A most noticeable and remarkable quality of despair is its introactive tendency. When the whole strength and vital motive, of a full-grown teleologic psychic life—the _dilettante_ is not capable of despair—is suddenly and completely withdrawn, there results, not indifference nor _ennui_ but a deep disturbance which is active on the _minus_ side of mental life. The complete breaking up of great and absorbing hopes and of the free objective activity flowing from them brings will tension down, not simply to _nil_, but gives it a spring back into the negative region beyond the line of mere quiescence and indifferentism. Despair is a revulsive process by which the whole mind is broken up, just as a propeller wheel running at high speed out of water or an engine working at high pressure when disconnected from its shafting, tend to wrench and shatter themselves. Desire is not really extinct, but latent; though smothered it burns inward. This is that peculiar cankering, corroding quality, which is always so marked in despair. Will, not self-shattered, but forcibly pent by external circumstances, gives a sullen restlessness to the mental life now turned in upon itself. Hence the capacity for despair will be directly as the co-ordinate capacity for action and reflection in any individual, and as such co-ordination marks the highest level of conscious life, despair is certainly a phenomenon of exceptionally complex and advanced consciousness. Again, we note that despair is intensely and oppressively a pain state, but the dull despair pain is distinct from racking fear pain. What now is the nature of despair pain, and what the reason for its peculiar quality? Here is not as in fear a feeling pain at pain, but at the idea of its inevitability and completely destructive power. The actual pain foreseen may seem bearable and excite little feeling, but it is the total loss of personal success, the complete thwarting of self-realization, that moves the mind to despair, that causes that sickening, dull, emotional pain which we term despair. Thus despair is eminently a disease of self-hood, an egoistic distemper, the strong and large individuality being peculiarly subject to it. However, the general problem of despair pain is practically the same as of the origin and nature of fear pain, which has already been discussed. Whether any mere representation induces pain, and how it does so, is certainly one of the most difficult problems of emotional psychology. We have in a previous chapter sought to indicate in a general way that purely subjective or mental pain which is not in any wise revival of sensation or objective does really exist. Also since pain _per se_ is always simple and identical, the differentiation of pains as seemingly quite different in kind, as fear pain, despair pain, etc., is really due to sensation, will, and other elements which closely adhere to pain and give it a certain local colouring. The whole emotion is a complex of various