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34

Instinctive Revenge

come unconscious and purely reflex. In other cases, the reactions are accompanied by consciousness, and appear to be less certain and but semi-reflex, as if the habit had not yet had time to become wholly fixed and despotic. Finally we reach habits which are entirely the result of individual education and are purely voluntary. To quote Prof. James: "Thus the animal's reflex and voluntary performances shade into each other gradually, being connected by acts which may often occur automatically, but may also be modified by conscious intelligence."

Every animal has the instinct of self-defence, and will strike back when attacked. Every society has this same instinct, and will react in like manner against an injurer. Evidently to be without this instinct courts destruction. In union is strength: brute strength and the strength of intellect. Life in society is the chief means for the development of intelligence, and as such natural selection enforces it. The anti-social individual, growing up unlike his fellows, becomes actively hurtful and more and more hateful to them, till instinctive antipathy brings social punishment upon him. The headlong rush of a mob of citizens, frenzied by some recent rape and murder, upon the supposed criminal, the fierce determination to hang him first and try him afterwards, the immediate execution, the grim feeling of satisfied vengeance; such lynch law is but too well known even among civilized men to-day. What is it but the instinctive social punishment of a crime so black that it has stirred the community to its very depths, awakening uncontrollable abhorrence and an imperative craving for vengeance, which the immediate death of the culprit alone can satisfy. Although calmed by many centuries of growing obedience to law, ancestral instincts at times reassert their sway over calmer, slow-voiced reason. The impulsive animal nature conquers

1 James, i, 13.

Social pun

for a time the intelligence of the rational man. ishment for crime is once more very close to social reflex action. And how easily this lynch law may again become customary is indicated by the action of an Ohio judge, who refused to surrender a supposed murderer to Kentucky authorities, on the ground that the great number of lynchings in that State rendered a legal trial improbable.

The lower we get in the scale of intelligence, the more despotic is the sway of reflex action over both individuals and social groups; that is, the stronger is the chain which compels them to follow, in unquestioning obedience, the dictates of ancestral habit or group custom. Therefore we should not expect to find aggressively anti-social, or, in other words, criminal members, in the lowest animal communities. We have no evidence that such exist.

As we rise to higher and higher types of mind, we find more and more acts which seem caused, sometimes by instinct, sometimes by conscious choice-semi-reflex acts we may call them. But the ultimate basis of reprisal for harmful acts lies in instinctive self-defence, reflex action, whether individual or social. Self preservation is the first law of nature, but it is recognized as a law only by men when they begin to deliberate upon their actions, after the purely reflex stage is ended. Then man develops the first law of punishment for wrong-doing-the law of revenge-an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. But punishment for harmful acts had existed long before; had existed, so far as only the individual is concerned, since the beginning of life upon the earth-while social punishment for acts harmful to the social group is found, as we have seen, among the higher animals, as well as among men. Punishment for crime is born of vengeance-social vengeance-and has its warrant and justification in the necessity for self-defence. Punishment for crime is fundamentally instinctive, and is precedent to all

36

The Accursed Thing

ideas of morality, all thought of individuals or their actions as good or evil. Punishment for crime is primarily meted out for acts most harmful to the social existence, whether committed intentionally or through ignorance, it matters not. Indeed, primitive law is filled with punishments to be inflicted upon trees, stones and animals, as well as men. The thing that does the harm is accursed and must be punished. So we read in Exodus, xxi. 28: "If an ox gore a man or a woman that they die; then the ox shall be surely stoned, and his flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be quit." In England, so late as the reign of Edward I., "If a man fell from a tree and was killed, the tree was' deodand' (forfeited to the relatives of the deceased). If he drown in a well, the well was to be filled up." Some will see in this but a late and strong evidence of the imputation of moral intelligence to trees and wells and their punishment as evil doers; but ancient penal law is full of evidence that it aimed directly at the satisfaction of vengeance, and that punishment was not proportioned to moral obliquity.

Far down into historic times, Roman and Germanic law punished the thief taken in the act much more severely than one who evaded capture until men's passions had had tfme to cool. Primitive punishment was proportioned to provocation. Among savage and semi-civilized men, as well as animals, individual or social vengeance fell upon the thing that did the harm, irrespective of intent. Thus the savage Kukis of southern Asia hack in pieces a tree from which a kinsman has fallen to his death. If a tiger kills one of their number, his relatives are disgraced until they have slain and eaten either this tiger or another one.

Punishment was originally individual or social reflex action, obedient to imperative demands of habit or custom,

1 Holmes, p. 24.

imbedded deep in animal nature by the workings of natural law. Those who believe that punishment for crime is essentially a retribution for individual moral guilt, or that its true object is the reformation of the offender, may well study punishments among criminals and savage men. True social punishment existed before moral thought was possible, and it has generically nothing whatever to do with the motives of the individual. It has its roots deep in the necessity of selfdefence, and is born of instinctive social vengeance. It deals with acts and not with motives, and its aim is the welfare of society, and not of the individual offender.

NOTE. It is certainly wise when investigating problems in animal psychology, to accept the simplest theory that will thoroughly harmonize and explain the facts. Such, the author believes, is the theory of punishment by social reflex action. The mind of the brute is so unlike ours that we are working in an unknown medium, and can at best do little more than guess. It is rash, indeed, to impute to animals a moral intelligence with difficulty discernible among lowest savage men.

CHAPTER III

CRIME AMONG SAVAGES.

IN every aggregation of living creatures may be found two great tendencies which we cannot explain-a tendency of offspring to be like their ancestors, and, on the other hand, a tendency to differ somewhat from their ancestors. These tendencies are mutually antagonistic and destructive, yet both are essentially necessary to the social welfare; for the one makes social life possible and the other makes possible social progress. How to foster both these tendencies toward the upbuilding of the social strength and effectiveness, is the great fundamental problem of every human society. The exclusive development of the principle of likeness will result in social stagnation, while the dominance of the principle of unlikeness will soon bring social disruption and death. In the ages before history, the great danger seems to have been from the latter tendency, and it was necessary to fuse every available social force into united opposition to the stiffnecked individualism of the human race. In historic times the difficulty has been reversed, and we have had to struggle manfully to prevent the crust of social custom from hardening so closely round us that individual and social growth be made impossible.

When human life was very young upon the earth, men were like children, utterly wayward and impulsive, passionate, revengeful, thoughtless, cruel from ignorance, easily frightened and intensely superstitious, yet recovering quickly from the immediate effects of all impressions, both good and bad; easily plastic in any direction, but as easily diverted into

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