“But at that time such attacks were not the fashion and my story was not printed. That was a great vexation to me. Sometimes I positively choked with resentment. At last I determined to challenge my enemy to a duel. I composed a splendid, charming little letter to him, imploring him to apologize to me, and hinting rather plainly at a duel in case of refusal. The letter was so composed that if the officer had had the least understanding of the good and beautiful, he would certainly have flung himself on my neck and offered his friendship. And how fine that would have been! How we should have got on together!”[55] So often in Dostoevsky one particular feeling is suddenly supplanted in this way by its direct opposite! We can find example after example of it. For instance, that unhappy child (in _The Karamazovs_) biting with hatred into Alyosha’s finger when the latter holds out his hand to him, just at the time when the child, though he does not recognize it, is developing for the same Alyosha a shy, wild affection. And what, in this young child, could have caused such a warping of affection? He had seen Dmitri Karamazov, Alyosha’s brother, come drunk out of an inn, thrash his father, and pull him insolently by the beard: “Papa, papa, how he humiliated you!” he cried later. Thus, over against humility--on the same moral plane, if I may be permitted to say so, but at the other extreme of the scale--there is pride, which humiliation exaggerates, exasperates, and deforms, sometimes hideously. Certainly, psychological axioms appear to Dostoevsky for what they really are, special definitions of truth. As novelist (for Dostoevsky is no mere theoretician, he is an explorer) he steers clear of induction and realizes how imprudent (on his part, at least) any attempts to formulate general laws.[56] It is for us, if we choose, to discover these laws in his books, by cutting, as it were, paths through the thicket. Here is one of the laws we can establish: the man who has suffered humiliation seeks to inflict humiliation in his turn.[57]