“Let us imagine [writes Freud][11] an undifferentiated vesicle of sensitive substance:  then its surface, exposed as it is to the outer world, is by its very position differentiated, and serves as an organ for receiving stimuli....  This morsel of living substance floats about in an outer world which is charged with the most potent energies, and it would be destroyed ... if it were not furnished with protection against stimulation. [On the other hand] the sensitive cortical layer has no protective barrier against excitations emanating from within....  The most prolific sources of such excitations are the so-called instincts of the organism....  The child never gets tired of demanding the repetition of a game ... he wants always to hear the same story instead of a new one, insists inexorably on exact repetition, and corrects each deviation which the narrator lets slip by mistake....  According to this, an instinct would be a tendency in living organic matter impelling it towards reinstatement of an earlier condition, one which it had abandoned under the influence of external disturbing forces—­a kind of organic elasticity, or, to put it another way, the manifestation of inertia in organic life.

“If, then, all organic instincts are conservative, historically acquired, and directed towards regression, towards reinstatement of something earlier, we are obliged to place all the results of organic development to the credit of external, disturbing, and distracting influences.  The rudimentary creature would from its very beginning not have wanted to change, would, if circumstances had remained the same, have always merely repeated the same course of existence....  It would be counter to the conservative nature of instinct if the goal of life were a state never hitherto reached.  It must be rather an ancient starting point, which the living being left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the circuitous paths of development.... The goal of all life is death....

“Through a long period of time the living substance may have ... had death within easy reach ... until decisive external influences altered in such a way as to compel [it] to ever greater deviations from the original path of life, and to ever more complicated and circuitous routes to the attainment of the goal of death.  These circuitous ways to death, faithfully retained by the conservative instincts, would be neither more nor less than the phenomena of life as we know it.”

Freud puts forth these interesting suggestions with much modesty, admitting that they are vague and uncertain and (what it is even more important to notice) mythical in their terms; but it seems to me that, for all that, they are an admirable counterblast to prevalent follies.  When we hear that there is, animating the whole universe, an Elan vital, or general impulse toward some unknown but single ideal, the terms used are no less