Considering that James, while still in his twenties, had found such resources within himself, and had learned how to occupy himself in ways so appropriate to the development of his best faculties, it would seem that he need not have labored under any sense of frustration and impotence. But such a feeling undoubtedly did weigh heavily upon him during more or less of the whole period between his winter in Berlin and 1872. And it was indeed due in great part to something else than the mere fact that he could not yet feel the rungs of the ladder of any particular career under his feet. No reader of the "Varieties of Religious Experience" can have doubted that he had known religious despondency himself as well as observed the distress of it in others. The problem of the moral constitution of things, the question of man's relation to the Universe,--whether significant or impotent and meaningless,--these had clearly come home to him as more than questions of metaphysical discourse. It was during this period that such doubts invaded his consciousness in a way that was personal and intimate and, for the time being, oppressive. He was tormented by misgivings which almost paralyzed his naturally buoyant spirit. Bad health, a feeling of the purposelessness of his own particular existence, his philosophic doubts and his constant preoccupation with them, all these combined to plunge him into a state of morbid depression. He seems to have hidden the depth of it from those who were about him. He even had an experience of that kind of melancholy "which takes the form of panic fear." When he wrote the chapter on the "sick soul" thirty years later, he put into it an account of this experience. He still disguised it as the report of an anonymous "French correspondent." Subsequently he admitted to M. Abauzit that the passage was really the story of his own case,[47] and it may be repeated here, for the words of the fictitious French correspondent, who was really James, are the most authentic statement that could be given. They will be found at page 160 of the "Varieties of Religious Experience."