Next, I attacked a formidable pile of old lecture notes, beginning with a few small and faded records of college exercises in bound sheets, including the _Heften_ of European courses, and finally the far more voluminous memoranda of my own lectures for nearly two-score years. How crude and impossible now were these earlier reminders of my professorial activity! What a prodigious amount of work, time, and even manual labor they involved! What hardihood of inference and conclusion! What immaturity and even foolhardiness of judgment on some of the greatest problems of life! If I wanted to dignify or even glorify my old age at the expense of my youth, here are abundant data for so doing. But I do not, and so I found peculiar pleasure in consigning, with my own hands, armfuls of such manuscript to the flames. How hard I rode my own hobbies! What liberties I took--and all with perfect innocence of intent--with the ideas of others, which insinuated themselves unconsciously into all of my mental complexes! And yet, at the same time, how voraciously I read, how copiously I quoted, and how radically I changed the form, substance, and scope of my favorite courses each year, slowly improving them in clarity and coherence! And how many special themes in my field, once central, have lapsed to secondary importance or become obsolete! Such breaks with the past, which psychology regards as analogues of a catharsis that relieves constipation, have a certain insurance value not only against ultra-conservatism but against the inveterate tendency of the old to hark back to past stages of life. As a part of the process of reorientation I felt impelled, as I think natural enough for a psychologist, to write my autobiography and get myself in focus genetically. To this I devoted the first year after my retirement. It is now complete and laid safely away and may or may not be published sometime, although certainly not at present. Its preparation served me well in advancing my understanding of the one I know best of all, and I would earnestly prescribe such an occupation as one of the most pleasant and profitable services intelligent old people can render to themselves and perhaps their posterity and friends, if not to the world at large. The reading of “lives,” too, is often one of the most absorbing and sometimes almost exclusive intellectual occupation of the old.