They were followed by feelings of sheepishness and self-contempt mingled with anger and a dislike of all things having to do with religion.  My inability to pass the conversion crisis and a growing contempt for empty enthusiasm finally led me to a saner attitude toward religion, from which I passed easily into religious scepticism; and later the study of philosophy and science, and particularly of psychology, banished the last lingering remnant of faith in a supernatural agency and led me to the passion for facts and indifference to values which have caused me to be often called “dead to all morality.”

    HISTORY II.—­C.A., aged 25, unmarried; tutor, preparing to take
    Holy Orders:—­

My paternal ancestry (which is largely Huguenot) is noteworthy for its patriotism and its large families.  My father, who died when I was a year old, is remembered for the singular uprightness and purity of his life from his earliest childhood.  The photograph which I have shows him as possessed of a rare classic beauty of features.  He was an ideal husband and father.  At the time of his death he was a Master of Arts and a school principal.  My mother is an extraordinarily neurotic woman, yet famed among her friends for her great domesticity, attachment to her husbands, and an almost abnormal love of babies.  She has nobly borne the ill-treatment of her second husband, who for several years has been in a state of melancholia.  My mother has been “highly-wrought” all her life, and has suffered intensely from fears of all kinds.  As a young girl she was somnambulistic, and once fell down a stairhead during sleep.  In spite of her bodily sufferings with indigestion, eye-strain, and depression she retains her youthfulness.  She has slight powers of reasoning.  She has had times of unconsciousness and rigidity, I have never heard any mention of epilepsy.  She has a horror of showing prudishness in regard to the healthful manifestations of sex life, and is always praising examples of what she terms “a natural woman.”

I have heard that during my first year my mother detected my nurse in the act of putting a morphine powder on my tongue for the purpose of keeping me quiet.  I was subject to convulsions at this period, and narrowly escaped a permanent hernia.  My family tell me that from the beginning I was a well-developed and boyish boy, full of mischief, impulsive, good to look upon, unusually affectionate, beloved by all.

In my third year I took pleasure in crawling under the bed with my boy-cousin who was nine months my senior, and after we had taken down our drawers, in kissing each other’s nates.  I do not remember which of us first thought of this pastime.

At the age of 4 I gave myself a treat by gazing upward through a cellar window at the nates of a woman who was defecating from several feet above into a cesspool that lay beneath.  It was during this summer also that I frightened