SIGMUND FREUD: 1856-1956
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nature and established, in a succession of vital discoveries, basic ex–
amples of cause-and-effect in the body. Indeed, Freud was so wedded
to positivism that in the absence of any empirical evidence he had
to pronounce God an "illusion." But in point of fact this kind of
empirical evidence is not always present in psychoanalysis either,
for even where certain "confirmations" exist, they lie under the sus–
picion of being culturally instigated by psychoanalysis itself. The
"proofs" that Freud found for his theories lay not so much in evi–
dence-for some
part
of this evidence, by the very nature of the ma–
terial, must always be beyond
proof-but in his way of reasoning
solidly about material which only he could see.
It is precisely this
enormous honesty and carefulness that make so curiously impressive
a book like
Moses and Monotheism,
which is not merely unfounded
on evidence, but at times preposterous because of Freud's suggestion
that he may be just about to find evidence at any minute. Yet the
book is anything but preposterous; indeed, it is strangely persuasive.
The basis of this, I submit, is the wholly sane, orderly, scientific way
in which Freud reasons, and which is so compelling in Freud's work
that he convinces us of the reality of what he is discussing. When
you look back, you can see that this air of leading us step by step
to the truth, of considering all possible objections, is not always
justified, for Freud often merely appears to consider objections. But
the point
~
that Freud had an honest persuasion and that once he
saw his subject, he opened up its possibilities honestly. Not everyone
who is wedded to positivistic explanations has an instinct for the
unexplored, and p
1
eople who go in for Freud's kind of material rarely
bother to reason at all. But he had the kind of mind that has both
an instinct for the reality behind phenomena and a moral determina–
tion to find a cause for everything. And it is no accident that in him
the wish for fame represents not only a hunger for success but a
desire to find a reputation that
will
express the immense role he
had to play.
Now this kind of mind, I feel, represents in Freud the Jewish
belief in the essential logic of human experience, and it is this, as
I see it, that enabled Freud to seize with such
conviction-the
essen–
tial mark of genius-on the basis of his early childhood experiences.
Freud, by attributing inquisitiveness in general to early sexual curi-
