Evil and the New Psychology

I

THE new psychology appears to be making a discovery, the first promise of which is not yet perceived, even by the psychologists. This discovery is difficult to state, both because it is not yet fully made, and because it concerns the human mind, about which we know so little that we have not even words to express that little precisely. I will, therefore, ask the reader to forgive me if my statement fails to satisfy him.

It is being made in the effort to cure certain mental disorders, such as those which are called phobias. The phobia, it appears, has its origin in the mental history of the patient, in some shock or other mischance which he has forgotten. The fact that he has forgotten the origin is itself part of the cause of the phobia; and, if the origin can by some means be discovered and made known to the patient, then he will be able to cure himself of the phobia. The whole process, though seeming to work mechanically, is mental. It is like putting a machine in order, except that the machine knows that it is out of order and rights itself by becoming aware of the origin of its disorder. The healing knowledge comes from outside, from the psychoanalyst, yet it also comes as knowledge to the patient. It is absorbed mentally, just as medicine is absorbed physically; and then, like medicine, it works, the patient cannot tell how, but still mentally.

Now, as I have said, the full promise of this discovery is not commonly perceived, even by psychologists; for, in the first place, they have not yet insisted that it can be extended to the errors and moral perversities of normal people; and, in the second, they are often prevented by certain unconscious assumptions of their own from seeing what a new light it throws upon the whole problem of evil. These two points are closely connected with each other, so that the first will lead me naturally to the second. I will, then, begin with the first, namely the extension of the discovery to the errors and perversities of normal people.

We are all aware, or should be, that our common method of dealing with each other’s errors, namely, by controversy, is not successful; its failure is well expressed in the lines: —

That is to say, a man convinced against his will is not convinced. Indeed, you cannot convince him of any error, thoroughly established in his mind, by a rational process; for the error itself was not established by a rational process. The psychoanalysts, when they deal with a phobia, arc aware of this. They do not argue with a patient, do not tell him that it is absurd to be afraid of edged tools or of open spaces, or what not. They know that argument in such cases is like rubbing a sore: it only makes the patient more aware of his disorder, and so more convinced of its reality. The psychoanalyst’s method is, rather, to assume that it is a mere disorder, to place it in the category of disease, not in that of reason; and to tell the patient how it has come about. Then, for the patient also, it passes out of the category of reason into that of disease; and, when he knows the cause of it, it becomes to him something finite, mechanical, external, and so loses its intimidating power over him. Instead of classing it with madness, he classes it with toothache; and this very classification, by separating it, as it were, from the whole system of his mind, is itself a cure.

Thus it is that we should deal with error, both in others and, finally, in ourselves. We should, to begin with, understand that the processes by which truth and error establish themselves in the mind are different; and, wherever we find error firmly established, we should seek for the cause of it and explain that cause to the person who is in error. Argument, in such cases, is worse than useless; for it treats error as if it were of the same nature as truth, takes it seriously, and assumes its origin to be rational. Further, when we attack a man’s errors by argument, we enlist all his self-love in defense of them. They are to him part of himself; but, if he is to renounce them, he must be persuaded that they are not part of himself, but an accident that has happened to him, like a phobia.

Opinions or beliefs, once very firmly held, often vanish from our minds, without our knowing why or how they have vanished. We may think that some argument has destroyed them, and then wonder why we have seen the force of this argument at last, when we have been familiar with it so long without heeding it. In such cases the argument is usually a mere summons to surrender: the battle has really been fought, and the victory won, in the unconscious; for the cause of our belief has, for some reason, disappeared, and the belief itself has remained only until challenged. The cause of a false belief is really an obstacle to perception of the truth, and, that obstacle removed, the truth is seen. At present, this removal of obstacles is often a matter of chance; but the discovery of the new psychology should help us to effect it deliberately, in ourselves and in others. The mere knowledge that there may be causes of our dearest beliefs, unknown to ourselves, should set us examining those beliefs with a new and more critical curiosity; for there is not one of us that really wishes to believe nonsense. We believe it because some particular credulity in our minds makes it appear to be sense; and credulity is always particular, not general; it is a tendency to believe, not any nonsense, but some favorite kind of nonsense. For it has always a particular cause; and, when once that is discovered, the beliefs in which the credulity expresses itself do not need to be argued with: they have lost their prestige for us, like an often repeated tune, the melody of which has turned to stale sentimentality. Yet, even when we have discovered the cause of a credulity, we seldom connect that discovery with the resulting change of belief. The change works in the unconscious, just as a patient is cured of a phobia without seeing how he is cured.

Suppose, for instance, that you believe more ill about someone than is true. That is because you have a readiness to believe ill about him — a credulity on that point for which there is a cause, not a reason. The credulity means a resentment against him, which, like a phobia, has power over you just because you are not aware of its cause. But then, suppose you suddenly become aware, by some means, of the cause of this resentment — as that he has wounded your vanity, or has caused you some loss of income, or that for some reason you are afraid of him. This cause you have hidden from yourself because you wished to enjoy the resentment, and could do so only by rationalizing it; that is to say by believing that the man’s actions and character justified it. But, the moment you are aware of the cause, the resentment itself loses its charm for you and is reduced to its proper proportions. Though, perhaps, the man has really behaved ill to you, your pleasure will no longer be in your anger, but rather in trying to be just in spite of it. You will judge yourself for your resentment, as well as him for provoking it. Your whole state of mind toward him will have lost its prestige and you will see it as having, not a reason, but a cause which it is your business to remove.

Resentments are just like phobias in this, that they are greatest and most dangerous to right thinking and feeling when the cause of them is unknown; then the mind is poisoned by them, as the body by a festering, covered wound. So, if you find yourself thinking and feeling about someone altogether in terms of some resentment, you may be sure that it has an unknown cause. Find the cause, and you will isolate the resentment from the rest of your mind. You will see it in its danger and ugliness, and have the will to rid yourself of it. We all have within us a will to be sane, and it acts as soon as we become aware of the caused insanity of any of our beliefs, of the feelings which make us credulous; for the beliefs are but a rationalizing of the feelings.

And this is true, not only of particular errors, such as we can detect in each other when we do not share them, but also of collective beliefs held by great masses of people, such as nations, or even by whole generations of every nation. The way to destroy these also is, not to argue with them, but to discover their cause and state it clearly. Only so can their prestige be destroyed.

If, for instance, it can be shown that a theological belief has been developed and maintained by a priesthood in its own professional interests, then it will lose its prestige for the laity, and even for the priesthood. Or if it can be shown that the whole doctrine of laissez-faire had its cause in the desire of people with capital to get every possible advantage from their capital without doing violence to their consciences, then that doctrine also will lose its prestige, even for them. But in all such cases the cause must be discovered and stated with precision, so that it will be clear, even to unwilling minds. Then it will gradually and unconsciously work its effect upon them, and they will find themselves no longer able to believe what they have believed, for their own comfort. It is impossible for us to believe anything for our comfort, as soon as we know that that is why we have been believing it. The process of comforting belief must be unconscious. To make us conscious of it is to end it.

Behind most, if not all, of our common and persistent erroneous beliefs there is some kind of fear; they are of the nature of phobias, though the fear, being an entirely negative and, therefore, unpleasant feeling, disguises itself in some more positive form. And even beliefs not altogether erroneous are constantly tainted and perverted by an element of fear. For instance, the belief in God and the belief in immortality have, all through the ages, been perverted by fear; in fact our minds are infested with inherited and habitual phobias, against which, hitherto, we have had no defense, since we were not even aware of the distinction between them and rational beliefs, or that in that distinction lay the promise of a cure. But now the promise has dawned upon us; and it remains to apply a scientific cure to all error, to discover and state its causes with precision. For, without precision of statement, there can be no conviction; but, with it, the conviction will come silently and irresistibly, since it will enlist the will to be sane, which is, in every man, on its side.

II

Unfortunately, the fulfillment of that promise is also hindered, as I have said, by certain unconscious assumptions of the psychologists, which make the promise itself seem a threat to the freedom of the mind. A great psychologist once said to me that he wished to free psychology altogether from philosophy. I answered that I did not know whether he could do it, or was right in trying to do it, but that he would certainly be right if he tried to free psychology from unconscious metaphysical assumptions. I was thinking of certain assumptions which seem to be often made by the Freudians, and which blind them to the promise of their great discovery. For they, finding the causes of evil in the mind, and by that means often removing the evil, make no distinction, in this matter, between right and wrong processes of the mind, but assume that the right processes are caused in the same way as the wrong.

That is their theory, but not, of course, their practice. They are able to remove a phobia from the mind by discovering its cause, but they do not try to remove a true belief by discovering its cause; and, if they did, they would find it impossible, not merely because the discovery of the cause would fail to remove the belief, but also because the cause of true beliefs, and, indeed, of all right processes in the mind, cannot be discovered.

The Freudian might admit this in the case of true beliefs; but he will not admit it in the case of other right processes. For instance, having discovered that many mental disorders are caused by the sexual instinct working in the unconscious, he is apt to assume that all the normal processes of the mind are controlled by the sexual instinct. He will tell you that all art is a disguised expression of the sexual instinct, because many failures and perversities of art can so be explained. And there are psychologists who will tell you that all morals are a product of the gregarious instinct, because we can often detect that instinct in bad morals. The assumption in both cases is that, behind the self and more real than the self, are a number of impersonal, and indeed mechanical, forces called instincts, into which the self can be analyzed away. As another psychologist once said to me: ‘Freud bombs the self into fragments and then hands the fragments back to you with a complacent smile.’

We have a right to be suspicious of all theories that are incompatible with practice; and no theory is more incompatible with the universal practice of mankind, — and indeed of the Freudians,—than this. For in practice, as I have said, they seek among these instincts only for the causes of what is wrong with the mind; and they know when they have found these causes, because, by finding them, they are able to set the mind right. This test they cannot apply, even if they would, the other way. No one has ever yet destroyed a true belief by discovering its causes; for true beliefs have reasons, not causes. Further, no one has yet discredited a right morality by connecting it with the gregarious instinct; nor has anyone made good art seem bad, or deterred the artist from producing it, by asserting that it is an expression of the sexual instinct. We may find in the egotism of mankind a cause for the once universal belief that the earth was the centre of the universe; we can find no cause for the belief that the sun is the centre of our solar system, except the fact that it is true.

We may see the working of the gregarious instinct in much conventional morality; we may even suddenly become aware of that instinct in our own morality; but to see it, is to discredit the morality. We are not aware of it in the morals of Socrates or of Christ, which are to us morals and arouse our sense of moral value because they revolt against the tyranny of the gregarious instinct. They are not caused as gregarious morality is caused; at least there is no cause which we can detect in them, which, when detected, discredits them. As we accept a true belief because it is true, so we accept their morals because they are good.

Again, it is the bad or the half-insane artist who finds a vent in his art for his unsatisfied appetites; and a psychologist can explain the causes of his failure so that we are convinced by the explanation. But, if he tries to explain success in art in the same way, we are not convinced, nor is the artist. I may see unconscious, unsatisfied, sexual instinct in some religious picture that revolts me with its sensuality disguised as sentimentality; or the discovery of that instinct may put me out of conceit with a picture that I myself have liked because it made a disguised appeal to my own sexual instinct. But I cannot see sex at all in Rembrandt’s Supper at Emmaus, or in Mozart’s G minor Quintet; nor would it put me out of conceit with these, to be told that there was disguised sex in them. That would be merely theory to me, even if I believed it: it would have no practical effect on my feelings such as is produced by the discovery and precise statement of the causes of bad art. And the reason here, as in the other cases, is that good art has not causes, like bad art. I accept it because it is beautiful, as I accept a true belief because it is true, or good morals because they are good. Certainly, there is good art in which sex is the theme; but it is consciously chosen by the artist as his theme. It was not the sexual instinct that caused Correggio to paint his Antiope; nor is it the sexual instinct that causes us to admire it. The picture cannot be discredited by imputing a sexual cause to it; for whatever there is of sex in it is conscious, both in the artist and in the spectator, being theme and not cause.

In fact, the whole theory of the unconscious, advanced by Freud and confirmed with so many valuable practical results, implies just that difference between the right and wrong processes of the mind which the Freudians tend to deny. The sexual instinct, they say, is dangerous to us when it is disguised; and that must be t rue also of other instincts, such as the gregarious. And the reason is that these instincts can control the processes of the mind only when it is unaware of their control. It is then that they act as hidden causes, even of thought, mastering and perverting the three spiritual activities — the moral, the intellectual, and the æsthetic. But this tyranny can be ended, as phobias can be ended, by becoming aware of it; and the Freudian method is to make us aware of it, and so to appeal to some other power in the mind which is stung into action as soon as it sees its enemies. Yet, according to the Freudian metaphysic, there is no other power. It is the instincts that become aware of themselves, not a self that becomes aware of them; and the Freudian appears to think that, when instincts become aware of themselves, they control themselves.

This is absurd, and inconsistent with the Freudian theory of the Censor, a mysterious power in the mind which prevents it from being aware of the working of its instincts. Clearly, instincts, by themselves, are not capable of consciousness; something else must be conscious, or unconscious, of them. You may, as some psychologists do, deny consciousness altogether; but you cannot impute it to instinct nor can you hold that it is caused by instincts working in concert or conflict with each other. Consciousness is consciousness of their concert or conflict; it is something which can control their concert or conflict; and we have never heard yet of an effect that can control its cause. The practical appeal of the Freudians is always to consciousness; they imply that it has the power to control instinct and so that it is something over and above instinct. Even while they tell us that we are all sex, they hope, by telling us that, to give us control of sex in the interests of the self; they do not mean that we should immediately proceed to act as sexual machines.

III

There is a class of theories about the nature of mind which may be called suicidal — they are like the pig, which is said to cut its own throat by swimming; for they attack the validity of all mental processes, including those which produce them. Thus, if everything in the mind is caused by instinct; if all morals come of the gregarious instinct and all art of the sexual; if our value for what we call righteousness and beauty is really only these two instincts giving themselves fine names to satisfy some further and self-deceiving instinct, the nature and purpose of which no one can explain, then intellectual processes also are subject to the same explanation, and that which we call our value for truth is but an instinct giving itself a fine name. Truth is a figment of the self-deceiving instinct, like righteousness and beauty; and there is no more validity in the intellectual process than in the moral or æsthetic. But, if that is so, then, since it is the intellectual process which produces the theory, the theory itself is discredited with all that it discredits. A Freudian could not continue to be a theorist at all if he held that conviction of truth is caused, as he holds moral conviction to be, by some instinct which transforms itself in consciousness into that conviction. He must reserve the intellectual activity from his destructive analysis, or the analysis also is destroyed by itself.

In practice, of course, he does reserve it, does hold that there is such a thing as truth to be discovered by the human mind, since he tries to discover it. While he may contend that all morals are to be explained in terms of the gregarious instinct, or all art in terms of the sexual, he does not explain his own theories in terms of any instinct. They are to him the truth; and truth means to all of us a belief that is in accordance with the facts and has no unconscious cause. Indeed, the moment we become aware of an unconscious cause for any belief of our own or of others, it is discredited for us, just as morals are discredited when we see them to be a product of the gregarious instinct.

As I began by saying—the way to destroy a belief is to discover its cause. But if the integrity of the intellectual activity must be maintained, why not the integrity of the moral and æsthetic activities? If there is such a thing as truth, which can be directly perceived by the mind, why are not righteousness and beauty also to be directly perceived? Why not attempt, with regard to these also, a reconciliation between theory and practice? Such a reconciliation is now most urgently needed; for we are all troubled, consciously or unconsciously, by a misgiving that our judgments of value lack the validity of our judgments of fact; that they are the effects of mechanical causes; and that, if we could understand how they were caused, they would lose their peculiar validity for us, and we should lose the convictions that give life all its meaning. So long as we have this misgiving, the passion for truth seems the enemy of the passion for righteousness and beauty; and if that is so, then are we of all creatures the most miserable.

But there is, I believe, the promise of a reconciliation in that very discovery, which to the Freudians seems to establish the automatic nature of mind; for what it does establish is the fact that all three spiritual activities of the mind are alike subject to disorders mechanically caused; in fact, that evil is so caused in all its forms. It does not establish the fact that good is so caused; indeed, instead of reducing good and evil both to the same mechanical process, it points to a new distinction between them, and one that gives us a new hope of mastering evil.

The words cause and effect are dangerous to thought, because we think that we understand their meaning when we do not. I will not, therefore, say that evil is caused and good is not; but rather that evil, in the mind, is something of which a definite and immediate cause can be discovered, and which can often be removed by the discovery of that cause; whereas good is something of which no definite or immediate cause can be discovered. This difference is hard to understand, and the difficulty has expressed itself in the dilemma of free will and predestination. Men have always seen, more or less dimly, the causes of the wrong processes of the mind, and so have inclined, when they thought of these, to determinism; but they have also failed to see any causes of the right processes of the mind; and, when they have thought of these, have inclined to a belief in the freedom of the will. In fact, the mind is like a machine when it acts wrongly, but not when it acts rightly.

But in the past there have been very strong practical causes for the assumption that the mind is in all things like a machine; since, proceeding on that assumption, men have found a cure or a palliative for many of the evils to which the mind is subject. So long as all kinds of wrong conduct, or even wrong belief, were held to be the expression of an evil will subject to no causes outside itself, there was no way of dealing with them except by punishment, which was usually itself a mechanical reaction and blind in its effects. But, as soon as wrong conduct, and wrong belief were seen to have causes that can be discovered, their causes were sought, and sometimes found, with the best results. The new psychology is based on the assumption, constantly confirmed by experience, that there are causes for all error and evil in the mind; and its great discovery is that the mind, when aware of these causes, will, with the whole of itself, resist and often overcome them.

But that is no reason why it should slip into the further assumption that what is good in the mind is caused in the same way as what is evil; or should, in older terms, utterly deny the freedom of the will. Rather, we should look to the new psychology to illustrate both freedom and the lack of it; for, hard as it is to understand, or even to stale the fact, both freedom and the lack of it seem to exist. It is only in theory that we ever think of discovering the causes of good. The practice of mankind is to take good for granted, as something that of its nature needs no explanation. But the same practice seeks an explanation of evil; for evil is that which ought not to be, that which instantly arouses in us the desire to remove it. There is, in fact, a problem of evil but, in the nature of things, no problem of good. The word provoked by evil is, why? but that word is never provoked by good. Good is identical with the self unified in a right relation, or answer, to external circumstances. But evil seems to be the self losing its unity, its identity, under a tyranny of external circumstances which turns it into a machine. Always when we are aware of evil in ourselves or in others, we are aware of the mechanical or automatic; the pain of evil consists in this, that it makes the self seem to itself a machine out of order. But it never seems to itself a machine in order, when it acts rightly. The sense of the mechanical, the caused, in the human mind is itself a sense of evil; and to import it also into good is to deny the difference between them.

According to the Freudians themselves, consciousness is good and unconsciousness evil, which means that automatism in the mind is evil, and something else — which we may call, vaguely enough, life or freedom — is good. But when we say that consciousness is good and unconsciousness evil, we need to know more precisely what we mean by those words. There is a sense in which the unconscious is not evil at all, but a necessary part of every mind; though in this sense also the word is still vaguely used. But when the Freudian speaks of the unconscious as the enemy, he means the unconscious as a deceiver; means certain instincts disguising themselves in the conscious, so that it takes them for something other than they are. In that case, of course, consciousness is imperfect. If it were perfect, it would see through the disguise; and the effort of the psychoanalyst is to make it more perfect, so that it can see through the disguise. Evil of all kinds— error, fear, hatred, all that makes for madness — thrives like a bacillus in the darkness of the mind; when the light of consciousness is turned upon it, it ceases to thrive.

IV

Here, it might seem, we are back at the old barren and unconvincing simplification of evil into ignorance, and good into knowledge. But the discovery of the new psychology is of value, both practically and theoretically, because it avoids that simplification while doing justice to knowledge. The word conscious is misleading, because it seems to mean a purely intellectual process; but, in fact, when a man becomes aware of the cause of error, or of any other evil in his mind, the process by which he overcomes that evil is more than intellectual. The awareness of evil, in proportion to its completeness and precision, causes the whole mind to mobilize against the evil, to unify itself against that danger which threatens its unity.

Where the unity of the mind is impaired by any evil within it, whether sin or error, it is filled with a sense of impotence, and of automatism; it begins at once to believe about itself that which will become true if the evil persists and increases. And the more completely it is unconscious of the evil and of its cause, the more automatic and impotent it seems to itself. But consciousness of the evil and of its cause at once gives the mind confidence in its own unity and power; there is some joy even in the agonies of repentance, because repentance means an access, however imperfect, of consciousness, and so of the sense of power. And what is repentance or conviction of sin but the beginning, at least, of that consciousness which, according to the new psychology, is the healer of the mind? Men do get strength from confession because it forces them to state their sin in plain terms; it is the beginning of the process which the psychoanalyst tries to complete. And when Plato said that the lie of the soul was the worst of all lies, he meant the lie with which the unconscious deceives the conscious, the lie which makes men behave automatically while they think they are behaving like rational creatures.

Perhaps the greatest and most dangerous of all human errors is the belief that we are, always and in all respects, alive; that we have been born alive and must remain so until we die. For, in fact, the living part of us, both physical and mental, is always liable to be overcome by a mechanical process, like those processes to which inorganic matter is subject. Just as our minds still have in them a brutishness inherited from the past, so our very life seems to inherit habits from the inorganic matter out of which it has arisen; and because of this inheritance, it is always, more or less, imperfectly life.

The body, for instance, is subject to strange automatisms of disease, in which a purposeless growth destroys its life; and madness is an automatism of the mind, in which instincts behave as if they really were forces, and the unconscious masters the conscious.

This invasion and conquest of life by not-life is what we mean by evil, whether it takes the form of disease, of error, of sin, or of æsthetic perversity. In fact, the difference between evil and good is not less, but far greater than we ever dreamed it was; for it is the difference, in a living creature, between life and not-life. And our profound hatred and fear of evil, so far from being a matter of consciousness only, is life’s hatred and fear of a threatening and invasive not-life. We feel that hatred and fear with the whole living part of ourselves; but the more evil masters us, the more are that hatred and fear weakened with the life which is being overcome by not-life. Hence the close connection between error and sin and æsthetic perversity; they are all symptoms of not-life, of automatism mastering life. It is because we suppose that we are always and in all respects alive, that we have failed to see the identity between life and good, and between evil and not-life. We cannot think of life as identical with good so long as we believe that we are always fully alive; for we know that we are not always completely good. And while we know that good is a matter of quality, we suppose life to be a matter of quantity, to be merely something that is or is not.

But, in fact, the very essence of life is its effort to be more intensely life; and the struggle for life is not merely a struggle of life to maintain itself against external dangers: it is also, and still more, an internal struggle. Life is always fighting for its life against a tendency within itself to behave as if it were not-life; and it is this struggle, carried on in purely physical terms in the lower forms of life, that becomes, in the higher, moral, intellectual, æsthetic, without ceasing to be still a struggle of life against not-life.

That which we call the spirit of man, that which distinguishes him from the beasts, is a higher quality, a greater intensity, of life; but this greater intensity never escapes from the struggle with automatisms. The musician composing a melody must resist them; only, the more completely he is an artist, the more fully is he aware of their danger. And that is true also of the saint, and the philosopher. Bad art, bad thinking, wrong conduct, all these are relapses into automatism. In the midst of life we are in death more profoundly than we ever have supposed.

The Manichæans, when they said that matter was evil, had a glimmering of the truth, for they saw that evil was not something inherent in spirit of life. But they were wrong in making the final distinction between matter and spirit. The final distinction is between life and not-life. In fact, the issue between good and evil, so far from being confused by the discoveries of the new psychology, is made sharper and more momentous than it ever was before. All forms of evil are allied, as being automatisms; and all forms of good, as being manifestations and efforts of life. Psychology itself, when it is real psychology, is not merely a curiosity which may discover ugly truths about the mind, and which may, therefore, be the enemy of our moral and æsthetic values. It is also part of the effort of life to be more intensely life, to extend that consciousness which is more alive than unconsciousness.

So long as we think of the struggle tor life as being purely instinctive or automatic, there will seem to us to be a conflict, which never can be reconciled, between that struggle and the higher activities of man; but this sense of a conflict that cannot be reconciled is only a modern form of Manichæism. As soon as the struggle for life becomes to us a struggle against automatism, a struggle for quality rather than quantity of life, we escape from the Manichsean sense of an irreconcilable conflict. The instinct of self-preservation, when it acts against the higher activities of the spirit, becomes for us, not the struggle for life, but a mere automatism, which life itself must resist. And so it is with all the other instincts: they are not evil, as the Manichæans held, nor are they irresistible forces behind the consciousness which, to flatter itself, it calls by pretty names. But they are liable to become automatic, when the consciousness fails to control them; and it can control them only by being aware of them. So the awareness at which the psychoanalyst aims is part of the effort of life to preserve itself from automatism, to make the whole mind alive and so good.

Some may fear that this identification of good with life, and of evil with not-life, will destroy for us the reality of the distinction between good and evil. Any theory which does that is malign, and sure, sooner or later, to be condemned by the judgment of mankind. For, in fact, no distinction is so real to us as that between good and evil; and, if we lost it, we should lose all sense of our own identity. Yes, but our sense of our own identity, so bound up with our sense of the difference between good and evil, is our sense of life. For life does not mean in fact, as it often means in talk, some vague common stock, which we all share. It means the individual self, and it exists only in individual selves. Life, in fact, is differentiation; the greater the intensity of life, the more differentiation there is; and that is true also of all kinds of good. There is a common stock of bad poetry, but the good poem says one thing as only it can be said. Our sense of its goodness is a sense of differentiation from all other poems; and, when we have said that it is good, we are apt to add also that it is alive.

Automatism to us, in poetry and all art, means commonplace, deadness, badness. And so it is with conduct. We are aware of a sameness in all kinds of wickedness. Milton’s Satan is not evil as it is, but evil glorified by the expression of a great poet. In evil, as we really meet it, there is something dull and generic, rather than specific and brilliant; it is mechanical, automatic action, without regard to the particular facts. A man subject to lust or rage or egotism becomes a machine, and behaves like all other men subject to the same passions. We see in him the passions, not himself; and what horrifies us in wickedness, besides its effects, is this dying of life out of the human being, this horrible marionettism pretending to be life. Whenever we hate a man, he has ceased to be himself to us, and become generic, typical of some automatism, while we ourselves, in that hatred, are also invaded by automatism. And it is the same with thought: error has always something generic in it, while truth is specific; for error is automatism pretending to be thought and repeating itself in forumulæ; while truth is that particular truth and no other.

Until we identify life with good, life is not completely life to us; nor is good completely good. The identification throws light on both of them, like the identification of God with love. So long as we think of life as not being necessarily and altogether good, we suppose that those automatisms which attack it belong to it; and so long as we think of good as something different from life, we are not altogether in love with it, but suppose that it may be dull and monotonous. So there are people who imagine that saints are unpleasant, or that classical music has no melody, or that all truths are unwelcome. To them good is something not quite alive; and they may even be drawn to evil because they suppose it to be more alive than good. So their sense of the difference between good and evil is actually weakened by their failure to identify good with life and evil with not-life.

And, finally, there is this failure in the perversities of the new psychology. If the Freudian saw that good was life and evil not-life, he would see that the analysis which he can apply to evil in the mind cannot also be applied to good. For that analysis is itself part of the effort which life makes to rid itself of not-life. Good, that is life, the unified self, cannot analyze itself; it can only analyze the automatisms which threaten its unity. When it tries to analyze itself also into automatisms, it is becoming automatic; and nothing could be more automatic than some of the assumptions of the Freudians. So long as they deal with evil, they are men of science, and there is the life of thought in them; but, as soon as they try to subject the whole content of the mind to their analysis, the life dies out of their thinking, and they repeat formulæ, unconfirmed by experience. At one moment Freud is a man of genius, is himself, and no one else, in an eager, living pursuit of truth; at the next, he is mastered by an unconscious assumption and becomes a Freudian.

The practical task of psychology is always, in a sense, negative; it is to remove from the mind obstacles to its own vital process. In that it is like all medicine, the task of which is, not to make health, but to remove obstacles to it. Just as medicine can discover the causes of disease, but not the causes of health, of wrong relations between the body and its environment, but not of right, so psychology can analyze, and remove by its analysis, all that makes for automatism in the mind, but not the life of the mind. And that is the practice of the Freudian, whatever his theory may be. He puts his faith in the life of the mind, when he has exposed its automatisms by analysis; and it is the underlying principle of all psychoanalysis that the final appeal must be to the life of the mind by making it aware of its automatisms. That life, that unity, that consciousness, or conscience, is there, to be strengthened by external help, but not to be explained by the same process that explains and destroys the unconscious automatism, evil. For, even if it could be so explained, there would finally be nothing for the psychoanalyst to appeal to, no difference between good and evil, between life and not-life.