this explanation is the true one I feel by no means clear. I throw it out simply as a suggestion, confessing that this peculiar emotion is one which neither analysis nor synthesis enables me clearly to understand." Footnote 45: _Principles of Psychology_, ii., § 518. This explanation seems to me only a partial one, and not applicable to all cases. In my opinion, no efforts of this kind can be successful, because the authors remain on the ground of normal psychology. This class of facts ought to be treated by the pathological method. It may be said that this is only the substitution of one word for another. By no means, as we shall see by the result. The mistake lies in attacking, in the first instance, phenomena of too delicate a nature, and considering them as isolated facts. We must proceed, not by synthesis or analysis, but by the cumulative method—_i.e._, we must establish a chain of facts, of which the last links, being of overwhelming importance, shall throw light on the first. I indicate the principal stages of this gradation thus—Æsthetic melancholy (transitory and intermittent); spleen, melancholia (in the medical sense);[46] then, advancing a step further, suicidal tendencies, and finally, suicide. This last term makes all the others comprehensible. The first stages are only embryonic, abortive, or modified forms of the tendency to self-destruction, of the desire which makes it seem agreeable. The weaker forms—checked in an immense majority of cases—approximate more or less to destruction, and can only be explained if compared with the extreme case. Footnote 46: Krafft-Ebing remarks: “An abnormal mode of feeling on the part of melancholic patients is found in the enjoyment of pain (_Leidseligkeit_). In these individuals, ideas which, in a healthy slate, would be provocative of pain, awaken in the diseased consciousness a faint feeling of satisfaction which represents the corresponding affective tone.” The evolutionists have stated the hypothesis that there must have existed certain animals so constituted that, in them, pleasure was connected with destructive acts, pain with useful ones, and that, as every animal seeks pleasure and shuns pain, they must have perished in virtue of their very constitution, since they sought the destructive and shunned the preservative influences. There is nothing chimerical in this supposition, for we see men find pleasure in acts which, as they very well know, will speedily result in their deaths. A being thus constituted is abnormal, illogical; he contains within himself a contradiction of which he will perish.