A further consideration, calculated to show not only the absurdity of punishment for example, but the iniquity of punishment in general, is that delinquency and punishment are, in all cases, incommensurable. No standard of delinquency ever has been, or ever can be, discovered. No two crimes were ever alike; and therefore the reducing them, explicitly or implicitly, to general classes, which the very idea of example implies, is absurd.
Nor is it less absurd to attempt to proportion the degree of suffering to the degree of delinquency, when the latter can never be discovered.
Let us endeavour to clear the truth of these propositions.
Man, like every other machine the operations of which can be made the object of our senses, may, in a certain sense, be affirmed to consist of two parts, the external and the internal. The form which his actions assume is one thing; the principle from which they flow is another. With the former it is possible we should be acquainted; respecting the latter there is no species of evidence that can adequately inform us. Shall we proportion the degree of suffering to the former or the latter, to the injury sustained by the community, or to the quantity of ill intention conceived by the offender? Some philosopher, sensible of the inscrutability of intention, have declared in favour of our attending to nothing but the injury sustained.
The humane and benevolent Beccaria has treated this as a truth of the utmost importance, 'unfortunately neglected by the majority of political institutors, and pre served only in the dispassionate speculation of philosophers.
It is true that we may, in many instances, be tolerably informed respecting external actions, and that there will, at first sight, appear to be no great difficulty in reducing them to general rules. Murder, according to this system, suppose, will be the exertion of any species of action affecting my neighbour so as that the consequences terminate in death. The difficulties of the magistrate are much abridged upon this principle, though they are by no means annihilated. It is well known how many subtle disquisitions, ludicrous or tragical according to the temper with which we view them, have been introduced to determine, in each particular instance, whether the action were or were not the real occasion of the death. It never can be demonstratively ascertained.