"It's very simple," Pradel replied. "Say that he was to a certain extent irresponsible." "You are simply asking me to speak like a police surgeon. It's expecting too much of me." "You believe then, doctor, that Chevalier was fully and entirely morally responsible?" "Quite the contrary. I am of opinion that he was not in the least responsible for his actions." "Well, then?" "But I also consider that, in this respect, he differed in nowise from you, myself, and all other men. My judicial colleagues distinguish between individual responsibilities. They have procedures by which they recognize full responsibilities, and those which lack one or more fractional parts. It is a remarkable fact, moreover, that in order to get a poor wretch condemned they always find him fully responsible. May we not therefore consider that their own responsibility is full--like the moon?" And Dr. Socrates proceeded to unfold before the astonished stage folk a comprehensive theory of universal determinism. He went back to the origins of life, and, like the Silenus of Virgil, who, smeared with the juice of mulberries, sang to the shepherds of Sicily and the naiad Aglaia of the origin of the world, he broke out into a flood of words: "To call upon a poor wretch to answer for his actions! Why, even when the solar system was still no more than a pale nebula, forming, in the ether, a fragile halo, whose circumference was a thousand times greater than the orbit of Neptune, we had all of us, for ages past, been fully conditioned, determined and irrevocably destined, and your responsibility, my dear child, my responsibility, Chevalier's, and that of all men, had been, not mitigated, but abolished beforehand. All our movements, the result of previous movements of matter, are subject to the laws which govern the cosmic forces, and the human mechanism is merely a particular instance of the universal mechanism." Pointing to a locked cupboard, he proceeded. "I have there, contained in bottles, that which would transform, destroy, or excite to frenzy the will of fifty thousand men." "Wouldn't be playing the game," objected Pradel. "I agree, it wouldn't be playing the game. But these substances are not essentially laboratory products. The laboratory combines, it does not create anything. These substances are scattered throughout nature. In their free state, they surround and enter into us, they determine our will, they circumscribe our freedom of device, which is merely the illusion engendered within us by the ignorance of our determinations." "What on earth do you mean?" asked Pradel, taken aback.