Excerpt from Under the Lens: And Other Stories The talk in our corner of the club gathered itself suddenly into a common focus. The waiter had brought over the evening papers, filled with the last phases of a sensational murder-trial and headlined with the verdict - a death sentence. One oi us - Collins, unsentimental, like the lawyer he was - curtly expressed the opinion that the fellow had got his deserts. Fergusson, the only medico in our coterie of assorted professionals, of course took him up at this (they lost no opportunity of chipping at each other) and promptly challenged, in pseudo-serious protest, the competence of Collins, or indeed any one of us, to pronounce on any man's deserts. He justified his provocative argument by a neat little exposition of the obscurities of human psychology. None of your psycho-analytic profundities, doctor! It was Thompson who protested. Keep to things the plain man can understand. I'll try, submitted Fergusson, with a factitious humility that did not conceal the twinkle behind his pince nez. But you would none of you be the worse for a little intellectual exercise. However, there's nothing beyond average comprehension in my remarks. All I'm trying to do is to give you a glimpse of human beings as they really are - machines in subtle inter-reaction with a highly variable point of consciousness which is itself the effective end of a vast, extraordinarily complicated mass of psychic impulses, inhibitions and conflicts altogether unsuspected by the individual himself. Thank you, doctor! Laughed Thompson, no plain man can have the smallest excuse for failing to understand you fully. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.