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- 250 CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
are very conscientious: some perform this service for one an-
other and other chastise themselves with their own hands. . . .
They will impose various public acts of penitence upon them-
selves with a beautiful and edifying effect; in fact you've noth-
ing to be uneasy about. . . . It's a law of nature."
"Well, you have certainly set my mind more at rest on that
score; but there's another thing worries me. Tell me, please, are
there many people who have the right to kill others, these
extraordinary people? I am ready to bow down to them, of
course, but you must admit it's alarming if there are a great
many of them, eh?"
"Oh, you needn't worry about that either," Raskolnikov
went on in the same tone. "People with new ideas, people with
the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely
few in number, extraordinarily so in fact. One thing only is
clear, that the appearance of all these grades and subdivisions
of men must follow with unfailing regularity some law of na-
ture. That law, of course, is unknown at present, but I am con-
vinced that it exists, and one day may become known. The vast
mass of mankind is mere material, and only exists in order by
some great effort, by some mysterious process, by means of some
crossing of races and stocks, to bring into the world at last per-
haps one man out of a thousand with a spark of independence.
One in ten thousand perhaps — I speak roughly, approximately
— is born with some independence, and with still greater inde-
pendence one in a hundred thousand. The man of genius is one of
millions, and the great geniuses, the crown of humanity, appear
on earth perhaps one in many thousand millions. In fact I have
not peeped into the retort in which all this takes place. But there
certainly is and must be a definite law, it cannot be a matter of
chance."
"Why, are you both joking?" Razumihin cried at last.
"There you sit, making fun of one another. Are you serious,
Rodya?"Raskolnikov raised his pale and almost mournful face and
made no reply. And the unconcealed, persistent, nervous, and
discourteous sarcasm of Porfiry seemed strange to Razumihin
beside that quiet and mournful face.
"Well, brother, if you are really serious . . . You are right,
of course, in saying that it's not new, that it's like what we've
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