confinement which amounted to illegal imprisonment, but that "we must
incontestably, and, indeed, principally, regard as such the cruel
withholding from him of the most ordinary gifts which Nature with a
liberal hand extends even to the most indigent,--the depriving him
of all the means of mental development and culture,--the unnatural
detention of a human soul in a state of irrational animality." "An
attempt," he says, "by artificial contrivances, to seclude a man from
Nature and from all intercourse with rational beings, to change
the course of his human destiny, and to withdraw from him all the
nourishment afforded by those spiritual substances which Nature has
appointed for food to the human mind, that it may grow and flourish,
and be instructed and developed and formed,--such an attempt must, even
quite independently of its actual consequences, be considered as,
in itself, a highly criminal invasion of man's most sacred and most
peculiar property,--of the freedom and the destiny of his soul.
...Inasmuch as the whole earlier part of his life was thus taken from
him, he may be said to have been the subject of a partial soul-murder."
This crime, if recognized, would, according to Feuerbach, far outweigh
the mere crime of illegal imprisonment, and the latter would be merged
in it.

Tittmann, in his "Hand-Book of Penal Law," also speaks of crimes against
the intellect, and particularly mentions the separation of a person from
all human society, if practised upon a child before it has learned to
speak and until the intellect Las become sealed up, as well as the
intentional rearing of a person to ignorance, as reducible to this head.
This was written before Caspar's case had occurred. He says, also, that
they are similar to cases of homicide; because the latter are punished
for destroying the rational being, and not the physical man. Murder and
the destruction of the intellect are, therefore, equally punishable. The