) Some where I have read that, not infrequently, children of from twelve to fourteen years of age — that is to say, children just passing from childhood to adolescence — are addicted to incendiarism, or even to murder. As I look back upon my childhood, and particularly upon the mood in which I was on that (for myself) most unlucky day, I can quite understand the possibility of such terrible crimes being committed by children without any real aim in view — without any real wish to do wrong, but merely out of curiosity or under the influence of an unconscious necessity for action.

There are moments when the human being sees the future in such lurid colours that he shrinks from fixing his mental eye upon it, puts a check upon all his intellectual activity, and tries to feel convinced that the