The Loeb-Leopold case - The Clarence Darrow Collection

The Loeb-Leopold Case
learned. How he got it nobody knows. It was pro-
phesied that he would have a brilliant future. In
a short time the fire had burned out. He was a
prodigy, with nothing but this marvelous brain
power, which nobody understood or could understand.
He was an intellectual freak. He never was
a boy; he never will be a normal man.
We have all read of Blind Tom, who was an idiot,
and yet a marvelous musician. He never could un-
derstand music, and he never did understand it; he
never knew anything about it; and yet he could go
to the piano and play so well that people marveled
and wondered. How it comes nobody can explain.
The question of intellect means the smallest part
of life. Back of this are man's nerves, muscles,
heart, blood, lungs — in fact, the whole organism;
the brain is the least part in human development.
Without the emotion-life man is nothing. All teach-
ing and all training appeal, not only to the intel-
lectual, but to emotional life.
A child is born with plastic brain, ready for such
impressions as come to it. Gradually his parents
and his teachers tell him things, teach him habits,
show him that he may do this and he may not do
that, teach him the difference between his and mine.
No child knows this when he is born. He knows
nothing about property or property rights. They
are given to him as he goes along. He is like the
animal that wants something and goes out and gets
it, kills it, operating purely from instinct, without
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