All this flashed like lightning through his mind.

Porfiry Petrovitch returned quickly. He became suddenly more jovial.

“Your party yesterday, brother, has left my head rather.... And I am out
of sorts altogether,” he began in quite a different tone, laughing to
Razumihin.

“Was it interesting? I left you yesterday at the most interesting point.
Who got the best of it?”

“Oh, no one, of course. They got on to everlasting questions, floated
off into space.”

“Only fancy, Rodya, what we got on to yesterday. Whether there is such a
thing as crime. I told you that we talked our heads off.”

“What is there strange? It’s an everyday social question,” Raskolnikov
answered casually.

“The question wasn’t put quite like that,” observed Porfiry.

“Not quite, that’s true,” Razumihin agreed at once, getting warm and
hurried as usual. “Listen, Rodion, and tell us your opinion, I want to
hear it. I was fighting tooth and nail with them and wanted you to
help me. I told them you were coming.... It began with the socialist
doctrine. You know their doctrine; crime is a protest against the
abnormality of the social organisation and nothing more, and nothing
more; no other causes admitted!...”

“You are wrong there,” cried Porfiry Petrovitch; he was noticeably
animated and kept laughing as he looked at Razumihin, which made him
more excited than ever.

“Nothing is admitted,” Razumihin interrupted with heat.

“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 is normally organised,
all crime will cease at once, since there will be nothing to protest
against and all men will become righteous in one 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 organise 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 retrograde! 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 reducing 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. Logic 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 musn’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 turned to Raskolnikov, “six people
holding forth like that last night, in one room, with punch as a
preliminary! No, brother, you are wrong, environment accounts 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 noteworthy
gravity; “a crime of that nature may be very well ascribed to the
influence of environment.”

Razumihin was almost in a frenzy. “Oh, if you like,” he roared. “I’ll
prove to you that your white eyelashes may very well be ascribed to the
Church of Ivan the Great’s being two hundred and fifty feet high, and I
will prove it clearly, exactly, progressively, and even with a Liberal
tendency! I undertake to! Will you bet on it?”

“Done! Let’s hear, please, how he will prove it!”

“He is always humbugging, confound him,” cried Razumihin, jumping up and
gesticulating. “What’s the use of talking to you? He does all that
on purpose; you don’t know him, Rodion! He took their side yesterday,
simply to make fools of them. And the things he said yesterday! And they
were delighted! He can keep it up for a fortnight together. Last year he
persuaded us that he was going into a monastery: he stuck to it for two
months. Not long ago he took it into his head to declare he was going
to get married, that he had everything ready for the wedding. He ordered
new clothes indeed. We all began to congratulate him. There was no
bride, nothing, all pure fantasy!”

“Ah, you are wrong! I got the clothes before. It was the new clothes in
fact that made me think of taking you in.”

“Are you such a good dissembler?” Raskolnikov asked carelessly.

“You wouldn’t have supposed it, eh? Wait a bit, I shall take you in,
too. Ha-ha-ha! No, I’ll tell you the truth. All these questions about
crime, environment, children, recall to my mind an article of yours
which interested me at the time. ‘On Crime’... or something of the
sort, I forget the title, I read it with pleasure two months ago in the
Periodical Review.”

“My article? In the Periodical Review?” Raskolnikov asked in
astonishment. “I certainly did write an article upon a book six months
ago when I left the university, but I sent it to the Weekly Review.”

“But it came out in the Periodical.”

“And the Weekly Review ceased to exist, so that’s why it wasn’t
printed at the time.”

“That’s true; but when it ceased to exist, the Weekly Review was
amalgamated with the Periodical, and so your article appeared two
months ago in the latter. Didn’t you know?”

Raskolnikov had not known.

“Why, you might get some money out of them for the article! What a
strange person you are! You lead such a solitary life that you know
nothing of matters that concern you directly. It’s a fact, I assure
you.”

“Bravo, Rodya! I knew nothing about it either!” cried Razumihin. “I’ll
run to-day to the reading-room and ask for the number. Two months ago?
What was the date? It doesn’t matter though, I will find it. Think of
not telling us!”

“How did you find out that the article was mine? It’s only signed with
an initial.”

“I only learnt it by chance, the other day. Through the editor; I know
him.... I was very much interested.”

“I analysed, if I remember, the psychology of a criminal before and
after the crime.”

“Yes, and you maintained that the perpetration of a crime is always
accompanied by illness. Very, very original, but... it was not that part
of your article that interested me so much, but an idea at the end of
the article which I regret to say you merely suggested without working
it out clearly. There is, if you recollect, a suggestion that there are
certain persons who can... that is, not precisely are able to, but have
a perfect right to commit breaches of morality and crimes, and that the
law is not for them.”

Raskolnikov smiled at the exaggerated and intentional distortion of his
idea.

“What? What do you mean? A right to crime? But not because of the
influence of environment?” Razumihin inquired with some alarm even.

“No, not exactly because of it,” answered Porfiry. “In his article all
men are divided into ‘ordinary’ and ‘extraordinary.’ Ordinary men have
to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because,
don’t you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to
commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they
are extraordinary. That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?”

“What do you mean? That can’t be right?” Razumihin muttered in
bewilderment.

Raskolnikov smiled again. He saw the point at once, and knew where they
wanted to drive him. He decided to take up the challenge.

“That wasn’t quite my contention,” he began simply and modestly. “Yet
I admit that you have stated it almost correctly; perhaps, if you like,
perfectly so.” (It almost gave him pleasure to admit this.) “The only
difference is that I don’t contend that extraordinary people are always
bound to commit breaches of morals, as you call it. In fact, I doubt
whether such an argument could be published. I simply hinted that an
‘extraordinary’ man has the right... that is not an official right, but
an inner right to decide in his own conscience to overstep... certain
obstacles, and only in case it is essential for the practical fulfilment
of his idea (sometimes, perhaps, of benefit to the whole of humanity).
You say that my article isn’t definite; I am ready to make it as clear
as I can. Perhaps I am right in thinking you want me to; very well. I
maintain that if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have
been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a
hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have
been in duty-bound... to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for
the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity. But
it does not follow from that that Newton had a right to murder people
right and left and to steal every day in the market. Then, I remember, I
maintain in my article that all... well, legislators and leaders of men,
such as Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without
exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they
transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held
sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either,
if that bloodshed--often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defence
of ancient law--were of use to their cause. It’s remarkable, in fact,
that the majority, indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity
were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men
or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving
some new word, must from their very nature be criminals--more or less,
of course. Otherwise it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut;
and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their
very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to
it. You see that there is nothing particularly new in all that. The
same thing has been printed and read a thousand times before. As for my
division of people into ordinary and extraordinary, I acknowledge that
it’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t insist upon exact numbers. I only
believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law
of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say,
material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have
the gift or the talent to utter a new word. There are, of course,
innumerable sub-divisions, but the distinguishing features of both
categories are fairly well marked. The first category, generally
speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live
under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty
to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing
humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the
law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their
capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied;
for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the
present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the
sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I
maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading
through blood--that depends on the idea and its dimensions, note that.
It’s only in that sense I speak of their right to crime in my article
(you remember it began with the legal question). There’s no need for
such anxiety, however; the masses will scarcely ever admit this right,
they punish them or hang them (more or less), and in doing so fulfil
quite justly their conservative vocation. But the same masses set these
criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or
less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second
the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the
second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal
right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me--and vive la
guerre éternelle--till the New Jerusalem, of course!”

“Then you believe in the New Jerusalem, do you?”

“I do,” Raskolnikov answered firmly; as he said these words and during
the whole preceding tirade he kept his eyes on one spot on the carpet.

“And... and do you believe in God? Excuse my curiosity.”

“I do,” repeated Raskolnikov, raising his eyes to Porfiry.

“And... do you believe in Lazarus’ rising from the dead?”

“I... I do. Why do you ask all this?”

“You believe it literally?”

“Literally.”

“You don’t say so.... I asked from curiosity. Excuse me. But let us
go back to the question; they are not always executed. Some, on the
contrary...”

“Triumph in their lifetime? Oh, yes, some attain their ends in this
life, and then...”

“They begin executing other people?”

“If it’s necessary; indeed, for the most part they do. Your remark is
very witty.”