Edgar Allan Poe believed that there existed inside a person a "spirit of perversity," one that made that person do the wrong thing at any given time for some inexplicable reason. In The Black Cat, the author explicitly states, "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. 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?"