n immense enterprise, but it is the only thing to be done. In some
ways it's an enormously attractive enterprise. Inspiring. It grips my
imagination. I think of the other men who must be at work. Working as I
do rather in the dark as yet. With whom I shall presently join up... The
attempt may fail; all things human may fail; but on the other hand
it may succeed. I never had such faith in anything as I have in the
rightness of the work I am doing now. I begin at that. But here is where
my difficulty comes in. The top of my brain, my innermost self says all
that I have been saying, but--The rest of me won't follow. The rest of
me refuses to attend, forgets, straggles, misbehaves."

"Exactly."

The word irritated Sir Richmond. "Not 'exactly' at all. 'Amazingly,'
if you like.... I have this unlimited faith in our present tremendous
necessity--for work--for devotion; I believe my share, the work I am
doing, is essential to the whole thing--and I work sluggishly. I work
reluctantly. I work damnably."

"Exact--" The doctor checked himself. "All that is explicable. Indeed it
is. Listen for a moment to me! Consider what you are. Consider what
we are. Consider what a man is before you marvel at his ineptitudes
of will. Face the accepted facts. Here is a creature not ten thousand
generations from the ape, his ancestor. Not ten thousand. And that ape
again, not a score of thousands from the monkey, his forebear. A man's
body, his bodily powers, are just the body and powers of an ape, a
little improved, a little adapted to novel needs. That brings me to my
point. CAN HIS MIND AND WILL BE ANYTHING BETTER? For a few generations,
a few hundreds at most, knowledge and wide thought have flared out on
the darknesses of life.... But the substance of man is ape still. He may
carry a light in his brain, but his instincts move in the darkness. Out
of that darkness he draws his motives."

"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; abhorre