Page:Freud - Reflections on war and death.djvu/40

Rh untransformed part of the emotional life is a very variable one.

In general we are inclined to rate the congenital part too highly, and are also in danger of over-valuing the whole cultural adaptability in its relation to that part of the impulse life which has remained primitive, that is, we are misled into judging people to be "better" than they really are. For there is another factor which clouds our judgment and falsifies the result in favor of what we are judging.

We are of course in no position to observe the impulses of another person. We deduce them from his actions and his conduct, which we trace back to motives springing from his emotional life. In a number of cases such a conclusion is necessarily incorrect. The same actions which are "good" in the civilized sense may