Such confessions can be easily elicited from psychopathic patients even in their best states of apparent diffidence, humility. _This paranoidal aspect of self-aggrandizement is present in all psychopathic cases._ In some this trait stands out more clearly and distinctly than in others. It is, however, present in all psychopathic patients, if one observes them closely and attentively. It is the expression of an intensified state of the impulse of self-preservation and fear instinct. In other words, it is a state of an exaggerated, hypertrophied egotism. “We must appeal to a law higher than the material law,” a patient writes in his account. “I worried much over it. Since that time the relation of mind and matter greatly interested me.... My health at this time failed, I lost appetite and strength, had hysterical symptoms. I was treated for general neurasthenia.” ... Psychopathic, philosophical and ethical speculations and interests have their sole source in fear of sickness and self-preservation. “One of my anxieties,” another patient writes, “of my present life is connected with my business and my relationship to my partners. I am naturally conscientious and inclined to be not only earnest and sincere, but serious. My nature, instincts, and desires are not superficial. Yet my relation to the business is a superficial one. I am neither fitted by natural tastes nor by training for the indoor, rather mechanical, conventional, and routine processes upon which business and commercial success depends.... “Without the common motives of an ordinary merchant (greed) I am placed in the position of the one who lives not by the usual and conventional standards of right and wrong, but rather by a more exalted and more rigid one of his own making which, unsupported by habit, and institutions, requires a greater loyalty, a higher resolve, and a firmer will than is required of the conventional and conforming citizen. Emerson says it demands something Godlike in one who would essay such a task, not placing the same values on money, trade, commerce, and profits as the natural money maker and money lover, and not the opportunity to substitute and supplement the usual motives by and with the larger, and to me more compelling, of community betterment and employee welfare....” This man had abandoned his wife and three children. Another patient writes of himself, “The hypersensitive nervous system with the initial shock has inhibited the development of my highest potentialities and my highest endeavors.” He summarizes his symptoms: “Dread and anxiety about being away from home and friends, self-consciousness, mental sluggishness, quick fatigue, inability for deep thought, general state of irritability.”