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 of 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 pincenez. "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 is 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."
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