Elements of Folk Psychology: Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of MankindWundt, Wilhelm Max
Science
Elements of Folk Psychology: Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
Wundt, Wilhelm Max
Ethnopsychology
But there is still another respect in which the recedence of the
principle of retaliation gradually led to an advance beyond the legal
conceptions characteristic of the heroic age. The command for strict
retribution takes into consideration merely the _objective_ injury in
which a deed results; to it, it is immaterial whether a person destroys
another's eye accidentally or intentionally. The same injury that he
has caused must befall him. Whoever kills a man must, according to
the law of Hammurabi, himself suffer death; if he kills a woman, he
is to be punished by the death of his daughter. If a house collapses,
the builder who constructed it must suffer death. For a successful
operation, the physician receives a compensation; if the operation
fails, the hand that has performed it is cut off. The same law
determines both reward and punishment. Moreover, it includes within its
scope even intellectual and moral transgressions. The judge who commits
an error is to be dismissed from office in disgrace; the owner who
neglects his field is to be deprived of it.
10. THE DIFFERENTIATION OF LEGAL FUNCTIONS.
The direct impetus to overcoming the defects that were inherent in
penal justice as a result of its having originated in the conflicts
of individuals, did not come from a clear recognition of differences
in the character of the crimes themselves, but primarily from the
fact of a gradual _division of judicial functions_. This is shown
particularly by the development of Græco-Roman as well as of Germanic
law. It is in the criminal court, which supersedes blood-revenge,
that public authority is most directly conscious of its power over
the individual. Hence the criminal court appears to be the highest
of the courts, and the one that most deeply affects the natural
rights of man. Its authority is vested solely in the ruler, or in a
particularly sacred tribunal. This is due, not so much to the specific
character of the crimes over which it has jurisdiction, as to the
respect which it receives because it assumes both the ancient duty of
blood-revenge and the function of exacting a requital for religious
guilt. Similarly, other offences also gradually pass from the sphere of
personally executed revenge or from that of the strife of individuals,
and become subject to the penal authority of the State. The division
of judicial authority, to which these tendencies lead, is promoted
by the differentiation of public power, as a result of which the
administration of justice is apportioned to various officials and
magistrates, as well as are the other tasks of the State. It is for
this reason that, if we consider their civilization as a whole, the
constitutional States of the Occidental world were led to differentiate
judicial functions much earlier than were the great despotic monarchies
of the Orient. These monarchies, as the code of Hammurabi shows,
possessed a highly developed husbandry and a correspondingly advanced
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