or omission with the infliction of pain. This is only an
imitation of nature, in which pain is a sanction and a deterrent. Family
and school discipline have always rested on this artificial use of pain.
It is, apparently, the most primary application of force or coercion. It
combines directly with vengeance, which is a primary passion of human
nature. Punishment is of this philosophy, for by punishment we furnish,
or add, a painful consequence to acts which we desire to restrain, in
the hope that the consequence will cause reflection and make the victim
desist. The punishment may be imprisonment (i.e. temporary exclusion
from the society), or fine, or scourging, or other painful treatment.
The sense of punishment is the same whether the punishment be physical
pain or other disagreeable experience. Although we have come to adopt
modern ideas about the infliction of physical pain in punishment, we
cannot depart far from its fundamental theory and motive. In the past,
physical pain has been employed also, in lynching and in regular
proceedings, to enforce conformity, and to suppress dissent from the
current mores of the society. The physical proceedings are measures to
produce conformity which differ from boycotting and other methods of
manifesting disapproval and inflicting unpopularity in that they are
positive and physical. Then the selection is positive and is pursued by
external and physical sanctions.

+224. The mediaeval church operated societal selection.+ It is evident
that the mediaeval church was a machine to exert societal selection. The
great reason for its strength as such is that it never made the mores of
the age; it proceeded out of them. It contributed, through a thousand
previous years, phantasms about the other world and dogmas about the
relation of this world to that one. These dogmas became mixed with all
the experience of life in the days of civic decline and misery, and
produced the mores of the tenth and eleventh centuries. All the great
doctrines then took on the form of manias or delusions. In the early
centuries of the Christian era "catholic" meant Christendom in its
entirety, in contrast with the separate congregations, so that the
concepts "all congregations" and the "universal church" are identical.
However, the church over the whole world was thought to have been
founded by the apostles, so that that only could be true which was found
everywhere in Christendom. So "catholic" came to have a p