Matt. Pity they didn't discover that before they hanged her.
Prof. My exact point! Where is the justice of punishing a woman whose gray matter functions perversely? It is nothing short of a crime.
Dolly. But she had suffocated five dear little babies?
Matt. How could she avoid suffocating babies if she had a yellow effusion in her brain?
Prof. Precisely my argument——
[Puts his proofs into Matt's hands. Points out a passage. Matt, a little embarrassed, takes them, looks through them.]
Prof. The point I wish to establish is this. While we all allow that extensive or recognizable diseases of, or injuries to, the brain, free a man from responsibility and punishment, how can we logically mete out blame or praise, punishment or reward to our ordinary acts, thoughts, and impulses, seeing that all our acts, thoughts, and impulses, good or bad, virtuous or criminal, are equally the mere expressions of certain inevitable physical changes in the brain, the mere register on the dial plate of consciousness of necessary predetermined complications in the working of certain atoms of the gray matter of our cortex?
Matt. Quite so! Quite so! [Dolly is about to speak, but Matt hushes her down with a warning look and sign.] The Professor wants to say with Socrates that no man would be such a fool as to do wrong, if he could possibly help it.
Prof. Well, if you like to put it that way——
Pilcher. And now perhaps we might proceed. Can you remember the exact terms, Mr. Barron?