In the face of these conceptions the position of the psychanalyst as a practical therapeutist becomes clearer, and the causes of his failure when he fails. In the first place, he deals with psychic results as processes, and ignores the physiology of their production. Since a true cure of the neurosis, what he is after, is impossible without a removal of the cause, a disturbance in the vegetative apparatus, he cannot succeed where an automatic adjustment among the viscera does not follow his probings and ferretings of the unconscious. In the second place, he disregards the existence of a soil for the planting of the malign complexes in the individual in whom they grow and flourish. That soil is composed in part of the endocrine relations within the vegetative apparatus. And as we can often attack that soil more effectively and radically from the endocrine end than from the experience end (e.g., repressed episodes) we may transform the soil and make it barren rock for morbid complexes, at any rate. The concept of the endocrine-vegetative apparatus as the determinant of normal and abnormal behaviour, emotional reactions and disturbances of power should in time cause even the most fanatic of the psychanalysts to recognize the functional basis of the mental acrostics they are so fond of dissecting. NATURAL ABILITY Another achievement of the psychanalysts is the recognition of the influence of organic and functional inferiorities of the individual upon the history of his personality. Gross organ inferiorities are those which are definite handicaps in the struggle for success in society, such as heart disease. Such handicaps, however, are limited to relatively few of a population. The raison d'être of the greater number of minor mental inefficiencies the psychanalyst puts down to handicaps in the unconscious. Again he mistakes figurative imagery for explanations. The conception of endocrine diversity in the make-up supplies us with the rationale of the vast majority of organic and functional defects and inferiorities, in short, subnormalities of any group, large or small. Moreover, how would the psychanalyst explain the occurrence and influence of organic and functional _superiorities_ and their tremendous influence upon the individual and society? We live in a generation which has acquired a flair for the pathologic. Undoubtedly it is a soul-sick generation, and its interest in sickness of the mind is only natural. Just the same, whatever advances, improvements, progress, have been made (and certainly a number of the changes in his environment, external and internal, must be admitted to be changes for the better) have been made, not by natural disability, but by natural ability. What is the physiology of natural ability?