Positive Law, as I have shown, presents a very simplified excerpt of Morality for the use of coarser natures. It is a summary of the minimum of self-denial, consideration for one's fellow men, and the feeling of joint responsibility, the observance of which the community must pitilessly demand from all its members if it is to continue to exist and not fall back within a very short time into the state of Hobbes's war of all against all. The necessity of self-preservation makes it a duty for the community to provide for the case that one of its members refuses to accept the minimum of discipline and to recognize the claims of another personality. The community prevents this revolt, which would frustrate its aim and endanger its existence, by employing physical force to break all resistance to the Law which it must, for the common weal, impose on all its members. That is an extraneous compulsion that certainly has something brutal and unworthy of man about it and may well arouse discomfort in more highly developed minds. It would undoubtedly be more dignified and better if there were no need for the handcuffs of the police, for prison cells and executioners, if man's own insight and the admonition of his conscience were enough to constrain everyone to respect the Law, that is, to practise a minimum of Morality.
But the community cannot wait until this stage of moral development has been generally attained. It refuses to entrust its existence to the spiritual purity of all its members. On principle it disregards processes in the consciousness of the individual--I have cited in an earlier chapter the few exceptions to this rule: investigation as to premeditation, accountability, freedom from undue influence--and keeps to actions which alone it judges. It declares itself incompetent to pronounce sentence upon a "storm inside a skull," to quote Victor Hugo. Its sphere is that of obvious facts. Not until subjective impulses and decisions are manifested in outward form does it intervene with methods of the same order, with outward coercion. The sanctions of its law are material, are punishments and fines. It hits the wrongdoer over the head and on his hands and forcibly empties his pockets. To look into his soul and set matters to rights there is a task undertaken much later by law-givers. It was only after they had remembered that the source of law is Morality and that its ultimate aim is not the bare attainment of a state of mutual respect for one another's rights, but the education of the community to a universal condition of self-discipline, consideration and neighbourly love, that the law-givers made a point not only of requiting the bad man's misdeeds, but also of trying to elevate him morally.