Every impression in our life affects our soul as if it were made of wax and not one such impression can be lost. That we forget so many impressions is due to the fact that we have repressed them out of our consciousness. Repression is a protective device but at the same time a cause for many serious nervous disorders. A painful impression, an unpleasant experience in the first or the second world, is so altered as to be unrecognizable in consciousness. As a reaction to this serious nervous disturbances, especially hysterical alterations of the psyche, may occur,--conditions which can be cured only by tracing out the dark pathways of the repressed emotions and reintroducing them into consciousness. They are conjured out of the dark realm of the unconscious into the glaring light of day and, lo! the ghosts vanish for all time and with them all those unpleasant symptoms which have so exercised the physician’s skill. If the psychotherapeutist is to fulfill his difficult task he must acquaint himself with the patient’s second world even more thoroughly than with the first. And so, too, a judge ought never to pronounce sentence without first having thoroughly penetrated the second world of the condemned. In that world are the roots of good and evil in human life. In his “Crime and Punishment” Dostoyevsky’s genius shows in a masterly way the relationship between the two worlds of a criminal. And so, too, Tolstoy, in his “Resurrection,” in an endeavour to enlist our sympathies in her behalf, describes the second world of a courtesan. It is her life-lie that she makes all the men in her embrace blessed. And in sooth, a spark of truth seems to slumber in this life-lie. Physicians, judges, lawyers, and ministers ought all to have a thorough training in psychology. Not psychology in the sense of that school philosophy which flourishes in theoretical phraseology and in theoretical facts remote from the green tree of life. Life can learn only from life. One who knows the secrets of the second world will not be surprised by any happenings that the day may bring forth. He will understand the weaknesses of the great and the strength of the small. He will see virtue and vice coalesce in one great stream whose murky waters will flow on into unknown regions. GRATITUDE AND INGRATITUDE Very few people perceive the ridiculous element in the frequent complaints about the wickedness of human nature. “Human beings are ungrateful, false, untrustworthy,” and so forth. Yes, but we are all human. We ought, therefore, logically speaking, complain: “We human beings are ungrateful, we are false, we are untrustworthy.” But naturally this requires a measure of self-knowledge that is seldom to be found in those bearing the vesture of humanity. Let us make a modest beginning; let us try to look truth in the face. Let us not put ourselves on a pinnacle above the others till we know how high or low we ourselves stand.