This has essentially the same psychological basis as the suspicional tendencies and pessimism with which it is so often associated. Suspicional tendencies arise from states of anxiety resultant on instability of association, dependent on lack of associating fibres. Pessimism (so frequently present in the otherwise healthy degenerate) is often, as Magalhaes has shown, nervous instability with alternations of irritability and prostration. The subject is supersensitive; impressions call forth intense and prolonged reactions followed by exhaustion. The state is characterised by a general hyperæsthesia, which naturally results in an excess of suffering. From instability and hyperæsthesia results discord between the feelings themselves, between the feelings and the intelligence, between the feelings, the ideas and volitions. Discord between the feelings shows itself in a great variety of paradoxes, contradictions, and inconsistencies. To the pessimist possession of a desired object does not atone for former privation. Pain or unsatisfied desire is replaced by the pain of _ennui_. With inability to enjoy what he has are coupled extravagant expectations regarding that which he does not have. He is extremely susceptible both to kindness and to contempt. He passes suddenly from violent irritability to languor, from self-confidence and vanity to extreme self abasement. His intense sensitiveness results in intellectual disorders. For this involves a great vivacity of the intuitive imagination, which favours the setting up of extravagant ideals, lacking in solid representative elements. Hence a gap opens between his ideal and the actual. He can never realise the ideal he pursues and so his feelings are of a sombre hue. From this excessive realism results a state of doubt, a certain distrust of all this rational objective knowledge. It assumes another form in extreme subjectivism. The pessimist is haunted by images of the tiniest religious scruples, suspicions, fears, and anxieties, resulting in alienation from friends, seclusion, misanthropy. The pessimist is further characterised by an incapacity for prolonged attention, a refractory attention and a feeble will. These result in inaction, quietism, reverie, self-abnegation, abolition of the personality, annihilation of the will, amounting sometimes even to poetic or religious ecstasy. Pessimism is frequently associated with a morbid fear of death. The tramp is one phase of the degenerate in whom the restless wandering tendencies of the neurasthenic and paranoiac are added to the parasitic tendencies of the pauper, and the suspicional egotism of the "reasoning maniac."