"the censor"; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may be opened
up, in such terms, into the tangle of events in a man's life, and a fresh
start may be made with fewer encumbrances and less morbid inhibition. "The
shortcomings of our description", Freud says, "would probably disappear if
for psychological terms we could substitute physiological or chemical
ones. These too only constitute a metaphorical language, but one familiar
to us for a much longer time, and perhaps also simpler." All human
discourse is metaphorical, in that our perceptions and thoughts are
adventitious signs for their objects, as names are, and by no means copies
of what is going on materially in the depths of nature; but just as the
sportsman's eye, which yields but a summary graphic image, can trace the
flight of a bird through the air quite well enough to shoot it and bring
it down, so the myths of a wise philosopher about the origin of life or of
dreams, though expressed symbolically, may reveal the pertinent movement
of nature to us, and may kindle in us just sentiments and true
expectations in respect to our fate--for his own soul is the bird this
sportsman is shooting.

Now I think these new myths of Freud's about life, like his old ones
about dreams, are calculated to enlighten and to chasten us enormously
about ourselves. The human spirit, when it awakes, finds itself in
trouble; it is burdened, for no reason it can assign, with all sorts of
anxieties about food, pressures, pricks, noises, and pains. It is born, as
another wise myth has it, in original sin. And the passions and ambitions
of life, as they come on, only complicate this burden and make it heavier,
without rendering it less incessant or gratuitous. Whence this fatality,
and whither does it lead? It comes from heredity, and it leads to
propagation. When we ask how heredity could be started or transmitted, our
ignorance of nature and of past time reduces us to silence or to wild
conjectures. Something--let us call it matter--must always have existed,