The embryology of the body is to those who have had no biological training far from being a gratifying subject of contemplation. The stages through which the body passes before reaching its familiar form have a superficial aspect of ugly and repulsive caricature with which only a knowledge of the great compressed pageant of nature they represent can reconcile the mind. The stages through which, according to the doctrines of Freud, the developing mind passes are not less repulsive when judged from the purely human point of view than are the phases of the body, which betray its cousinship with the fish and the frog, the lemur and the ape. The works of Nature give no support to the social convention that to be truly respectable one must always have been respectable. All her most elaborate creations have “risen in the world” and are descended in the direct line from creatures of the mud and dust. It is characteristic of her method to work with the humblest materials and to patch and compromise at every step. Any given structure of her making is thus not by any means necessarily the best that could conceivably be contrived, but a workable modification of something else, always more or less conditioned in its functioning by the limitations of the thing from which it was made. To the biologist, therefore, the fact that Freud’s investigations of the development of the mind have shown it passing through stages anything but gratifying to self-esteem will not be either surprising or a ground for disbelief. That Freud’s conclusions are decidedly unpalatable when judged by a narrowly human standard is very obvious to any one who is at all familiar with the kind of criticism they have received. It must be acknowledged, moreover, that his methods of exposition have not always tended {89} to disguise the nauseousness of the dose he attempts to administer. Such matters, however, lie altogether apart from the question whether his conclusions are or are not just, though it is perhaps justifiable to say that had these conclusions been immediately acceptable, the fact would be presumptive evidence that they were either not new or were false. The work of Freud embodies the most determined, thorough, and scientific attempt which has been made to penetrate the mysteries of the mind by the direct human method of approach, making use of introspection—guided and guarded, it is true, by an elaborate technique—as its essential instrument. To have shaped so awkward and fallacious an instrument into an apparatus for which accuracy and fruitfulness can be claimed is in itself a notable triumph of psychological skill.