or fifty thousand years man has been faced with the enigma¹ of himself and his fellows. Man has been victimized by brutal instincts and impulses which have caused him to erect, in self-protection, prisons, legal codes and complex social systems. Man has not felt safe from man, and indeed, the conduct of man down the ages has not much justified belief or faith: wars, murder, arson, treachery and betrayals, cynicism² and destruction have marred³ his progress, until history itself is a long montage⁴ of battles, murders and running blood.

      When you teach a child history, what are you teaching him? You are teaching him how this town killed that town, how this king was murdered by that woman, how this war changed the boundaries here and there. It is a pretty strange picture for a civilized being. Not even the apes are indulging in this sort of thing.

      Confronted with this aspect in himself and his fellows, man has long searched for an answer to the riddle of his own behavior, for ways to remedy that behavior. Long before Diogenes,⁵ man was searching for such answers to his questions. In Babylon,⁶ Chaldea,⁷ India, and even in the distant primitive times, those men who could think found concern in the antisocial and unreasonable conduct of their fellows.

      Man’s search for the answer to his own riddle was quickened⁸ during the last century by two things: the first was the energy and curiosity of Sigmund Freud, and the second was the mathematics of James Clerk Maxwell⁹ and his studies of energy in the physical universe. These two things came up almost simultaneously.

      Freud worked without knowledge of the physical universe, which was developed in the years which followed his initial efforts. Freud was not a physical scientist. If anything, he was a mystic.¹⁰

Continued...

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