These deluded patients live in a world we often do not sense, a world whose reality we do not appreciate. The nurse, after much experience, finds that there is a key to every resistance, to every lack of co-operation, to abnormal attitudes and actions. She realizes that a powerful emotion of desire or fear, of love or hate, of ambition or self-depreciation, of hope or despair, of faith or distrust, unchecked by reason or judgment through the years, has provided a soil upon which emotional thinking alone can grow. The patient is a mere puppet of the suggestions of emotions which may not be at all pertinent to the facts. NURSING THE DELUDED PATIENT The nurse soon realizes the uselessness of attempting to argue a patient out of his delusions, of trying to convince him that the things he sees and hears and perhaps tastes and feels, are but hallucinations. Her very insistence only fastens his attention more firmly upon the false conclusion or makes him more convinced that his mind is giving him a true report from the senses of sight and hearing and taste and feeling. But often a quiet disregard of the delusions while the nurse goes on her way and holds her patient to his routine, consistently and confidently, as she would in case they were not true, will eventually cause him to question their reality just because no calamity results. The nurse acts as if these delusions and hallucinations were non-existent in reality, and when the occasion arises, through the patient's questioning, she urges him to exert his will to act also as if they were not true; to try it and see what happens. Arguing, also, she finds, usually antagonizes or makes the patient stubborn. He cannot prove by her logic his point, but he "knows" from inner experience that he sees what he sees, hears what he hears, and knows what he knows. The fact that the nurse does not is merely annoying evidence that she is blind, deaf, or stupid to these things of his reality. He knows he is lost and damned, or tainted; that he is King George, Cæsar, or the Lord, as the case may be; or that his internal organs are all wrong. He "feels" it and the nurse can't--therefore, he alone has true knowledge of it. In the end, the wise nurse who never disputes with him, but leads him on to action which utterly disregards these things, may bring about a gradual conviction in the patient's mind that a man couldn't do what he does if all these things were true; and the delusion slowly may lose its force or the hallucination fade away. Many patients drop them from their lives entirely. Many others in whom dementia is not indicated, or in whose cases it is indefinitely delayed, can come to an intellectual realization that all these things are fantasies, and do not represent reality; that despite their continued, frequent, or occasional demands upon feeling life, they can be consistently ignored. These psychopathic individuals may act as they would if the delusions never came henceforth