ently appropriated, I can
always say to her, 'You see, I've squandered half your money, and shown I
am a weak and immoral man, and, if you like, a scoundrel' (I use the
prisoner's own expressions), 'but though I am a scoundrel, I am not a
thief, for if I had been a thief, I shouldn't have brought you back this
half of the money, but should have taken it as I did the other half!' A
marvelous explanation! This frantic, but weak man, who could not resist
the temptation of accepting the three thousand roubles at the price of
such disgrace, this very man suddenly develops the most stoical firmness,
and carries about a thousand roubles without daring to touch it. Does that
fit in at all with the character we have analyzed? No, and I venture to
tell you how the real Dmitri Karamazov would have behaved in such
circumstances, if he really had brought himself to put away the money.

"At the first temptation--for instance, to entertain the woman with whom he
had already squandered half the money--he would have unpicked his little
bag and have taken out some hundred roubles, for why should he have taken
back precisely half the money, that is, fifteen hundred roubles? why not
fourteen hundred? He could just as well have said then that he was not a
thief, because he brought back fourteen hundred roubles. Then another time
he would have unpicked it again and taken out another hundred, and then a
third, and then a fourth, and before the end of the month he would have
taken the last note but one, feeling that if he took back only a hundred
it would answer the purpose, for a thief would have stolen it all. And
then he would have looked at this last note, and have said to himself,
'It's really not worth while to give back one hundred; let's spend that,
too!' That's how the real Dmitri Karamazov, as we know him, would have
behaved. One cannot imagine anything more incongruous with the actual fact
than this legend of the little bag. Nothing could be more inconceivable.
But we shall return to that later."

After touching upon what had come out in the proceedings concerning the
financial relations of father and son, and arguing again and again that it
was utterly impossible, from the facts known, to determine which was in
the wrong, Ippolit Kirillovitch passed to the evidence of the medical
experts in reference to Mitya's fixed idea about the three thousand owing
him.

Chapter VII. An Historical Survey

"The medical experts have stri