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PARTISAN REVIEW
the centenary of Freud's birth; it is also a year in which the current
of popular thought expressed in commemoration of the date quickens
one's awareness of Freud's impact on our times.
Rear-guard fundamentalism did not require a Darwin to slay it
in an age of technology. He helped, but this contribution was trivial
in comparison with another. What Darwin had done was to propose
a set of principles unified around the conception that all organic
species had their origins and took their form from a common set of
circumstances-the requirements of biological survival. All living
creatures were on a common footing. When the post-Darwin era of
exaggeration had passed and religious literalism had abated into a
new nominalism, what remained was a broad, orderly, and unitary
conception of organic nature, a vast continuity from the monocellular
protozoans to man. Biology had at last found its unifying principle
in the doctrine of evolution. Man was not unique but the inheritor
of an organic legacy.
As the summit of an evolutionary process, man could still view
himself with smug satisfaction, indeed proclaim that God or Nature
had shown a persistent wisdom in its effort to produce a final, perfect
product. It remained for Freud to present the image of man as the
unfinished product of nature: struggling against unreason, impelled
by driving inner vicissitudes and urges that had to be contained if
man were to live in society, host alike to seeds of madness and majesty,
never fully free from an infancy anything but innocent. What Freud
was proposing was that man at his best and man at his worst is
subject to a common set of explanations: that good and evil grow
from a common process.
Freud was strangely yet appropriately fitted for
his
role as archi–
tect of a new conception of man. We must pause to examine his
qualifications, for the image of man that he created was in no small
measure founded on his painfully achieved image of himself and of
his times. Weare concerned not so much with his psychodynamics,
as with the
intel~ectual
traditions he embodies. A child of his century's
materialism, he was wedded to the determinism and the classical
physicalism of nineteenth-century physiology so boldly represented
by Helmholtz. Indeed, the young Freud's devotion to the exploration
of anatomical structures was a measure of the strength of this in–
heritance. But at the same time, as both Lionel Trilling and W. H.
