The first, and lowest, is neither moral nor social, but purely animal and reflex—"a defensive reflex."[[182]] The individual who suffers violence, who thinks himself attacked or injured, immediately reacts. This is “the exasperated instinct of conservation,” or, to call it by its true name, revenge. So the savage who, before Darwin’s eyes, broke his son’s head for having dropped a store of shell-fish, the fruit of a laborious day’s fishing. This defensive reflex frequently recurs in the psychology of crowds; it is needless to give instances. It may seem paradoxical to take revenge as a starting-point for the sense of justice; but we shall see how it becomes mitigated and rationalised.

In fact, a second stage corresponds to revenge deferred through premeditation, reflection, or some analogous cause. It tends towards equivalence and reaches it under the form of retaliation, so frequent in primitive communities. The idea of equality, tooth for tooth, eye for eye, has won its way; the instinct has become intellectualised.

So far, the compensation claimed would appear to have only an individual character; but it must very early have taken on a collective character, by reason of the close solidarity uniting the members of the small social aggregate—the clan or family. An all-powerful opinion forces the injured party to pursue his revenge even when he does not wish it; and when a vendetta is in force as between clan and clan, the stage of collective responsibility appears, and the notion of the compensation due is enlarged.

However, revenge restores, in the social aggregate, a state of war, which has to be eliminated; hence a reaction on the part of the community tending to suppress or attenuate it. This is the stage of arbitration and peace-making. Many facts show that, in the beginning, the decision of the umpires is without binding value, and supported by no coercive means. It is a proof not so much of culpability as of an indemnity to be paid to those concerned; the criminal trial is as yet a civil action.

For this temporary and unsanctioned arbitration the social development logically substitutes a permanent and guaranteed arbitration, exercised by a chief, or an aristocracy, or the popular assembly. Compensation becomes obligatory and is forcibly imposed. The condemned person must submit or leave the community; if refractory, he is excommunicated, and in primitive societies the outlaw’s life is intolerable; we see the equivalent of it in modern strikes. Let us also note the somewhat widely distributed custom of a division of the indemnity imposed, one portion being assigned to the injured party, the other to the state—i.e., the chief. The notion of justice has taken on a definitely social character.

It only remains that it should become universal. It long remains enclosed within the limits of the social group. All that contributes to the material and moral welfare of the group is good, and conversely; outside the group, all acts are unmoral. We find in history, and even at the present time, many proofs of this dualism or duplication of the individual, according as he is acting within his own social environment or with regard to strangers. Such were the Germans of Cæsar’s time.[[183]] In their earlier period, the Greeks considered themselves as less under moral obligation towards the Barbarians, and the Romans towards foreigners (hostes). It is especially owing to the efforts of the philosophers—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics—that justice ceased to be national and became universal. It might be added that at that period when the notion of justice remains a national one, it still varies within the group, according to caste; it is not the same for priests and warriors, for free men and for slaves, for aristocrats and for merchants. In the beginning, particularism was the rule.

It is evident that, on the negative side, the evolution of moral life has been especially due to the progress of intelligence; the emotional element has only been incidental. Compared with the sense of justice, the feeling of active benevolence, if not evolved more quickly, at least appeared sooner, because nearer to instinct and less dependent on reason. A certain philosopher (Kant, I believe) was surprised that there is so much kindness and so little justice among men. He did not observe as a psychologist, or else he was led astray by intellectualist prejudice. This must be so, because tenderness is innate and spontaneous, justice acquired and deliberate; because one springs directly from an instinct, while the other has to undergo various metamorphoses. If man is sociable and moral, it is less because he thinks than because he feels in a certain manner and tends in a certain direction.

To conclude: moral emotion is a very complex state. Those sentimentalists in the last century, or in this, who have maintained the hypothesis of a “moral sense,” have erroneously considered it as a special sense with an innate faculty of discriminating good and evil. It is not a simple act, but the sum of a set of tendencies. Let us eliminate the intellectual elements, and enumerate its emotional constituents only: (1) as basis, sympathy—i.e., a community of nature and disposition; (2) the altruistic or benevolent tendency manifesting itself under different forms (attraction of like to like, maternal or paternal affection, etc.), at first weak, but gaining more expansion by the restriction of the egoistic feelings; (3) the sense of justice with its obligatory character—whose origin we have just traced; (4) the desire of approbation or of divine or human rewards, and the fear of disapprobation and punishments. As in the case of all complex feelings, its composition must vary with the predominance of one or other of its constituent elements; in one case it is obligation (the Stoics), in another charity, in many the fear of public opinion or of the law, of God or of the devil. It is impossible that it should be constant and identical in all men.

IV.

The pathology of the moral sense cannot detain us long, its detailed study belonging to the department of criminal anthropology. Numerous works have been published on this subject within the last half-century; there would be no advantage in presenting a bald abstract of these. Lombroso’s view of the “born criminal,” with his physiological, psychical, and social characteristics, has been violently attacked, and sustained serious damage. Several successive theories have attempted to explain the existence of this moral anomaly: atavism, according to which the born criminal is a survival, a return to primitive man, who is assumed to have been violent and unsociable; infantilism, which has recourse, not to heredity, but to arrested development, and alleges that the perversion which is permanent in the criminal is normal, but transient, in the child; the pathological view which connects the criminal type with epilepsy, considered as the prototype of violent and destructive impulses; the sociological view (the most recent), which attributes a preponderant function to social conditions, and maintains that the criminal is “a microbe inseparable from his environment.”[[184]] We need not enter into a detailed examination of these hypotheses, which have given rise to much passionate debate: one question alone concerns our subject, that of moral insensibility—a condition described, long before the days of criminal anthropology, under the names of moral insanity (Prichard, 1835), folie morale, impulsive insanity, instinctive monomania, etc., and which will serve to show once more the independence and the preponderance of feeling in the moral life.[[185]]