“Or fails to draw them,” said Sir Richmond.

“Or fails....  And that is where these new methods of treatment come in.  We explore that failure.  Together.  What the psychoanalyst does-and I will confess that I owe much to the psychoanalyst—­what he does is to direct thwarted, disappointed and perplexed people to the realities of their own nature.  Which they have been accustomed to ignore and forget.  They come to us with high ambitions or lovely illusions about themselves, torn, shredded, spoilt.  They are morally denuded.  Dreams they hate pursue them; abhorrent desires draw them; they are the prey of irresistible yet uncongenial impulses; they succumb to black despairs.  The first thing we ask them is this:  ‘What else could you expect?’”

“What else could I expect?” Sir Richmond repeated, looking down on him.  “H’m!”

“The wonder is not that you are sluggish, reluctantly unselfish, inattentive, spasmodic.  The wonder is that you are ever anything else....  Do you realize that a few million generations ago, everything that stirs in us, everything that exalts human life, self-devotions, heroisms, the utmost triumphs of art, the love—­for love it is—­that makes you and me care indeed for the fate and welfare of all this round world, was latent in the body of some little lurking beast that crawled and hid among the branches of vanished and forgotten Mesozoic trees?  A petty egg-laying, bristle-covered beast it was, with no more of the rudiments of a soul than bare hunger, weak lust and fear....  People always seem to regard that as a curious fact of no practical importance.  It isn’t:  it’s a vital fact of the utmost practical importance.  That is what you are made of.  Why should you expect—­because a war and a revolution have shocked you—­that you should suddenly be able to reach up and touch the sky?”

“H’m!” said Sir Richmond.  “Have I been touching the sky!”

“You are trying to play the part of an honest rich man.”

“I don’t care to see the whole system go smash.”

“Exactly,” said the doctor, before he could prevent himself.

“But is it any good to tell a man that the job he is attempting is above him—­that he is just a hairy reptile twice removed—­and all that sort of thing?”

“Well, it saves him from hoping too much and being too greatly disappointed.  It recalls him to the proportions of the job.  He gets something done by not attempting everything. ...  And it clears him up.  We get him to look into himself, to see directly and in measurable terms what it is that puts him wrong and holds him back.  He’s no longer vaguely incapacitated.  He knows.”

“That’s diagnosis.  That’s not treatment.”

“Treatment by diagnosis.  To analyze a mental knot is to untie it.”

“You propose that I shall spend my time, until the Commission meets, in thinking about myself.  I wanted to forget myself.”