OF INJURIES AND OF HONOUR.
Injuries that are personal and affect a man’s honour—that is, the fair
share of favour that he has a right to expect from others—should be
punished with disgrace.
There is a remarkable contradiction between the civil laws, which set
so jealous and supreme a guard upon individual life and property, and
the laws of so-called _honour_, which set opinion above everything. This
word _honour_ is one of those that have served as the basis for long
and brilliant argumentations, without any fixed or permanent idea being
attached to it. How miserable is the condition of human minds, more
distinctly cognisant of the remotest and least important ideas about
the movements of the heavenly bodies, than of those near and important
moral notions, which are ever fluctuating and confused, according as the
winds of passion impel them and a well-guided ignorance receives and
transmits them! But the seeming paradox will vanish, if one considers,
that, as objects become confused when too near the eyes, so the too great
propinquity of moral ideas easily causes the numerous simple ideas which
compose them to become blended together, to the confusion of those clear
lines of demarcation demanded by the geometrical spirit, which would
fain measure exactly the phenomena of human sensibility. And the wonder
will vanish altogether from the impartial student of human affairs, who
will suspect that so great a moral machinery and so many restraints are
perchance not needed, in order to render men happy and secure.
This _honour_, then, is one of those complex ideas which are an
aggregate not only of simple ideas but of ideas no less complex than
themselves, and which in their various presentments to the mind now admit
and now omit some of their different component elements, only retaining
some few common ideas, just as in algebra several complex quantities
admit of a common divisor. To find this common divisor in the different
ideas that men form of _honour_, we must cast a rapid glance over the
first formation of communities.
The necessity of remedying the disorders caused by the physical despotism
of each man singly produced the first laws and the first magistrates;
this was the end and object of the institution of societies, and this
end has always been maintained, either in reality or appearance, at the
head of all codes, even of those that operated otherwise. But the closer
contact of men with one another and the progress of their knowledge
brought about an endless series of mutual actions and needs, which
ever lay beyond the foresight of the laws and below the actual power
of individuals. From this epoch began the despotism of opinion, which
afforded the only means for obtaining from others those benefits and
averting those evils, for which the laws failed to provide. It is this
opinion that is the trouble equally of the wise man and the fool; that
has raised the semblance of virtue to higher credit than virtue itself;
that even makes the rascal turn missionary, because he finds his own
interest therein. Hence the favour of men became not only useful but
necessary, if a man would not fall below the general level. Hence, not
only does the ambitious man seek after such favour as useful to himself,
and the vain man go begging for it as a proof of his merit, but the man
of honour also may be seen to require it as a necessity. This _honour_ is
a condition that very many men attach to their own existence. Born after
the formation of society, it could not be placed in the general deposit;
it is rather a momentary return to the state of nature, a momentary
withdrawal of one’s self from the dominion of those laws which, under the
circumstances, fail to afford the sufficient defence required of them.
Hence both in the state of extreme political liberty and in that of
extreme political subjection the ideas of honour disappear or get
perfectly confused with others. For in the former the despotism of the
laws renders the pursuit of the favour of others of no avail; and in
the latter state the despotism of men, by destroying civil existence,
reduces everybody to a precarious and temporary personality. Honour,
therefore, is one of the fundamental principles of those monarchies that
are a mitigated form of despotism, being to them what revolutions are to
despotic States, namely, a momentary return to the state of nature, and a
reminder to the chief ruler of the condition of primitive equality.