truthfully be said of the personality of the epileptic is that it is likely to display psychic disorder, evanescent or fixed. Attacks are subject to the widest variation both as to frequency and intensity, but the most enigmatic things about the disease are the warnings of the attack, and the phenomena that sometimes appear vicariously of the attack; the epileptic equivalent it is called. Dostoievsky had these auræ and equivalents in an unusual way and with extraordinary intensity, and narration of them as they were displayed in the different characters of his creation who were afflicted with epilepsy and of their effects and consequences is an important part of every one of his great books. Dostoievsky would seem to have been of the belief that a brain in which some of the mechanisms are disordered may yet remain superior both intellectually and morally to others less affected, and that the display of such weakness or maladjustment may put the possessor in tune with the Infinite, may permit them to blend momentarily with the Eternal Harmony, to be restored temporarily to the Source of its temporal emanation. Although he describes this in his Letters, as he experienced it, he elaborates it in his epileptic heroes and in none so seductively as in The Idiot where he makes Prince Myshkin say:

He thought amongst other things how in his epileptic condition there was one stage, just before the actual attack, when suddenly in the midst of sadness, mental darkness and oppression his brain flared up, as it were, and with an unwonted outburst all his vital powers were vivified simultaneously. The sensation of living and of self-consciousness was increased at such moments almost tenfold. They were moments like prolonged lightning. As he thought over this afterward in a normal state he often said to himself that all these flashes and beams of the highest self-realization, self-consciousness and "highest existence" were nothing but disease, the interruption of the normal state. If this were so, then it was by no means the highest state, but, on the contrary, it must be reckoned as the very lowest. And yet he came at last to the very paradoxical conclusion: What matter if it is a morbid state? What difference can it make that the tension is abnormal, if the result itself, if the moment of sensation when remembered and examined in the healthy state proves to be in the highest degree harmony and beauty, and gives an unheard of and undreamed of feeling of completion, of balance, of satisfaction and exultant prayerful fusion with the highest synthesis of life? If at the last moment of consciousness before the attack he had happened to say to himself lucidly and deliberately "for this one moment one might give one's whole

life", then certainly that moment would be worth a lifetime. However, he did not stand out for dialectics; obfuscation, mental darkness and idiocy stand before him as the obvious consequences of those loftiest moments.

It is a question for the individual to decide whether one would give his whole life for a moment of perfection and bliss, but it is probable that no one would without assurance that some permanent advantage, some growth of spirit that could be retained, some impress of spirituality that was indelible, such as comes from an understanding reading of Hamlet or a comprehended rendering of Parsifal, would flow from it or follow it. But to have it and then come back to a world that is "just one damn thing after another", as someone has said who recognizes that there is no surer way of causing amusement in his fellow man than by using a swear word without passion, it is impossible to believe. Dostoievsky was right when he said that Myshkin could look forward to obfuscation, mental darkness and imbecility with some certainty, for physicians experienced with epilepsy know empirically that the unfortunates who have panoplied warnings, and especially illusions, are most liable to become demented early. But that all epileptics with such warnings do not suffer this degradation is attested by the life of Dostoievsky who was in his mental summation when death seized him in his sixtieth year.

Another phenomenon of epilepsy that Dostoievsky makes many of his characters display is detachment of the spirit from the body. They cease to feel their bodies at supreme moments, such as at the moment of condemnation, of premeditated murder or planned crime. In other words, they are thrown into a state of ecstasy similar to that responsible for the mystic utterances of St. Theresa, or of insensibility to obvious agonies such as those of Santa Fina. He not only depicts the phenomena of the epileptic attack, its warnings and its after-effects in the most masterful way, as they have never been rendered in literature, lay or scientific, but he has also described many varieties of the disease. Before he was exiled, in 1847, he gave a most perfect description of the epileptic constitution as it displayed itself in Murin, a character in The Landlady. The disease, as it displays itself in the classical way, is revealed by Nelly in The Insulted and Injured, but it is in

Myshkin in The Idiot, that we see epilepsy transforming the individual from adult infantilism, gradually, almost imperceptibly to imbecility, the victim meantime displaying nobility and tendermindedness that make the reader's heart go out to him.

The first fruits of Dostoievsky's activities after he had obtained permission to publish were inconsequential. It was not until the appearance of Letters from a Deadhouse, which revealed his experiences and thoughts while in prison, and the volume called The Despised and the Rejected, that the literary world of St. Petersburg realized that the brilliant promise which he had given in 1846 was realized. Some of his literary adventures, especially in journalism, got him into financial difficulties, and he began to write under the lash, as he describes it, and against time.

In 1865 appeared the novel by which he is widely known, Crime and Punishment, in which Dostoievsky's first great antinomian hero, Raskolnikov, a repentant nihilist, is first introduced to the reader. He believes that he has a special right to live, to rebel against society, to transgress every law and moral precept and to follow the dictates of his own will and the lead of his own thought. Such a proud, arrogant, intellectual spirit requires to be cleansed, and inasmuch as the verity, the essence of life lies in humility, Dostoievsky makes his hero murder an old pawnbroker and her sister and then proceeds to put him through the most profound mental agony imaginable. At the same time his mother and sister undergo profound vicarious suffering, while a successor of Mary Magdalene succors him in his increasingly agonized state and finally accompanies him to penal servitude. Many times Raskolnikov appears upon the point of confessing his crime from the torments of his own conscience but, in reality, Svidrigailov, a strange monster of sin and sentiment, and the police officer, Petrovitch, a forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, suggest the confession to him and between the effect of their suggestion and the appeal of Sonia, whose love moves him strangely, he confesses but does not repent. He does not repent because he has done no sin. He has committed no crime. The scales have not yet fallen from his eyes. That is reserved for the days and nights of his prison life and is to be mediated by Sonia's sacrificial heroism. It is

interesting to contemplate Dostoievsky at the state of development when he wrote Crime and Punishment, or rather the state of development of his idea of free will. Raskolnikov has the same relation to Stavrogin of The Possessed and to Kirillov, the epileptic of the same book, as one of the trial pictures of the figures in the Last Supper has to Leonardo's masterpiece. Dostoievsky apparently was content to describe a case of moral imbecility in its most attractive way, and then when he had outlined its lineaments to leave it and not adjust it to the other groupings of the picture that was undertaken. It would seem that his interest had got switched from Raskolnikov to Svidrigailov, who has dared to outrage covenants and conventions, laws and morality, and has measured his will against all things. Svidrigailov knows the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, indeed he realizes it with great keenness, and when he finds that he is up against it, as it were, and has no escape, he puts the revolver to his temple and pulls the trigger. Death is the only thing he has not tried, and why wait to see whether eternity is just one little room like a bath house in the country, or whether it is something beyond conception? Why not find out at once as everything has been found out? Svidrigailov is Dostoievsky's symbol of the denial of God, the denial of a will beyond his own. "If there is a will beyond my own, it must be an evil will because pain exists. Therefore I must will evil to be in harmony with it. If there is no will beyond my own, then I must assert my own will until it is free of all check beyond itself. Therefore I must will evil.”

Raskolnikov represents the conflict of will with the element of moral duty and conscience, and Svidrigailov represents its conflict with refined, deliberate passion. This same will in conflict with the will of the people, the State, is represented by Stavrogin and Shatov, while its conflict with metaphysical and religious mystery is represented by Karamazov, Myshkin and Kirillov. Despite the fact that they pass through the furnace of burning conflicts and the fire of inflaming passions, the force of dominant will is ever supreme. Their human individuality, as represented by their ego, remains definite and concrete. It is untouched, unaltered, undissolved. Though they oppose themselves to the elements that are devouring them, they continue to assert their ego and self-will

even when their end is at hand. Myshkin, Aloysha and Zosima submit to God's will but not to man's.

Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov are the books by which Dostoievsky is best known in this country, and the latter, though unfinished, was intended by him to be his great work, “a work that is very dear to me for I have put a great deal of my inmost self into it”, and it has been so estimated by the critics. Indeed, it is the summary of all his thoughts, of all his doubts, of all his fancies, and such statement of his faith as he could formulate. It is saturated in mysticism and it is a vade mecum of psychiatry. It is the narrative of the life of an egotistic, depraved, sensuous monster, who is a parasite, a cynic, a scoffer, a drunkard and a profligate, the synthesis of which, when combined with moral anesthesia, constitutes degeneracy, and of his three legitimate sons and their mistresses, and of an epileptic bastard son who resulted from the rape of an idiot girl. Material for a tragedy indeed, and a tragedy it is from which flows a follower of Christ who Dostoievsky confidently believed was the prototype of him who would fulfill his Saviour's mission. The eldest son, Dimitri, grows up unloved, unguided, unappreciated, frankly hostile to his father whom he hates. This hatred becomes intense when they are rivals for Grushenka's favors, so that it costs him no pang to become a parricide on convincing himself that the father has been a successful rival. On being assured of his mistress's love, he forgets his crime in a drinking bout, Psychologically he represents the type of unstable, weak-willed. uninhibited being who cannot learn self-control. Such individuals may pass unmarked so long as they live in orderly surroundings, but as soon as they wander from the straight path they get into trouble. Their irritability, manifested for the smallest cause, may give rise to attacks of boundless fury which are further increased by alcohol and the gravest crimes are often committed in these conditions. The normal inhibitions are entirely absent; there is no reflection, no weighing of the costs. The thought which develops in the brain is at once translated into action. Their actions are irrational, arbitrary, dependent upon the moment, governed by accidental factors.

Despite overwhelming proof, Dimitri denies his guilt from the