r 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 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 abou