BIOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY 437 



tlon of moral certitude. As Dean Sperry says, it is the loss of the "ethical 

 universals," with which Christianity has equipped Western civilization, 

 that creates the "grave moral perplexities" of the present. This is where 

 modern psychology enters the picture. For a justification of our moral code 

 we no longer have to have recourse to theological revelation, or to a meta- 

 physical Absolute; Freud in combination with Darwin suffice to give us 

 our philosophic vision. The great contribution of Freud was the discovery 

 of the unconscious mind. What matter if logicians assert that the phrase 

 is a contradiction in terms? It is now firmly established that through the 

 process known as repression, desires and ideas, emotions and purposes, can 

 be forced out of consciousness, or at least out of contact with the main or- 

 ganization of consciousness that we call the self or ego. They are then "in 

 the unconscious," but in the unconscious they continue operating just as if 

 they were ordinary processes of the mind, and they are still able to influence 

 the conscious life of the ego in the most varied ways. 



Repression is the banishment from consciousness of desires and ideas that 

 produce otherwise intolerable conflict. It is a special form of what psy- 

 chologists and neurologists call inhibition. The repressed ideas are so in- 

 tolerable that consciousness \\'ill not even recognize their existence or 

 examine them rationally; yet they are so powerful that they distort con- 

 sciousness itself. 



It has not, I think, been sufficiently recognized that repression is normal 

 in man. Man is the only organism whose mind is so constructed that con- 

 flict is inevitable. The young child is subjected to powerful conflicts even 

 before it can talk and reason, and long before it has adequate experience 

 to resolve a conflict rationally. Repression is thus an adaptation to conflict, 

 especially to early conflict; in its absence, the degree of assurance necessary 

 for action and adjustment would be impossible. 



Undoubtedly the picture of human psychology given by psychoanalysts 

 and other modern dynamic theories is crude and incomplete, but equally 

 undoubtedly it is a first approximation to the truth. 



Its importance for philosophy, and especially for ethics, is enormous, 

 for it enables us to understand how ethical and other values can be abso- 

 lute in principle while remaining obstinately relative in practice; and in 

 conjunction with our knowledge of evolution, it enables us to reconcile 

 absolutism and relativism by uniting them in the concept of right direction. 



THE ETHICAL CONFLICT 



When, however, we come to practice, we find ourselves plunged back 

 into the confusion of the relative. For instance what will be the right way 

 of treating Germany? The absolute principle of justice makes us feel the 

 demand that crime should be punished. But, applied to the Germans, does 

 this mean punishing Hitler, the Nazi leaders, all those directly guilty of 

 cruelty and injustice, or the whole German people? Furthermore, the ab- 



