For example: disease is often produced by lack of sleep; hence it is of central importance to teach people how to sleep. Excluding organic disease in the causation of most cases of sleeplessness--for most people suffering from insomnia do not have organic disease--one can say this: _Insomnia usually depends on something wrong in the patient's day_. The state of the night depends on the state of the day. If the day has been free not merely from gross sin, but free from hygienic blunder, then the night will go somewhere nearly right. If the day has been filled with concentrated work in which the mind has been wholly upon the thing it has in hand, if there have been no elements of strain through distraction or worry, causing double currents in the mind, then when night comes one can turn the mind off and go to sleep. On the other hand, the mind which has been intent half on its own job and half on its own worries, never wholly "turned on" during the day, cannot be "turned off" at night. Any physician or any patient succeeds in curing insomnia who succeeds in finding out what is wrong in the way the sleepless person lives, and how it can be corrected. But most people want to go on living in just the same stupid way and yet to get rid of the sleeplessness "in spite of themselves." The obvious way is to take a drug that for a while will stop insomnia even when life goes on as before. There are many drugs that will give sleep, but there are no harmless drugs that give sleep--none. Physicians receive about once a year advertisements of a drug for sleep which is "wholly without ill effects," but I do not think it shows undue skepticism or dogmatism to say that those drugs never do what they say, and never will. Sleep being a natural process, anything that forces it upon us hardly can be free from ill effects. Hence the first thing in attacking a case of insomnia is to say, "Never take a drug again." Natural processes whereby fatigue accumulates and puts us to sleep do not go on rightly if we are being artificially driven into sleep by a drug.