value of a symbol leads to constructive truth and helps us to live. It furthers hopefulness and the possibility of future development.
The functional importance of the symbol is clearly shown in the history of civilisation. For thousands of years the religious symbol proved a most efficacious means in the moral education of mankind. Only a prejudiced mind could deny such an obvious fact. Concrete values cannot take the place of the symbol; only new and more efficient symbols can be substituted for those that are antiquated and outworn, such as have lost their efficacy through the progress of intellectual analysis and understanding. The further development of mankind can only be brought about by means of symbols which represent something far in advance of himself, and whose intellectual meanings cannot yet be grasped entirely. The individual unconscious produces such symbols, and they are of the greatest possible value in the moral development of the personality.
Man almost invariably has philosophic and religious views of the meaning of the world and of his own life. There are some who are proud to have none. These are exceptions outside the common path of mankind; they miss an important function which has proved itself to be indispensable to the human mind.
In such cases we find in the unconscious, instead of modern symbolism, an antiquated archaic view of the world and of life. If a requisite psychological function is not represented in the sphere of consciousness, it exists in the unconscious in the form of an archaic or embryonic prototype.
This brief résumé may show what the reader cannot find in this collection of papers. The essays are stations on the way of the more general views developed above.
Zürich,
January, 1916.
