Page:Philosophical Review Volume 25.djvu/507

No. 3.] and action. It is because this method is so ancient, so well understood, and so spontaneously used, that many an honest person confronted with an equally honest Freudian analysis of his subconscious self, would be likely to draw from it quite perverse conclusions about the state of his soul. I do not undertake to state where the border of efficiency between the two methods is to be drawn. It is our destiny to become completely self-knowing; and I do not think that any one can have too much self-knowledge or self-analysis, so long as it is true self-knowledge, proportionate. But so long as the method of health by intuition of health (if I may so describe it) has any important rôle to play, it is a serious defect of any general scheme of moral hygiene not to take account of it. And the defect becomes doubly serious when, as appears to me the tendency of the Holt-Freudian scheme, the natural and unconscious use of this intuitive method—externally so similar to repression and censorship in the hypocritical sense—is confused with them. It is not true, I repeat, that every thought and motive which is under ban and can be revealed by psycho-analysis is a real ingredient of character. And with due respect to Holt's definitions, this method of interpretation is, in its actual working, too subjective.

But this error, I believe, is rather Freud's than Holt's; for in Holt's own principles the antidote is clearly enough stated. "The inscrutable 'thought behind' the actions of a man, which is the invisible secret of those actions, is another myth" (p. 85). Take this general principle of behaviorism together with the principle that the characteristic purposes of a man are those which reach the widest horizon; these purposes are himself, provided that they are actively engaged in integrating the rest of his purposes into their own system. Take it with the comment that the hidden thought is a myth not because it is non-existent; but because only those thoughts have significance for character which achieve expression. We shall then have, I believe, a much sounder principle of judgment. We shall be judging a man by that which he is ultimately moving toward, rather than by what, as vestige of infantile wish-definitions, still adheres to him from a past which of his own growth he is shuffling off.