I presume that just as, and just because men have minds AND bodies, an evolutional history in the ordinary sense and a mental history in a sense not commonly considered, so there will always be two, or perhaps three, parties among psychologists and men of science, and each one, in so far as it is limited in its vision, may be considered as abnormal, if one will. I decline, however, to admit that the temperamental peculiarities of one group are more in need either of justification or of rectification through psychoanalysis than those of the others. It is probably true that emotional tension often plays a larger part among persons who love a priori reasoning—the "tender-minded" of Dr. James—than it does in those who work through observation; but on the other hand exclusively empirical attitude has its limitations and its dangers. Philosophy and metaphysics deal more distinctively with essential function—that is with real existence,—while natural science and the genetic psychology (of which psychoanalysis, strictly speaking, is a branch) deal rather with appearances and with structure. Both are in need of investigation. The FORM which art, religion, and literature assume is determined by men's personal experiences and special cravings. The essential motive of art and religion is, however, the dim recognition by men of their relation to the creative spirit of the universe.
No one can doubt that function logically precedes structure; or if any one does doubt this, he need only observe his own experience and see how in every new acquisition of knowledge or of power there come, first, the thought, the idea, then the effort, next the habit, and finally the modification of cerebral mechanism, in which the effort and the habit become represented in relatively permanent and static form. In fact, the crux of the whole discussion between science and metaphysics turns on, or harks back to the discussion between function and structure; and it is the latter, in the sense in which I mean the word, that has had of late a too large share of our attention.
The enterprise on which we are all of us embarked,—whether we define it as an investigation, pure and simple, into human nature and human motives, or as a therapeutic attempt to relieve invalids of their symptoms,—is a larger one than it is commonly conceived of as being. Each physician and each investigator has, indeed, the right to say that for practical reasons he prefers to confine his attention to some single portion of one or the other of these tasks, be it never so small. But each one should regard himself as virtually under an obligation to recognize the respects in which this chosen task is incomplete. Every physicist is aware that there is some form of energy underlying, or rather expressing itself in, light and heat and gravitation. Physicists do not study this form of energy, not because they do not wish to but simply because they cannot do so by the only methods that they are allowed to use. But, as a reaction of defense, they sometimes assert that no one else can do so either, that this underlying energy cannot be explained. To say this is, however, in my judgment, to misappreciate what an explanation is.
To explain any matter is to discover the points of similarity, or virtual identity, between the matter studied and ourselves. But in order to do this thoroughly, or rather in order to do it with relation to the essential nature of some form of energy (the "Libido," for example, considered as an unpicturable force) one must first consider what we, the investigators, are, not at our less good, but at our best. It is with us, as given, with our best qualities regarded as defining in part the Q. E. D. of the experiment, that the investigation must begin. The nature of any and every form of real underlying energy or essence must be defined in terms of our sense of our own will and freedom. And this means that we must conceive and describe ourselves, and expect to conceive and to describe the powers that animate us, no longer as a system of forces subject to the so-called laws of nature (which are, in reality, not immutable) but as relatively free, creative agents; no longer as the product of the interplay of instincts, but as individuals possessed of real reason, real power of love and real self-consistent will. To claim to study the effects of the "Libido," to which we ascribe the vast powers with which we are familiar, yet fail to seek in it what would correspond to our own best attributes, would be to lay aside our duties as students of human nature. It would be to confine our attention to the "structure" of the mind, the form under which it manifests itself, without having studied the laws of its action under conditions which are more favorable to its development.
It must, now, have struck students of psychoanalytic literature that a marked tendency has been shown toward supplementing the study of structure,—that is, the detailed history of men's experiences and evolution, regarded as sequences of phenomena,—by the study of the function or creative energy for which the experiences stand. Silberer, whose work is endorsed by Freud, has gone to a considerable length in this direction; and the whole tendency of Freud's insistence on the relevancy, in the mental sphere, of the law of the conservation of energy has been a movement, though, I think, a narrow one, in this direction. More recently, Jung has emphasized the importance of this tendency, and has dwelt more strongly, as I think, than the facts warrant, on the supposed unwillingness of Freud to recognize its importance.
Behind the experiences of childhood, for example, lie the temperamental trends of childhood, and it is these with which we really need to get acquainted; for these trends, if not the whole causes and equivalents of the experiences which are recounted to us by our patients, constitute the conditions without which the latter would not have been what they became.
But Jung himself, strangely enough, in both of his carefully prepared arguments, specifically rejects all intention of dealing "metaphysically" with this theme, in spite of the fact that every movement toward a fuller recognition of creative energy is nothing less than metaphysics, even though not in name.
The skilled observer, scrutinizing the motives and peering into the history of the person whose traits and trends he is called on to investigate, must see, in imagination, not only a vast host of acts, but also a vast network of intersecting lines of energy of which the casual observer, and even the intimate friend, may be wholly unaware. We call these lines of energy by many special names,—"Libido" or "Urlibido," first of all, then love and hate and jealousy, and so on.
What are these lines of energy, and how can we study them to the best purpose? Obviously they are incomplete editions of the love and reason and will the laws of which we can study to best advantage in ourselves and in men where they are displayed in their best, that is, in their most constructive form. To make such studies is to recognize metaphysics, but instead of doing of doing this tacitly and implicitly we should do it openly and explicitly.
The study of human nature should, in short, begin at the top, rather than at the bottom; just as, if one had to choose what phase of a symphony one would choose in order to get an idea of its perfection, one would take some culminating moment rather than the first few notes simply because they were the first. To be accurate, one could not do justice to the symphony except by studying it as a whole, and similarly one should study the man as a whole, including his relations to the universe as a whole. It is as wholes that great poets conceived of their poems and great artists of their pictures, and it is as a whole that each and every human life, standing as it does as the representative of the body of the universe, and the spirit of the universe, on the other, should implicitly be viewed.