Crime and Punishment

process, will become at last a normal society, but they believe that a
social system that has come out of some mathematical brain is going
to organise all humanity at once and make it just and sinless in an
instant, quicker than any living process! That’s why they instinctively
dislike history, ‘nothing but ugliness and stupidity in it,’ and they
explain it all as stupidity! That’s why they so dislike the _living_
process of life; they don’t want a _living soul_! The living soul
demands life, the soul won’t obey the rules of mechanics, the soul is an
object of suspicion, the soul is retrograde! But what they want though
it smells of death and can be made of India-rubber, at least is not
alive, has no will, is servile and won’t revolt! And it comes in the end
to their reducing everything to the building of walls and the planning
of rooms and passages in a phalanstery! The phalanstery is ready,
indeed, but your human nature is not ready for the phalanstery--it
wants life, it hasn’t completed its vital process, it’s too soon for the
graveyard! You can’t skip over nature by logic. Logic presupposes three
possibilities, but there are millions! Cut away a million, and reduce