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- 394 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
Stupid that if others are stupid — and I know they are — yet I
won't be wiser? Then I saw, Sonia, that if one waits for every
one to get wiser it will take too long. . . . Afterwards I under-
stood that that would never come to pass, that men won't
change and that nobody can alter it and that it's not worth
wasting effort over it. Yes, that's so. That's the law of their
nature, Sonia, . . . that's so! . . . And I know now, Sonia, that
whoever is strong in mind and spirit will have power over them.
Anyone who is greatly daring is right in their eyes. He who de-
spises most things will be a lawgiver among them and he who
dares most of all will be most in the right! So it has been till
now and so it will always be. A man must be blind not to see it!"
Though Raskolnikov looked at Sonia as he said this, he no
longer cared whether she understood or not. The fever had
complete hold of him; he was in a sort of gloomy ecstasy (he
certainly had been too long without talking to anyone) . Sonia
felt that his gloomy creed had become his faith and code.
"I divined then, Sonia," he went on eagerly, "that power is
only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up.
There is only one thing, one thing needful: one has only to
dare! Then for the first time in my life an idea took shape in
my mind which no one had ever thought of before me, no one!
I saw clear as daylight how strange it is that not a single person
living in this mad world has had the daring to go straight for it
all and send it flying to the devil! I . . I wanted to have the
daring . . . and I killed her. I only wanted to have the daring,
Sonia! That was the whole cause of it!"
"Oh hush, hush," cried Sonia, clasping her hands. "You turned
away from God and God has smitten you, has given you over to
the devil!"
"Then, Sonia, when I used to lie there in the dark and all this
became clear to me, was it a temptation of the devil, eh?"
"Hush, don't laugh, blasphemer! You don't understand, you
don't understand! Oh God! He won't understand!"
"Hush, Sonia! I am not laughing. I know myself that it was
the devil leading me. Hush, Sonia, hush!" he repeated with
gloomy insistence. "I know it all, I have thought it all over
and over and whispered it all over to myself, lying there in the
dark. . . . I've argued it all over with myself, every point of it,
and I know it all, all! And how sick, how sick I was then of
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