Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/495

No. 3.] be 'involved' in Freudian practice. But it is Holt, and not Freud, who has said what these ideas are, and what they mean in terms of other ethical theories. We may thus fairly regard this as a pioneer treatise, one with a weighty thesis, and further, one whose vigor, compactness, and clarity throw into welcome relief the issues about which discussion will naturally center.

One looks first for the basis of the distinction between good and bad. The psycho-analyst begins with a condition judged hygienically bad, namely the mental disorder. If this disorder is caused by a repression of wishes, then repression must be judged to be extrinsically bad. Professor Holt translates this clinical judgment into an ethical judgment: repression is morally bad. This condemnation of repression is the characteristic common element in the two value-systems. But why is repression morally bad? This judgment, I take it, does not depend, through a utilitarian first premiss, upon the fact that repression may cause mental disorder. It seems to depend rather upon the judgment that the condition of repression is one already out of normal relation to the facts of the world. The implied first premiss is that there is a natural relation to these facts, and that this natural relation is "somehow right" (p. 151).

This natural relation is one of a personal knowledge of facts, and an adjustment to them through this knowledge rather than through authority. The facts will 'drive us on to morals' if we expose our minds to them: this is the ethics of the dust, the ethics from below upward. On the other hand, if we take our relation to the facts through social authorities, with those prohibitions and tabus which prevent acquaintance and personal knowledge, we deprive ourselves of the natural reasons for moral behavior, and our good conduct, such as it is, is a result of repression, not of wisdom. This is the ethics 'from above' (p. 132), sanctioned by the prestige of the censor, and hence not sanctioned by the inner working of one's own experience and discrimination. "Thus (through their official bans) it comes to pass that church and state often play in the adult's experience