not pass judgement now as to their absolute significance, we must discern in them something highly up-to-date, the word as used here having no pejorative connotations. It seems more difficult to determine whether the Freudian theories could have originated in any other spot in the cultural world of Europe and America, or whether Vienna was the one predestined point. For my part I am not inclined to consider any factor in such phenomena as accidental; I take it that every modification of time and place has its effect on the spiritual product. I see it as more than a mere accident that K. E. Neumann should have lived and ended his obscure life here; for Vienna is the old Porta Orientis of Europe. Likewise I find it very fitting and consistent that Dr Freud's theories should have started on their career from this city, like those facile and somewhat trivial, yet pliable and seductive opera melodies with which they have so few points of actual contact. Vienna is the city of European music; she is the Porta Orientis also for that mysterious inner Orient, the realm of the unconscious. Dr Freud's interpretations and hypotheses are the excursions of the conscious time-spirit along the shores of this realm. In my first letter I tried to explain how closely the basic element of Austrian music seems to coincide with local conditions, with that which the French language designates as sociable, and which differentiates the Austrian nature from the German nature as a whole. But nothing is so closely related to the social and the sociable as psychology, which is nothing other than the systematic application of social faculties. In both cases the demand is to appreciate the feelings of others, to note their more subtle excitations, and in a degree to identify oneself with them—all of which goes to make up something which is unlearnable: tact. This seems to me the most natural explanation for the fact that German scientificism is occasionally accused of lacking psychological fineness, while on the other hand it is in this very field of psychology that there is such a pronounced contact between Viennese researches and those of Western Europe in general, especially the Parisian school. The internal force, which we might call the genius loci, is active in many ways, and there is a great attraction in noting the relationship among its various facets of expression.
