e stood
before a sign reading: "First ride 25c, second ride 15c, third ride
10c." Then, scratching his head, he exclaimed, "Faith, and I'll take
the third ride!" Should there by any chance be a reader who, eager to
find the way out without paying the price of knowledge, is tempted to
say to himself "Faith, and I'll begin with Part III," we give him fair
warning that if he does so, he will in all probability end by putting
down the book in a confused and skeptical frame of mind.

It is difficult to find our way out of a maze without some faint idea
of the path by which we got in. He who brings to this chapter the
popular notion that nervousness is the result of worn-out
nerve-cells, can hardly be expected to understand how it can be cured
by a process of mental adjustment. Suggestion to that effect can
scarcely fail to appear to him faddish and unpractical. But once a
person has grasped the idea that "nerves" are merely a slip in the cog
of hidden mental machinery, and has acquired at least a
working-knowledge of "the way the wheels go round," he can scarcely
fail to understand that the only logical cure must consist in some
kind of readjustment of this underground machinery. If "nerves" were
physical, then only physical measures could cure, but as they are
psychic, the only effective measures must be psychic.

=Gross Misconceptions.= Nervousness is caused by a lack of adjustment
to the world as it is; therefore the only possible cure must be some
sort of readjustment between the person's inner forces and the demands
of the social world. As this lack of adjustment is concerned chiefly
with the repressed instinct of reproduction, it is only natural that
there should be people who believe that "the way out" lies in some
form of physical satisfaction of the sex-impulse--in marriage, in
changing or ignoring the social code, in homo-sexual relations or in
the practice of masturbation. But we have only to look about us to see
that this prescription does not cure. Freud naively asks whether he
would be likely to take three years to uncover and loosen the psychic
resistances of his patients, if the simple prescription of sex-license
would give relief.

Since there are as many married neurotics as single, it is evident
that even marriage is not a sure preventive of nervousness. License,
on the other hand, can satisfy only a part of the individual's
craving. Freud insists that the sex-instinct has a psychic component
as well a