As has been pointed out, however, the state of “mechanical mixture” is utterly alien to the normal mind, which tends rapidly to interpret, in the light of its own experience, and to integrate as far as possible, its events, however incongruous they may be. The mind cannot, for any length of time, allow a new experience to remain strange or undigested. It must gather in and assimilate that event to the systematised complex which we call its own past experience. It follows that the ultimate result upon any particular mind of a new experience, if it be of a personally significant nature, will depend almost entirely upon the past history of that mind. Thus for example the question whether the patient can or cannot satisfactorily stand up to his new troubles will be determined not only by his disposition, temperament and character, but also by his previous personal experience. It is thus obvious to anyone who gives the matter any serious consideration, that the manifestation of a severe psychical shock must necessarily be determined in a large measure by the nature of the mind upon which the injury falls. It would be idle to pretend therefore, that, in diagnosis, the story of the patient’s past experience can be left out of account, for the manifestation of the injury will obviously depend largely upon the individual patient’s “mental make-up.” Faced by the existence of a number of unusual mental phenomena the patient will inevitably succeed in time in inventing for himself, explanations of their co-existence. This “rationalisation,”[15] as it is called, is a perfectly normal process which is constantly going on in every individual, yet it plays a great part in complicating the mental disorders of the middle stage, and thereby intensifying the patient’s ultimate distress. For instance, he may not be more than temporarily disturbed by the unusual experiences we have mentioned[16] if they assail him separately. But, given time, he will soon begin to connect their appearances, and will argue to himself that these phenomena can have only one meaning: that he is mad or rapidly becoming so. And in this completely erroneous procedure he will be aided and abetted, not only by his own ignorance of the relation of mental normality to abnormality, but also by the general tendency of the uneducated to class everything unusual in the mental sphere as “mad.” Once he is convinced that he is in this state he may easily lose all hope of getting better, thereby increasing enormously the gravity of his case. Completely illogical, but to him entirely satisfactory explanations of his condition will then multiply.