Israel Kafka’s case was by no means a rare one.  The fact of having been made to play a part which to him seemed at once blasphemous and ignoble had indeed turned the scale, but was not the motive.  In all things, the final touch which destroys the balance is commonly mistaken for the force which has originally produced a state of unstable equilibrium, whereas there is very often no connection between the one and the other.  The Moravian himself believed that the sacrifice of Unorna, and of himself afterwards, was to be an expiation of the outrage Unorna had put upon his faith in his own person.  He had merely seized upon the first excuse which presented itself for ending all, because he was in reality past hope.

We have, as yet, no absolute test of sanity, as we have of fever in the body and of many other unnatural conditions of the human organism.  The only approximately accurate judgments in the patient’s favour are obtained from examinations into the relative consecutiveness and consistency of thought in the individual examined, when the whole tendency of that thought is towards an end conceivably approvable by a majority of men.  A great many philosophers and thinkers have accordingly been pronounced insane at one period of history and have been held up as models of sanity at another.  The most immediately destructive consequences of individual reasoning on a limited scale, murder and suicide, have been successively regarded as heroic acts, as criminal deeds, and as the deplorable but explicable actions of irresponsible beings in consecutive ages of violence, strict law and humanitarianism.  It seems to be believed that the combination of murder and suicide is more commonly observed under the last of the three reigns than it was under the first; it was undoubtedly least common under the second.  In other words it appears probable that the practice of considering certain crimes as the result of insanity has a tendency to make those crimes increase in number, as they undoubtedly increase in barbarity, from year to year.  Meanwhile, however, no definite conclusion has been reached as to the state of mind of a man who murders the woman he loves and then ends his own life.

Israel Kafka may therefore be regarded as mad or sane.  In favour of the theory of his madness the total uselessness of the deed he contemplated may be adduced; on the other hand the extremely consecutive and consistent nature of his thoughts and actions gives evidence of his sanity.

When he found himself a prisoner in Unorna’s conservatory, his intention underwent no change though his body was broken with fatigue and his nerves with the long continued strain of a terrible excitement.  His determination was as cool and as fixed as ever.

These somewhat dry reflections seem necessary to the understanding of what followed.