Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/500

488 the principle of vicarious satisfaction thus defined, it is conceivable that comparatively few of the enumerable wishes of a man should be satisfied, and yet the man be satisfied. The inevitable lopping-off that comes with every large decision, the successive specializations into which we are driven, the relinquishments necessary if only through lack of time, the hungers left by poverty, by social pressure, by the hundred comparative failures to one thorough success in competitive pursuits, and finally that universal human longing due to the actual absence from the world of those objects upon which many wishes might run out (the music not yet written, the justice not yet achieved, not to speak of the lacking edible crows or wholly good wars, even if there be edible mushrooms and wholly good theaters),—all of this need no more make man unhappy than make him immoral, if our psychology can show us that the 'soul,' or the 'will,' or the total wish of man, is so far a genuine entity that a checked wish need not persist as a repressed and rebellious moment of subconscious demand, but find its way upward into a purpose that is satisfied.

If this could be shown, and I believe that it is precisely in this direction that the development of the Freudian school is tending, we should be inclined to transfer Holt's moral law of discriminative self-expression to the one wish or purpose, and let the particular wishes take the consequences. The difference between the two methods might be symbolized in some such fashion as this:

Assume as before that we have wish A which can be satisfied by X, but at the cost of repressing wish B; and we have wish B which can be satisfied by Y (or by not-X), but at the cost of repressing A. According to the method of discrimination we are to find an object X' which will satisfy A without repressing B, and presumably also an object Y' which will satisfy B without repressing A. According to the method of vicarious satisfaction we have to recognize the more general wish, M, of which A and B are special forms, and then to find the object, Z, which will satisfy M.

Under this latter method, A and B would not be satisfied in