THE LIMITS OF HUMAN AUTOMATISM. 303 



the infliction of severe punishment, although he had not intended 

 to do harm to any one ; and this because he could have helped 

 doing what he did, and must have wilfully shut his eyes to its 

 possible or probable consequences. — So, when a man deliberately 

 plans to blow up a house or a ship, at the sacrifice of scores or 

 (it may be) of hundreds of human lives, for the sake of gaining 

 a few scores or hundreds of pounds by a fraudulent policy of 

 insurance, the primary instincts of humanity would protest 

 against his being punished with a view merely to the prevention 

 of similar crimes and to his own reformation, and every one 

 feels that he "richly deserves" the heaviest penalty of the law.* 

 And we have no terms of reprobation strong enough for the 

 cowardly ferocity of a Nana Sahib ; who gratified his hatred of 

 the British to whom he had previously professed to be a friend, 

 by the brutal murder of the defenceless women and children 

 who had trusted themselves to his protection; and who, if he 

 had been taken "red-hand," would assuredly have been deemed 

 by the world in general a fitting object of "retributive justice." 



But, as has been pithily remarked, if vice and virtue are pro- 

 ducts like sugar and vitriol, the laws of whose production science 

 may be expected to discover, "it will be as irrational to feel indigna- 

 " tion at base and cowardly actions, as it would be to feel angry 

 "about the chemical affinities." And the like may be said of the 

 irrationality, on the automatist hypothesis, of the moral approval 

 we feel for acts of noble self-sacrifice ; — such as that of the steers- 

 man of the burning ship, who held his place at the wheel, so as to 

 run the ship towards shore, though the fire beneath was roasting 

 the soles of his feet ; — or that of the handful of brave men who 

 blew open the gate of Delhi, the stronghold of the Indian mutineers, 

 in the face of what seemed certain annihilation ; — or that of the six 

 hundred soldiers who kept their stations on the deck of the sinking 

 Birkenhead, while the women and children were being lowered 

 into the boats. Could we entertain that feeling, if we really 

 believed the men whose deeds and sufferings we hold among our 

 most precious memories, to be nothing more than well-regulated 



* I here allude not merely to the recent Bremerhaven explosion, but to a 

 case in which the blowing up of a pile of building that contained two hundred 

 people, was attempted in Glasgow, fortunately without success, when I was 

 studying in Edinburgh about forty years since. 



