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Page 35
The doctor waved his hand rather contemptuously.
"I know nothing about your theological distinctions; I am a doctor. I say
that there is no such thing as moral responsibility for past acts, no
such thing as real justice in punishing them, for the reason that human
beings are not stationary existences, but changing, growing, incessantly
progressive organisms, which in no two moments are the same. Therefore
justice, whose only possible mode of proceeding is to punish in present
time for what is done in past time, must always punish a person more or
less similar to, but never identical with, the one who committed the
offence, and therein must be no justice.
"Why, sir, it is no theory of mine, but the testimony of universal
consciousness, if you interrogate it aright, that the difference between
the past and present selves of the same individual is so great as to make
them different persons for all moral purposes. That single fact we were
just speaking of--the fact that no man would care for vengeance on one
who had injured him, provided he knew that all memory of the offence had
been blotted utterly from his enemy's mind--proves the entire
proposition. It shows that it is not the present self of his enemy that
the avenger is angry with at all, but the past self. Even in the
blindness of his wrath he intuitively recognizes the distinction between
the two. He only hates the present man, and seeks vengeance on him in so
far as he thinks that he exults in remembering the injury his past self
did, or, if he does not exult, that he insults and humiliates him by the
bare fact of remembering it. That is the continuing offence which alone
keeps alive the avenger's wrath against him. His fault is not that he did
the injury, for _he_ did not do it, but that he remembers it.
"It is the first principle of justice, isn't it, that nobody ought to be
punished for what he can't help? Can the man of to-day prevent or affect
what he did yesterday, let me say, rather, what the man did out of whom
he has grown--has grown, I repeat, by a physical process which he could
not check save by suicide. As well punish him for Adam's sin, for he
might as easily have prevented that, and is every whit as accountable for
it. You pity the child born, without his choice, of depraved parents.
Pity the man himself, the man of today who, by a process as inevitable as
the child's birth, has grown on the rotten stock of yesterday. Think you,
that it is not sometimes with a sense of loathing and horror unutterable,
that he feels his fresh life thus inexorably knitting itself on, growing
on, to that old stem? For, mind you well, the consciousness of the man
exists alone in the present day and moment. There alone he lives. That is
himself. The former days are his dead, for whose sins, in which he had no
part, which perchance by his choice never would have been done, he is
held to answer and do penance. And you thought, young man, that there was
such a thing as justice !"
"I can see," said Henry, after a pause, "that when half a lifetime has
intervened between a crime and its punishment, and the man has reformed,
there is a certain lack of identity. I have always thought punishments in
such cases very barbarous. I know that I should think it hard to answer
for what I may have done as a boy, twenty years ago.
"Yes," said the doctor, "flagrant cases of that sort take the general
eye, and people say that they are instances of retribution rather than
justice. The unlikeness between the extremes of life, as between the babe
and the man, the lad and the dotard, strikes every mind, and all admit
that there is not any apparent identity between these widely parted
points in the progress of a human organism. How then? How soon does
identity begin to decay, and when is it gone--in one year, five years,
ten years, twenty years, or how many? Shall we fix fifty years as the
period of a moral statute of limitation, after which punishment shall be
deemed barbarous? No, no. The gulf between the man of this instant and
the man of the last is just as impassable as that between the baby and
the man. What is past is eternally past. So far as the essence of justice
is concerned, there is no difference between one of the cases of
punishment which you called barbarous, and one in which the penalty
follows the offence within the hour. There is no way of joining the past
with the present, and there is no difference between what is a moment
past and what is eternally past."
"Then the assassin as he withdraws the stiletto from his victim's breast
is not the same man who plunged it in."
"Obviously not," replied the doctor. "He may be exulting in the deed, or,
more likely, he may be in a reaction of regret. He may be worse, he may
be better. His being better or worse makes it neither more nor less just
to punish him, though it may make it more or less expedient. Justice
demands identity; similarity, however close, will not answer. Though a
mother could not tell her twin sons apart, it would not make it any more
just to punish one for the other's sins."
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