“Your mother over again, Rose. You never got this independent temper from the Smiths, let me tell you. Irreligious my poor brother may have been, and was, in consequence of which he failed in business, and went through the Bankruptcy Court—for unless the Lord buildeth the house, how shall it stand?—but there was no temper about him. And no vice either.”
“Ah, that’s interesting. You understand,” said the doctor, “that these things have a very direct bearing upon Cecil’s case.”
“Do you mean heredity?” Rose asked.
“Certainly I do.”
“The Spirit bloweth where it listeth,” Uncle Alfred automatically quoted, and at once proceeded, in his usual business-like fashion, to the point at issue. “No, my poor brother was a very quiet, well-disposed fellow. Weak, that was his only trouble. Couldn’t say ‘No.’”
“He wasn’t an imaginative, highly-strung person?”
“Nothing of the kind,” Uncle Alfred declared, with a rather offended intonation.
“Cecil is both, you know,” the doctor gently pointed out.
Rose leaned forward, looking earnestly at Dr. Lucian. “I want you to tell me something. Is Ces morally responsible for the things he does?”
Lucian hesitated for a long while before he replied. At last he said: “Honestly, I don’t think he is. Wait——” as she moved, as though uncontrollably. “I don’t mean that he’s of unsound mind. Remember that there’s a great difference between someone who doesn’t know right from wrong and someone who may know it, but has not the strength of mind to control the desire which prompts him towards wrong. The first state implies a deficiency in perception; the second, a deficiency in control. To a certain extent we all, at one time or another, unless we definitely belong to the first group, come under the second. But there are always resistances within ourselves—urgings towards the good. We can call them the promptings of conscience, or the risk of detection, or the fear of consequences. One or other of these motives will serve to deter us, quite frequently, from doing wrong. But I believe, personally, that there are certain individuals in whom those resistances are either non-existent, or else of so feeble a nature that they have no chance of acting as deterrents. Such a deficiency is congenital, for the most part.”