e like this--how curious and uncertain is the process by which
it makes up its so-called mind. So-called truth is a nebulous thing at
best; facts are capable of such curious inversion and interpretation,
honest and otherwise. The jury had a strongly complicated problem before
it, and it went over it and over it.

Juries reach not so much definite conclusions as verdicts, in a curious
fashion and for curious reasons. Very often a jury will have concluded
little so far as its individual members are concerned and yet it will
have reached a verdict. The matter of time, as all lawyers know, plays
a part in this. Juries, speaking of the members collectively and
frequently individually, object to the amount of time it takes to decide
a case. They do not enjoy sitting and deliberating over a problem unless
it is tremendously fascinating. The ramifications or the mystery of a
syllogism can become a weariness and a bore. The jury-room itself may
and frequently does become a dull agony.

On the other hand, no jury contemplates a disagreement with any degree
of satisfaction. There is something so inherently constructive in the
human mind that to leave a problem unsolved is plain misery. It haunts
the average individual like any other important task left unfinished.
Men in a jury-room, like those scientifically demonstrated atoms of a
crystal which scientists and philosophers love to speculate upon, like
finally to arrange themselves into an orderly and artistic whole, to
present a compact, intellectual front, to be whatever they have set out
to be, properly and rightly--a compact, sensible jury. One sees this
same instinct magnificently displayed in every other phase of nature--in
the drifting of sea-wood to the Sargasso Sea, in the geometric
interrelation of air-bubbles on the surface of still water, in the
marvelous unreasoned architecture of so many insects and atomic forms
which make up the substance and the texture of this world. It would seem
as though the physical substance of life--this apparition of form which
the eye detects and calls real were shot through with some vast subtlety
that loves order, that is order. The atoms of our so-called being, in
spite of our so-called reason--the dreams of a mood--know where to go
and what to do. They represent an order, a wisdom, a willing that is not
of us. They build orderly in spite of us. So the subconscious spirit
of a jury. At the same time, one does not forget the strange hypn