particularly upon the mood in which I was on that (for myself) most
unlucky day, I can quite understand the possibility of such terrible
crimes being committed by children without any real aim in view--without
any real wish to do wrong, but merely out of curiosity or under the
influence of an unconscious necessity for action. There are moments when
the human being sees the future in such lurid colours that he
shrinks from fixing his mental eye upon it, puts a check upon all his
intellectual activity, and tries to feel convinced that the future will
never be, and that the past has never been. At such moments--moments
when thought does not shrink from manifestations of will, and the carnal
instincts alone constitute the springs of life--I can understand that
want of experience (which is a particularly predisposing factor in
this connection) might very possibly lead a child, aye, without fear
or hesitation, but rather with a smile of curiosity on its face, to set
fire to the house in which its parents and brothers and sisters (beings
whom it tenderly loves) are lying asleep. It would be under the same
influence of momentary absence of thought--almost absence of mind--that
a peasant boy of seventeen might catch sight of the edge of a
newly-sharpened axe reposing near the bench on which his aged father was
lying asleep, face downwards, and suddenly raise the implement in order
to observe with unconscious curiosity how the blood would come spurting
out upon the floor if he made a wound in the sleeper's neck. It is under
the same influence--the same absence of thought, the same instinctive
curiosity--that a man finds delight in standing on the brink of an abyss
and thinking to himself, "How if I were to throw myself down?" or in
holding to his brow a loaded pistol and wondering, "What if I were
to pull the trigger?" or in feeling, when he catches sight of some
universally respected personage, that he would like to go up to him,
pull his nose hard, and say, "How do you do, old boy?"