The study of sociology / by Herbert Spencer.

  • Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The study of sociology / by Herbert Spencer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    32/468 (page 14)
    Obennier in Grermany, Montesinos in Spain—unite to show that in proportion as tbe criminal is left to suffer no other penalty than that of maintaining himself under such restraints only as arc needful for social safety, the reformation is great: exceeding, indeed, all anticipation. French schoolmasters, never question- ing the belief that boys can be made to behave ■well oidy by rigid discipline and spies to aid in carrying it out, are astonished on visiting England to find how much better boys behave when they are less governed : nay more—among English boys themselves, Dr. Arnold has shown that more trust is followed by improved conduct. Similarly with the anomalies of incorporated human nature. We habitually assume that only by legal restraints are men to be kept from aggressing on their neighbours; and yet there are facts which should lead us to qualify our assumption. So-called debts of honour, for the non-payment of which there is no legal penalty, are held more sacred than debts that can be legally enforced; and on the Stock-Exchange, where only pencil memoranda in the respective note-books of two brokers guarantee the sale and purchase of many thousands, contracts are safer than those which, in the outside world, are formally registered in signed and sealed parchments. Multitudes of cases might be accumulated showing how, in other directions, men’s thoughts and feelings produce kinds of conduct which, & priori, would be judged very improbable. And if, going beyond our own society and our own time, we observe what has happened among other races, and among the earlier generations of our own race, we meet, at every step, workings- out of human nature utterly unlike those which we assume when making political forecasts. Who, generalizing the experiences of his daily life, would suppose that men, to please their gods, would swingr for hours from hooks drawn through the muscles of their backs, or let their nails grow through the palms of their clenched hands, or roll over and over hundreds of miles to visit a shrine ? Who would have thought it possible that a public sentiment and a private feeling might be as in China,