When, in autumn 1910, experimenting with typhoid cultures, I had soiled my face and mouth, I naturally said to myself that it might give me typhoid fever. I washed my face and beard with soap and a solution of sublimate without considering that I was safe against the infection. I _reasoned_ that it would be preferable to contract the disease and to die of it. (At my age typhoid fever is almost always fatal. I had never had it, and might therefore consider myself in a state of receptivity.) It is fine to fall on the battlefield, especially at an age when life and activity are already on the wane. But all that was pure _reasoning_; _instinctively_ I still felt a great desire to live, and it was with joy that I counted the days which separated me from the danger of having contracted typhoid fever. I felt much relieved a fortnight after the incident, considering that the limit of incubation was passed. Thus _reasoning_ and feeling or _instinct_ were not in accord. Since then, in the three following years, a modification has taken place in my psychical condition. The prospect of death _frightens me less than before_. During my cardiac crisis of the 19th October 1913 I even felt no fear of death, and my satisfaction at my recovery was _less_ than before. I think it is that difference in quantity which constitutes the first symptoms of _indifference_ towards death, an indifference which is hardly perceptible at first. Satiety with life is sometimes observed in old people of 80; it is not surprising to feel the first approach of it about 70, especially in the case of a man like myself who began very early to lead a very intense life. Other special circumstances influence even more this precocious satiety of life. As I become more indifferent to my own life I feel a more and more acute anxiety for the health, life, and happiness of those who are dear to me. I am especially troubled by a consciousness of the imperfection of modern medicine. In spite of the progress realised in these latter days, it is still powerless against a multitude of diseases, threatening us on all sides. Pulmonary lesions (tuberculosis, pneumonia, etc.), the nephrites, and an infinite quantity of other diseases can yet neither be prevented nor cured. So we live in constant fear for those we love. When medicine shall (as I am persuaded) have conquered all these evils, one cause of the bitterness of life will cease--but that is not yet the case. That is why, besides the weakening of the life-instinct, a resignation towards death grows in us, as a means of no longer feeling the ills which afflict our neighbours. With time, when that source of unhappiness has been eliminated by medicine, old age will be more attractive, and an orthobiotic life will become normal and realisable.