This reference to the existence of an exceedingly complicated and significant problem may suffice to explain why we by no means seldom meet with individuals among our patients who are quite specially called, because of their spiritual and social gifts, to take an active part in the work of civilisation--for this they are biologically destined. We must never forget that what to-day is deemed a moral law will to-morrow be cast into the melting-pot and transformed, so that in the near or distant future it may serve as the basis of a new ethical structure. This much we ought to have learnt from the history of civilisation, that the forms of morality belong to the category of transitory things. The finest psychological tact is required with these critical natures, so that the dangerous corners of infantile irresponsibility, indolence and uncontrolledness may be turned, and a pure, untroubled vision of the possibility of a moral autonomous activity made possible. Five per cent. on money lent is fair interest, twenty per cent. is despicable usury. That point of view we have to apply equally to the sexual situation. So it comes about that there are many neurotics whose innermost delicacy of feeling prevents their being at one with present-day morality, and they cannot adapt themselves to civilisation as long as their moral code has gaps in it, the filling up of which is a crying need of the age. We deceive ourselves greatly if we suppose that many married women are neurotic only because they are unsatisfied sexually or because they have not found the right man, or because they still have a fixation to their infantile sexuality. The real ground of the neurosis is, in many cases, the inability to recognise the work that is waiting for them, of helping to build up a new civilisation. We are all far too much at the standpoint of the "nothing-but" psychology; we persist in thinking we can squeeze the new future which is pressing in at the door into the framework of the old and the known. And thus the view is only of the present, never of the future. But it was of most profound psychological significance when Christianity first discovered, in the orientation towards the future, a redeeming principle for mankind. In the past nothing can be altered, and in the present little, but the future is ours and capable of raising life's intensity to its highest pitch. A little space of youth belongs to us, all the rest of life belongs to our children. Thus does your question as to the significance of the loss of faith in authority answer itself. The neurotic is ill not because he has lost his old faith, but because he has not yet found a new form for his finest aspirations. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 176: Translated by Mrs. Edith Eder.] [Footnote 177: "Psychoanalysis." Nervous and Mental Disease, No. 19. Monograph series.] [Footnote 178: See Author's preface to "The Psychology of Dementia Præcox."]