goes through the bodily organs to make a medical diagnosis. _Instability_ The shiftless person, in the sense in which I define the words, is the person who does not move often enough, who rests too long on one particular set of habits so that he allows the world to move away from him while he is left high and dry. Or he allows himself to get fixed in one little set of habits and becomes a person with one idea. That is shiftlessness, the person who cannot accommodate or adapt himself. The opposite of this is _instability_--the defect of the person who shifts too often, who cannot stay in one field long enough. In the physical field this applies to people with motor nervousness, people who never can keep still. But we are more interested, of course, in the psychical side of it. Any piece of work can be said to have three phases, something like the phases that Sir Almoth Wright has emphasized in his writings on immunity. We have first a stage of interest and elation, then a slump, a depressed or negative phase, as Wright said, a stage when things are not going smoothly or when organization seems endlessly complicated. Then is the time when, if we are of an unstable type, we throw up our work. The unstable person cannot believe that the undertaking is going on and up to a third or positive phase, which in the end will be on a higher level than the phase in which we started. Normal people habitually expect these three phases in every human undertaking. They foresee the negative phase before they get out of the first one. Hence they are not astounded or bitter when the inevitable slump comes in the second phase. But the unstable person breaks off at that point and tries something else. It constitutes one of the most serious blots in any one's record if we find that he has changed his work four or five times already. "Why did you leave your first job?" we ask, and, "Why did you leave the second one?" There is never a satisfactory reason for so many changes. These people are rolling stones; they gather no moss. They never accumulate skill, power, and money as the result of having stuck long enough in one place. We see mental instability also in temperament, in spirits. Many people get into trouble because they do not realize their own "negative" and "positive" phases. Most people, we say, have their ups and downs. But if we take our ups and downs too seriously, then we may talk about suicide as so many people do. It is in these emotionally unstable phases that people give offence to others, quarrel with their families, lose their jobs.