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less free, since they obey the impulses of others; nevertheless, their
elasticity gives them a certain relative liberty, because they do not
feel constraint and easily adapt themselves to laws and other social
requirements. But the highest form of liberty, the moral faculty of
higher adaptation, is not that of the human fox who exploits others
for his own profit, but that of true higher intellects, capable of
adapting their activity to the social requirements of humanity. On the
contrary, the man who is least free is the one who, dominated by his
passions and baser appetites, or by insufficiency of intelligence or
will power, is thereby incapable of conducting himself reasonably,
gives way to all temptations and impulses, falls into all kinds of
snares, cannot keep to any resolution, and is in perpetual conflict
with society.

What is the use of the theoretical belief in free-will in this case?
This man feels subjectively as free, or often more free, than one who
is more reasonable and more master of himself, and yet he is a slave!
When, dominated by his psychic bonds, he violates the law, he is
punished, but he himself resents the punishment as an injustice. The
judge who condemns him and imagines he holds the scales of justice in
equilibrium, only carries out the principles of an unjust law, a kind
of mild retaliation, exacting moderate expiation. Or again, by
exercising a right derived from old traditions based on religious
ideas, he plays the part of proxy for the Deity and judges in His
place. We might even say that a mail is in reality all the more free
the better he realizes that he is not so, _i.e._, that his actions
depend on the activity of his brain! At any rate he will then be less
often deceived and will react in a more plastic manner.

=The True Task of Penal Law; Its Traditional Errors in the Sexual
Question.=--Penal law has only one thing to do, that is to cut itself
free from its roots and transplant itself on a social and scientific
soil. There would then be no longer a penal law, but a _law protecting
society against dangerous individuals, and a law of administration for
persons incapable of conducting themselves_. Its task would be the
complement of that of civil law. Henceforth the judge would cease to
pass judgment on his neighbor and his neighbor's motives, acting as a
proxy for God. He would no longer punish, but would content himself
with protecting, restraining and ameliorating.

The hist