Inexperienced humanitarians long for the time when eating will be superfluous, when a few pills of concentrated albumin combined with a few drops of some essential ferment will supply the necessary energy for our mental and physical labours. What a stupid dream! If such a time ever came, how unhappy humanity would be! The most of mankind, truth compels me to say, live only to eat. For them “eating” is synonymous with “life.” With the discovery of such pills the wine of life would be drawn. No! No! No! If there were no such thing as eating we should have to invent it to save man from despairing. Eating enables one who has suffered shipwreck on Life’s voyage to withdraw into a sphere which once meant the greatest happiness to all human beings and still means it to all animals. One takes refuge in the primal instincts where one is safe and comfortable, until Mother Earth again devours and assimilates him before she awakes him to new life. We are all eternal links in an unending chain of links. And that is the whole meaning of eating: life and death. Every bite we eat means a quick death for myriads of living things. They must die that we may live. And so we live by death until our death gives life to others. It’s no mere accident that Don Juan is summoned from the feast to his death. ARE WE ALL MEGALOMANIACS? There is no sharp dividing line between health and disease. One shades off into the other by imperceptible gradations. Disease grows out of health organically. There are a thousand transitions from the one to the other; a thousand fine threads link them together, and often not even the best physicians can determine where health ceases and disease begins. As Feuchtersleben says, there is no lyric leap in the epic of life. Nor do delusions make their entry unheralded into a well ordered mental life. Delusions slumber in all of us and wait for their prey. The quiet normal being is just as subject to them as the raving maniac with rolling congested eyes. We need only open our eyes understandingly upon the bustle and tumult of life to be able to exclaim with Hans Sachs: “Madness! Everywhere madness!”