="Nerves" Again.= Despite the organic disturbances which may beset the reproductive organs, and despite the havoc wrought by venereal diseases, it may be said with absolute assurance that the majority of feminine ills are the result neither of the natural frailty of the female body, nor even of man's infringement of the social law, but are the direct result of false suggestion and of false attitudes toward the facts of the reproductive life. The trouble is less a difficulty with the reproductive organs than a difficulty with the reproductive instinct. "Something wrong" with the instinct is translated by the subconscious mind into "something wrong" with the related generative organs, and converted into a physical pain. That this relation has always been dimly felt is shown by the fact that the early Greeks called nervous disorders _hysteria_, from the Greek word for womb. It is only lately, however, that the blame has been put in the right place and the trouble traced to the _instinct_ rather than to the _organs_ of reproduction. =Why Women Are Nervous.= Although women hold no monopoly, it must be conceded that they are particularly prone to "nerves." The reason is not hard to find. Since the leading factor in a neurosis is a disturbance of the insistent instinct of reproduction, a disturbance usually based on repression, then any class of persons in whom the instinct is particularly repressed would, in the very nature of the case, be particularly liable to nervousness. No one who thoroughly knows human nature would attempt to deny that woman is as strongly endowed as man with the great urge toward the perpetuation of the race, or that she has had to repress the instinct more severely than has man. The man insists on knowing that the children he provides for are his own children. Whatever the degree of his own fidelity, he must be sure that his wife is true to him. Thus has grown up the insistence that, no matter what man does, woman, if she is to be counted respectable, shall control the urge of the instinct and live up to the requirements of continence set for her by society.