THE SANCTIONS OF MORALITY
The concept of Morality includes an idea of compulsion, of coercion. A
voice says to man: "You must!" or "You may not!" It commands him to do,
or to refrain from doing, something. If he obeys, all is well; but if he
takes no notice of it, pays no heed to it, the question arises: "What
now? Will the voice rest content with crying in the wilderness? Will it
not mind speaking to deaf ears? Will the refractory individual not
suffer for disregarding it, or has it means to enforce obedience, and
what are these means?"
The answer to this question depends on what view one holds as to the
nature of this monitory, warning, commanding voice. Whoever believes in
Kant's categorical imperative must admit that this word of command is
denuded of all power of coercion and must absolutely rely on the good
will of the individual in whose soul it makes itself heard. According to
Kant the moral law aims at no extraneous result, no utility. It is its
own aim and object. But its own aim is fulfilled as soon as the
categorical imperative has spoken, whether the individual acts in
accordance with it or not. It has therefore in principle no sanction.
True, Kant contradicts himself, for after having sternly excluded from
his doctrine all utility as the end of Morality, all trace of feeling
from moral action, he smuggles blissful happiness in by a back door; the
result of submission to the moral law and its dutiful fulfilment, he
declares, will be bliss. Bliss, however you interpret it, is a
pleasurable emotion. Whether you act morally with the declared intention
of attaining the pleasurable emotion of bliss, or whether this
pleasurable emotion comes of its own accord as an undesired reward when
you have acted morally merely from a feeling of duty, without a thought
for such a result, without a wish to attain it, it makes no difference
to the fact that moral action actually meets with a reward. Kant does
not openly promise this, but with a wink he whispers in your ear that
there is a prospect of it.
Nor does it alter the further fact that Kant, having contemptuously
expelled Eudæmonism from his system, reinstates it with full honours.
Once it has been conceded that moral conduct makes man blissful, in
other words gives him a reward, the categorical imperative also has a
sanction, albeit a very insufficient one. He who fulfils the moral law
attains bliss; that is a spur whether you admit it or not. But he who
does not fulfil it loses this advantage, otherwise, however, nothing
happens to him. The sanction, therefore, is onesided. A reward is
offered for the fulfilment of the moral law, but there is no punishment
for its non-fulfilment. For it is no penalty if bliss is withheld from
him who has no conception of it and no desire for it. No matter, then,
if the moral law be eternal and immutable as the stars above us, if it
be categorical, if it be fulfilled, not owing to a conception of its
effect, not from liking for this effect, but from an inner necessity, it
ceases to be a living force for mankind or to have any practical
significance; for the single thread which unites it with human
feelings--the whispered, vague promise of bliss--is too thin. Feeling
which has no knowledge of this misty bliss, and therefore no yearning
for it, is uninfluenced by the categorical moral law. Reason is not
necessarily convinced that it is right and valid. The moral law abides
like the stars with which it is arbitrarily compared, itself a star in
airless space, pursuing its course regardless of humanity, having no
relation to it or connexion with it; regard for or disregard of the
moral law makes no perceptible difference, and it ceases to have any but
a kind of astronomical interest for mankind, a purely theoretical
interest for purposes of scientific observation and calculation, and is
in no way applicable to the feelings, thoughts and actions of men.
Theological Morality adopts a widely different point of view. Its logic
compels it to provide the most effective sanctions. God is the lawgiver
of Morality. He prescribes with dictatorial omniscience what is good,
what is bad, what should be practised and what avoided. Obedience earns
a glorious reward, revolt entails the most terrible punishment. Reward
and punishment are eternal, or may in certain circumstances be so, and
this, by the way, is cruelty which ill accords with the universal
goodness ascribed to God. For human understanding will never be
persuaded, will never be able to grasp, that a sinner, however grave
and numerous his sins committed during the brief period of the fleeting
life of man, can ever deserve an eternity of the most fearful
punishment. The lack of proportion between the deed and the penalty is
so monstrous that it is felt to be the gravest injustice, against which
both Reason and feeling revolt. Imagination can conceive hell fire that
lasts a certain time and has an aim, like life with its praiseworthy and
wicked deeds, but it boggles at the idea of a hell from which there is
no escape and the agonies of which are endless.
The Old Testament conceives the sanctions of the moral law enunciated by
God in a thoroughly realistic manner. Fulfil the commandment "that thy
days may be long in the land." If you disobey, the curse of the Lord
will be on you and you will be pursued by His anger unto the fourth
generation. Christianity considered it dubious to make this life the
scene of reward and punishment. It is imprudent to let divine justice
rule here below, so to say, in public, before an audience and
representatives of the Press who attentively follow the proceedings,
watch all its details, and can judge whether the verdict is put into
execution. Prudence demands that the trial should take place in the next
world, where it is protected from annoying curiosity. Mocking onlookers
cannot then observe that it is only in the dramas of noble-minded poets
that in the last act vice is inevitably punished and virtue rewarded,
while in real life only too often merit starves, suffers humiliation and
poverty and altogether leads a miserable existence, while sin flourishes
in an objectionable manner and to the very end revels in all the good
things of this earth. However, the religious moralists painted such a
vivid and arresting picture of what awaits the sinners in the next
world, that if men had not been obdurate in their disbelief they must
have shudderingly realized it, as if it actually happened in this world.
Words from the pulpit admonishing men to obey God's law under penalty of
most terrible punishment were greatly emphasized by the paintings and
sculpture over the altars and the church doors, where all the tortures
of hell were depicted by great artists who put all their imagination and
all their genius into the work.
As innumerable people have testified, these representations were taken
so literally, not only by the simple-minded masses but also by the more
highly educated, that they were haunted by them, waking and sleeping,
and imagined that in their own flesh they felt the torture of flames, of
boiling pitch, of the prick of the pitchfork as the devil turned them on
the grid, of the teeth with which the spirits of hell tore their flesh
from their bones. The fear of hell poisoned many a life up till quite
recently, especially in Scotland, and kept people in a constant state of
agitation and anguish which occasionally rose to mad despair. It is
remarkable that only punishment was so impressively held up to man's
view, but not reward. Pictures of paradise are much less rich and varied
than those of hell, and its joys are peculiarly modest. The inventive
powers of painters, sculptors, and poets did not rise above a
beautifully illuminated hall where the blessed are ranged around God's
throne and with folded hands sing hymns of praise to Him, while angels
play an accompaniment on trumpets and fiddles. A prayer meeting, a choir
and a concert of music, that is all that Christian eschatology holds out
as an eternal reward to virtue. It redounds to its credit that it
assumes a sufficiently modest taste among the good to make them long for
these joys and find infinite happiness in them.
Islam does not count on such moderation. The joys of paradise that it
promises are so crudely sensual that they may well arouse lust in coarse
natures, and can counterbalance the fear of hell fire. The ideas of the
reward of merit in the hereafter held by the northern nations, Germans
and Scandinavians, are just as low and coarse. For the Mohamedans
paradise is a harem; for the worshippers of Odin it is a pot-house where
there are free drinks and a jolly brawl to end up with. Heroes who fall
in battle--they knew no virtues but a warlike spirit and contempt of
death--enter Valhalla, where they partake of the everlasting orgies of
the gods, drink unlimited quantities of mead and beer, and fight for
them to their heart's content without taking any harm. The North
American Indians hope, after leading a model life, to be gathered to the
Great Spirit, and in the happy hunting grounds of heaven evermore to
kill abundant game. Only Buddhism comforts the virtuous man with finer
and more spiritual hopes. From out his world of weariness and pessimism
it opens up the prospect of Nirvana to him, that is, of the end of all
feeling, which after all can only be painful, and of all thought, which
after all is only melancholy and despair, and of the volatilization of
the personality, the only real release; while it condemns the sinner to
the worst punishment, continued existence in ever new incarnations.
These are indeed extraordinarily vigorous sanctions, which, though they
fail to have any effect on the unbeliever, make a very deep impression
on the believer, and are well fitted to determine his actions. But they
imply a debasement of the motives for leading a moral life, which are no
longer the outcome of insight and a convinced desire for good, but the
result of fear and avidity, a speculation for profit, a prudent flight
from danger. The practice of morality becomes a safe investment for the
father of a family who hopes to find his savings augmented by interest
in the hereafter, and the avoidance of vice becomes a schoolboy's fear
of punishment. Nevertheless, the view is widely held by superficial,
practical men that these imaginary and deceptive sanctions of Morality
cannot be dispensed with, that only the fear of hell can keep the masses
from giving themselves up to every form of vice and crime, that only the
promise of paradise is capable of inducing them to act unselfishly and
make sacrifices, and that all bonds of discipline would be loosened if
they ceased to believe in a last judgment and an hereafter with its
rewards and punishments.
This whole system of sanctions in a future life is a transcendental
projection (according with primitive, childlike thought) of immanent
practices and forms in the positive administration of justice which are
transferred to a class of actions that successfully evade it.
Traditional and customary Law, as well as written Law, puts its whole
emphasis on sanctions; it partakes itself of the nature of a sanction.
Without sanctions it has no meaning. It is not kindly counsel, nor
fatherly admonition, nor wise advice, it is a stern command, it is
coercion, and this arouses only scorn if it is not armed with the means
to make itself a reality to which the unwilling must also submit,
because they cannot help themselves. There is no law, there can be no
law, which is not supplemented by arrangements that make it binding for
everyone.
In the British House of Commons it has been customary for many hundred
years to designate members as the representatives of their particular
constituency. Only if a member commits a grave offence against the rules
of the House does he run the risk of the Speaker's calling him by name,
but this case has not arisen within the memory of man. A disrespectful
Irish member of Parliament, urged by perverse curiosity, asked the
Speaker one day: "What would happen if you called me by my name?" The
Speaker thought for a short time and then answered with impressive
gravity: "I have no idea, but it must be something terrible." Such a
mysterious threat of an unknown catastrophe may suffice for a picked
assembly whose members would no doubt maintain order and observe all the
rules of parliamentary decency, even if they were not held in check by
the fear of some dark danger. It would not be sufficient by a long way
to guarantee the rule of Law in a society which includes individuals of
the most varied disposition, mind development, education and strength of
impulse.
Positive Law, as I have shown, presents a very simplified excerpt of
Morality for the use of coarser natures. It is a summary of the minimum
of self-denial, consideration for one's fellow men, and the feeling of
joint responsibility, the observance of which the community must
pitilessly demand from all its members if it is to continue to exist and
not fall back within a very short time into the state of Hobbes's war of
all against all. The necessity of self-preservation makes it a duty for
the community to provide for the case that one of its members refuses to
accept the minimum of discipline and to recognize the claims of another
personality. The community prevents this revolt, which would frustrate
its aim and endanger its existence, by employing physical force to break
all resistance to the Law which it must, for the common weal, impose on
all its members. That is an extraneous compulsion that certainly has
something brutal and unworthy of man about it and may well arouse
discomfort in more highly developed minds. It would undoubtedly be more
dignified and better if there were no need for the handcuffs of the
police, for prison cells and executioners, if man's own insight and the
admonition of his conscience were enough to constrain everyone to
respect the Law, that is, to practise a minimum of Morality.
But the community cannot wait until this stage of moral development has
been generally attained. It refuses to entrust its existence to the
spiritual purity of all its members. On principle it disregards
processes in the consciousness of the individual--I have cited in an
earlier chapter the few exceptions to this rule: investigation as to
premeditation, accountability, freedom from undue influence--and keeps
to actions which alone it judges. It declares itself incompetent to
pronounce sentence upon a "storm inside a skull," to quote Victor Hugo.
Its sphere is that of obvious facts. Not until subjective impulses and
decisions are manifested in outward form does it intervene with methods
of the same order, with outward coercion. The sanctions of its law are
material, are punishments and fines. It hits the wrongdoer over the head
and on his hands and forcibly empties his pockets. To look into his soul
and set matters to rights there is a task undertaken much later by
law-givers. It was only after they had remembered that the source of law
is Morality and that its ultimate aim is not the bare attainment of a
state of mutual respect for one another's rights, but the education of
the community to a universal condition of self-discipline, consideration
and neighbourly love, that the law-givers made a point not only of
requiting the bad man's misdeeds, but also of trying to elevate him
morally.
At different times, at different stages of civilization, and according
to the current views of the universe, society has interpreted in
different ways the punishment it inflicts and which it carries out by
forcible means, so as to ensure respect for its laws. Its original
character is that of revenge for an offence. The wrongdoer has offended
the community, it attacks him furiously and breaks every bone in his
body just as an angry individual would do in his first access of
indignation. That is Draco's penal code. That is the law of literal
requital. The special characteristic of this sanction is its violence
and lack of moderation. It does not trouble to find the right proportion
between punishment and crime. It does not carefully and fairly weigh the
force of its blows. The club falls with a frightful crash, but its
dynamical effect is not calculated beforehand in kilogrammetres. "The
stab of a knife is not measured," as an Italian proverb says. Thus
conceived, punishment has something primitive about it, something
intolerably barbarous. The community does the very things it was
created, by Morality and Law, to prevent; it exercises the right of the
stronger against the challenger; it promotes war, not that of all
against all, but of all against one, and its punishment is an act of
war.
In a strongly religious society which lives in the idea of immediate
community with the deity, every transgression of the law is felt to be a
sin against the gods, and the punishment becomes an expiation offered to
them so as to avert their dangerous anger from the commonwealth. In the
administration of justice dim religious ideas are mingled, punishment is
tinged with a veneer of civilization, the culprit is, so to speak,
offered as a sacrifice to the gods. This supernatural view was prolonged
by the Inquisition, at least for a certain class of offences, until
almost modern times.
When society awakens to the consciousness that its bond of union is
Morality, and that its most important task is to educate its members in
Morality, it introduces the concept of betterment into its penal system.
It wants not only to punish the wrongdoer sharply but also to transform
him inwardly and purify him. He is to feel that the punishment is not
only a requital but a mental benefit. In the Austrian army, until
corporal punishment was abolished, it was a rule that the soldier, after
being flogged, should approach the officer on duty and say, as he
saluted, "I thank you for the kind punishment." That is the attitude
that society, when it gives a moralizing tendency to its penal laws,
wishes the person who has been punished to attain. In this there is much
pleasing self-deception not unmixed with a good deal of hypocrisy. Penal
law offers the wrongdoer but little scope for improvement.
All misdemeanours and crimes flow from three sources: ignorance, passion
and innate, anti-social self-seeking. Ignorance is the main, almost the
exclusive cause of wrongdoing among young criminals who have been badly
brought up or neglected, who have never had anything but bad examples
before them, and who cannot distinguish between good and evil. Society
may hope to improve these by right treatment; it must not punish, it
must educate them. Men who commit crimes from passion are those who
possess a consciousness of Morality and a conscience, who know quite
well what is right and what wrong, but have not sufficient strength of
character, that is, not an adequately developed power of inhibition, to
resist an opportunity, a temptation, a turmoil of their instincts. To
want to improve them is senseless, for they are not bad; they are weak,
or at any rate not strong enough. What they need is a strengthening of
their character, of their faculty of inhibition, and to achieve this is
beyond the power of society. All it can do is to humiliate the guilty
party by publicly exposing his lapse and by condemning him, and then
grant a delay of the execution of the sentence. In so doing it says to
him: "You have acted basely and ought to be ashamed of yourself, now go
and do not do it again." If the warning is unavailing and he relapses,
then the earlier sentence, as well as the new one, is executed. Fear of
this is added to his motives for acting honestly, and may possibly
strengthen his resistance to the onslaught of his evil instincts. But
his good conduct will always be at stake in the struggle between his
power of inhibition and his instincts, and the stronger of the two will
always carry the day. And finally, upon the man whose organic
disposition makes him anti-social, upon Lombroso's born criminal,
society can have no educative effect whatever. It is a hopeless case.
Society can render him harmless, it cannot alter him. Consideration for
his neighbour will never find a place in his consciousness. He will
never learn to resist his impulses and desires. His spiritual
insensibility makes him indifferent to the sufferings of others.
Incapable of continuous and equable effort, he will always want to prey
on society by begging, deceiving, stealing and robbing. He has no
conscience and does not hear the voice of society in his mind. He knows
nothing of good and evil, which are both empty phrases for him, words
without any meaning, and he is convinced that he acts rightly every time
he seeks to satisfy his appetites. In his case it is love's labour lost
to try and give a moral meaning to the sanctions of the law. Punishment
is not directed against the soul of the born criminal, only against his
body. It overwhelms him, fetters him and makes him either for the time
being, or permanently, harmless; but his organic tendency continues to
sway him, and whenever he recovers his liberty he is the same as before
he was punished.
The Mystics give to punishment the character of fatherly and chastening
discipline by which the sinner expiates his crime and is purged of the
sin; thus it purifies him and leads him back to the state of innocence;
a kind of anticipatory hell fire which enables him to enter paradise. In
"Gorgias" Plato says explicitly: "He who is punished is liberated from
the evil of his soul." And the Apostle Paul teaches us: "Punishment is
ordained for the betterment of man." Criminal anthropology recognizes
that it is useless to expect this moralizing and redeeming effect from
punishment. Lombroso altogether rejects punishment as a means of
discipline and expiation, and before him Bentham and J. S. Mill, and
simultaneously with him and after him Fouillée, Guyau and Maudsley
adopted the same view. According to them the sanction of criminal law,
which extends and completes it and ensures its efficacy, can have no
other aim than the law itself, and this aim is to defend society against
its active enemies, if possible by converting them, if necessary by
forcible subjugation.
In a book which is full of interest, but whose value is considerably
diminished by a strong admixture of mysticism, "Esquisse d'une morale
sans obligation ni sanction," M. Guyau goes much farther than the
criminal anthropologists and sociological opponents of punishment, and
expresses the somewhat paradoxical view that "the real sanction seems to
imply complete freedom from punishment for the crime committed, as
punishment for any action that has been accomplished is useless." It is
quite correct that no punishment under the sun can undo what has been
done. But it is not feasible for that reason to dispense with all
punishment for misdeeds and to call this systematic freedom from
punishment a sanction. Guyau overlooks the fact that the punishment is
directed not to the crime but the perpetrator. It certainly alters
nothing in a past transgression of the law, and that is not its object,
but it may possibly have the effect of preventing fresh misdeeds on the
part of the same wrongdoer or of others, and that would justify it.
If society must renounce the idea of improving the misdemeanant,
especially the man whose organic tendencies make him a criminal and who
is the most dangerous and commits the most numerous and worst crimes, it
nevertheless assumes that it makes an impression on morally doubtful
characters by punishing misdemeanours and crimes, that it warns them and
prevents them from erring. That is the theory of intimidation, which
also has many opponents. It will hardly be denied that psychologically
it is well founded. The conception of the evil consequences for himself
that his action may entail strengthens the impulsive man's power of
inhibition when he is about to do wrong, and perhaps enables him to
overcome his immoral instinct. Only it is difficult to measure the force
which the thought of punishment adds to the effort of inhibition. This
force does not come into question at all with the man who sins
occasionally from passion. The flood of his impulses sweeps away all
barriers which reason may oppose, and their power of resistance is not
materially increased by the fear of consequences, because the mental
horizon is completely darkened at the time of the storm and no prevision
is possible. The criminal from organic causes exercises no inhibition.
He knows that society condemns his actions, but he is convinced of his
personal right to carry them out, and fears no punishment, because he
hopes to escape it, and tries his utmost by means of planning, prudence
and self-control to outwit society. The theory of intimidation is not
applicable to these two classes of criminals, and they constitute a
large proportion of the army of wrongdoers against which society has to
defend itself by force.
But there remains the great number of mediocre natures whose sympathy
with their fellow men, the emotional foundation of the subjective
impulse to Morality, is only slightly developed, who have a superficial
veneer of Morality, who act honourably out of prudence, but who would
feel no repugnance towards perpetrating profitable misdeeds, if they
were certain that they would incur no risk. These insipid characters
whose emotional temperature oscillates round about freezing point and
who are incapable of great excitement, of passion, would see no reason
to resist any temptation, to disregard any favourable opportunity, if
the penal code, the judge and the policeman did not warn them to be
careful. For this kind of man the penal sanction is really a useful and
perhaps an indispensable means of prevention, and it has been thought
out and developed by the community with a view to such people.
Not content with theoretical considerations, people have also appealed
to practical experience to test the theory of intimidation. In some
countries capital punishment was either legally abolished or tacitly
suppressed, the judges either refraining from pronouncing the sentence
on the prisoner or the head of the state, when appealed to, commuting it
by an act of pardon to loss of liberty. Statistics seemed to show that
serious crimes meriting the death penalty increased, and capital
punishment was reintroduced or the practice of systematic pardons was
abandoned, with the alleged result that the worst crimes grew less
numerous. I express myself doubtfully, because I do not think that the
statistics were sufficiently conclusive. They embraced too small a
number of cases and too short a period of time. It cannot be
conclusively proved that the abolition of the death penalty resulted in
an increase of capital crimes; but it is certain that crimes were never
more frequent or more horrible than in the times when criminal justice
was most cruel and made use of the most terrible sanctions. Up to the
dawn of modern times legal torture was administered, at every street
corner there were gallows, the poor wretch under sentence of death was
pinched with red-hot pincers, the executioner tore the flesh from his
bones, poured boiling pitch over him, cut out his tongue, hacked off his
hands, broke him on the wheel or burnt him alive; executions were a sort
of public entertainment or popular holiday, and efforts were made to
attract as many spectators as possible; every inhabitant of one of the
larger towns was familiar from childhood with the horrid spectacle of
mutilated human bodies writhing in torture, and there rang in his ears
the echo of the screams of pain and of the shrill death rattle of the
victims. But these impressions were so far from intimidating the gaping
crowd that many hurried from the place of execution to commit the most
execrable crimes, the punishment of which they had just witnessed;
consequently punishments have gradually been made less cruel, and the
public is excluded from executions, which clearly indicates a decisive
rejection of the theory of intimidation.
The truth is that the severity of the punishment has no effect upon the
frequency or the savagery of crimes. The criminality of a community
depends on the value and emphasis of the moral education which it
bestows upon the rising generation. It can prevent its members, at any
rate the average, normal type, from developing into criminals. But the
fear of punishment has no deterrent effect upon those whose criminal
impulses have not been subjugated by social discipline. The severity of
the punishment does not contribute anything to the defence of society.
It only proves that the lawgiver and the criminal judges are on the
lowest level of civilization which corresponds to a widespread and
barbarous criminality, and that their modes of thought and feeling are
horribly like those of the criminals whom they sentence to torture, the
gallows, and the wheel.
Positive law aims at defending society, and tries to attain its end by
punishing transgressions. It provides no reward for conscientious
obedience. The law has no honours to bestow on blamelessness and virtue.
Society felt the want of this and made attempts to encourage honourable
conduct by conferring distinctions, just as it tries to intimidate vice
by punishing crime. These attempts were not particularly happy. The
bestowal of titles and orders is no recognition of virtue, but a means
adopted by governments to ensure devotion to power. An arrangement was
made in some places to honour model citizens in public and crown them
with laurels, but it soon came to grief owing to indifference and
mockery. A private individual wanted to fill this gap in social
institutions. The Count of Montyon, a son of the eighteenth century,
whose philosophy he had imbibed, instituted the prizes for virtue which
are distributed annually by the French Academy. They are bestowed on
modest integrity in humble circumstances which has manifested a sense of
duty, neighbourly love and self-sacrifice. This friend of man has had
few imitators, and that is understandable. Sound common sense realizes
that rewards like the Montyon prizes for virtue do not with the
infallibility of a natural law fall to the lot of merit, but are nearly
always adjudicated to the prizewinner by chance, by recommendation, and
by all sorts of influences that have nothing to do with virtue; and it
seems unjust that among equal claims some should be satisfied while
others, the great majority, are not. It would be vain to contend that
one virtue which goes empty-handed is not unfairly treated when another
gets a benefit on which it has not counted, and that in a moral
character, such as alone would be eligible for a prize for virtue, there
is no room for envy. That would be the moral of the Gospel concerning
the labourers who came at the eleventh hour, which has met with
opposition from others besides the contemporaries of Jesus.
On the whole, the community has never felt called upon to solve the
moral problem of the reward of virtue. It has always contented itself
with the punishment of vice and has given its law threatening, but not
encouraging, sanctions. This attitude shows that it has always had a
clear conception of its moral task. In its positive law it never
included anything but that minimum of Morality that was absolutely
necessary to its existence, and without which it would dissolve into its
original elements, its order would be replaced by chaos, by the war of
all against all. It must insist on the observance of this minimum; it
must use forcible means to achieve this. But it does not feel justified
in demanding more than this minimum, because more is not claimed by its
instinct of self-preservation. A surplus of virtue over and above the
amount necessary for the life of society is desirable; but it does not
lie within the scope of the natural functions of the community,
determined by its organic necessities, to achieve this by compulsion
and the provision of legal rewards as an encouragement. It is the
business of the individual to work at his own moral improvement, and the
community cannot interfere directly in the matter. It is enough that it
encourage this work indirectly by bestowing care on the culture and
education of the individual, by making it the duty of its public schools
to inculcate good principles, and by creating a public opinion which
surrounds all the activities of higher morality with admiration, respect
and gratitude. The moral education of the individual is not an object
with which laws are concerned; it is the result of the constant, vital
influence of the community, and can have no sanction other than the
increase of well-being of every single person within the social union,
which is a natural consequence of raising the moral level of the
community.
The penal sanctions of positive law have a gross materialism about them
corresponding to the definite concreteness of the actions with which
positive law deals. The broad field of Morality, however, which is
outside the narrow sphere of the laws, has no room for sanctions of a
material nature. The penalties prescribed by law are directed to actions
which, if they became general, would in a very short space of time
result in the dissolution of society. The community essays by forcible
measures to prevent this kind of action, and these measures more or less
fulfil their aim, whether you interpret their use on the theory of
discipline, of expiation and purification by repentance, of improvement
and moral re-birth, or of intimidation. All these theories were invented
later on, after the community had been convinced by experience that
punishment, if it does not entirely prevent crime, at least limits it
sufficiently to make the continued existence of society possible, and
more or less to guarantee to its members the safety of their life, their
property and their personal dignity.
Against transgressions of the moral law, the results of which are not
immediately obvious, such as ruthless selfishness, blunted sympathy and
lack of active neighbourly kindness, the community does not proceed with
forcible measures; firstly, because it cannot establish their existence
convincingly and hence cannot try them in a court of justice, and
secondly, because it does not recognize them as constituting an
immediate danger to its existence. Now, as the sanctions set up by
society are not applicable to these transgressions, an individual whose
mind does not penetrate very far into matters is disquieted, for
accustomed as he is to the spectacle of the steady justice of the state,
he seeks the counterpart in the forms of this justice in the world of
Morality, and does not discover it at the first glance. He asks
anxiously where are the police, the public prosecutor, the examining
magistrate, the criminal court, the prison for sins against Morality,
and invents them, since he cannot find them. He transfers to the
hereafter the sanctions of Morality, which are not visible on earth. He
cannot make up his mind to renounce them, because the fact that sins
against the moral law go unpunished would seem to him to indicate
intolerable anarchy, comparable with the state of a community where
everyone could murder, rob and mutilate to his heart's content without
incurring the risk of the least personal unpleasantness.
In the sphere of the moral law punishment certainly does not follow hot
foot upon crime, but it nevertheless does not fail to appear, and
becomes visible when the eye is capable of embracing long periods of
time and of tracing intricate connexions. The sanctions of the moral law
differ from those of criminal law, but they are not wanting. They are of
a subjective and of an objective character. The subjective punishment
for a sin against the laws of Morality is remorse. It is inflicted by
the inner judge who rules in the consciousness of the individual, by
conscience, and penetrates to the very deepest depths of a person's mind
which no outward punishment imposed by the community ever reaches. It is
not only religious and political martyrs who endure torture and death
with proud serenity, conscious that they are morally immeasurably
superior to their executioners; even common criminals remain perfectly
unmoved by their punishment and regret only that they are weaker than
their captors. Prisons are full of convicts who look upon their
condition as that of prisoners of war. They have been worsted in their
battle with law. That seems to them a misfortune but not a disgrace.
They are neither humble nor contrite, but revengeful. They are
determined and ready to take up the duel with society as soon as an
opportunity offers and they may hope to do so with some prospect of
success.
But remorse is an unresisting submission to the verdict of conscience
and the consciousness of one's own unworthiness. It is the recognition
of the justice of the sentence which brands one, and the constant,
anguished realization that one's personality has been deservedly
humiliated, dishonoured and deprived of its rights. As a spiritual
process, remorse causes the sinner continually to relive the misdeed he
committed, while at the same time he is fully conscious of its atrocity.
The ego becomes dual, one part active, the other watching and judging.
The one again and again perpetrates its misdeed, the other looks on
horrified and suffers agonies. It is one long torture and disgrace of
self. Remorse condemns the sinner perpetually to repeat in his mind the
deed which fills him with horror of himself. This state of mind is the
nearest approach to eternal damnation in hell. There is only one means
of temporary escape: to extinguish memory by narcotics. That is why
remorse not seldom leads to drunkenness. Shakespeare, with a poet's
infallible insight into the soul, has grasped and depicted the nature of
remorse, the uninterrupted, torturing presence of the misdeed in man's
consciousness. Lady Macbeth sees her hands ever stained with the blood
of the innocent royal victim whom she herself did not even murder, and
she complains that "all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this
little hand." Leontes, in the "Winter's Tale," on hearing of Hermione's
alleged death, of which he believes himself guilty, mourns:
"Once a day I'll visit
The chapel where they lie; and tears shed there
Shall be my recreation: so long as nature
Will bear up with this exercise, so long
I daily vow to use it."
Remorse is the most effective of the subjective sanctions of Morality;
it is almost too effective, for owing to its duration and severity the
punishment easily grows disproportionate to the crime. But it has one
great disadvantage, it affects only better natures who have an active
conscience and spiritual delicacy, while it spares the wicked who have
no conscience, who perpetrate their misdeeds contentedly, without a
qualm, and regret them only when they are discovered and lead to
unpleasantness.
Nevertheless, the actions of these hardened sinners do not go quite
unpunished. Moral law always takes vengeance for transgressions, but not
directly on the evildoer. In addition to the subjective, it also has an
objective sanction; when it is violated retribution falls on the
community. The masses have a dim idea that every evil deed meets with
requital and express it in the proverb that "Though the mills of God
grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." They have noticed that
the curse of an evil deed never fails to come, and is consummated with
crushing force, only that it does not happen at once. It seems
objectionably unjust that the culprit should not feel the effect of his
crime, whilst others do who were not born when it was perpetrated. But
the concept of retributory justice is as little applicable to the
far-reaching relations in the life of humanity as to the actions of the
laws of Nature, for instance gravity or electricity. Morality is, as I
have shown, an adaptation of the species to the natural conditions in
which it is forced to live. Morality, therefore, has an aim, which is to
make social life in common possible for the individual, this life alone
enabling him to maintain his existence amid the conditions obtaining on
this earth. The discipline which Morality imposes on the individual
leaves him a certain amount of free play. If he escapes from this
discipline to a certain small extent which does not threaten the
existence of society, this revolt has no ill effect upon the life of the
species, the latter has no grounds for punishing him, and the only, yet
sufficient, sanction of the loose Morality of an undisciplined
individual lies in the fact that he is more or less inferior to the most
perfect type of the species, and visibly bears the stamp of his
worthlessness in his character, his bearing and his mode of thought. But
if in his disregard of Morality the individual goes so far as to
frustrate its aim and endanger the existence of society, then the latter
must either find ways and means of rendering the culprit harmless or
else it overlooks his misdeed and thereby becomes an accessory and
justly suffers the evils consequent upon a deterioration of Morals which
is universally tolerated.
The means by which a society must defend the Morality necessary to its
existence can only be spiritual, for it is not a question of breaches of
the positive law which result in the intervention of justice and of
material penalties, but of a disregard of the commands of Morality,
which are not drawn up in paragraphs. Public opinion suffices to rouse
the individual who despises the Moral law to an uncomfortable sense of
his unworthiness; if he finds himself treated with contempt and sees
disapproval and dislike in everyone's face, either he will be spurred
to an effort to overcome his immoral instincts or his self-respect will
suffer from the universal contempt with which he meets; and this
suffering is his punishment, therefore it is the sanction of a breach of
the Moral law.
If public opinion does not keep careful and severe watch, such as may be
termed the function of a higher moral police, then inevitably the moral
tone of the whole society will sink to a lower level, and this will
result in making life harder and more difficult, and in certain
circumstances may lead to dissolution. This is not a theoretical
assumption, but an observed fact, a lesson taught by history. It tells
us of epochs in which the licentiousness of individuals, favoured by a
society too dull, weak and indifferent to stand up against bad examples,
succeeded in corrupting all classes. Such a period is exemplified by the
fall of Rome. Common natures indulged and wallowed in every vice, the
better ones felt such disgust for a life without nobility and virtue
that they discarded it, and the community lost all excuse of joint
responsibility and became so loosely knit together that it was incapable
of common effort or sacrifice, and collapsed miserably at the first
onslaught of a foreign aggressor tempted by its depravity.
The disintegration of a society, the sanction of its sins against
Morality, is a slow process. It does not often take place
catastrophically, with theatrical effect, so that even a dull observer
can grasp the connexion between cause and effect. But whoever
investigates closely will realize that all evils from which society
suffers, which make life more bitter and harder for its members, are
ultimately due to defective Morality. What are class struggles with
their consequent hostilities between groups of the same nation, their
coercion and damage, but manifestations of self-seeking, lack of
consideration and injustice, that is, of Immorality? Would they be
possible if members of all classes, capitalists and workers,
agriculturists and townsmen, rulers and subjects were inspired by
neighbourly kindness, understanding and appreciation of the needs,
pretensions and feelings of their opponents, and by a spirit of
self-sacrifice? Would the decay of character, the arbitrariness and
arrogance of the mighty, the cowardly slavishness of the masses, with
the resultant rottenness of public affairs, be conceivable if
individuals were conscious of their dignity and their duty to themselves
and the community, and if they had the strength and the determination to
overcome their fear of men? Could wars of aggression bring ruin upon
mankind if leading personalities did not give way to the desire for
outward honours, to the hunger for power, to avarice, to the itch of
vanity, that is to the lowest forms of selfishness, and if the masses
out of stupidity or fear of a mental effort, and out of dread for their
personal responsibility did not allow themselves to be misused for base
purposes?
Thus we find insufficient Morality in individuals, or the complete lack
of it, to be at the root of all evils with which the community is
afflicted, and we are justified in conceiving war, party quarrels,
collisions between groups representing different interests, revolutions,
in fact, all tragedies of life in societies with the suffering and
destruction they entail, as the penal sanction of sins against Morality.
Morality, which was created to facilitate life for the individual or to
make it at all possible for him, is no longer able to fulfil its aim,
and the society finds itself by its own fault back in the condition of
misery and fear, owing to which its instinct of self-preservation
originally forced it to make the effort of setting up the Moral law.
Even the most merciless zealot cannot wish for a more efficacious and
painful punishment of Immorality.
But Morality does not possess the sanction of punishment alone, it has
also the more amiable one of reward. We have seen that by strengthening
the faculty of inhibition it raises the individual to a higher level of
organic development, that by the inculcation of consideration and
neighbourly kindness it affords the community the possibility of working
together peacefully and profitably. But it does more than that. It gives
life an incomparably higher value than when it is dull and uniform, by
enriching and beautifying it with heroism and with ideals.
Ideals and heroism are direct creations of Morality and inconceivable
without it. The ideal is a conception of perfection; the thought of
attaining it is accompanied by the most pleasurable emotions, and the
individual regards it as his life's task to strive for it. The struggle
for the ideal implies effort at all times, renunciation of the ease of a
thoughtless and care-free existence, an endless series of difficult
victories over appetites clamouring for immediate satisfaction, that is,
constant work in the service of Morality. He who has an ideal is never
troubled by the problem of the meaning of life. His life has an aim and
significance. He knows whither he goes, why he lives, for what he works.
He knows nothing of the doubts of the aimless wanderer, of the
discouraging consciousness of one's own uselessness, and his assurance,
his conviction that his efforts are useful and worthy come very near to
happiness. Heroism is the noblest victory of a thinking and volitional
personality over selfishness; it is altruism which rises to
self-sacrifice, the proud subjugation by Reason of the most primitive
and powerful of all instincts, that of self-preservation. It is the
highest achievement of which Morality is capable. It is never developed
for the profit of an individual, but always for that of a community, for
a thought, for an ideal. His heroic conduct raises the hero out of the
rut of his existence, liberates him from the trammels of his
individuality and enlarges this to represent a community, its longings,
its resolutions, its determination. At the moment of his heroic action
the hero lives innumerable lives, the lives of all for whom he risks his
own, and if death reaches him, it can destroy only his single person,
but cannot put an end to the dynamic activity of the community which is
included in the hero, while he is magnificently elevated far above
himself. The faculty of forming an ideal of existence and activity, and
of rising to the heights of heroism, is the royal reward of Morality
which the perfect subjection of animal instincts to the rule of human
Reason has achieved. Its punishment for those retrograde individuals who
never learn to control their instinctive reflex actions is that they are
denied the sight of the glory of the ideal, that heroism is unknown and
incomprehensible to them, that they lead their lives fettered and
imprisoned, unconscious of any task, without prospect or exaltation, as
if they dwelt in a cellar or in a dark dungeon. These are the sanctions
of Morality. It has no others, nor does it need them.
In one passage of the book cited above Guyau makes the doubting remark:
"Who can tell us whether Morality is not ... at one and the same time a
beautiful and useful art? Perhaps it bewitches us and deceives us." Let
us assume that it is an illusion. That would not detract from its value
for mankind. Is not all our knowledge of the world, is not our whole
view of Nature an illusion? We are made conscious of the universe by its
qualities, and these qualities are conferred on it by our senses. But
all knowledge that we derive from our senses is an illusion. For the
senses do not convey reality to us, but the modifications which the
influence of reality produces in our sense organs. The universe has
neither sound nor colour nor scent. But we perceive it as sounding,
coloured and scented. These qualities we attribute to reality are
illusions of our senses, but these illusions make up all the beauty of
the world which without them would be dumb, blind and without charm for
us.
Life for us is an unspeakably oppressive riddle. Has it an aim, and, if
so, what? We do not know. All thought only leads to the conclusion: life
is its own aim and end, we live for life's sake. And this conclusion is
no solution of the problem. Then Morality appears, and not only makes
life easier and possible, but even shows us an aim, if not for
universal, at least for individual life. That aim is the humanization of
the animal, the spiritualization of man, the exaltation and enrichment
of the individual by means of sympathy, neighbourly kindness, a sense of
joint responsibility, and the subjection of Instinct to Reason which, as
far as we know, is the noblest product of Nature. It is possible that
Morality, which hides the eerie unintelligibility of life from us, is an
illusion. Blessed be the illusion which makes life worth living.
Printed in England by Cassell & Company, Limited, London, E.C.4.
F17.122