Crime and Punishment by Part 1 Chapter 6 Page 25

or shorter time after, according to the individual case, and then passed off like any other disease. The question whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.

When he reached these conclusions, he decided that in his own case there could not be such a morbid reaction, that his reason and will would remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the simple reason that his design was “not a crime...” We will omit all the process by means of which he arrived at this last conclusion; we have run too far ahead already... We may add only that the practical, purely material difficulties of the affair occupied a secondary position in his mind.