Читать книгу The Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas - Edward Westermarck - Страница 56

80 Darwin, Descent of Man, p. 69.

81 Romanes, Animal Intelligence, p. 478.

82 Brehm, Thierleben, i. 156. Idem, From North Pole to Equator, p. 305. Rengger (Naturgeschichte der Säugethiere von Paraguay, p. 52) gives the following information about the Cay:—“Fürchtet er … seinen Gegner, so nimmt er seine Zuflucht zur Verstellung, und sucht sich erst dann an ihm zu rächen, wenn er ihn unvermuthet überfallen kann. So hatte ich einen Cay, welcher mehrere Personen die ihn oft auf eine grobe Art geneckt hatten, in einem Augenblicke lass, wo sie im besten Vernehmen mit ihm zu sein glaubten. Nach verübter That kletterte er schnell auf einen hohen Balken, wo man ihm nicht beikommen konnte, und grinste schadenfroh den Gegenstand seiner Rache an.” See, moreover, Watson, The Reasoning Power in Animals, especially pp. 20, 21, 24, 156 sq.; Romanes, op. cit. p. 387 sqq.; but also Morgan, Animal Life and Intelligence, p. 401 sq.

83 Palgrave, Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia, i. 40.

84 Watson, op. cit. p. 26 sq.

85 Aas, Sjaeleliv og intelligens hos Dyr, i. 72.

86 Smellie, Philosophy of Natural History, i. 448.

I find it inconceivable that anybody, in the face of such facts, could still believe that the revenge of early man was at first essentially indiscriminating, and became gradually discriminating from considerations of social expediency. But by this I certainly do not mean to deny that violation of the “self-feeling” is an extremely common and powerful incentive to resentment. It is so among savage87 and civilised men alike; even dogs and monkeys get angry when laughed at. Nothing more easily rouses in us anger and a desire for retaliation, nothing is more difficult to forgive, than an act which indicates contempt, or disregard of our feelings. Long after the bodily pain of a blow has ceased, the mental suffering caused by the insult remains and calls for vengeance. This is an old truth often told. According to Seneca, “the greater part of the things which enrage us are insults, not injuries.”88 Plutarch observes that, though different persons fall into anger for different reasons, yet in nearly all of them is to be found the idea of their being despised or neglected.89 “Contempt,” says Bacon, “is that which putteth an edge upon anger, as much, or more, than the hurt itself.”90 But, indeed, there is no need to resort to different principles in order to explain the resentment excited by different kinds of pain. In all cases revenge implies, primordially and essentially, a desire to cause pain or destruction in return for hurt suffered, whether the hurt be bodily or mental; and, if to this impulse is added a desire to enhance the wounded “self-feeling,” that does not interfere with the true nature of the primary feeling of revenge. There are genuine specimens of resentment without the co-operation of self-regarding pride;91 and, on the other hand, the reaction of the wounded “self-feeling” is not necessarily, in the first place, concerned with the infliction of pain. If a person has written a bad book which is severely criticised, he may desire to repair his reputation by writing a better book, not by humiliating his critics; and if he attempts the latter rather than the former, he does so, not merely in order to enhance his “self-feeling,” but because he is driven on by revenge. Dr. Boas tells us that the British Columbia Indian, when his feelings are hurt, sits down or lies down sullenly for days without partaking of food, and that, “when he rises his first thought is, not how to take revenge, but to show that he is superior to his adversary.92

87 Turner, ‘Ethnology of the Ungava District,’ in Ann. Rep. Bur. Ethn. xi. 270 (Hudson Bay Indians). Georgi, Russia, iii. 205 (Aleuts). Sarasin, Ergebnisse naturwiss. Forschungen auf Ceylon, iii. 537 (Veddahs). von Wrede, Reise in Ḥadhramaut, p. 157 (Bedouins). Winterbottom, Native Africans in the Neighbourhood of Sierra Leone, i. 211.

88 Seneca, De ira, iii. 28.

89 Plutarch, De cohibenda ira, 12.

90 Bacon, ‘Essay LVII. Of Anger,’ in Essays, p. 514.

91 Bain, Emotions and the Will, p. 177.

92 Boas, First General Report on the Indians of British Columbia, read at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne meeting of the British Association, 1889, p. 19.

In the feeling of gratification which results from successful resentment, the pleasure of power or superiority also may form a very important element, but it is never the exclusive element.93 As the satisfaction of every desire is accompanied by pleasure, so the satisfaction of the desire involved in resentment gives a pleasure by itself. The angry or revengeful man who succeeds in what he aims at, delights in the pain he inflicts for the very reason that he desired to inflict it.

93 Cf. Ribot, op. cit. p. 221 sq.

Revenge thus only forms a link in a chain of emotional phenomena, for which “non-moral resentment” may be used as a common name. In this long chain there is no missing link. Anger without any definite desire to cause suffering, anger with such a desire, more deliberate resentment—all these phenomena are so inseparably connected with each other that no one can say where one passes into another. Their common characteristic is that they are mental states marked by an aggressive attitude towards the cause of pain.

As to their origin, the evolutionist can hardly entertain a doubt. Resentment, like protective reflex action, out of which it has gradually developed, is a means of protection for the animal. Its intrinsic object is to remove a cause of pain, or, what is the same, a cause of danger. Two different attitudes may be taken by an animal towards another which has made it feel pain: it may either shun or attack its enemy. In the former case its action is prompted by fear, in the latter by anger, and it depends on the circumstances which of these emotions is the actual determinant. Both of them are of supreme importance for the preservation of the species, and may consequently be regarded as elements in the animal’s mental constitution which have been acquired by means of natural selection in the struggle for existence. We have already noted that, originally, the impulse of attacking the enemy could hardly have been guided by a representation of the enemy as suffering. But, as a successful attack is necessarily accompanied by such suffering, the desire to produce it naturally, with the increase of intelligence, entered as an important element in resentment. The need for protection thus lies at the foundation of resentment in all its forms.

This view is not new. More than one hundred and fifty years before Darwin, Shaftesbury wrote of resentment in these words:—“Notwithstanding its immediate aim be indeed the ill or punishment of another, yet it is plainly of the sort of those [affections] which tend to the advantage and interest of the self-system, the animal himself; and is withal in other respects contributing to the good and interest of the species.”94 A similar opinion is expressed by Butler, according to whom the reason and end for which man was made liable to anger is, that he might be better qualified to prevent and resist violence and opposition, while deliberate resentment “is to be considered as a weapon, put into our hands by nature, against injury, injustice, and cruelty.”95 Adam Smith, also, believes that resentment has “been given us by nature for defence, and for defence only,” as being “the safeguard of justice and the security of innocence.”96 Exactly the same view is taken by several modern evolutionists as regards the “end” of resentment, though they, of course, do not rest contented with saying that this feeling has been given us by nature, but try to explain in what way it has developed. “Among members of the same species,” says Mr. Herbert Spencer, “those individuals which have not, in any considerable degree, resented aggressions, must have ever tended to disappear, and to have left behind those which have with some effect made counter-aggressions.”97 Mr. Hiram Stanley, too, quoting Junker’s statement regarding the pigmies of Africa, that “they are much feared for their revengeful spirit,”98 observes that, “other things being equal, the most revengeful are the most successful in the struggle for self-conservation and self-furtherance.”99 This evolutionist theory of revenge has been criticised by Dr. Steinmetz, but in my opinion with no success. He remarks that the feeling of revenge could not have been of any use to the animal, even though the act of vengeance might have been useful.100 But this way of reasoning, according to which the whole mental life would be excluded from the influence of natural selection, is based on a false conception of the relation between mind and body, and, ultimately, on a wrong idea of cause and effect.

94 Shaftesbury, ‘Inquiry concerning Virtue or Merit,’ ii. 2. 2, in Characteristicks, ii. 145.

95 Butler, ‘Sermon VIII.—Upon Resentment,’ op. cit. p. 457.

96 Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 113.

97 Spencer, Principles of Ethics, i. 361.

98 Junker, Travels in Africa during the Years 1882–1886, p. 85.

99 Hiram Stanley, op. cit. p. 180. Cf. also Guyau, Esquisse d’une Morale sans obligation ni sanction, p. 162 sq.

100 Steinmetz, Ethnol. Studien, &c. i. 135.

From non-moral resentment we shall pass to the emotion of moral indignation. That this is closely connected with anger is indicated by language itself: we may feel indignant on other than moral grounds, and we may feel “righteous anger.” The relationship between these emotions is also conspicuous in their outward expressions, which, when the emotion is strong enough, present similar characteristics. When possessed with strong moral indignation, a person looks as if he were angry,101 and so he really is, in the wider sense of the term. This relationship has not seldom been recognised by moralists, though it has more often been forgotten. Some two thousand years ago Polybius wrote:—“If a man has been rescued or helped in an hour of danger, and, instead of showing gratitude to his preserver, seeks to do him harm, it is clearly probable that the rest will be displeased and offended with him when they know it, sympathising with their neighbour and imagining themselves in his case. Hence arises a notion in every breast of the meaning and theory of duty, which is in fact the beginning and end of justice.”102 Hartley regarded resentment and gratitude as “intimately connected with the moral sense.”103 Adam Smith made the resentment of “the impartial spectator” a corner-stone of his theory of the moral sentiments.104 Butler found the essential difference between sudden and deliberate anger to consist in this, that the “natural proper end” of the latter is “to remedy or prevent only that harm which implies, or is supposed to imply, injury or moral wrong.”105 And to Stuart Mill, the sentiment of justice, at least, appeared to be derived from “the animal desire to repel or retaliate a hurt or damage to oneself, or to those with whom one sympathises.”106

101 Notice, for instance, Michelangelo’s Moses.

102 Polybius, Historiae, vi. 6.

103 Hartley, Observations on Man, i. 520.

104 Adam Smith, op. cit. passim.

105 Butler, op. cit. p. 458.

106 Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, p. 79.

Moral indignation, or disapproval, like non-moral resentment, is a reactionary attitude of mind directed towards the cause of inflicted pain. In a subsequent chapter we shall see that both are in a similar way determined by the answer given to the question, What is the cause of the pain?—a fact which, whilst strongly confirming their affinity, throws light upon some of the chief characteristics of the moral consciousness. Nay, moral indignation resembles non-moral resentment even in this respect that, in various cases, the aggressive reaction turns against innocent persons who did not commit the injury which gave rise to it. The collective responsibility assumed in certain types of blood-revenge is an evidence of this in so far as such revenge is not merely a matter of individual practice, but has the sanction of custom. And even punishment, which, in the strict sense of the term, is a more definite expression of public, or moral, indignation than the custom of private retaliation, is often similarly indiscriminate.

Like revenge, and for similar reasons, punishment sometimes falls on a relative of the culprit in cases when he himself cannot be caught. In Fiji, says Mr. Williams, “the virtue of vicarious suffering is recognised.” It once happened that a warrior left his charged musket so carelessly that it went off and killed and wounded some individuals, whereupon he fled himself. His case was judged worthy of death by the chiefs of the tribe, and the offender’s aged father was in consequence seized and strangled.107

107 Williams and Calvert, Fiji, p. 24.

In other cases an innocent person is killed for the offence of another, not because the offender cannot be seized, but with a view to inflicting on him a loss, according to the rule of like for like. The punishment, then, is meant for the culprit, though the chief sufferer is somebody else. According to the Laws of Ḫammurabi, “if a builder has built a house for a man and has not made strong his work, and the house he built has fallen, and he has caused the death of the owner, that builder shall be put to death.” But “if he has caused the son of the owner of the house to die, one shall put to death the son of that builder.”108 Similarly, “if a man has struck a gentleman’s daughter and caused her to drop what is in her womb, he shall pay ten shekels of silver for what was in her womb.” But “if that woman has died, one shall put to death his daughter.”109 The following custom which Mr. Gason reports, as existing among the Australian Dieyerie, in case a man should unintentionally kill another in a fight, is probably based on a similar principle:—“Should the offender have an elder brother, then he must die in his place; or, should he have no elder brother, then his father must be his substitute; but in case he has no male relative to suffer for him, then he himself must die.”110

108 Laws of Ḫammurabi, 229 sq.

109 Ibid. 209 sq.

110 Gason, ‘Manners and Customs of the Dieyerie Tribe,’ in Woods, Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 265.

This extreme disregard of the suffering of guiltless persons is probably not so much due to downright callousness as to a strong feeling of family solidarity. The same feeling is very obvious in those numerous instances in which both the criminal himself and members of his family are implicated in the punishment.

Among the Atkha Aleuts, the punishment for certain offences was sometimes carried so far as to include the wife of the offender.111 Among the Ew̔e-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast, “a person found guilty of having procured, or endeavoured to procure, the death of another through the agency of the gods Huntin and Loko, is put to death, and his family is generally enslaved as well.”112 Among the Matabele, if a person is declared by the witch-doctor to have caused injury to somebody else by making charms, he “is immediately put to death, his wife and the whole of his family sharing his fate.”113 Among the Shilluks of the White Nile, “murder is punished with death to the criminal and the forfeiture of wives and children to the Sultan, who retains them in bondage.”114 Among the Kafirs, in cases of trespasses against the king, the sentence falls not only on the individual, but on his whole house.115 In Madagascar, the code of native laws, up to recent time, reduced for many offences the culprit’s wife and children to slavery.116 In some parts of the Malay Archipelago, according to Crawfurd, a father and child are considered almost inseparable, hence when the one is punished the other seldom escapes.117 In Bali, the law prescribes that for certain kinds of sorcery the offender shall be put to death. It adds, “If the matter be very clearly made out, let the punishment of death be extended to his father and his mother, to his children and to his grand-children; let none of them live; let none connected with one so guilty remain on the face of the land, and let their goods be in like manner confiscated.”118

111 Petroff, ‘Report on Alaska,’ in Tenth Census of the United States, p. 158.

112 Ellis, Ew̔e-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, p. 225.

113 Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa, p. 153.

114 Petherick, Travels in Central Africa, ii. 3.

115 Ratzel, History of Mankind, ii. 445.

116 Sibree, The Great African Island, p. 181. Ellis, History of Madagascar, i. 174, 175, 193.

117 Crawfurd, op. cit. i. 82.

118 Ibid. iii. 138.

The Chinese doctrine of responsibility is to a great extent based upon family solidarity; in great crimes all the male relatives of the offender are held responsible for his deed. Every male relative, of whatever degree, who may be dwelling under the roof of a man guilty of treason, is doomed to death, with the exception of young boys, who are allowed their lives, but on the condition that they are made eunuchs for service in the imperial palace.119 In ancient Mexico, traitors and conspirators were not only themselves killed, but their children and relatives were made slaves to the fourth generation.120 According to an Athenian law, a man who committed sacrilege or betrayed his country was banished with all his children.121 Aristotle mentions a case of sacrilege in which “the bones of the guilty dead were disentombed and cast beyond the borders of Attica; the living clan were condemned to perpetual exile, and the city was subsequently purified.”122 The Macedonian law involved in punishment the kindred of conspirators against the monarch.123 Dionysius of Halicarnassus states that some of the Greeks “think it reasonable to put to death the sons of tyrants together with their fathers, whereas others punish them with perpetual banishment”; and he contrasts this with the Roman principle that “the sons shall be exempted from all punishment, whose fathers are offenders, whether they happen to be the sons of tyrants, of parricides, or of traitors.”124 But after the end of the Marsic, and civil wars, this rule was transgressed;125 and later on Arcadius, though expressly ordaining that the punishment of the crime shall extend to the criminal alone,126 took a different view of the punishment for treason. By a special extension of his imperial clemency, he allows the sons of the criminal to live, although in strict justice, being tainted with hereditary guilt, they ought to suffer the punishment of their father. But they shall be incapable of inheritance; they shall be abandoned to the extreme of poverty and perpetual indigence; they shall be excluded from all honours and from the participation of religious rites; the infamy of their father shall ever attend them, and such shall be the misery of their condition, that life shall be a punishment and death a comfort.127 Among the Anglo-Saxons, before the time of Cnut, the child, even the infant in the cradle, was liable to be sold into slavery for the payment of penalties incurred by the father, being “held by the covetous to be equally guilty as if it had discretion.”128 Even later, the child of an outlaw, following the condition of the father, also became an outlaw; and this grievance was only partly remedied by Edward the Confessor, who relieved from the consequences of the father’s outlawry such children as were born before he was outlawed, but not such as were born afterwards.129 During the Middle Ages it was the invariable rule to confiscate the entire property of an impenitent heretic, a rule which was justified on the ground that his crime is so great that something of his impurity falls upon all related to him.130 The Pope Alexander IV. also excluded the descendants of an heretic to the second generation from all offices in the Church.131 Owing to religious influence, illegitimate children were not only deprived of the title to inheritance, but they were treated by some law-books as almost rightless beings, on a par with robbers and thieves.132 If a person committed suicide, his goods were confiscated, and, according to a French mediæval law, his wife was besides deprived of her own private property.133 Even in the latter half of the eighteenth century, in France, in the case of an attempt made against the life of the king, the whole family of the criminal was banished.134 Nay, in various European countries, up to quite recent times—in England till 1870—forfeiture of property has been the punishment prescribed for certain crimes, including suicide;135 which means, if not actually the imposition of penalties on the survivors in a case where the culprit himself is out of reach, at least a gross disregard of their ordinary rights of property. It is hardly necessary to point out how often, in the very society in which we live, “social punishments” are inflicted upon children for their father’s wrongs.

119 Douglas, Society in China, p. 71 sq. Ta Tsing Leu Lee, sec. ccliv. p. 270.

120 Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, ii. 459.

121 Meursius, Themis Attica, ii. 2, in Gronovius, Thesaurus Graecarum Antiquitatum, v. 1968.

122 Aristotle, De republica Atheniensium 1. Cf. ibid. 20.

123 Curtius Rufus, De gestis Alexandri Magni, vi. 11. 20.

124 Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanae, viii. 80.

125 Ibid. viii. 80.

126 Codex Iustinianus, ix. 47. 22.

127 Ibid. ix. 8. 5.

128 Laws of Cnut, ii. 77. Cf. Lappenberg, History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings, ii. 414; Wilda, op. cit. p. 906.

129 Leges Edwardi Confessoris, 19.

130 Lecky, History of Rationalism in Europe, ii. 36, n. 1. Eicken, Geschichte und System der mittelalterlichen Weltanschauung, p. 572 sq. Paramo, De origine et progressu Sancti Inquisitionis p. 587 sq.

131 Eicken, op. cit. p. 573.

132 Ibid. p. 573.

133 Du Boys, Histoire du droit criminel des peuples modernes, ii. 236.

134 Hertz, Voltaire und die französische Strafrechtspflege im achtzehnten Jahrhundert, p. 27.