"They doubt about their charities. They wonder whether they may really not be doing more harm than good, though they have investigated the cases, or have had them investigated, and the objects of their charity may have been proved to be quite deserving. They hesitate about the acquisition of new friends, and doubt whether they should give them any confidence, and whether the confidences they have received from them are not really baits."[12] Here, decidedly, we have a state of affairs not only breeding unhappiness, but involving a vast waste of nervous energy. This it is that chiefly makes the yielding to trivial doubts a menace to human welfare. To conserve energy for useful purposes, we are so constituted that ordinarily the little acts of everyday life--our rising, dressing, eating, attending to household or business details of a routine character--are done by us automatically. We take it for granted that we do them correctly, and, usually, we so do them. If now and then we make a mistake, we think little about it. Rightly, we regard it as of no account, compared with matters of more importance. Thus we conserve our energy for our life work. Whereas the doubter about trivialities fritters his energy away. And, now, taking up the question of the causation of this costly habit of doubting about trivialities, let us turn once more to the cases of the two morbid doubters who consulted the Washington and Boston specialists. In both of these cases, psychological analysis was undertaken to ascertain the causes of the exaggerated tendency to doubt. In both it was found that the patients had been subjected in childhood to conditions almost inevitably productive of a profound distrust of self. This was particularly true in the Washington case. The patient in this case was the only son of parents whose love had led them to be over-solicitous about him. When he was a little fellow they could not bear to have him out of their sight, lest something should happen to him. They had anticipated his wishes, done for him things that he might very well have done for himself; and, when he did attempt to do things for himself, they intervened to help him. The result was an enfeebling of his consciousness and of his will. The man grew up without initiative. People had always done things for him, had always decided things for him. How could any one expect him to decide anything for himself? It was not that he was naturally weak-minded, weak-willed; it was that his training had engendered in him conditions making for mental confusion and instability of purpose. Such was the outcome of the neurologist's psychological study of his case. It held the possibilities of a cure, through psychic re-education, having as its starting point the emancipation of this child of thirty from slavish dependence on his parents. And, in the end, after nearly two years of patient effort, a cure was actually effected.