I
know they are--yet I won't be wiser? Then I saw, Sonia, that if one
waits for everyone to get wiser it will take too long.... Afterwards I
understood 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 despises 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 going over it all! I have kept wanting to forget it
and make a new beginning, Sonia, and leave off thinking. A