Woman’s incapacity for truth--which I hold to be consequent on her lack of free will with regard to the truth, in accordance with Kant’s “Indeterminism”--conditions her falsity. Any one who has had anything to do with women knows how often they give offhand quite patently untrue reasons for what they have said or done, under the momentary necessity of answering a question. It is, however, hysterical subjects who are most careful to avoid unveracity (in a most marked and premeditated way before strangers); but however paradoxical it may sound it is exactly in this that their untruthfulness lies! They do not know that this desire for truth has come to them from outside and is no part of their real nature. They have slavishly accepted the postulate of morality, and, therefore, wish to show at every opportunity, like a good servant, how faithfully they follow instructions. It is always suspicious when a man is frequently spoken of as exceptionally trustworthy: he must have gone out of his way to let people know it, and it would be safe to wager that in reality he is a rogue. No confidence must be placed in the genuineness of hysterical morality, which doctors (no doubt in good faith) often emphasise by remarks as to the high moral position of their patients. I repeat: hysterical patients do not consciously simulate. It can only be made clear to them by suggestion that they actually have been simulating, and all the “confessions” of the dissimulation can only be explained in the same way. Otherwise they believe in their own natural honesty and morality. Neither are the various things which torture them imaginary; it is much more likely that in the fact that they feel them, and that the symptoms first disappear with what Breuer calls “catharsis” (the successive bringing to their consciousness of the true causes of their illness by hypnotism), lies the proof of their organic untruthfulness. The self-accusations which hysterical people are so full of are nothing but unconscious dissimulation. The sense of guilt, which is equally poignant in great and most trifling things, cannot be genuine; if the hysterical self-torturers possessed a standard of morality for themselves and others they would not be so indiscriminate in their self-accusations, and not cast as much blame on themselves for a slight error as for real wrong-doing.