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- 244 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
"I am not wrong. I'll show you their pamphlets. Everything
with them is 'the influence of environment,' and nothing else.
Their favourite phrase! From which it follows that, if society
i? normally organised, all crime will cease at once, since there
will be nothing to protest against and all men will become right-
eous inone instant. Human nature is not taken into account, it
is excluded, it's not supposed to exist! They don't recognise that
humanity, developing by a historical living process, will become
at last a normal society, but they believe that a social system
that has come out of some mathematical brain is going to organ-
ise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an
instant, quicker than any living process! That's why they
instinctively dislike history, 'nothing but ugliness and stupidity
in it,' and they explain it all as stupidity! That's why they so
dislike the living process of life; they don't want a living soul!
The living soul demands life, the soul won't obey the rules of
mechanics, the soul is an object of suspicion, the soul is retro-
grade! But what they want though it smells of death and can
be made of india-rubber, at least is not alive, has no will, is
servile and won't revolt! And it comes in the end to their reduc-
ing everything to the building of walls and the planning of
rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready,
indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery
"— it wants life, it hasn't completed its vital process, it's too
soon for the graveyard! You can't skip over nature by logic.
Logis presupposes three possibilities, but there are millions! Cut
away a million, and reduce it all to the question of comfort!
That's the easiest solution of the problem! It's seductively
clear and you mustn't think about it. That's the great thing, you
mustn't think! The whole secret of life in two pages of print!"
"Now he is off, beating the drum! Catch hold of him, do!"
laughed Porfiry. "Can you imagine," he tvu-ned to Raskolnikov,
"six people holding forth like that last night, in one room, with
punch as a preliminary! No, brother, you are wrong, environ-
ment accoimts for a great deal in crime; I can assure you of
that."
"Oh, I know it does, but just tell me: a man of forty violates
a child of ten; was it environment drove him to it?"
"Well, strictly speaking, it did," Porfiry observed with note-
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