Such expressions of anger against oneself often finish with fainting. The reason of the latter is much less exhaustion through paroxysms of rage than the recognition and consciousness of one’s own helplessness. Reichenbach[96] once examined the reason for the fainting of people in difficult situations. It is nowadays explained as the effect of the excretion of carbonic acid gas and of the generated anthropotoxin; another explanation makes it a nervous phenomenon in which the mere recognition that release is impossible causes fainting, the loss of consciousness. For our needs either account of this phenomenon will do equally. It is indifferent whether a man notices that he cannot voluntarily change his condition in a physical sense, or whether he notices that the evidence is so convincing that he can not dodge it. The point is that if for one reason or another he finds himself physically or legally in a bad hole, he faints, just as people in novels or on the stage faint when there is no other solution of the dramatic situation. When anger does not lead to rage against oneself, the next lower stage is laughter.[97] With regard to this point, Darwin calls attention to the fact that laughter often conceals other mental conditions than those it essentially stands for--anger, rage, pain, perplexity, modesty and shame; when it conceals anger it is anger against oneself, a form of scorn. This same wooden, dry laughter is significant, and when it arises from the perception that the accused no longer sees his way out, it is not easily to be confused with another form of laughter. One gets the impression that the laughter is trying to tell himself, “That is what you get for being bad and foolish!” Section 16. (3) _Cruelty._ Under this caption must be placed certain conditions that may under given circumstances be important. Although apparently without any relations to each other they have the common property of being external manifestations of mental processes.