How does this unhappy state arise? In the first place, from the very start of life people differ in the quality of eagerness. There is a wide variability in these qualities. Of two infants one will call lustily for whatever he wants, show great glee in anticipating, great eagerness in seeking, and a high degree of satisfaction when his desire is gratified. And another will be lackadaisical in his appetite, whimsical, "hard to please" and much more difficult to keep pleased. Fatigue will strip the second child of the capacity to eat and sleep, to say nothing of his desires for social pleasures, whereas it will only dampen the zeal and eagerness of the first child. There is a hearty simple type of person who is naively eager and enthusiastic, full of desire, passion and enthusiasm, who finds joy and satisfaction in simple things, whose purposes do not grow stale or monotonous; there is a finicky type, easily displeased and dissatisfied, laying weight on trifles, easily made anhedonic, victims of any reduction in their own energy (which is on the whole low) or of any disagreeable event. True, these sensitive folk are creators of beauty and the esthetic, but also they are the victims of the malady we are here discussing. Aside from this temperament, training plays its part. I think it a crime against childhood to make its joys complex or sophisticated. Too much adult company and adult amusements are destructive of desire and satisfaction to the child. A boy or girl whose wishes are at once gratified gets none of the pleasure of effort and misses one of the essential lessons of life.--that pleasure and satisfaction must come from the chase and not from the quarry, from the struggle and effort as well as from the goal. Montaigne, that wise skeptic, lays much homely emphasis on this, as indeed all wise men do. But too great a struggle, too desperate an effort, exhausts, and as a runner lies panting and motionless at the tape, so we all have seen men reach a desired place after untold privation and sacrifice and who then found that there seemed to be no energy, no zeal or desire, no satisfaction left for them. The too eager and enthusiastic are exposed, like all the overemotional, to great recessions, great ebbs, in the volume of their feeling and feel for a time the direst pain in all experience, the death in life of anhedonia. After an illness, particularly influenza, when recovery has seemingly taken place, there develops a lack of energy feeling and the whole syndrome of anhedonia which lasts until the subtle damage done by the disease passes off. Half or more of the "nervousness" in the world is based on actual physical trouble, and the rest relates to temperament.