrine of moral insanity, which has done more to make men charitable and soften legal and theological barbarism than any one doctrine that I can think of since the message of peace and good-will to men.

Automatic action in the moral world; the reflex movement which seems to be self-determination, and has been hanged and howled at as such (metaphorically) for nobody knows how many centuries:  until somebody shall study this as Marshall Hall has studied reflex nervous action in the bodily system, I would not give much for men’s judgments of each others’ characters.  Shut up the robber and the defaulter,