Page:The plea of Clarence Darrow, August 22nd, 23rd & 25th, MCMXXIII, in defense of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., on trial for murder.djvu/60

 Now, your Honor, who are these two boys?

Leopold, with a wonderfully brilliant mind; Loeb, with an unusual intelligence;—both from their very youth crowded like hothouse plants, to learn more and more and more. Dr. Krohn says that they are intelligent. In spite of that, it is true:—they are unusually intelligent. But it takes something besides brains to make a human being who can adjust himself to life.

In fact, as Dr. Church and as Dr. Singer regretfully admitted, brains are not the chief essential in human conduct. There is no question about it. The emotions are the urge that make us live; the urge that makes us work or play, or move along the pathways of life. They are the instinctive things. In fact, intellect is a late development of life. Long before it was evolved, the emotional life kept the organism in existence until death. Whatever our action is, it comes from the emotions, and nobody is balanced without them.

The intellect does not count so much. Let me call the attention of the court to two or three cases. Four or five years ago the world was startled by a story about a boy of eleven, the youngest boy ever turned out at Harvard, who had studied everything on earth and understood it; he was simply a freak. He went through Harvard much younger than anybody else. All questions of science and philosophy he could discuss with the most learned. How he got it nobody knows. It was prophesied that he would have a brilliant future. I do not know his name, and it is not necessary. In a short time the fire had burned out. He was a prodigy, with nothing but this marvelous brain power, which nobody understood or could understand. He was an intellectual freak. He never was a boy; he never will be a completed normal man. Harvard had another of the same kind some years