It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself - to offer violence to its own nature - to do wrong for the wrong's sake only - that urged me to continue and finally to consummate the injury I had inflicted upon the unoffending brute. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my final overthrow. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of PERVERSENESS. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at first grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me.

He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, fled in extreme terror at my approach. The socket of the lost eye presented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain. In the meantime the cat slowly recovered.

The black cat edgar allan poe story