Very often such slight symptoms as passing lapses of memory are magnified into approaching complete failure of memory, and lassitude becomes a permanent loss of will power, evidently due to disease in the patient's mind, and there begins the persuasion that nothing can overcome it. Morbid introspection becomes, after a time, the favourite occupation, and every slightest sensation or feeling sets up trains of thought that lead to far-reaching conclusions with regard to physical weakness. The patient is apt to be greatly preoccupied with himself, to neglect his duty towards others, to be utterly selfish, to fail to realise how much sympathy is being wasted on him. Some people never pass beyond this preliminary stage of the mental disorder. Usually, however, after a time the patient misinterprets not only his own sensations, but the actions of other people in his regard; he becomes suspicious and distrustful of everybody around him, sometimes even of his best friends. He is passing on to the second stage of the disease, in which he is sure to feel that he is the object of persecution. Just as he misunderstood his physical symptoms, so he misconstrues the actions of his friends. He is sure that they look at him curiously, that they smile {288} ironically. Sometimes he thinks that they wink at one another with regard to him, or make signs behind his back that are meant to be derisive. Even harmless passing observations may be morbidly perverted into severe and inimical criticism of himself and his actions. The paranoiac is now apt to enter fully upon the second or persecutory stage of his mental disorder. His distress and discomfort he attributes to those around him and he is sure that he is the subject of persecution. At first his persecutors are not very definitely recognised. No particular person is picked out and even no particular set of persons. There is just a vague sense of persecution. A distinguished neurologist once said that no sane person in this world, outside of a novel or a play, has time to make it his business to persecute anyone else. When people come, then, with stories of persecution, either they themselves are not in their right mind and are deluded as to the source of the persecution, or else their persecutor is not in his right mind and the case needs seeing to from the other standpoint.