be reborn. It sounds old,
very old. And pathetic because it recognizes original and permanent
ingredients of our composition in the words pugnacity, greed, sex,
fear, as elements to be accepted in any system of the principles of
civilization. It is the bubble of education all over again. What in
our cells is pugnacity? What in our bones is greed? What in our
blood is sex? What in our nerves is fear? Until these inquiries are
respected, conscious character building or even stock breeding must
remain the laughing stock of the smoking rooms and the regimental
barracks.

Come the Freudians. To them we owe the aeroplanes to a new universe.
They have opened up for us the geology of the soul. Layer upon layer,
cross-section upon cross-section have been piled before us. And what
a melodramatic cinema of thrills and shivers, villains and heroes,
heroines and adventuresses have they not unfolded. Each motive, as
the stiff psychologist of the nineteenth century, with his
plaster-of-Paris categories and pigeon holes and classifications,
labelled the teeming creatures of the mind, becomes anon a strutting
actor upon a multitudinous stage, and an audience in a crowded
playhouse. Scenes are enacted the febrile fancy of a Poe or a de
Maupassant never could have conjured. The complex, the neurosis, the
compulsion, the obsession, the slip of speech, the trick of manner,
the devotion of a life-time, the culture of a nation all furnish bits
for the Freudian mosaic. Attractions and inhibitions, repulsions and
suppressions are held up as the ultimate pulling and pushing forces of
human nature.

But is the problem solved? Is not human nature primarily animal
nature? And do we so thoroughly understand this animal nature? Does
not all this material of Freudianism consist of variations upon social
burdens imposed on the original human nature? To be sure, at every
moment of life, choices have to be made, and choice involves the
clashing of instincts and motives, with victory for one or some, and
defeat for the others. But the Freudian material per se--the sex
material--is it not merely the by-product of a certain state of
society? A sane society would eliminate nearly all of Freudian
disease, but still have original human nature upon its hands. Why is
it that of two individuals exposed to the same situation, one will
develop a complex, the other will remain immune? The only soil we know
of, the real foundation stones of our being and living, a