tion. The thing which is new for them always bulks big in the universe, without any reference to what is true for everybody. For the rest, any sane man will certainly say that this, if it exists, is a part of the unconscious mind which had much better remain unconscious. But it is yet another mark of this sort of agnostic that he is ready to assert his absolute knowledge of everything to the verge of a contradiction in terms. Just as he will always try to write a history of prehistoric man, so he will always struggle to be conscious of his own unconsciousness. And behind all this, as behind the diabolism of the Calvinist and the materialism of the Utilitarian, there is in many cases a mood or a motive which is simply a silly pleasure in brutality and blasphemy. The same sort of thrill that was given by saying that most men were damned, or that all men were selfish, is given by suggesting, however absurdly, that holy motherhood or the love of little children has in it something of the unearthly darkness of Edipus.

84

Even in these unnatural schools, doubtless, this mood is rare, and generally, to use their own favorite word, unconscious. But the same parallel can be found in many political and ethical schools of recent times, and in connections that are cleaner, if quite equally pedantic. Just as it is the latest fad to prove that everything is sexual, so it was the last fad but one to prove that everything was economic. The Marxian notion, called the materialist theory of history, had the same sort of stupid self-confidence in its very insufficient materialism. As the one fad conceives everything

about the bird to be connected with mating, so the other conceived everything connected with it to consist of catching worms. It would be inadequate even about birds, and we ourselves are not limited to a taste for catching worms and still less for being worms. But the most vital answer was, of course, that birds have no history, but only natural history. In so far as it is true that birds do nothing but feed and breed, they do nothing worthy of record, and nothing is recorded; and that is why we have no great historical works on the "Golden Deeds of Goldfinches" or "The Lives of Famous Larks." The whole type of thought in both cases rests on an intellectual confusion between the constant conditions of living and the determining motives of life. It is obvious that life could not continue if sex and food were entirely absent, but that has nothing in the world to do with how frequently they are present. It had certainly nothing to do with how frequently they are present as motives explaining decisive events. It is exactly as if we were to say that because a man stands everywhere or goes anywhere supported on two legs, therefore his two legs are his only interests in life. It is like suggesting that his whole heaven must be in the contemplation and admiration of his legs; that if he runs to catch a train, it must be to exercise his legs, or if he looks to inherit a fortune, it must be to buy boots. Certainly man can only stand on the earth and advance down the ages on the two physical supports of alimentation and reproduction, but that he is perpetually thinking about these things is not only flatly contradicted by the whole of his history, but is really incon

sistent with his having any history. It was said of Sir Willoughby Patterne that he had a leg, and we may even make the bold scientific inference that he had two legs; but if there were nothing but two legs, there would be no romance called "The Egoist." And if there were nothing but these material supports, there would be no romance called "The Roman Empire" or "The Crusades" or "The French Revolution" or "The Great War."

In the case of the materialist theory of history reason has already begun to return even to the materialist. The shrewdest and most hard-headed of the Marxians, such as that very virile veteran, Mr. Hyndman, have already seen through and corrected this very crude economic formula. Even the wildest and most dehumanized of the Marxians are no longer talking very much about the materialist theory of history; in their own realm of Russia, indeed, they are talking mostly about the necessity of strike-breaking and servile labor. The monomania of economic history is already passing, as the monomania of utilitarianism had passed before it, and the monomania of Calvinistic determinism before that. It was time for another monomania to appear.

The monomania of the omnipresence of sex, like the last monomania of the omnipresence of economics, could easily be refuted at length and at large; for the purposes of brevity either is best referred to the daily experience of any ordinary man. Just as any ordinary man who has fallen in love, or got drunk with his friends, or gone for a walk in the country, knows that there are a number of normal motives that are not economic, so any grown man who has ever looked

In

with pleasure at a little boy of three or four knows that the father-complex is all nonsense, and that his pleasure is mingled of many things which psychoanalysis does not analyze, but largely of something of which psychoanalysis would seem to be quite unaware the sense of the absurd. a very short time, no doubt, everybody will be pointing out these palpable absurdities in the current psychological fashion, just as they are already beginning to point out the absurdities in the last economic fashion, and have long been pointing out those in the former economic fashion and the yet earlier theological fashion. These fads fade very fast, and it may seem hardly worth while to prick bubbles that will burst of themselves.

Nevertheless, there is one consideration that makes it worth while. It is a character of all these manias that they cannot really convince the mind, but they do cloud it. Above all, they do darken it. All these tremendous and rather temporary discoveries have had the singular fascination that they were not merely degrading, but were also depressing. Each in turn leaves no trace on the true and serious conclusions of the world. But each in turn may leave very deep and disastrous wounds and dislocations in the mentality of the individual man. Calvinism is dead, but not before Cowper died of it. In short, the real case against the new psychology is purely psychological. Where it is not worth watching as a science, it is worth watching as a disease. Perhaps, however, the best simile is that of the watch kept beside a restless sleeper, tossing in fever or delirium in which one delusion chases another. These things in very truth are of such stuff

as dreams are made of, and never more than when they themselves seek for signs and portents in dreams. A nightmare is never true and a nightmare is never lasting, but it always towers above the stars and occupies heaven and earth while it lasts. It would be a kindness to give people a passing pinch to wake them up.

$ 5

Of course there are other things in psychoanalysis besides this craze for reading the single sexual instinct into all sorts of other instincts and ideas. Of some of them, perhaps, I may write more generally on another occasion, and I will only briefly refer to them here. The idée fixe about the indirect influence of sex is sufficiently typical of the trend of such things and the main truth about them. For the main truth about psychoanalysis is simply that it is not analysis. It does not really analyze at all, for to analyze is to resolve a reality into all its constituents. In the case of the soul this cannot be done perfectly, and these doctors do it much more imperfectly even than it might be done. find their favorite cause in cases where it would be the business of an analyst to find five or six causes, and their complexes really remain complex. But above all they are dealing with a complex which must remain more complex than the cosmos itself.

They

The other great subject matter of psychoanalysis, besides the sex instinct, is the unconscious mind. It is self-evident that nobody can analyze the unconscious mind. Nobody can cut up the whole of it into the smallest pieces, count all the pieces, and be certain that none is missing. The most we can do is to become aware of

the thing, or of adumbrations of the thing, much as psychic investigators claim to do of the psychic world, not even knowing whether the things seen are significant or insignificant as compared with the things not seen. Indeed, it is obvious that among the possibilities of a subconscious mind are all the psychic possibilities. The moment a thing is outside the lighted circle of consciousness, we cannot be certain what allies it has in the darkness. Indeed, we cannot even be certain whether it belongs to us or not. If a prompting comes from nowhere of which we are conscious, obviously we cannot even be conscious that it comes only from our own unconsciousSo far as we know it is news from nowhere, and so far as we merely guess it might be news from anywhere. We cannot conjecture the mere existence of an undiscovered country, and then calmly map out the frontier between that undiscovered country and another undiscovered country. We are improving on the philosopher who said that the snark was a boojum, merely by asserting on our own authority that the snark is strictly forbidden to be a boojum. That is all we are rationalistically entitled to say of the region beyond our conscious reason, that it may contain anything from heaven to hell.

ness.

Turn from this to the fantastic fashion-plate now in vogue in which the subconscious man is already photographed as huge and hairy as his predecessor, the missing link, now, alas! no more. The minor poetry, the fashionable fiction, the talk of the drawing-room, and the tags of the newspaper are full of some ridiculous mythology about every man having inside him a sort of aged and micro

cephalous monkey. Wistful and melancholy poems are written about how trying it is for a man to have a monkey inside him, and ethical essays earnestly debate whether the man should own the monkey or the monkey the man. Men are forgetting that unconsciousness is unconscious, exactly as they forgot that the missing link was missing. They are making a picture of the subconscious man exactly as they made a picture of the superman. In the existing atmosphere of the thing, if it does not indeed pass like a fashion, it can only remain as a superstition. The modern world may or may not recover a religion, but it is rapidly making a mythology.

It is with this mythology that I have been dealing here, as threatening to be a superstition fit for savages, and not with the minimum of true medicinal treatment for the mind, which would require another sort of article to itself. Even in that subject of the medicine there would be too much that savors of the medicine-man. But I do not at all deny that, in the hands of men truly scientific and preferably sane, much may be done in the disentangling of morbid memories or unnatural associations. But by far the best case for this better side of the business is to be found in another historical retrospect, of the time before Calvinism began the dance of the modern monomanias. Our civilization before the Calvinist philosophy was possessed of the Catholic philosophy. The Puritans destroyed the institutions of medieval Christianity one after another, and the moderns. have been driven to restore them one after another. The only difference is

that the same thing which had a moderate medieval form generally has an extravagant modern form. The cult of feminism has made nonsense of the protests against Mariolatry. There are wild Protestant sects in America at this moment, which would still probably refuse honor to the Mother of God, while they are already asking why God is not called a mother. The cult of estheticism made nonsense of the protests against ritualism. William Morris actually put on his wall-papers the symbols that Christians were forbidden to put on their walls, and because men might not say the Litany of the Virgin reverently, Swinburne rewrote it for them blasphemously, and addressed it to a harlot. Because it was superstitious of the monks to practise communism on a small scale, everybody is commanded by the Bolshevists to practise it on a colossal scale; and because we destroyed democratic guilds that were conservative, we are rewarded with trades-unions that are revolutionary. The modern world rejected as incredible the medieval miracles that were worked by relics and holy places, and has gone off to work its own miracles with tables and tambourines; it has denied that a dead man could possibly have a glorified body, and lived to hear its most eminent scientists saying that he can have a glorified golf-club and a glorified brandy and soda. There is not a single one of the institutions denounced and destroyed as parts of medieval society that has not by this time been painfully parodied as a part of modern society. There was perhaps only one lacking, and it has now been supplied. Psychoanalysis is the restoration of the confessional.

The modern world has really suffered from a monstrous burden of secrecy. Perpetually talking of enlightenment and public opinion, it has had more privacy in the bad sense than any previous age. Its conservative politics are sustained by secret party funds, its revolutionary politics by secret societies. In emotional matters it has grown still more stagnant and poisonous, and the healthiest aspect of the new psychology is that it is the bursting of that secretion.

On the practical side the comparison remains the same. Whether or not it can do all the alleged good that the confessional does, it could certainly do all the alleged harm that the confes

sional was accused of doing. It confesses to every count in the old indictment: the unseemliness of the subject matter, the possible unworthiness of the recipient. Indeed, the vulgar charge is much plainer against a casual experimentalist than against a selfdedicated celibate. A priest may be a systematic profligate and break his vows, but it is not immediately obvious why a systematic profligate should have any vows to break. But all this comparison is beyond the question here; it is enough to say that in this also the modern world dubiously copies the medieval world, which is furiously condemned. And that if this be a fault, it is the nearest the thing comes to a virtue.