substance; he can not put them on one side, and himself on the other, and say, ‘It is not mine; I never did it.’ What he ever at any time has done, that he is now; and, when his name is called, nothing, which has ever been his, can be absent from that which answers to the name. In this (real or supposed) juridical sphere the familiar saying of Agathon,
μόνου γὰρ αὐτοῦ καὶ θεὸς στερίσκεται,
ἀγένητα ποιεῖν ἅσσ᾽ ἂν ᾖ πεπραγμένα.
is as inexorably true, as it is false when we pass into a higher region, where imputation of guilt is as meaningless, as even the Westminster Review would have it be.
And he must account for all. But to give an account to a tribunal means to have one’s reckoning settled. It implies that, when the tribunal has done with us, we do not remain, if we were so before, either debtors or creditors. We pay what we owe; or we have that paid to us which is our due, which is owed to us (what we deserve). Further, because the court is no civil court between man and man, that which is owed to us is what we pay (alas for the figments of the unenlightened mind). In short, there is but one way to settle accounts; and that way is punishment, which is due to us, and therefore is assigned to us.
Hence, when the late Mr. Mill said, ‘Responsibility means punishment,’ what he had in his mind was the vulgar notion, though he expressed it incorrectly, unless on the supposition that all must necessarily transgress. What is really true for the ordinary consciousness; what it clings to, and will not let go; what marks unmistakeably, by its absence, a ‘philosophical’ or a ‘debauched’ morality, is the necessary connection between responsibility and liability to punishment, between punishment and desert, or the finding of guiltiness before the law of the moral tribunal. For practical purposes we need make no distinction between responsibility, or accountability, and liability to punishment. Where you have the one, there (in the mind of the vulgar) you have the other; and where you have not the one, there you can not have the other. And, we may add, the theory which will explain the one, in its ordinary sense, will also explain the other; and the theory which fails in the one, fails also in the other; and the
