will confess that I owe much to the psychoanalyst--what he does is to
direct thwarted, disappointed and perplexed people to the realities of
their own nature. Which they have been accustomed to ignore and
forget. They come to us with high ambitions or lovely illusions about
themselves, torn, shredded, spoilt. They are morally denuded. Dreams
they hate pursue them; abhorrent desires draw them; they are the prey of
irresistible yet uncongenial impulses; they succumb to black despairs.
The first thing we ask them is this: 'What else could you expect?'"

"What else could I expect?" Sir Richmond repeated, looking down on him.
"H'm!"

"The wonder is not that you are sluggish, reluctantly unselfish,
inattentive, spasmodic. The wonder is that you are ever anything
else.... Do you realize that a few million generations ago, everything
that stirs in us, everything that exalts human life, self-devotions,
heroisms, the utmost triumphs of art, the love--for love it is--that
makes you and me care indeed for the fate and welfare of all this round
world, was latent in the body of some little lurking beast that crawled
and hid among the branches of vanished and forgotten Mesozoic trees?
A petty egg-laying, bristle-covered beast it was, with no more of the
rudiments of a soul than bare hunger, weak lust and fear.... People
always seem to regard that as a curious fact of no practical importance.
It isn't: it's a vital fact of the utmost practical importance. That
is what you are made of. Why should you expect--because a war and a
revolution have shocked you--that you should suddenly be able to reach
up and touch the sky?"

"H'm!" said Sir Richmond. "Have I been touching the sky!"