What part now does sorrow play as a psychic life-function, and how explain it on the general principle of natural selection? At first sight, sorrow or grief over the past seems utterly valueless, seems to be mental energy thrown away. The past is irretrievable, of what use then is any grief? Is not all regret vain? To deplore its loss does not tend to restore a lost arm, and it is of no use crying over spilled milk. Indeed, he who bewails spilled milk has not only the actual loss but the ideal pain about the loss. He who grieves suffers doubly. But while it is true that sorrow for what has happened cannot alter the occurrence, yet it has a permanent salutary effect on the one who sorrows to give more caution for the future. The child will carry the pitcher of milk the more carefully next time by the more he has grieved over the past occurrence. By increasing sensitiveness and capacity for sorrow experience is strengthened, deepened, and completely adjusted to environment. Shallow and volatile natures, who take all loss and harm easily, and even gaily, have little strength, and attain no great and permanent growth. But with most, when the object of strong desire is suddenly lost, not only will there be a disappearance of the positive feeling about it, but an actual _minus_ or negative state will be generated, a reaction mode we term grief. By this grief the chief lessons of all higher experience are made possible. Grief is not a pathological phenomenon in mind, but in its place thoroughly normal and useful. Indeed, if under certain circumstances grief did not appear, mind would be proved very crude, obtuse, or diseased. He who never feels sad about what has happened, is not of a progressive or highly advanced type. If one does not feel sorry for his past errors and hurtful actions, he plainly has so much the less motive force to higher action for the future. If sorrow had never entered the world of mind, if the whole corrective for injurious actions or want of action lay wholly in the immediate pain resulting or in the direct simple emotions like fear and anger, a most potent factor in psychic progress would be lacking. The possibility of going wrong, _i.e._, literally aside, and contrariwise to one’s own interests, is implied in the struggle for existence. The next best thing to the impossible _status_ of being unable to do wrong, is to have the capacity of feeling for the wrong, that is, of experiencing grief. Sorrow is thus a corrective of the highest importance in the history of experience. The slips, willed and unwilled, from the narrow path of upward evolution are of necessity many; but a man is, on the whole, best doing the largest part in the evolution scheme in which he finds himself, who both knows the wrong as such, and is sorry for it, whether in the primitive selfish mode, or better still, on the higher ethical and religious grounds. The greatest and most efficient minds are those who have felt most keenly for their