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A curious set of happenings, in which I myself was one of the actors, throws a good deal of light on this by no means uncommon occurrence. It was in the early days of my interest in occultism, when I was still buying nay experience by the expensive but effectual method of running my head into obstacles, I made the acquaintance of a woman who was interested in psychic matters. She was a person of the most extreme sensitiveness to anything unclean or ugly, fastidious to a degree in her personal habits, living almost exclusively on uncooked vegetarian foods, even refusing eggs as too stimulating. Although not an animal lover, she was morbidly humanitarian, reading with gusto those papers which give lurid and detailed descriptions of vivisection experiments. Had I been older and wiser I should have recognised the significance of her ultra-cleanliness and ultra-sensitiveness as marking the ab-reaction of a sadistic temperament - sadism being a pathology of the emotional nature in which the sex instinct takes the form of an impulse to inflict pain. Not having learnt then many things which I now know, I looked upon her characteristics as indicative of an exalted spirituality.