This “return to childhood” may also be observed in nervous people who have retained their critical faculty. I recall a woman of forty who employed a maid to dress and undress her, also to wash her, and who did not perform certain personal functions without the company and assistance of the maid. And I must not forget to mention the twenty-four-year-old youth who was brought to me by his mother because he was incapable of doing any work and who was not ashamed in my presence to take a good swallow of milk every five minutes from an ordinary baby’s milk-bottle. This kind of “infantilism” often attains grotesque proportions. To-day the aforementioned woman laughs at the “incomprehensible malady,” and the grown-up suckling is an industrious official who supports his family very comfortably. Both of them wished to defeat nature and return to childhood. Not infrequently a bodily change accompanies this mental state. The hair falls out, the features become softer, and the signs of adult masculinity undergo regressive changes. In all probability this condition is associated with certain disturbances of the internal metabolism. But who can say positively whether the impulse to these disturbances did not proceed from the stubborn look backwards, the yearning for childhood, and the enraptured glance into the depths of the past? All the wisdom of life consists in the manner of our forgetting. What fine overtones of the harmonies and discords of the past must accompany the concords of the day! But every day has a right to its melody. Each one lives its own life and is a preparation for the future. One who fills his day with the delights and the pains of the past murders it. Only on appropriate occasions may we, must we, direct our eyes backwards, survey the path we have traversed, and again concentrate our gaze on the milestones of memory. All ye who are ever bewailing your lot and are incapable of rising above your fate--hearken unto me and know that ye no longer live, that ye died ere the law of destruction robbed ye of life! Let me tell ye what ye may find writ in burning letters in the firmament of knowledge: _it is never too late!_ Only he has lost his life who thinks he has lost it. Forgive and forget! Drink of the lethe of work and solicitude for others! Ye are egoists! For even the mirror of your woes on which your eyes are riveted shows you only your own agonized image. And measure your pains by the infinity of pain that fills the world. ALL-SOULS. I am not crying for the dead who have died but who are still alive for me. I am crying for the dead who are still alive but who are dead for me. When I look back upon the long succession of years that I have travelled, and think of all my lovers who accompanied me part of the way, and then left me to wander alone, I feel as if a heavy fog were enveloping everything that otherwise appears beautiful and delightful....