It is obvious, however, that the means by which the hostile will can be negatived fall _prima facie_ within the region of automatism. The recalcitrant element of consciousness is not susceptible to the end as an idea, or it would not be recalcitrant. The end can here assert itself, agreeably to the general principle of State action, only through external action the mental effects of which cannot be precisely estimated. It might, therefore, seem that the pain produced by the reaction of the automatic system on the aberrant consciousness--the punishment--was simply a natural pain, which might act as a deterrent from aberration, but had no visible connection with the true whole or end for the mind of the offender. We shall speak below of the sense in which { 225} punishment is deterrent or preventive. But it is to be noted at this point that a high-class secondary automatism, with which all along we have compared the system of rights as engrained in the habits of a people, retains a very close connection with consciousness. We do not indeed will every step that we walk, but we only walk while we will to walk, and so with the whole system of routine automatism which is the method and organ of our daily life. At any interruption, any hindrance or failure, consciousness starts up, and the end of the whole routine comes sharply back upon us through our aberration.
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.