As we have mentioned, this rationalisation is no unusual phenomenon in ordinary life. It will be clear to anyone who gives the question a moment’s thought that few of the non-scientific[17] beliefs held by even a highly educated person have ever been logically reasoned out from fundamental principles. In fact such principles frequently cannot be reached, for the very good reason that they have never been consciously conceived by the individual. One’s views on religion, politics, or the relations and rights of the sexes may exhibit in their outer casings a semblance of rational structure: their core, however, is not reason but emotion. As James expresses it:— “In its inner nature, belief or the sense of reality is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else ... reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life. This is the only sense which the word ever has in the mouths of practical men.... Whenever an object so appeals to us that we turn to it, accept it, fill our mind with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real for us and we believe it. Whenever, on the contrary, we ignore it, fail to consider it or act upon it, despise it, reject it, forget it, so far it is unreal for us and is disbelieved.... Whatever things have intimate and continuous connection with my life are things whose reality I cannot doubt.”[18] Few people, however, realise this truth so clearly, or express it so lucidly, as Professor James. Often we believe that we are logically convinced when in reality we have been convinced first, and have invented reasons for our conviction afterwards. But many of our beliefs and attitudes have been implanted in us in childhood or early youth by processes which could not by the wildest stretch of imagination be called logical. And not the least important of those beliefs are those held by the average Briton with regard to insanity.[19] For the patient, then, his mental troubles, having intimate and continuous connection with his life, become very real indeed. But the longer he is left alone to “cheer up,” the longer he broods over his troubles in isolation, the longer he is allowed to build theories upon his inadequate and inaccurate data, the more intimately and continuously connected with his life will the abnormalities become. They may come to be so integrated with each other that his very personality becomes tinged. Then he is no longer a normal person battling with his separate enemies, but one who has made terms, and those often disastrous ones, with his closely allied foes. An attempt to cure him at this stage will then necessitate the analysis of a highly complex compound, while in the early and middle stages merely the attack upon separated elements is necessary.