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 doubt that religion is a compound reaction, made up of love,—­sympathetic response to the parental love of God,—­fear, negative self-feeling, and positive self-feeling in the shape of aspiration for the desired ideal of character; all woven into several compound emotions such as awe, gratitude, and reverence.

It goes almost without saying that religion, if it be vital, is one of the greatest sources of moral energy and spiritual dynamic, and that it is and always has been one of the greatest aids to sublimation that man has found.  A force like the Christian religion, which sets the highest ideal of character and makes man want to live up to it, and which at the same time says, “You can.  Here is strength to help you”; which unifies life and fills it with purpose; which furnishes the highest love-object and turns the thought outward to the good of mankind—­such a force could hardly fail to be a dynamic factor in the effort toward sublimation.  This book, however, deals primarily with those cases for which religion has had, to call science to her aid in order to find the cause of failure, to flood the whole subject with light, and to help cut the cords which, binding us to the past, make it impossible to utilize the great resources that are at hand for all the children of men.

=Where We Keep Our Instincts.= It must have been impossible to read through these two chapters on instinct without feeling that, after all, we are not very well acquainted with ourselves.  The more we look into human nature, the more evident it becomes that there is much in each one of us of which we are only dimly aware.  It is now time for us to look a little deeper,—­to find where we keep these instinctive tendencies with which it is possible to live so intimately without even suspecting their existence.  We shall find that they occupy a realm of their own, and that this realm, while quite out of sight, is yet open to exploration.