Years ago—or to be precise in the year 1840—de Quincey, comparing the mental diseases that arise from excessive expression with those that come from insufficient expression, or the non-expression, of deep sensibilities, wrote as follows concerning this matter: “Amongst the Quakers (who may be regarded as a monastic people) anomalous forms of nervous derangement are developed, the secret principle of which turns ... upon feelings too much repelled and driven in. Morbid suppression of deep sensibilities must lead to states of disease equally terrific, and possibly even less tractable; not so sudden and critical it may be, but more settled and gloomy.”[117] This anticipates most of what modern psychology has discovered about repression, and can be applied just as legitimately to repression in the physical as in the psychical sphere. But a very much earlier record of the same common-sense view about repression, or non-expression of natural appetites and sensibilities, is to be found in Aristotle’s _Poetics_, where the doctrine of _catharsis_ constitutes the kernel of all that modern psychologists would claim in regard to this particular aspect of civilized humanity. As the life of the individual female is prolonged, and the _tone_ of her reproductive organs depreciates through the deleterious influence of long idle waiting, there occurs an abatement of the unconscious influences impelling the positive spinster to seek a fuller life. A sort of passive adaptation to abnormality takes place in which a balance is attained, and the restless and more afflicting symptoms become accordingly less acute. But, with the decline in sexual vigour and alertness, there is a corresponding falling off of good spirits, hopefulness, and the love of life, and frequently there supervenes a pronounced distaste for human concerns or a general depression, which makes the spinster the proverbially embittered female of popular tradition. The more positive she was at the outset, the more likely is this revulsion of feeling to appear in an intolerable form—hence the common occurrence of embittered spinsters on the Continent, where women are, as a rule, more positive than in England. Indeed, it can usually be taken for granted that where Nature has been thwarted without any dire results, Nature was not originally very strong, or not assertive enough to offer very severe resistance. The presence of thousands of very cheerful and completely adapted spinsters in England, therefore, far from being a good sign, is in reality a very deplorable one; for it argues that in them Nature was not powerful enough to offer any determined fight before allowing herself to be completely conquered.