even to accomplish any permanent alleviation of the malady which they profess to cure. And when they attack the essential religious principle of Puritanism,—its deep human passion for perfection,—they are seeking to destroy the one principle which can possibly result in the integration of the national life.
Now, as I talk with the members of the beautiful younger generation which comes through my class-room year after year, I find that the Freudians are profoundly mistaken in their analysis of human nature. The deepest craving of these average young men and women is not to be unbound, and released, and to be given a license for a free and spontaneous doing as they please in all directions. They recognize that nature and environment and lax educational discipline have made them beings of sufficiently uncoördinated desires and scattering activities.
What they deeply crave is a binding generalization of philosophy, or religion, or morals, which will give direction and purpose, which 'will give channel and speed, to the languid diffusive drift of their lives. The suppressed desire which causes their unhappiness is a suppressed desire for a good life, for the perfection of their human possibilities. The average unreflective man does not always know that this
