factors which are closely knit into a single state which to common observation seems simple, but which is really constituted in its _ensemble_ by the total specific forces of many elements. In psychics, as in physics, we know that common sense analysis of phenomena must be at fault, and that one who says “I certainly have an entirely different pain when I fear and when I despair,” is as much in the wrong as he who maintains essential diversities in material substance, or radical distinctions of species in the organic world. So we must believe that the peculiar quality of the pain in despair exists, not in the pain itself, but is really the colouring result from various coincident sensations and ideas. The lowering of the mental tone far below the zero point is greatly accentuated by refluent waves of organic sensation set up from the physical basis of the psychic disturbance. How, we may now ask, did despair ever evolve and become a well-defined psychic form? in what way in the course of natural selection could such an apparently disadvantageous variation have arisen and been developed? The serviceability of fear is plain to every one, but of what possible value could despair be in the struggle of life? The one who gives up in despair is but very rarely doing the best thing. If we cannot look to the general principle of evolution, serviceability, how can we account for the appearance and growth of such a phase as despair, except as abnormal variation, a disease, profitable to the enemies of the individual, and so developed by and for external organisms. As there is an abnormal pathological variation of fear, which we have previously noticed, and which is forced in its development by enemies who profit by it, so despair is a psychic disease, entirely hurtful to the individual, and, so far, only advantageous for its enemies. Despair is, without doubt, one of those altruistic variations which serve, not the individual, but some antagonist in the struggle of existence. To bring one to despair is to make him entirely helpless and wholly at our mercy for our own ends. The possibility that active-reflective natures may prey upon themselves is thus stimulated into an actual phenomenon whose growth is continually fostered by those whose advantage it is to reduce the individual to a helpless condition. Despair is hardly an hypertrophy or atrophy of any normal tendency, it is rather a pathological _genus_ by itself. The capacity for despair being inherent in the general formation of mind as subject to collapse, it arose solely in response to the needs of organisms warring upon the organism afflicted. The whole field of physical and psychical altruistic variation under the general law of natural selection, decadent and self-injurious characteristics being stimulated and maintained in a kind of artificial selection, is an interesting but unexplored field, attention so far having been turned to