the cause, it is put out. Putting it out does not,
however, end the drama; putting it out serves to complicate the drama.
For the "new psychology"[91] shows that whenever an interest or a desire
or impulsion is put out of the mind, it is really, if not extirpated,
put into the mind; it is driven from the conscious level of existence to
the unconscious. It retains its force and direction, only its work now
lies underground. Its life henceforward consists partly in a direct
oppugnance to the inhibitions that keep it down, partly in burrowing
beneath and around them and seeking out unwonted channels of escape.
Since life is long, repressions accumulate, the mass of existence of
feeling and desire tends to become composed entirely of these
repressions, layer upon layer, with every interest in the aggregate
striving to attain place in the daylight of consciousness.

Now, empirically and metaphysically, no one interest is more excellent
than any other. Repressed or patent, each is, whether in a completely
favorable environment or in a completely indifferent universe, or before
the bar of an absolute justice, or under the domination of an absolute
and universal good, entitled to its free fulfilment and perfect
maintenance. Each is a form of the good; the essential content of each
is good. That any are not fulfilled, but repressed, is a fact to be
recorded, not an appearance to be explained away. And it may turn out
that the existence of the fact may explain the effort to explain it
away. For where interests are in conflict with each other or with
reality, and where the loser is not extirpated, its revenge may be just
this self-fulfilment in unreality, in idea, which philosophies of
absolute values offer it. Dreams, some of the arts, religion, and
philosophy may indeed be considered as such fulfilments, worlds of
luxuriant self-realization of all that part of our nature which the
harsh conjunctions with the environment overthrow and suppress.
Sometimes abortive self-expressions of frustrated desires, sometimes
ideal compensations for the shortcomings of existence, they are always
equally ideal reconstructions of the surrounding evil of the world into
forms of the good. And because they are compensations in idea, they are
substituted for existence, appraised as "true," and "good," and
"beautiful," and "real," while the experiences which have suppressed the
desires they realize are condemned as illusory and unreal. In them
human