shed with protection against stimulation. [On the other hand]
the sensitive cortical layer has no protective barrier against
excitations emanating from within.... The most prolific sources of
such excitations are the so-called instincts of the organism....
The child never gets tired of demanding the repetition of a game
... he wants always to hear the same story instead of a new one,
insists inexorably on exact repetition, and corrects each deviation
which the narrator lets slip by mistake.... According to this, _an
instinct would be a tendency in living organic matter impelling it
towards reinstatement of an earlier condition_, one which it had
abandoned under the influence of external disturbing forces--a kind
of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the manifestation
of inertia in organic life.

"If, then, all organic instincts are conservative, historically
acquired, and directed towards regression, towards reinstatement of
something earlier, we are obliged to place all the results of
organic development to the credit of external, disturbing, and
distracting influences. The rudimentary creature would from its
very beginning not have wanted to change, would, if circumstances
had remained the same, have always merely repeated the same course
of existence.... It would be counter to the conservative nature of
instinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached.
It must be rather an ancient starting point, which the living being
left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the
circuitous paths of development.... _The goal of all life is
death...._

"Through a long period of time the living substance may have ...
had death within easy reach ... until decisive external influences
altered in such a way as to compel [it] to ever greater deviations
from the original path of life, and to ever more complicated and
circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of death. These
circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative
instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of
life as we know it."

Freud puts forth these interesting suggestions with much modesty,
admitting that they are vague and uncertain and (what it is even more
important to notice) mythical in their terms; but it seems to me that,
fo