I shall venture to make upon the work of Freud will be such as are suggested {77} by the biological point of view of which this essay is intended to be an exposition. The standard of interest upon which they are based will therefore necessarily differ to some extent from that which is usually adopted in writings of the psycho-analytic school.
To the biologist perhaps the most striking characteristic of the work of this school is its complete acceptance of what one may call the human point of view. It seems to be satisfied that no useful contribution to psychology is to be obtained outside the limits of human feeling and behaviour, and to feel no impatience to expand its inquiries into a still larger field. It is not that the school has failed to show an extremely vigorous movement of expansion. Beginning as a mere province of medicine, and while its foothold there was still far from general recognition, it invaded the regions of general psychology, of æsthetics, ethnology, the study of folklore and myth, and indeed of all matters in which it could find its essential material—the records of human feeling and conduct. Beyond the human species it has shown remarkably little of this aggressive spirit, and it seems to feel no need of bringing its principles into relation with what little is known of the mental activities of the non-human animals.
The absence of any strong pressure in the direction of establishing a correlation of all mental phenomena, whether human or not, is not a matter of merely theoretical interest. The actual practical success to be obtained to-day in such an attempt might possibly be insignificant and yet of great value in moulding the whole attitude of mind of the investigator towards matters lying wholly within the sphere of human psychology. However much one may be impressed by the greatness of the edifice which Freud has built up and by the soundness of {78} his architecture, one can scarcely fail, on coming into it from the bracing atmosphere of the biological sciences, to be oppressed by the odour of humanity with which it is