“I’ve always had these fits of passion. As far back as I can remember. I was a kicking, screaming child. I threw things. I once threw a fork at my elder brother and it stuck in his forehead, doing no serious damage--happily. There were whole days of wrath--days, as I remember them. Perhaps they were only hours.... I’ve never thought before what a peculiar thing all this raging is in the world. WHY do we rage? They used to say it was the devil. If it isn’t the devil, then what the devil is it? After all,” he went on as the doctor was about to answer his question; “as you pointed out, it isn’t the lowlier things that rage. It’s the HIGHER things and US.” “The devil nowadays,” the doctor reflected after a pause, “so far as man is concerned, is understood to be the ancestral ape. And more particularly the old male ape.” But Sir Richmond was away on another line of thought. “Life itself, flaring out. Brooking no contradiction.” He came round suddenly to the doctor’s qualification. “Why male? Don’t little girls smash things just as much?” “They don’t,” said Dr. Martineau. “Not nearly as much.” Sir Richmond went off at a tangent again. “I suppose you have watched any number of babies?”’ “Not nearly as many as a general practitioner would do. There’s a lot of rage about most of them at first, male or female.” “Queer little eddies of fury.... Recently--it happens--I’ve been seeing one. A spit of red wrath, clenching its fists and squalling threats at a damned disobedient universe.” The doctor was struck by an idea and glanced quickly and questioningly at his companion’s profile. “Blind driving force,” said Sir Richmond, musing. “Isn’t that after all what we really are?” he asked the doctor. “Essentially--Rage. A rage in dead matter, making it alive.” “Schopenhauer,” footnoted the doctor. “Boehme.” “Plain fact,” said Sir Richmond. “No Rage--no Go.” “But rage without discipline?” “Discipline afterwards. The rage first.” “But rage against what? And FOR what?” “Against the Universe. And for--? That’s more difficult. What IS the little beast squalling itself crimson for? Ultimately? ... What is it clutching after? In the long run, what will it get?” (“Yours the car in distress what sent this?” asked an unheeded voice.) “Of course, if you were to say ‘desire’,” said Dr. Martineau, “then you would be in line with the psychoanalysts. They talk of LIBIDO, meaning a sort of fundamental desire. Jung speaks of it at times almost as if it were the universal driving force.” “No,” said Sir Richmond, in love with his new idea. “Not desire. Desire would have a definite direction, and that is just what this driving force hasn’t. It’s rage.” “Yours the car in distress what sent this?” the voice repeated. It was the voice of a mechanic in an Overland car. He was holding up the blue request for assistance that Sir Richmond had recently filled in. The two philosophers returned to practical matters. Section 3