In a sense, all the classifications as to the cause of crime are misleading and worthless.  Your existence is the result of infinite chances and causes appalling in their number.  Out of a thousand eggs, one is fertilized by perhaps one of a billion sperms, and from this you have been given life.  Each of your parents and grandparents and so on, back for two hundred thousand years of human ancestors, and back to infinity before man was born, was the result of the same seemingly blind and almost impossible hazard.  The infinitely microscopic chance that each of us had for life cannot be approximated.  All the drops of water in the ocean, or all the grains of sand upon the shore, or all the leaves on all the trees, if converted into numbers and used as a denominator, with one for a numerator, could hardly tell the fraction of a chance that gave us life.

The causes of human action are infinite, and no cause stands isolated from the rest.  In the first place we cannot tell the meaning of the word “cause” when applied to a problem of this sort.  In law the ordinary rule for a “proximate cause” is “an event or happening in the direct line of causation, not too remote, that has led to the result, and without which the result could not have happened.”  But this means nothing.  Infinite are the causes which have led to every act, and without each one of the infinite causes the act could not have resulted.  If it be something that affected a life, and had it not happened then the life would have drifted somewhere else.  In the end it would have reached the same harbor of Nirvana.  But the life would not have been the same.  A drop of water falls on the Rocky Mountains, it trickles along, going around through pebbles and grains of sand; it joins with others, meets trees and roots, winds and twists perhaps for hundreds, even thousands of miles before one can tell by what channel it will reach the sea.  Infinite accidents determine even which sea it shall finally reach.  The most radical advocates of social control are never at a loss to lay their fingers on causes or to know what would have happened if something else had not happened; they never hesitate to forbid seemingly innocent acts because they are certain that evil will follow.  They are contemptuous of one who wants to preserve the semblance and spirit of freedom.

Life has none too much to offer where men are left to control themselves, and to be forbidden to follow your inclinations and desires because sometimes they may result disastrously, is to give up what seems to be a substance for what is most likely a shadow.