A friend of mine, a quite celebrated neurologist, psychiatrist, and interpreter of Freud, and myself were met one night to discuss a very much talked-of book of his, a book of clinical studies relative to various obsessions, perversions and inhibitions which had afflicted various people in their day and which he, as a specialist in these matters, had investigated and attempted to alleviate. To begin with, I should say that he had filled many difficult and responsible positions in hospitals, asylums, and later, as a professor of these matters, occupied a chair in one of our principal universities. He was kindly, thoughtful, and intensely curious as to the workings of this formula we call life, but without lending himself to any—at least to very few—hard and fast dogmas. More interesting still life appeared to interest but never to discourage him. He really liked it. Pain, he said, he accepted as an incentive, an urge to life. Strife he liked because it hardened all to strength. And he believed in action as the antidote to too much thought, the way out of brooding and sorrow. Youth passes, strength passes, life forms pass; but action makes all bearable and even enjoyable. Also he wanted more labor, not less, more toil, more exertion, for humanity. And he insisted that through, not round or outside, life lay the way to happiness, if there was a way. But with action all the while. So much for his personal point of view. On the other hand he was always saying of me that I had a touch of the Hindu in me, the Far East, the Brahmin. I emphasized too much indifference to life—or, if not that, I quarreled too much with pain, unhappiness, and did not impress strongly enough the need of action. I was forever saying that the strain was too great, that there had best be less of action, less of pain.... As to the need of less pain, I agreed, but never to the need of less action; in verification of which I pointed to my own life, the changes I had deliberately courted, the various activities I had entered upon, the results I had sought for. He was not to be routed from his contention entirely, nor I from mine.