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The man who is mentally healthy is able to gain strength and consolation and the material through which he can achieve mental development through his contact with reality, no matter whether that reality is painful or not. This view may owe its origins to experience in no way metaphysical, but such as might be achieved through failure to admit the existence of a physical hazard to physical progress and the resultant fall. The reciprocal view is that no man can become mentally healthy save by a process of constant search for fact and a determination to eschew any elements, however seductive or pleasurable, that interpose themselves between himself and his environment as it really is. As a psychoanalyst I include the man's own personality as a part, and a very important part, of his environment. By contrast it may be said that man owes his health, and his capacity for continued health, to his ability to shield himself during his growth as an individual by repeating in his personal life the history of the race's capacity for self-deception against truth that his mind is not fitted to receive without disaster. Like the earth, he carries with him an atmosphere, albeit a mental one, which shields him from the mental counterpart of the cosmic and other rays at present supposed to be rendered innocuous to men, thanks to the physical atmosphere.