should be carefully cultivated, and not extinguished, by every social
organization.

In all social systems it must be recognized that certain branches of
culture, such as scientific research and art, involve great expense
and bring little or no material reward to the scientist or the artist.
A richer State ought to provide for these important branches of
civilization, which always tend to higher culture.

I have already mentioned separation of property and an equable
division of the fruits of labor between conjoints as the only just
basis in marriage contracts. I repeat here, that true justice can only
be established by the recognition of equal legal rights for men and
women.

PENAL LAW

Penal law is the right of punishment. It is based on the ideas of
_culpability_ and _expiation_, and these are based on the idea of
free-will, which is itself founded on a pure illusion, as we have
shown above.

This simple reflection is sufficient to show the precarious position
of our present penal law. The science of penal law has too long
ignored the progress of humanity and of the other sciences. It is
affected with incurable marasmus, because its foundations are laid in
error. The idea of expiation was naturally developed on the basis of
mysticism combined with the right of the stronger, and associated with
the sentiment of vengeance natural to the low mentality of our animal
ancestors. Among the latter the weaker was punished because he was the
weaker: "_Vae victis!_" and order was obtained by force. But the
visions of human imagination having urged man to create a god or gods
in his own image, he attributed to the divinity the sentiments of
anger experienced by man, and pretended that expiation was required
for offenses against this or that majesty or human idea, transformed
into an offense to the divine majesty.

This offense to the divinity was therefore only the nebulous
expression of a developing social conscience in man, an obscure
mixture of sentiments of wounded sympathy, adulation of the strong and
great, and desire for vengeance and expiation. Till then man was
accustomed to judge other men according to the right of the stronger,
more or less mitigated by sentiments of family and friendship. His
terror of natural mysteries--the forest, night, thunder, hurricanes,
stars, etc., led him to imagine the intervention of occult powers, and
later on of higher powers capable of judging good and evil actions,
the idea