As I talk with supposedly educated people, I am amazed to see how little people who have lived forty or fifty years in the same tenement of clay have learned about that structure. I do not mean that everybody ought to study physiology. I mean, for example, such a simple thing as _how to rest_. One cannot rest just as somebody else rests. We have individual finger-prints, no two alike, and individual hand-writing. So we have--and should have found--our own way of working and of resting, which is probably as individual as our finger-prints. But we follow each other like sheep. The instructions we give to a tuberculous patient are needed because of his medical ignorance or that of others. I once received a wonderfully touching letter from a middle-aged tuberculous lawyer who finally learned the medical facts necessary to save his life through reading a popular magazine. He was being treated for tuberculosis, about as badly as a human being could be treated, but he did not know this. He had gone to the best doctor in his vicinity. Through reading in a popular magazine an account of a medical conference on the treatment of tuberculosis he finally learned the truth and cured himself. Medical ignorance in relation to diabetes, to stomach trouble, to venereal disease, to heart disease, it may be one of our tasks to remove before inculcating the régime needed in these troubles. _Educational ignorance_, ignorance of proper institutions and methods to give a man the power which he needs, is often exemplified in relation to industrial training. One sees people in industry who could do a great deal better work if they had better training. But they do not know where to get it. In many cities there are scholarships and funds for people who show ambition to be better trained. Educational ignorance, then, as well as industrial and medical ignorance, may bring people into economic trouble, even into physical trouble. Such people often turn up at a dispensary asking the doctor merely to cure a headache or a stomach-ache. Yet if the doctor is wise he will find this other trouble hidden in the background. Obviously ignorance as a cause of trouble is a historic, not a catastrophic, cause. Ignorance does not happen suddenly. Its bad results accumulate gradually. _Shiftlessness_ Another mental element in social diagnosis I call _shiftlessness_, in a particular sense that I want to define. Not shiftlessness in the sense of a general moral accusation, but as a failure of adjustment--maladjustment, due to shiftlessness in the sense of an inability to shift when there is a need for it. Professor Edouard Fuster[1] has spoken of social treatment as consisting almost entirely of helping people towards a better self-adjustment to their actual or attainable environment. People often make a failure of their lives because they do not shift when the proper time arrives. There are also people who shift too often, on the other hand. I shall speak of that later.