v] Some Implications of I he Incarnation 161 



Freud's doctrine, that every memory persists. Indeed 

 he and his followers go so far as to make the impressions 

 of early infancy of far-reaching importance in determin- 

 ing the life, conscious and unconscious, of later years; 

 and in many ways the facts seem to bear out this view. 



The past lives and is changed in the present. Thus 

 Bergson. 



I am what I am because of my past ; but I am chang- 

 ing, modifying myself and being modified. Hence My- 

 self is the sum-total of my past experience, as related to 

 that of me which persists. The full meaning of the past 

 is only realised in the future. The past is ever operative 

 in the present for the sake of the future. Thus Cunning- 

 ham. 



We see, then, that by introducing the idea of the tran- 

 scendental ego we at once find a means of harmonising 

 Freud and Bergson. Bergson, the pantheist, looks back 

 on the urging of the vital impulse ; Freud, the material- 

 ist, looks forward to the influence of the mechanism of 

 past mental states upon the mechanism of future mental 

 states. 



For consider Freud's views. The associations found 

 in psychoanalysis seem purely mechanical, but all the 

 time there is an end, and a useful end, to be achieved by 

 those associations; a teleological significance is intro- 

 duced by Freud over and over again, implicitly and even 

 explicitly, into the conception of the psychic activities. 

 What, for example, could be more explicit than this 

 statement ; "This primitive mental activity must have 

 been modified by bitter practical experience into a more 

 expedient secondary activity 1 ' ' ? Here is teleology with 

 a vengeance! The past is utilised, as it must be, to 

 determine the present and the future. The past lives, 

 is, in the present, and the organism must act in accord- 

 ance with it, for there is the mechanical basis, and there 



1 The Interpretation of Dreams. Trana. Brill, p. 446. 

 MOD. 1 i 



