uncertain, mythical, and vague, but the suggestion conveyed is false—­false, I mean, to the organic source of life and aspiration, to the simple naturalness of nature:  whereas the suggestion conveyed by Freud’s speculations is true.  In what sense can myths and metaphors be true or false?  In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from literary psychology, they may report the general movement and the pertinent issue of material facts, and may inspire us with a wise sentiment in their presence.  In this sense I should say that Greek mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false.  The chief terms employed in psycho-analysis have always been metaphorical:  “unconscious wishes”, “the pleasure-principle”, “the Oedipus complex”, “Narcissism”, “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, and some of its parts, under pressure of the others, must have got tied up into knots, like the mainspring of a watch, in such a violent and unhappy manner that when the pressure is relaxed they fly open as fast