“But Leger,” said Dr. Corning, “was evidently a madman. Georget is right in saying that he was a madman, because none but a madman would say that he had been led to commit murder by a blind and _irresistible_ will.” “That might do to say, if we were certain of the truth of the materialistic doctrines taught at Paris some forty or fifty years ago, but which are now generally rejected. Dr. Cazeauvielh, however, concedes that persons of this description, without being deprived by their madness of free will, are yet carried away, driven onward by an idea, by something indefinable, which is precisely what theologians mean by obsession. The court decided correctly, I think, in rejecting the plea of insanity in the case of the monster Leger, and in condemning him to death, though evidently under Satanic influence when he committed his horrible and disgusting crimes—crimes which recall the Ghouls of the Arabian Nights—because there was no struggle of the human person against the invading spirit. “Satan can by Divine permission enter our bodies, compel, as it were, the human person to stand aside, and use our organs himself, and do whatever he pleases with them; but he cannot annihilate the human person, or take from the soul free will. Always is it in the power of the possessed to resist, morally and effectually, the evil intentions of the devil. The possessed retains his own consciousness, his own intellectual and moral faculties unimpaired, and never confounds himself with the spirit that possesses him. Always, then, does he retain the power of internal protest and struggle. Wherever this power is exercised, and there is clearly a struggle, there is no responsibility attaching to him, whatever the crimes the body, through the possession of the devil, is made to commit. But it may often happen that this power to protest is not exercised, and the possessed yields his moral assent to the crimes committed by the demon that possesses him. He then becomes a partaker of their guilt. Wherever it is clear that he has not internally resisted, that he has not struggled against the demon, and protested against his iniquity, the law should punish him for the crimes as severely as if there had been no possession at all. The error of modern jurisprudence is that, not recognizing the fact of possession, it punishes alike both classes, or it lets off both under the plea of insanity. In the latter case justice becomes too lax, and the greater the criminal, the more enormous his crime, the less likely is he to be punished; in the former case justice is too severe, and persons really innocent, and meritorious even, are condemned as the basest of criminals. The law in the middle ages, or before the wonderful progress of intelligence and humanity in modern times, distinguished between the two classes, and knew how to acquit the innocent and to punish the guilty. Now the tendency is either to acquit or to condemn both indiscriminately.”