Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/505

No. 3.] heart, so is he. Or in Holt's terms,—As a man's ultimate horizon of response is, so is he. But one could hardly without cynicism sweepingly identify the subconsciousness of repression with the man or with any essential part of him. Yet this is precisely what the Freudian analysis inclines to do; and it is here that Holt's psychology might act as a salutary corrective, if it were consistently applied. Let me develop this suggestion briefly.

The first appeal of the Freudian clinic, and of the Holtian ethic, is to a greater candor, and a new self-scrutiny. It demands of us confidence in a severer but friendlier truth, as a condition of moral growth. If it confronts us with something like a universal threat to the effect that "There is nothing hidden that shall not be made known"—since in spite of ourselves our expressions are a perpetual self-betrayal (Holt, p. 36ff)—it does much to make endurable the admission of the supposedly inadmissible; for it shows our individual fault as a common human failing, holding out the greeting of a general companionship in confession. The goal of such added self-knowledge and self-avowal can be nothing but truth and health, and it must be prized accordingly. Psycho-analysis, with vastly different weapons than those of Carlyle, may be still more pervasively effective than he in making us aware of the amount of sham in our lives. Dr. James J. Putnam speaks wholly in the spirit of the new self-knowledge when he refers to the "hidden motives and self-deceptions which to a greater or less degree falsify the lives of every man and every group of men," or suggests "the discovery that some apparently harmless act, classifiable in ordinary parlance as a wholly justifiable form of tender emotion, is in reality a sign that (his) thoughts are tending in objectionable directions." In so far as subtle hypocrisies and double-motives are real ingredients of character, nothing can be more welcome than a usable method for detecting them.

It does not follow, however, that every thought or motive which is under suppression is such a real ingredient of character,