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/83

 old enough to move back and forth, according to what seemed to be his volition, when he was not haunted with these phantasies.

The state made fun of Dr. White, the ablest and, I believe, the best psychiatrist in America today, for speaking about this boy's mind running back to the Teddy bears he used to play with, and in addressing somebody he was wont to say, "You know, Teddy"

Well, your Honor, is it nothing but the commonplace action of the commonplace child or the ordinary man? A set of emotions, thoughts, feelings take possession of the mind and we find them recurring and recurring over and over again.

I catch myself many and many a time repeating phrases of my childhood, and I have not quite got into my second childhood yet. I have caught myself doing this while I still could catch myself. It means nothing. We may have all the dreams and visions and build all the castles we wish, but the castles of youth should be discarded with youth, and when they linger to the time when boys should think wiser things, then it indicates a diseased mind. "When I was young I thought as a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child; but now I have put off childish things," said the Psalmist twenty centuries ago. It is when these dreams of boyhood, these phantasies of youth still linger, and the growing boy is still a child—a child in emotion, a child in feeling, a child in hallucinations—that you can say that it is the dreams and the hallucinations of childhood that are responsible for his conduct. There is not an act in all this horrible tragedy that was not the act of a child, the act of a child wandering around in the morning of life, moved by the new feelings of a boy, moved by the uncontrolled impulses which his teaching was not strong