Pagina 176 di 1294

But in the last resort he simply ceased to believe in himself,

and doggedly, slavishly sought arguments in all directions,

fumbling for them, as though someone were forcing and drawing him

to it.

At first--long before indeed--he had been much occupied with one

question; why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so

easily detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious

traces? He had come gradually to many different and curious

conclusions, and in his opinion the chief reason lay not so much

in the material impossibility of concealing the crime, as in the

criminal himself. Almost every criminal is subject to a failure

of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal

heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution are

most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse of reason

and failure of will power attacked a man like a disease,

developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the

perpetration of the crime, continued with equal violence at the

moment of the crime and for longer or shorter time after,

according to the individual case, and then passed off like any

other disease.