SUMMARY

Civilized man as he is to-day is a product of the past and can be
understood only as that past is understood. The conflicts with which
he is confronted are the direct outcome of the evolutional history of
the race and of its attempt to adapt its primitive instincts to
present-day ideals.

Character is what we do with our instincts. According to Freud, all
of a man's traits are the result of his unchanged original impulses,
or of his reactions against those impulses, or of his sublimation of
them. In other words, there are three things we may do with our
instincts. We may follow our primal desires, we may deny their
existence, or we may use them for ends which are in harmony with our
lives as we want them to be. As the first course leads to degeneracy,
the second to nervous illness, and the third to happy usefulness, it
is obviously important to learn the way of sublimation. Sometimes this
is accomplished unconsciously by the life-force, but sometimes
sublimation fails, and is reestablished only when the conscious mind
gains an understanding of the great forces of life. This method of
reeducation of the personality as a means of treatment in nervousness
is called psycho-therapy.

=Religion's Contribution.= If it be asked why, amid all this
discussion of instincts and motives we have made no mention of that
great energizer religion, we answer that we have by no means forgotten
it, but that we have been dealing solely with those primary tendencies
out of which all of the compound emotions are made. Man has been
described as instinctively and incurably religious, but there seems no