ked to support and to
rationalise. Is human nature, then, resident in each individual soul?
Certainly: but the soul is merely another name for that active principle
which we are looking for, to be the seat of our sensibility and the source
of our actions. Is this psychic power, then, resident in the body?
Undoubtedly; since it is hereditary and transmitted by a seed, and
continually aroused and modified by material agencies.

Since this soul or self in the body is so obscure, the temptation is great
to dramatise its energies and to describe them in myths. Myth is the
normal means of describing those forces of nature which we cannot measure
or understand; if we could understand or measure them we should describe
them prosaically and analytically, in what is called science. But nothing
is less measurable, or less intelligible to us, in spite of being so near
us and familiar, as the life of this carnal instrument, so soft and so
violent, which breeds our sensations and precipitates our actions. We see
today how the Freudian psychology, just because it is not satisfied with
registering the routine of consciousness but endeavours to trace its
hidden mechanism and to unravel its physical causes, is driven to use the
most frankly mythological language. The physiological processes concerned,
though presupposed, are not on the scale of human perception and not
traceable in detail; and the moral action, though familiar in snatches,
has to be patched by invented episodes, and largely attributed to daemonic
personages that never come on the stage.

Locke, in his psychology of morals, had at first followed the verbal
rationalism by which people attribute motives to themselves and to one
another. Human actions were explained by the alleged pursuit of the
greater prospective pleasure, and avoidance of the greater prospective
pain. But this way of talking, though not so poetical as Freud's, is no
less mythical. Eventual goods and evils have no present existence and no
power: they cannot even be discerned prophetically, save by the vaguest
fancy, entirely based on the present impulses and obsessions of the soul.
No future good, no future evil avails to move us, except--as Locke said
after examining the facts more closely--when a _certain uneasiness_ in the
soul (or in the body) causes us to turn to those untried goods and evils
with a present and living interest. This actual uneasiness, with the dream
pictures which it evokes, is a mere