Suppose now that a certain hypothesis, or "fiction," instead of being an instrument for dealing with external reality, is unconsciously designed as a refuge from the real. Suppose it is a symbolic compromise among conflicting desires in the individual's unconscious of which he cannot rid himself. Suppose it is a disguised expression of motives which the individual as a civilized being cannot admit to his own consciousness. Suppose it is a fiction necessary to keep up one's ego consciousness or self-appreciative feeling without which either he or his world would instantly become valueless. In these latter cases the fiction is not and cannot be, without outside help, modified by the reality of experience. The complex of ideas becomes a closed system, a world in and of itself. Conflicting facts of experience are discounted and denied by all the cunning of an insatiable, unconscious will. The fiction then gets itself substituted for the true facts of experience; the individual has "lost the function of the real." He no longer admits its disturbing elements as correctives. He has become mentally unadjusted--pathological. Most healthy people doubtless would on analysis reveal themselves as nourishing fictions of this sort, more or less innocent in their effects. It is possible that it is by means of such things that the values of living are maintained for us all. But with the healthy these fictions either hover about the periphery of our known world as shadowy and elusive inhabitants of the inaccessible, or else they are socially acceptable as religious convention, race pride, ethical values, personal ambition, class honor, etc. The fact that so much of the ground of our valuations, at least so far as these affect our self-appreciation, is explicable by psychologists as "pathological" in origin need not startle us. William James in his _Varieties of Religious Experience_, you will remember, took the ground that in judging of matters of this kind, it is not so much by their origins--even admitting the pathological as a cause--but by their fruits that we shall know them. There are "fictions" which are neither innocent nor socially acceptable in their effects on life and character. Many of our crowd-phenomena belong, like paranoia, to this last class.