As the history-taker traces out the symptoms of the patient's illness after finding an answer to this first question, _Why to-day?_ two opposite habits of mind must be employed, one passive, the other active. We must be sure that the patient shall feel that he has had a good listener, that his troubles have really been appreciated. But if we are constantly putting in questions, as we certainly must later, the patient does not feel that he has been listened to. We desire first of all to get his own story in his own words, passively. We may not necessarily write down a single word of it. But I have found that the patient's own way of expressing the nature of his troubles is often important and characteristic. It helps to prevent our histories from looking too much alike, which is their commonest fault. Hence we should get into them somewhere a phrase or several phrases reported passively in the patient's own words; if possible a phrase in which he describes his "presenting symptom," the thing of which he chiefly complains. But the second stage in the process of taking a patient's history is the most important. In this part we should be active, not passive. We must attack our task with a tool in our hand, _a mental tool fitted to rake out of the mass of confused ideas in his mind certain significant facts_. That rake is a logical schedule of questions which you use upon him actively, not passively, and by using which you get answers either negative or positive. Whenever you think well, you _think with a schedule_ of that kind in your mind. If you pack a trunk well, you pack it using a list, a schedule of the things that ought to go into that trunk. Our printed social face-card helps us to think and question with a schedule before us, to think in an orderly way, without forgetting our items, and thus to select what we need out of the mass of disorderly facts in the patient's memory.