His reason tells him quite correctly, and far too often for his personal comfort, that had he not given, or failed to carry out, a particular order, certain disastrous and memory-haunting results might not have happened. It tells him, quite convincingly, that in his present state he is not as other men are. Again, the patient reasons, quite logically, but often from false premises, that since he is showing certain symptoms which he has always been taught to associate with “madmen,” he is mad too, or on the way to insanity. If nobody is available to receive this man’s confidence, to knock away the false foundations of his belief, to bring the whole structure of his nightmare clattering about his ears, and finally, to help him to rebuild for himself (not merely to re-construct for him) a new and enlightened outlook on his future—in short, if he is left alone, told to “cheer up” or unwisely isolated, it may be his reason, rather than the lack of it, which will prove to be his enemy. And nobody who has observed the hyperæsthesia to noises and light in the nerve-hospital, nobody who has seen the effects upon the patients of a coal dropping unexpectedly out of the fire, will have much respect for the phrase, “lost his senses.” There exist, of course, cases of functional blindness, deafness, cutaneous anæsthesia and the rest, but the majority of the nerve patients show none of these disorders and recovery from them is often rapid. In a word, it is not in the intellectual but in the _emotional_ sphere that we must look for terms to describe these conditions. These disturbances are characterised by instability and exaggeration of emotion rather than by ineffective or impaired reason.[2] And as we shall see later, in the re-education of the patient, the physician is compelled continually to take this fact into account. As we have pointed out, every nerve-stricken soldier presents a case by itself. Slavish adherence by the physician to one of the classical names or labels used in diagnosis usually spells failure. The patient must be approached _without prejudice_, and the doctor who wishes to be of real help to him must make up his mind to examine and ponder over the sufferer’s mental wounds with as much, nay, even more—care and expenditure of time than would be given to physical injuries. A mere cursory inspection in the course of the formal ward visit is a solemn farce, if it pretends to be a serious attempt to cure the mentally afflicted.