shrinking from ... moral contamination" (p. 119). But the difficulty is only apparent. When we call the theater bad it is only because in satisfying wish A it in some way thwarts and represses wish B. And our moral problem is, not simply to find objects which satisfy our wishes severally; but to find among a class of objects X which satisfy a given wish A, that variety X' which thwarts no other of the entire magazine of wishes. The postulate which this type of ethical theory seems bound to make is that such objects as X' exist. The edible mushrooms and the good theaters exist, and I can reach them.
II.
If I point out the generous optimism of this postulate, it is not for the sake of disputing its general validity, nor that of the corresponding dictum, that if repressions occur in this world of ours, it is through lack of knowledge (p. 128). It is for the sake of enquiring whether all repressions are alike evil; whether some may not be both inevitable and desirable.
Is Professor Holt, perhaps, treading dangerously near that view from which Thorndike has recently so solemnly warned us,—the view that original human nature, as a bundle of wishes, is always right? This view, says Thorndike, "by being attractive to sentimentalists, absolutist philosophers, and believers in a distorted and fallacious form of the doctrine of evolution, has been of great influence on educational theories."[1] He then points out the presence in us of wishes to lie, to steal, to fight, to torture, to run away, some of which we are bound not merely to repress but to throttle, because they are appropriate only to an archaic environment. We have to 'unlearn a large portion of our natural birthright.' One may reasonably challenge these categories, denying that there is any such wish in human nature as a wish to lie, or to steal, etc. One may insist that whatever impulses we have must be given non-invidious names; the alleged wish to lie may in fact be a wish to dramatize or invent, etc. But one has still to consider the broad necessity of discipline, perhaps even of excision, in the making of the moral
- ↑ Original Nature of Man, p. 270.
