time: the refreshing river 



which might be estabUshed between human beings. Revolutionaries, 

 it is true, are perfectly right when they complain that many psycho- 

 analysts aim at reconciling their patients to the existing order, i.e. of 

 fitting them for their environment; and that they do not consider 

 the possibility that this environment is itself sick.^ But the proper 

 conclusion surely is that both the social environment and man himself 

 need radical alteration.^ To abandon the attempt to transform the 

 form.er would be to go back on all the past centuries of human 

 struggle. Yet whatever w^e do to it, there is no immediate possibility 

 that we could make man any other than an organism beginning by 

 growth and development in utero, having parents and later developing 

 mentally under their influence or the influence of substitutes for 

 them, and at last living in a space-time continuum with all the inevit- 

 able frustrations depending upon this fact. There is, as it were, an 

 irreducible minimum of hardness in man's condition. Take, for 

 example, Eliot's poem, "Animula:"^ 



"The heavy burden of the growing soul 

 Perplexes and offends m.ore, day by day; 

 Week by week, offends and perplexes more, 

 With the imperatives of is and seems 

 And may and may not, desire and control. 

 The pain of living and the drug of dreams 

 Curl up the small soul in the window-seat 

 Behind the Encyclopaedia BritannicaJ" 



Or the speech of the Four Tempters to Thomas of Canterbury in the 



play:* 



"Man's life is a cheat and a disappointment; 

 All things are unreal. 

 Unreal or disappointing; 

 The Catherine wheel, the pantomime cat. 

 The prizes given at the children's party, 

 The prize awarded for the English Essay, 

 The scholar's degree, the statesman's decoration. . . ." 



^ Some psychologists do apparently realise this, e.g. Burrow and Frank; see Syz, 

 Amer. Journ. Sociol., 1937,42, 895. 



^ Two books from diis \iewpoint whicli are much to be recommended are Soviet 

 Russia Fights Neurosis by F. E. Williams (London, 1934) and The New Road to Progress 

 by S. D. Schmalhausen (London, 1935). 



^ T. S. Eliot, "Animula" in Collected Poems, p. iii. 



* T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, p. 44.. 



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