and fluid quality. With increasing experience and with a growing power
to argue from ascertained facts, character becomes formed, and if
tempered by discipline will come to present a more and more unyielding
surface to environment, until finally it becomes set into the
stability of adult age.

We may perhaps, with some approach to truth, look upon the adult
neurotic as one whose character retains something of the
impressionable quality of childhood throughout life, so that, to the
last, environment influences conduct more than is natural.

All the emotions of neurotic persons are exaggerated. Disappointments
over trifles cause serious upsets; grief becomes overmastering.
Violent and perhaps ill-conceived affection for individuals is apt to
be followed by bitter dislike and angry quarrelling. On the physical
side, sense perception is abnormally acute, and many sensations which
do not usually rise up into consciousness at all become a source of
almost intolerable suffering. To these most unhappy people summer is
too hot and winter too cold; fresh air is an uncomfortable draught,
while too close an atmosphere produces symptoms of impending
suffocation.

In some neurotics there is an excessive interest in all the processes
of the life of the body, and when attention is once attracted to that
which usually proceeds unconsciously, symptoms of discomfort are apt
to arise. Thus so simple an act as swallowing may become difficult, or
for the time being impossible. To breathe properly and without a sense
of suffocation may seem to require the sustained attention of the
patient; or again, the voice may be suddenly lost.