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was not one of those men who lose heart in face of danger.
On the contrary, his self-confidence increased with the in-
crease of danger. It must be noted that our prosecutor was in
general too hasty and morbidly impressionable. He would
put his whole soul into some case and work at it as though
his whole fate and his whole fortune depended on its re-
sult. This was the subject of some ridicule in the legal world,
for just by this characteristic our prosecutor had gained a
wider notoriety than could have been expected from his
modest position. People laughed particularly at his passion
for psychology. In my opinion, they were wrong, and our
prosecutor was, I believe, a character of greater depth than
was generally supposed. But with his delicate health he had
failed to make his mark at the outset of his career and had
never made up for it later.
As for the President of our Court, I can only say that
he was a humane and cultured man, who had a practical
knowledge of his work and progressive views. He was rath-
er ambitious, but did not concern himself greatly about
his future career. The great aim of his life was to be a man
of advanced ideas. He was, too, a man of connections and
property. He felt, as we learnt afterwards, rather strongly
about the Karamazov case, but from a social, not from a
personal standpoint. He was interested in it as a social phe-
nomenon, in its classification and its character as a product
of our social conditions, as typical of the national character,
and so on, and so on. His attitude to the personal aspect of
the case, to its tragic significance and the persons involved
in it, including the prisoner, was rather indifferent and ab-

1110 The Brothers Karamazov