Of course, apart from the doubt which such a response casts on the external appearances theory of bashfulness, and its emphasis on the mental, as opposed to the physical, factor, it really throws scarcely any light on the question of causation. Just as there are many awkward, badly dressed, and deformed people who are not bashful, so there are many modest and sensitive ones who go through life in wholly normal fashion, perhaps untroubled even by bashfulness of the occasional type. Quite evidently there still is an underlying something which has to be taken into account before one can fully understand chronic bashfulness. That something the modern medical psychologist is beginning to believe he has discovered through proceeding on the assumption that bashfulness is far more than a mere innate weakness or character defect; that it is, in reality, a functional nervous trouble, differing only in degree, not in kind, from hysteria and other psychoneuroses. That is to say, the medical psychologist assumes that, as is now believed to be the case in every psychoneurosis, the bashful man is the victim of subconscious memories of distressing incidents in his early life; incidents which, in his case, have had the effect of arousing in an exaggerated degree sentiments of shame or fear. The supersensitive child, having seen or heard something that profoundly shocks him, or having committed some petty or really serious fault, feels, on the one hand, that he has a shameful secret he must guard carefully, and, on the other hand, fears that people can read his secret in his eyes. Hence, he develops feelings of awkwardness and embarrassment when others look at and speak to him. He fidgets, blushes, stammers, trembles; in a word, displays all the symptoms indicated by the term bashfulness. In the course of time one of two things will happen: either increased knowledge will reassure him, and he will, as the saying is, outgrow his bashfulness; or the hidden fear and shame--even though the original occasion for them may have completely lapsed from conscious remembrance--will fix themselves firmly in his mind, causing a habit of bashfulness which may torture him all his life.