So it is with punishment. Primarily, no doubt, chastisement by pain, and the appeal to fear and to submissiveness, is effective through our lower nature, and, in as far as operative, substitutes selfish motives for the will that wills the good, and so narrows its sphere. But there is more behind. The automatic system is pulsing with the vitality of the end to which it is instrumental; and when we kick against the pricks, and it reacts upon us in pain, this pain has subtle connections throughout the whole of our being. It brings us to our senses, as we say; that is, it suggests, more or less, a consciousness of what the habitual system means, and of what we have committed in offending against it. When one stumbles and hurts his foot, he may look up and see that he is off the path. If a man is told that the way he works his factory or keeps his tenement houses is rendering him liable to fine or imprisonment, then, if he is an ordinary, careless, but respectable citizen, he will feel some thing of a shock, and recognise that he was getting {226} too neglectful of the rights of others, and that, in being pulled up, he is brought back to himself. His citizen honour will be touched. He will not like to be below the average which the common conscience had embodied in law. When we come to the actual criminal consciousness, the form which the recognition may take in fact may vary greatly; and as an extreme there may be a furious hostility against the whole recognised system of law, either involving self-outlawry through a despair of reconciliation, or arising through some sort of habitual conspiracy in which the man finds his chosen law and order as against that recognised by the State. [1] But after all, we are dealing with a question of social logic and not of empirical psychology. And it must be laid down that, in as far as any sane man fails altogether to recognise in any form the assertion of something which he normally respects in the law which punishes him (putting aside what he takes to be miscarriage of justice), he is outlawed by himself and the essentials of citizenship are not in him. Doubtless, if an uneducated man were told, in theoretical language, that in being punished for an assault he was realising his own will, he would think it cruel nonsense. But this is a mere question of language, and has really nothing to do with the essential state of his consciousness. He would understand perfectly well that he was being served as he would say anyone should be served, whom he saw acting as he had done, in a case where his own {227} passions were not engaged. And this recognition, in whatever form it is admitted, carries the consequence which we affirm. [1] See the account of the Mafia in Marion Crawford’s _Corleone_. Accepting this as described, it simply is the social will in which the population of a certain region find their substitute for the State.