Social laughter is momentary, soon burns itself out and passes away like the fire and smokes of straw, but genius shakes the very skies with its lasting, inextinguishable laughter.

If society is to progress on a truly humanistic basis, without being subject to mental epidemics and virulent social diseases to which the subconscious falls an easy victim, the personal consciousness of every individual should be cultivated to the highest degree possible.

Human institutions depend for their existence and stability on the impulse of self-preservation and its close associate, - the fear instinct.

Psychology must postulate uniformity of interrelation of physical, physiological, and psychic processes.

Psychology is the science of psychic states both as to content and form, regarded from an objective standpoint, and brought in relation to the living corporeal individual.

The main source of psychopathic diseases is the fundamental instinct of fear with its manifestations, the feeling of anxiety, anguish, and worry.

Superstitions, and especially the early cultivation of religion, with its "fear of the Lord" and of unknown mysterious agencies, are especially potent in the development of the instinct of fear. Even the early cultivation of morality and conscientiousness, with their fears of right and wrong, often causes psychoneurotic states in later life. Religious, social, and moral taboos and superstitions, associated with apprehension of threatening impending evil, based on the fear instinct, form the germs of psychopathic affections.